A page of charity donation links organized by Lil Nas X in connection with his new album; covers a range of groups helping with issues from mental health struggles to incarcerated people and those living with HIV/AIDS.
An aid organization that places particular focus on assisting Haitian immigrants, which is particularly necessary work right now in the wake of mass Haitian deportations.
The Transgender Artists Bundle (Itch.io)
A collection of 21 games by trans creators for $10. Ends October 8th at midnight.
9 Organizations Making Abortion Access a Reality in Texas (Every Action)
Links to organization providing counseling, transport, and abortion services to pregnant people in Texas in spite of the recent ban.
Every person has the constitutional right to an abortion in all fifty states. However, the state of Texas this week enacted a ban on all abortion care after six weeks, and in doing so, succeeded in making abortion extremely difficult to access for millions.
The six-week ban is not a new tactic for anti-abortion extremists, but Texas’ ban goes a step further than prior bans in other states: as NPR puts it, “this law allows individuals to bring civil lawsuits against abortion providers or anyone else found to ‘aid or abet’ illegal abortions.” The Supreme Court failed to strike down this ban, ruling 5-4 to uphold it.
Texas’ ban is a dangerous, extremist precedent. Abortion bans have disproportionate and cruel effects on already-marginalized communities. Anti-abortion groups have also indicated a desire to test this variety of the six-week ban tactic in other states.
50 Years After Attica, Prisoners Are Still Protesting Brutal Conditions. Will America Finally Listen? (Time, Heather Ann Thompson)
The history of the Attica Uprising, a foundational event to the modern abolition movement that began with negotiations and ended with nearly all of the protesters dead. Includes graphic descriptions of carceral violence.
Attica’s men succeeded in getting New York’s Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald to agree in negotiations to “provide adequate medical care,” as well as to “access to outside doctors and dentists,” and then, in the wake of their rebellion, both houses of the New York State legislature were willing to consider reforms to prison medical care statewide in 1972. Then, in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling Estelle v. Gamble, which established clearly that “deliberate indifference by prison personnel to a prisoner’s serious illness or injury constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”
Yet in 2021, and not just as a result of COVID-19, the incarcerated across the country still somehow find themselves much sicker than they need to be, dying unnecessarily painful as well as early deaths. According to journalist Keri Blakinger’s investigation for the Marshall Project, correctional systems often hire people to provide care who have few if any qualifications, or even licenses that have been restricted or suspended. And because they can’t afford the usurious co-pays many prison systems now require, many prisoners who are ill can’t even see the doctor to begin with.
Much of prison health care is now privatized, aimed at profits. This means not just billing practices totally unsuited to a prison population, but also the denial of lifesaving procedures. That medical abuses related to privatization are a regular occurrence behind bars is corroborated by the physicians themselves, according to the ACLU. As one Arizona doctor who was expected to provide care for more than 5,000 people revealed, not only were her requests for consults with a specialist always denied, because “it costs too much money,” but she also regularly ran out of prisoners’ medications.
A revolution led by sex workers (Xtra*, Chanelle Gallant)
A conversation between sex worker organizers about what makes the movement such a powerful environment for the fight for liberation.
I’ve been organizing in sex worker communities for nearly two decades and what I’ve seen is… well I’ve seen many things. Among the most significant is how the sex industry brings together just about every marginalized community under constant attack from laws that criminalize them, their clients, their bosses or associates.
These attacks are not about the sex. They’re about the fact that sex workers are cisgender and transgender women, Indigenous people, queer and trans people, drug users, poor and working class people, people of colour, fat people, and sick, disabled and neurodivergent people; they are moms in refugee camps, trans women in prisons, migrant men without immigration status working in the back rooms of underground gay bars and clubs. This diversity of marginalization is the real reason that sex workersare oppressed.
But it’s also why sex work networks can draw on such an exceptional range of wisdom and analysis about systems of domination, how to stand up to them and how to survive. No one knows how to hack the systems designed to keep us in our place better than a room full of sex workers. And that’s on top of their unparalleled knowledge of the complexity of human sexuality. More than anyone else, sex workers know the truth about sex, because their money and survival count on it. They know what people actually want versus what they will say they want in public. What other community brings together so much knowledge about social and economic justice and the secrets of sex, emotions and desire?
VIDEO: Discussion of the legacy of Islamophobia and the surveillance state in the wake of 9/11.
TWEET: Upcoming seminar on October 8th training lawyers and activists on ways to fight police brutality.
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