Maybe stay away from the Garbage Plates?

It's unexpectedly cold in the winter, I'll
grant you, but not unexpectedly welcoming.

I must say, I take issue with this headline from theguardian.com: “Trans people are finding safe haven in an unexpected place: Upstate New York.” Unexpected? Why unexpected? It’s famously progressive New York, not say, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, or Florida (the worst state), all of which have passed bans on gender affirming care. 

"Trans people? Like Optimus Prime?"

-a shocking number of Americans

So why unexpected? I'm not saying that New York is blue through and through. Nowhere is. As the article points out, New York is (like California, and really the country as a whole) kind of purple. My hometown of Rochester is surrounded by red counties. But like most red counties across the land, they're like forty people and a Bass Pro Shop. The cities in New York state are progressive. It turns out when you live in proximity to people different from you, it's harder to pretend said people don't exist or aren't deserving of the same rights and freedoms that you have. 

Maybe this is just the smug liberal in me talking (it definitely is), but I wonder if a lot of our frustration stems from the idea that that proximity necessarily influences our perspective. And that despite our numbers, our national policy ends up being shaped by underpopulated red states with outsized voting power thanks to some poor decision making by a bunch of landowners in powdered wigs.

Pictured: the Constitutional convention coming up with the
Electoral College and basically ruining everything forever.

Above: the second largest hole in the state.
The first being in the chests of Republicans
where a heart in a human would reside.

Anyway, the Guardian specifically recounts the stories of several trans people fleeing hostile states, including a twenty-three year old trans man named Travis Covitz who moved to Rochester after college to escape the transphobic legislation and culture of his home state of Arizona. There, he found a supportive and diverse community representative of everything that is good and pure in America instead of the book banning goons of the Grand Canyon State on some moral crusade to run everybody else's lives. 

New York is a "sanctuary state" having passed legislation preventing law enforcement and state agencies from cooperating with out-of-state agencies that try to interfere with things like gender-affirming care. Which, I mean, it kind of bums me out that we need something like sanitary states, but until people stop voting Republican, it's what we've got.

With each passing day, Republicans move closer and closer to being X-Men villains.

If conservatives should be outraged by
anything it should be the Garbage Plate.

So why even am I talking about this? I don't live in Rochester anymore. I was lured by the unpredictable weather and unsustainably high cost of living of the Bay Area (well, Santa Cruz anyway). But I am feeling a sense of, what's it called? Hometown pride? Yeah, pride in my hometown and state for being such a safe place (relatively speaking, I mean, it's still America) for one of our country's most vulnerable groups. Pride that is slightly diminished but the fact that we invented the Garbage Plate, but still...