haha does anyone know what's going on haha

the mavs trade, birth control discourse, stories i've been working on, and misc. items

Things have clearly gotten incredibly bad, but at least you have a new email from me, so, there’s that! As I’m sure you can understand, everything has been incredibly busy on my end, so I thought I’d just throw together a reading list of what I see as some of the most important stories I’ve been working on lately, and other miscellaneous tidbits at the end of this email. But before that…

If I were a Mavs fan, I would also be incredibly suspicious and conspiracy theory-pilled right now. The more obvious answer is that that the organization is incredibly stupid but if there has ever been a time to join Kyrie Irving in putting a tinfoil hat on, it would be now, because I’ve never seen anything make less sense. As someone who was too young when 9/11 happened to remember anything about that day, I can only imagine Saturday night had similar vibes, at least if Twitter/Bluesky existed in 2001.

And another note about insane things that have been happening on social media lately:

People have been incredibly not normal—arguably even abnormal!—about a very silly tweet that sadly broke out of containment and reached many TikTok-brained people it should not have reached over the last two-ish weeks:

And here is where I come in to shamelessly self-plug…

In 2022, I interviewed birth control experts and TikTokers about increasingly concerning online discourse about IUD pain and general, viral dinsinformation about birth control. To be clear, I have a lot of frustrations with the needlessly great burden that seeking out and obtaining the right birth control can be for young women/pregnant-capable people, and that can sometimes be an incredibly shitty process. That doesn’t change the fact that birth control is a miraculous and wonderful resource, and maligning it without full context serves regressive right-wing agendas.

It's true that better pain management should be offered with IUDs and IUDs might be a better fit for some than others, but the idea that it's innately unsafe is right-wing propaganda. Here’s my 2022 story in Jezebel on all of that.

A lot of seemingly apolitical content about birth control “safety concerns” and "alternatives" on TikTok isn't apolitical at all despite presenting that way. It exploits the reality that many people have mixed experiences with different forms of birth control in order to feed cultural panics that can then yield further policy restrictions on birth control, at a time when anti-abortion leaders are increasingly trying to conflate birth control and abortion to further police both. (Story with an update on that will come out this week…) I wrote about supposedly apolitical “trad” content catered to young, female audiences and promoting birth control disinfo in 2022, as well, here. Let’s give it up for me in 2022… I was really on it… I’d argue I still am <3

And now, a short, incomprehensive reading list of my recent work:

• Attention-Seeking Bigot Claims Immigrants Are ‘Raping Our Women’ to Justify Bill That Could Harm Survivors: From the Laken Riley Act to the heinously named “Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act," HR 30, anti-immigrant lawmakers are increasingly invoking "women's safety" to expand the mass deportation apparatus, all while placing women/survivors at greater risk. HR 30 claims it would make it easier to deport accused domestic abusers who aren't convicted of anything; experts I spoke to warn it's more likely to harm non-citizen victims who practice self-defense or are falsely accused of abuse by their abusers, which is incredibly common and effective. (Ahem! DARVO)

• Texas’ Abortion Ban Is Forcing Children Under 12 to Travel Out-of-State for Care: At least 100 minors—including at least six children under 12—had to leave Texas for abortion in 2023. Child welfare advocates say most of the pregnancies resulted from rape. In 2021, Greg Abbott shrugged off concerns about his abortion laws by pledging to "eliminate rape.”

• New York Doctor & Louisiana Mother Indicted Over Abortion Pills: So, this is incredibly bad! On Friday, a New York doctor was indicted for allegedly mailing abortion pills to a Louisiana mom for her daughter, a minor; the mom was also indicted. Anti-abortion states are increasingly challenging shield laws, opening the door to target blue-state abortion providers.

• Why Did Democrats Ever Stop Calling These Natalist Freaks Weird? Last week, a Department of Transportation memo called for “preference” to be given “to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” To be clear, this administration doesn't just want to ~incentivize~ families/having kids: Their primary goal is to force pregnancy/childbirth and try to punish people who don’t have kids. JD Vance and Elon Musk have both suggested childless adults should lose their voting rights. Speaking of Elon Musk, I hope he [redacted].

• Trump Effectively Greenlights Anti-Abortion Violence: ICYMI, the Trump administration has worked quickly to scale back decades-old protections for abortion clinics, which all too often face physical violence, arson, harassment and terrifying threats; at the same time, he’s also pardoned a slew of violent anti-abortion activists who faced prison time. He’s effectively declaring open season on abortion providers. Should also note that many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who were pardoned, too, have histories of targeting abortion clinics. Cool!

• Republicans in 4 States Want to Charge Abortion Patients with Homicide: At least three of these bills potentially threaten abortion patients with the death penalty. Will they pass? Probably not, but this is about pushing the overton window ever-wider until we regard these bills as normal and someday one of them passes. That’s the playbook anti-abortion leaders have been using for a very long time and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it seems to be working pretty well for them. Horribly for the rest of us though!

OK. Now for miscellaneous updates and other important tidbits for real fans first…