In this discussion, we talk with two trans organizers in Missouri about the recently withdrawn emergency rule made by the state Attorney General Andrew Bailey. At the time, the emergency rule, which was one of the most far reaching bans on trans access to affirming medical care, had been stayed by the courts and was awaiting further hearing.
The Attorney General withdrew the ruling, claiming that it was no longer needed because the Missouri legislature had passed two bills that removed access to trans care for youth. The situation on the ground in Missouri is still dire, but the particular extremity of the rule has at least temporarily been dodged. (Just after, Gov. DeSantis in Florida introduced a flurry of new anti-trans legislation as if to outstrip Missouri in hateful targeting). During this conversation, we discuss the specific details that made this rule significantly threatening, as well as the various reactions and organizing efforts that it provoked. Though the situation has changed in Missouri, the discussion still holds important insight for those of us committed to the struggle against the state’s gender fascism, since this is a coordinated effort by the Republican party across state lines to wield violent power against specific populations deemed disposable. I will also read a statement by the organizers written in the wake of the withdrawal of the rule.
You can find the guests at Mid Missouri Trans Folks on instagram and venmo.
Our interview with journalist and community organizer, Kit O’Connell (of the Texas Observer), and anarchist and activist lorén (of QTPIE or Queer and Trans People Illuminate Everything). Both folks are trans folks in Austin, Texas, and we speak for the hour about the increasing legal and social oppression of trans and gender non-conforming folks in that state as well as across the so-called USA, some of its impacts on trans children and children of trans parents, organizing, allyship and community defense.
It’s also worth nothing that Ms. Bandit is being harassed with doctored photos by conservative groups playing up the fearmongering concerning children, as you can see in this tweet here: https://twitter.com/BrigitteBandit/status/1654503599345377280
DDOS Secrets leak of American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), an homophobic, anti-abortion and transphobic group run by Christian fundamentalists behind the lawsuit attempting to illegalize mifepristone as an abortion pill and that is confusingly named something like the American Academy of Pediatrics (a legit medical organization). The leak was the feature of a recent article in Wired.
Welcome to 67th edition of BAD NEWS, Angry Voices from Around the World, which is a monthly news program produced by international network of anarchist and anti-authoritarian radios.
This month we have contributions from three radio projects. A-Radio Berlinspoke to a comrade from the anarchist feminist anti-prison alliance, who organizes the annual protest rally in front of the women’s prison in Chemnitz, a small town in Eastern Germany. The focus of the conversation were: hardships of unionizing inside German prisons and the importance of building connections and creating empowering moments together.
The second piece is from Kilavo Seme, a show on Radio Študent Ljubljana, which spoke with an activist from Quelili collective about their interesting and a bit crazy idea to buy a ship which would connect europe and latin america to fight, among other things, for climate justice and against colonization.
Finally The Final Straw Radio is sharing a portion of a new interview with supporters of 4 people facing up to 12 years in US federal prison for alleged after-hours graffiti at a fake abortion clinic near to Miami in the state of Florida in the wake of the Supreme Court removal of the protection of legal right to choose abortion, laws limiting access for trans people to health care and public participation, and other regressive steps across the so-called USA.
This Bad News has been put together by Črna luknja in Ljubljana.
Call in for anarchist prisoner, Noah Coffin #1795167
Noah Coffin, a Texas prisoner was granted parole six months ago (November 2022), but has not been released from Texas Correctional and has not been given a reason why.
Call/Email the Texas parole board and voice concern as to why Noah has yet to be released, you can reach them at: (512) 936-6351 or bpp_pio@tdcj.texas.gov (call script and email script to follow).
Call Script:
Hello, I am calling to voice my concern about a prisoner at the Ellis Unit Detention Center, Noah Coffin 01795167. He was granted parole six months ago and has yet to be released from prison, I am just wondering why that is? I am urging you to release him.
Email Script:
Dear Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles,
I am contacting you on behalf on Noah Coffin 01795167, a prisoner who is incarcerated at Ellis Unit in Texas. Noah was granted parole six months ago, but has yet to be released from prison, I am emailing you to inqure why that is? I am urging you to release him immediately as he has been granted parole.
Upcoming
We are planning a number of other chats in coming weeks that will take a while to find their way into our main podcast stream including: an interview with one of the authors of We Go Where They Go, a history of Anti-Racist Action around the millenium; an interview with comic artist and collagist Johnny Damm; an interview with transfem anti-fascists in the UK about the recent violence in Liverpool as fascists attempted to attack refugees held up in a hotel; Devi Machete of Contra Viento y Marea Comedor mutual aid space run by refugees and anarchists in Tijuana, Mexico; and more.
We’ll be releasing those interviews listed above as we can to our patrons subscribed at a level of $3 or more per month. The patreon funds go to pay for our basic operations cost like web hosting and PO Box as well as to the transcription work that allows our material to be translated into other languages, accessed more easily by folks with hearing difficulties and search engines. The transcripts also get made into zines that can be shared with people behind bars or in person! Check out the growing list of zines at https://tfsr.wtf/zines and consider supporting us at https://patreon.com/tfsr or by other methods at https://tfsr.wtf/support
. … . ..
Featured Track:
If You Go Down (I’m Going Down, Too) by Kelsae Ballerini from Subject To Change
First up, a chat with two members of the South Florida Anti-Repression Committee doing solidarity for the 4 queer activists facing up to 12 years in Federal prison on charges related to graffiti at a Pregnancy Crisis Center, aka a building funded by church and state to dissuade people from getting abortions. The Department of Justice is charging them under the FACE Act, a criminal law passed in the 1990’s to stop threats, violence and blockades against health clinics that offered like abortions, screenings, contraception and other services under attack by religious extremists in the USA. There are also Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, known also as a SLAPP suits being brought by a Miami-based Christian anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center called Heartbeat of Miami as well as the state of Florida against the accused apparently intended to have a chilling effect and minimize their ability to defend themselves against the Federal indictments.
Oso and Hunter of SFLARC talk about the arrests, about the defendants and the rising tide of gender fascism and war on bodily autonomy in DeSantis’ Florida and around the country.
Following this, we’re sharing audio from the February 2023 episode of Bad News, a monthly English-language podcast from the A-Radio Network. In this segment, you’ll hear comrades from Črna luknjashow on Radio Študent speakin with an activist inSofia, Bulgaria about theantifascist mobilization known as Anti-lukovmarsh, which will take place on 25th February under the slogan “No Nazis On Our Streets” – Thisis amanifestation against one of the biggest international neo-nazi gatherings(Lukov March). You can find moreinfo at: http://antifa-bulgaria.org.
Announcements
Support Parole for Sundiata Jawanza
Political prisoner and activist Sundiata Jawanza in South Carolina has an upcoming parole and is looking for support. You can learn more about his case at https://www.sundiatajawanza.com/
We’ll be stating this a few times during this episode, but Mixael Laufer is not licensed to offer medical advice and his opinions are his own. Also, be aware (if you want to be) that laws in different jurisdictions may differ. For instance, pressing your own pills has recently been criminalized in WA state in the so-called USA.
We hope you enjoy this interview and you can check out the project at FourThievesVinegar.org, where you can find a growing collection of introductory videos about their work starting Monday, March 13th, 2023 around noon.
First up, you’ll hear updates on the situation of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party by Shupavu wa Kirima, General Secretary of that formation and partner of Rashid. Rashid has been showing signs of prostate cancer for over a year and his medical visits and care have been clearly delayed and avoided by Virginia Department of Corrections staff and administration. There is a call for phone zaps on the VDOC, Warden McCoy & the rest of Sussex 1 prison to demand that Rashid get the treatment that he needs to stay alive. Updates can be found on the RIBPP instagram & twitter accounts, on Shupavu’s personal social media and RashidMod alongside his writings. You can contact the RIBPP about this effort via defendrashid@protonmail.com . Check the show notes for more links. [ 00:02:26 – 00:21:56 ]
Then, we’ll be featuring a few segments from recent months episodes of Bad News from the A-Radio Network:
You’ll hear an interview from the November 2022 episode by Frequenz-A with Lölja Nordic a leftist anarchist from the Feminist Anti-War Resistance from St. Petersburg, Russia, to speak about the international, feminist, anti-war movement against the Russian war in Ukraine. You can find that telegram channel at t.me/femagainstwar in Russian. [ 00:22:42 – 00:35:44 ]
We share an interview by A-Radio Berlin from October with ABC Belarus on the infotour they were conducting at the time. [ 00:36:08 – 00:49:06 ]
Finally, back to Frequenz-A with someone about the squat opened this fall in Slovenia known as PLAC, the acronym meaning square and standing for Ljubljana Participatory Autonomous Zone [ 00:49:24 – 01:02:40 ]
Anarchist Struggle, or Tekoşîna Anarşist in Kurmanji, is an anarchist combat medic collective operating in Rojava since the time of the war against Daesh / Isis, though its roots go back further. For the hour, you’ll hear a voice actor sharing the words of a member of TA calling themselves Robin Goldman about the their experiences of Asymmetric Warfare waged by Turkey and its proxies in the TFSA, the culture of TA right now, the medical work they’re doing, queerness in Rojava and other topics.
You can find TA online on twitter at @TA_Anarsist as well as their website TekosinaAnarsist.NoBlogs.Org. Members of TA suggested that folks interested in queer and trans organizing in Rojava support the group Keskasor, Kurdish for rainbow and based in Diyarbakir, Turkey. It can be emailed at heftreng.keskesor@gmail.com, found on twitter via @Keskasor_lgbti or on instagram at @KeskesorLGBTI, though their social media presence was last updated in 2020.
This week on the show, we sat down with Bayla Ostrach, an activist, anarchist, longtime defender, provider of and researcher around issues of reproductive healthcare. We speak about experiences researching and working on the issue in Catalunya, the battle for abortion and reproductive autonomy in the so-called US, the challenges faced by independent clinics against the business model of clinic chains like Planned Parenthood, legal and material pressure and attacks by anti-abortion extremists as well as the cultural and political struggle to defend and expand the ability for people to get safe, affordable, full spectrum and stigma-free abortion and reproductive care more broadly.
** Content warning, because we are discussing a stigmatized series of medical procedures adjacent to sexual, social and political violence, listeners should be advised and we’ll put warnings in a few places during the episode. If you are hearing the radio version and want to hear a longer version of this show, and to listen at your own pace, check out our full podcast at our website, to be followed in about a week by a transcript for easy reading & a zine for printing. **
A list of people, works, and resources mentioned by our guest:
Singer, E., (Elyse Ona), and Bayla Ostrach. “The End of Feminist Abortion Counseling? Examining Threats to Women’s Health.” In Transcending Borders, 255–70. Palgrave-MacMillan (Springer imprint), 2017. http://link.springer.com/.
This week on the show, you’ll hear from Doug, Onion and Papi, three folks involved in the Aston Park Build, a daily event to hold space in Aston Park in downtown Asheville, creating art, sharing food and music and a wider part of organizing here to demand safer space & redistribution of wealth to care for houseless folks and relieve the incredible strains on housing affordability in Asheville. We talk about the park actions, the housing crisis and service industry wage woes, local government coddling of business owners and police repression of folks on the margins.
This week we re-air an interview done with Aishah Shahidah Simmons, who is a writer, community organizer, prison abolitionist, and cultural worker who has done just an immense amount of work over the years to help disrupt and end the patterns of sexual abuse and assault within marginalized communities. In this interview we talk about a lot of things, her background and how she came to be doing the work shes doing right now, how better to think about concepts like accountability, what doing this work has been like for her as an out lesbian woman, and about her book Love WITH Accountability, Digging Up the Roots of Childhood Sexual Abuse which was published in 2019 from AK Press.
This interview feels very important right now, because we are in a time of overturn, tumult, stress, and uncertainty, and I think that in order for us to really be able to knuckle down and go in this for the long haul itll be imperative for our radical communities to take solid care of ourselves and of each other. I hope you get as much out of hearing Aishah’s words as I did conducting and editing this interview.
Before we get started, as a content notice: we will be talking about some difficult topics in this interview. I will do my best to repeat this notice at regular intervals, but please do take care and treat yourself kindly (however that looks).
This week on the show, we bring you the audio of an activist panel from the recent Queer Conference held online by University of North Carolina, Asheville, in March of 2021.
The conference was titled Fitting In and Sticking Out – Queer [In]Visibilities and the Perils of Inclusion. From the panel’s description for the conference:
This panel brings together 4 local (Asheville, NC) and regional groups working at different intersections of queer community support. We will learn about the work these groups do, the particular issues that affect southern queers, the changes in visibility and inclusion for queer community, and the building of larger coalitions of liberation. Representatives from four organizations will be part of the panel:
Youth OUTright (YO) is the only nonprofit whose mission is to support LGBTQIA+ youth from ages 11-20 in western North Carolina. Learn more about their work on their website, and support them financially here.
Southerners on New Ground (SONG) is a nonprofit aimed at working towards LGBTQ liberation in the south. Find out more about their work on their website, and support them financially here.
Tranzmission Prison Project (TPP) is a prison abolition grassroots organization that provides literature and resources to incarcerated members of the LGBTQ community. Learn more about their work on their website and donate here.
Pansy Collective is a decentralized, DIY, queer, music and arts collective that created Pansy Fest, an annual queer music festival showcasing LGBTQ musicians from the south and rural areas, prioritizing reparations for QTBIPOC artists and community members, and community education and organizing around the principles of autonomy, mutual aid, antifascism, love, and liberation for all. Learn more about their work on their website, or donate here.
