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"When you embark on the act of stripping away outer layers of defensiveness, fear, and projections, you get to the joy that is your true inner self—the version of you you’ve been trying to get to know all along."
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"...art unlocks a critical component of political organizing and activism: imagination. A dream. Organizing and activism are mechanisms to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet and build it."
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“Something that all queer people have is that we’ve actively erased some of the boxes that cishet white supremacy has taught us our life is 'supposed' to look like. And there’s some liberation that comes with erasing those boxes.”
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"Because folks within the reproductive health, rights, and justice spaces haven’t made physical spaces, events, and social media spaces accessible for disabled people and chronically ill people to participate, the realities of disabled people accessing abortion aren’t there. They were never invited or given space to be there to begin with. And when their voices aren’t even present to be heard or included, it leaves much more space for the claims of anti-abortion extremists to take up space in the public dialogue around abortion access."
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"The internet allows for a sort of extension of the self. To be able to speak to people around the globe from anywhere, including the comfort of bed, is liberating for people whose bodies may be physically experiencing symptoms that are preventing them from showing up in traditional in-person advocacy spaces like protests or hearings."
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“By being, we are queering the boxes dominant systems put us in. Blurring the lines between self and other. Slother. We are not new, we are ancient.”
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"In his rather short career, 46-year-old Matthew Kacsmaryk has issued devastating blows rooted in anti-queer, anti-health care, anti-science, and anti-immigrant reasoning for communities in Texas and beyond. His confirmation to the federal bench was controversial; he was already known as being outwardly homophobic by denying, in some cases, that LGBT people even exist. He’s exactly the kind of Christofascist who shouldn’t be making decisions about our basic human rights."
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"Being here for sober people in movement spaces might look a little different than words of affirmation... it might look like lowering the registration fee to the event so that more people can attend and less resources are spent ensuring there’s an open bar."
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"Abortion is normal. Just a few weeks ago, I dropped my partner off at one of the many clinics in the region where she provides abortion care. In a quiet parking lot in Wichita, Kansas, one of the five abortion clinics in the entire state, patients, their partners, and their kids waited for appointment times in cars, their radios and heaters humming. I couldn’t help but think about how badly I wished for politicians and voters from both sides of the aisle to see how normal this scene was. Not dramatic. Not fraught. But deeply problematic. Because that week, the parking lot was filled with cars with Texas license plates. Alabama. Louisiana. New Mexico. Missouri. Arkansas. They had all driven all day or all night to be here. To be handed pills, or to have a five minute outpatient procedure."
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"Sex is now a part of my continual adjusting of expectations from what the world tells us things should feel like versus what they do feel like. And there’s some grief that comes with the fact that I’ll never figure out how to return to a time when sex can come on a whim, a surprise to my day in the throes of passion. This is me, now. I’ll never be healed; I’ll never be completely “healthy” again. I’ll have to keep navigating “coming out” as chronically ill, sick, or disabled, and there’s a deep risk of being abandoned in those moments."
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"The urgency that capitalism teaches us, the productivity that capitalism teaches us is that we have to go to work, and grind, and make a 'something.' A widget. And the fact that we right now are working on something a little less tangible; creating safety, creating care within our communities, that’s actually a disrupting force to the white supremacy that this country is built on.”
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"Abortion is a personal issue that, over the course of carefully executed decisions by anti-abortion extremists over the last several decades, has somehow been turned into a decision that everyone gets to have a say in. If we want to have a say about abortion, we should listen to people who have abortions and people who provide abortions."
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"We can also talk about abortion more. Say the word “abortion” when talking about it, especially with family and friends. Abortion is not shameful, embarrassing, or wrong. It’s a common, normal, and basic part of reproductive health care. We must center the lived experience and expertise of people who have abortions. When we live in a state with as awful maternal mortality rates as we do, we need to be working to normalize and destigmatize all reproductive health care, including abortion care, because when communities have access to the full spectrum of care, everyone benefits."