it's sara 🏳️‍⚧️

BREAKING NEWS: A 6-year-old boy is floating away in a hot air balloon. Watch live: www.cnn.com/live

and say that this is the pinnacle, this is validation
this is how we take pride in our nation
cause for gold we’ll ignore a little hypocrisy
someone always gets fucked in a meritocracy
seems like this problem’s just got no solution
so fuck the whole goddamn institution

corruption and poverty and public health
and still keep a little gold for yourself
maybe i'm more cynical than most
but i just can't find room for both
the problem's not with the IOC
the problem's that we put it on TV

but figuring out who’s the femmest
makes us all armchair biochemists
who say you can't be without equal
unless you're handy with a needle
there's oppressor and oppressed
and then there's the trans and intersex
so as long as you compartmentalize
you can celebrate while you criticize

and we cross our fingers hoping
that all our heroines aren't doping
and that every waking hour spent
in search of international empowerment
won't end up being in vain
because no matter how hard they train
they just couldn't stand a chance
on a playing field that's chemically enhanced

the ioc said would be legal
so their girls would have no equal
in the eyes of some extranational jurist
who declares a race the purest
and knows cis women on the roster don't
hold up against testosterone
so all the prodigal examples
submit blood and urine samples

fuck the olympics
and fuck the women's sports in specific
cause it seems like every nation
all the ghanans and croatians
and the cubans and the spaniards
want that pendant with the lanyard
that says they followed every rule
gave their athletes all the fuel

so in conclusion, a poem

sports polluted by capitalism and imperialism will inevitably turn to accusation culture, whether that's chess engines or steroids or transvestigations

the discussion is so toxic for trans athletes in other sports because other sports have those external motivators. there is money to be made. or even worse, you could be focused on international competition and national pride!

sure there are rankings that inform playoffs and stuff but the incredibly high barrier to entry and intangible reward means that if someone shows up it's largely for the love of the game.

roller derby almost never faced that because it's a sport with few incentives to cheat. it's almost entirely nonprofit. you can't really make any money off of it. if your team gets a bad reputation for unfair play, people just don't book games with you. everyone is literally paying to be there.

when we talk about trans athletes, we talk about cheating, right? the big bad boogeytran is the amab person in a mostly afab sport, trying to gain an advantage, and the best defense that allies can muster is "well the trans athletes aren't that dominant, if they become dominant we can reevaluate"

(and yes i know better than anyone that gatekeeping and discrimination is still a thing in spite of it, don't @ me)

i was also on the @wftda.bsky.social board of directors.

the cultural reckoning we're having over trans athletes in sports came for roller derby ten years ago, and derby at the highest levels did the right things. it eliminated hormone testing and institutional gatekeeping for trans athletes.

at the end of this video @sarahz.bsky.social asks how we create a chess culture that doesn't drive people to cheat in the first place.

i spent 10 years playing roller derby as a 6'7" transgender woman. i had a lot of good experiences and a lot of bad experiences.

have you ever been through a friend dumping?

i don't mean a fight with a friend, or an unrequited friendship, but a friendship that was close, and then the other party abruptly ducked out.

or maybe you were the friend dumper, and you had to cut out someone toxic.

is that a common experience?

a chaotic meme i made of chicago iconography featuring the new pope, pope leo xiv, and a lot of other symbols of chicago, over the chicago skyline

LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

how many of my trans friends will be unalive this time next year? place your bets here!

(payout is void if someone unalives me. sorry!)

How Pedro Zamora used TV to fight AIDS YouTube video by Matt Baume

if you, like me, were too young to experience pedro zamora's cultural moment when it happened, this is required viewing for a pivotal moment in queer culture.

also, i sobbed through this entire video. well done, @mattbaume.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Le...

The Real Real World: How Pedro Zamora Used MTV to Save Lives It’s the mid 90s and reality TV is in its infancy with The Real World. At first, many critics dismiss the show as trash — along with everything else about MT...

New video is live on YouTube! Journey back with me to the 90s for the story of how Pedro Zamora used MTV and The Real World to save lives:

stop talking to me like im struggling w a middle school bully, i cant "sticks and stones" my way out of targeted violence from the government. get serious

"they cant tell u who u are"

yea but they can take away medical care i need to survive. they can use government policy to out me to employers. they can destroy the chance of future legal protections. they can further escalate the torture of trans prisoners

in case it weren't clear, they wanna ban a lot more than my identity

increasingly feel like we shouldn't have let cis people know anything about trans shit beyond the medical treatments for gender dysphoria and material examples of transmisogyny

My Job YouTube video by Cam'ron - Topic

i'm a sucker for songs that take a left turn at the end of a verse. like when cam starts talking about "new shoes and purses" here
youtu.be/RGXhOBc_xkE?...

But Democrats, who dubbed the bill the "Child Predator Empowerment Act," said it was a dangerous invasion of privacy for young girls that would put them at greater risk. They also pointed to the bill as the latest example of an unhealthy fixation among Republicans with trying to restrict the rights of transgender individuals, when they could be spending their time passing legislation to create jobs or reduce the prices of groceries. Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said bluntly that the bill was an example of Republicans' "creepy obsession with your kids' private parts" and that it would fuel more hate against a small and vulnerable population of transgender children that already faces higher rates of bullying and mental health issues.

genuinely surprised to see politicians use the right's most potent anti-trans attack to try to defend trans people

#mutualaid
#helpsky
#helpfolkslive2025
💸💕

this is really good so far