lavendertook

I am so angry at the media right now, including NPR framing the attack in Orlando as a terrorist act. This slaughter was primarily a hate crime against the LGBTIQ community. As yet there has been no direct connection found between the shooter and ISIS except as inspiration--a group for the killer to claim association with to frame his killing as a political act beyond personal religious belief. Islamic fundamentalist hate for same sex love is no different than Christian fundamentalist or any fundamentalist groups' hatred of queer folk.

And the people in Orlando shot are no more dead than the children and adults shot in the non-ISIS inspired Newtown massacre. The scope of the slaughter is due to the easy obtaining of a military assault rifle, pure and simple.

And yes, a bomb would also create such widespread slaughter, as in the Boston Marathon bombing, but bombs take a lot more planning and ingenuity to assemble and thus allow more avenues for discovery--they are harder to pull off. The killer yesterday would have had to have done a lot more work and planning, that would have had a good chance of being discovered as he was already watched. But the assault rifle he obtained lawfully could not be taken away because anyone can buy one.

By calling this act a terrorist act, rather than primarily a hate crime, politicians can deflect from the weapon used and banning assault weapons, and focus on discriminatory crap against Muslims like expanding watch lists--which would have done NOTHING to prevent this already watched killer from obtaining his arms legally like any other violent hate-filled individual out there who doesn't fit an Islamic terrorist profile. It is not only the ISIS inspired who use assault rifles for mass killing and the people in Orlando would have been just as dead if their killer was a Christian fundamentalist or neo-Nazi homophobe. And targeting the mentally ill will do nothing good. No one should have an assault weapon. Rage is all too human and we do not take the hate crimes of domestic violence seriously enough, and that was clue for what this killer was capable of.

But not even the Democrats, let alone the Republicans want to take on the NRA, and we give them outs to not do so by making terrorism the issue here rather than the weapons available to the enraged.

No enraged person should have access to a trigger they can pull for mass killing, whatever ideology or lack thereof inspires them. (I'm not too crazy about access to individual targeted guns as well, and military use is another argument, but let's just start here with assault weapons to enact some laws against mass slaughter.) The second amendment was designed with flintlock rifles in mind, not automatic weapons with hundreds of rounds. By framing the act as terrorism, we deflect from the insanity of allowing these weapons for mass slaughter to be legal and easily obtained.

The people who kill people cannot easily kill SO MANY people without assault guns. It doesn't matter whether this hate-filled act was inspired with a terrorist group's agenda in mind. The slaughter is still the same. The issue is not international terrorism but the need to ban these weapons of mass killing from the hands of anyone harboring any homegrown hatred, which means banning them from the U.S. public, period.

Also posted at http://lavendertook.dreamwidth.org/198148.html with comments

. . . try your luck . . . try your luck . . .

So I've been doing lots of research on my post-lumpectomy diagnosis of lobular carcinoma in situ (LCIS), which is a heavier dose of the atypical lobular hyperplasia (ALH) I was diagnosed with in August. It is not invasive cancer, though its presence increases my risk of that developing. I may never develop invasive cancer. If I do one day, it is almost as likely to pop up in either breast. It could take the form of lobular cancer like my mom has, or the more common ductal cancer. There just hasn't been enough research on this uncommon condition for them to know. And I doubt there will be much more in my lifetime--that's not where the diminishing research money is going to go. There's no telling--it seems to be much more of a wild card than having the BRCA gene, which I thankfully do not have. Hopefully, after I reach saturation on the info, which I think I"m approaching, I'll start getting back more to what passes for normal life and not be all-cancer-all-the-time, but right now it's still all consuming and overwhelming.

I've gotten over being mad at my surgeon for seeming cut-happy to me in not presenting prophylactic bilateral mastectomy as a more aggressive course than is normally recommended, and presenting my odds, my cancer risk, on the high side, when the data is really unreliable. Enter the Cancer Casino. Six month diagnostic monitoring and a regimen of hormone therapy (tamoxifen, Evista, or Arimidex pills) is the usual course for LCIS at present and lowers your risk by more than half. Some women and trans men with my diagnosis do choose the prophylactic bilateral mastectomy option as best for them, which reduces your risk to less than an average woman without risk factors, and if it stopped being recommended for this condition, then they couldn't get it covered by insurance, so it's important that it remains an option as viable for this condition.

But it's not the choice for me right now. Though my odds might be 50/50 in developing cancer, the odds of developing chronic pain from a mastectomy is over 12%, and much, much higher if you choose reconstruction, along with big risks of surgical complications down the road, like 30-65%, and if that happened to me, the pain would be compounded with regret that I had a chance to have not gone through that and maybe never have developed cancer either, and I brought this pain on myself, because that really is how I roll--I know it.

My thoughts on reconstruction surgery come from my liminal spot on the trans and cis spectrum, and my thoughts on cutting one's body to suit cultural concepts of what your gendered body should look like and interrogating your internalized perceptions, including the Hollywood industry's impact on people everywhere on the continuum, so it's complicated. Mastectomy includes the loss of an erogenous zone for me--that is not a negligible thing to this old sex radical--no reconstruction work can return that to you once the nerve connection is severed, not in my life time or the next generation's, I suspect. I value that as an intrinsic part of my bodily existence. Again, this bodily experience isn't universal among women, but my experience is not unique, and it should matter to more women than I see in articles and forums--it should matter to more people discussing mastectomies who supposedly take the sexual experience of women seriously and like to castigate cultures that are not their own for practicing clitoradectomies.
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I went to DC Pride last Saturday and it was a blast. My first DC Pride parade was exactly 20 years ago, right before I moved up here, from North Carolina. I had marched in several pride parades down there and one up in Boston with BiNet USA in the early 90's. I hadn't marched a parade in several years, and really haven't been either physically or emotionally fit for it as I am now. I marched with DC BiWomen, the only bisexual group marching this year. I had never been to a parade with a bi group where we got such a warm reception, so many cheers, grins, waves, and high fives. I cannot overstate what a high it is to be cheered on like that. The crowd skewed young, though there were plenty of us older folk, and it was wonderfully racially diverse.


Half the cheers we got were for this banner on the side of our van of "the bi umbrella" with its all-inclusive terms of who we are and who we love. BiNet USA is trying to tackle the problematic way the term "bisexual" reinforces a sexual binary of male/female (that denies more gender diversity) by redefining the "bi" as "self and other," and the women who designed the banner ascribe to that definition. I'm not sure I buy that redefinition and it's why I technically identify as a lesbian-identified pansexual, or far more simply, just queer, and it's why the umbrella concept is pretty neat.
( We're here! We're Queer! We just wanna beer. )