you subtract, I react, you remove, i disapprove
on Google removing Pride from their calendars, Deloitte removing pronouns, and trans people being removed from the Stonewall monument website
Hi babies!!! Ok I feel like I’ve done so much over the past week that I haven’t filled you in on, so I’m kinda backtracking right now, but I have to tell you about the BEST WALK I HAVE EVER DONE IN NEW ZEALAND. I’m not kidding you - I’ve lived here for my whole life - and somehow I’ve never walked this hidden gem of a track.
It’s called the Patuna Chasm, and it’s the best thing ever. Basically you drive to someone’s farm, they put you on a trailer and drive you for 15 minutes on a farm track until you’re at the start of the chasm.
Beforehand, they let you know about the hazards, which are: you WILL be walking in water over 1 meter deep, climbing down ladders, using ropes to help you scramble down rocks - but I promise you it’s not as scary as it sounds - it’s actually just such a fun adventure.
So you walk for about 40 minutes until you’re inside the chasm, and then for the next 2 hours, you’re literally walking through the water in the most amazing scenes you’ve ever walked through. Every few minutes there’s a new pool for you to play mermaids in, the walls are mossy and beautiful, and the eels are very friendly.
It was just the BEST DAY EVER and topped off with a little wine in Martinborough afterwards? Perfection.
Anyway, enough about me, on with the news!
US park service erases references to trans people from Stonewall monument website
Ugggggggh. Have you heard about this? Last Thursday the US National Park Service removed all references to transgender people from its website for the Stonewall national monument. This monument honours the 1969 uprising outside New York City’s Stonewall Inn, led by trans women of colour, which sparked the modern gay rights movement.
This action aligns with federal agencies across the nation striving to adhere to an executive order signed by Donald Trump on his first day in office, which mandates the US government to define sex strictly as male or female.
“This blatant act of erasure not only distorts the truth of our history, but it also dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals – especially transgender women of color – who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights,” organizers at the Stonewall Inn and the non-profit Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative said in a statement.
Since the removal, protests have erupted (and rightly so) and this story is being covered wonderfully by
:
Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM because its holiday list wasn’t ‘sustainable’
Google Calendar users are maaaad after discovering that certain events, like Pride Month, are no longer highlighted by default. A Google product expert confirmed that observances like Black History Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Month, Jewish Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month have also been removed. Here’s what Google had to say about it:
For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world. We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.
Deloitte US asks consultants to drop gender pronouns in email signatures
Again, ugh. Last week, Deloitte asked its consultants who engaged with the US government to “remove gender pronouns from their email signatures” in order to “align with emerging government client practices and requirements.”
Hi bookies! I wanted to share with you some highlights from our Shit You Should Read About Book Club that we’ve revamped over on Fable!
We have loved seeing you all migrate there and introduce yourselves in our club lobby (sorry that is the cutest name for the general chat) + discuss our February book pick, Martyr! by using the chapter-by-chapter discussion channels!! It’s such a cute place on the internet that I would love for you to join if you haven’t already - and you’ll be able to vote on our poll for which book we should read in March!
Love
xx
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i know we're supposed to fight back and all that but i feel so hopeless. i'm watching myself and everyone like me be erased before my eyes. i'm only seventeen so i don't know what the fuck i'm supposed to do. progress has happened so slowly and my community has gotten so much done and trump has torn a ton of it down in less than a month. i feel like a ghost. i don't know what the point of fighting is when the people we need to fight are miles more powerful than we could ever dream of being.
Cool thing on the chasm subject. Bad things happening in USA in the other hand