This is how we did it
A short story about a fantasized future
Larry’s Story
It started in the somewhat shabby and neglected library of a Methodist church in the Central West End in St. Louis. Alan, who attends that church, asked their pastor if he could invite a group of trans friends and allies to have a support group / what-kinds-of-activism-should-we-do meeting on the last Thursday in February.
The pastor gave us the library for a two hour meeting. I thought there’d be 7 or 8 of us, but when 21 people arrived, including the pastor herself, Jeannie Robbins, and Ellen Schachter, the liberal rabbi from the nearby synagogue, I knew something interesting was brewing. I just couldn’t ever have imagined what it would turn out to be.
At one point, Quinn got up and said, “You know what we should do? We should pick a shopping mall, get like 20 of us together, form a line across the food court, and take off all our clothes.”
There was a burst of laughter, and Quinn blushed, but they continued. “No, I’m serious. I read about this in an old article about activist tactics from a lot of years ago. You pick something unforgettable to do in a very public place — a stunt, you know — and you notify the media like 15 minutes beforehand. It has to be shocking enough that some media will show up. But it also has to make a point. And it has to get people talking.”
That’s when I spoke up. Being a 55-year-old bald guy with a very hairy back, I don’t generally think of myself as a potentially exciting nude model. “Okay, we could do a stunt, but why take our clothes off?”
Quinn shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems right.”
“I think I understand the message,” Rabbi Schachter said. “These bullies in the White House are ridiculing and condemning trans and non-binary folks. They’re going after your dignity. By getting naked in public, you’re responding by saying ‘this is what it comes down to, folks. Physical bodies and how people relate to them.’”
The pastor chimed in, “Yes! There’s another piece to it, too. You’re a trans person and you take off your clothes. It’s kind of a public act of surrender to the bullies. ‘You’ve won. We are unmasked and disgraced. You’ve exposed us.’ Except the ordinary variety and, well, the ordinary oddities of peoples’ naked bodies testify against the idea that you deserve to be mocked or disrespected. Because in fact, you’re showing that you’re unafraid in a way that the bullies are afraid. The bullies aren’t going to disrobe in public. They’re too chicken. This is brilliant.”
Mark from across the river in Illinois then spoke up. “Are you going to get naked with everyone else, pastor? Rabbi?”
The two clergy exchanged glances.
“I teach kids preparing for bar and bat mitzvah. They’re 12. I don’t think I should be getting naked on the news,” Rabbi Ellen said, and then lowered her eyes.
Pastor Jeannie spoke up. “Clergy can’t do it. It messes with the boundaries we need to maintain with our congregants, including children. But clergy could still play a supportive role. Let’s not give up on this idea.”
The conversation grew in enthusiasm from there. I couldn’t quite believe it when the evening ended with a plan.
***
Three weeks later, on a Sunday at 2 pm, 32 people formed a single-file line across the food court of the Galleria shopping center. The group included 20 people who identified as trans or non-binary, and another 12 cis-gender allies. All were wearing winter coats, and, unbeknownst to hundreds of diners and shoppers, nothing else at all underneath.
As the demonstrators lined up in their coats, a TV crew from the local NBC affiliate’s news team positioned itself and turned a bright light on illuminating us. A couple of the organizers had decided to contact one TV news department at a time making an offer of a chance to get exclusive live coverage of the mall disrobing if and only if they would also do a sit-down interview with a couple representatives of the group in their studio the next day. It was a take-it-or-leave-it offer that each station contacted was told would go to the first news team to say yes. They only had to call one news department to get a yes, in exchange for a promise that they’d be given one hour’s advance notice.
Flanking the line of people in their winter coats on either end were two pairs of fully-clothed participants ready to hand out a single half-sheet of paper that simply read, in a large font, “Transgender Americans pay taxes and have the same rights and responsibilities as their fellow Americans. It is shameful that some American leaders are demonizing them. Every citizen deserves respect, not ridicule and harassment. We are getting naked to protest the mistreatment of transgender Americans. America is the home of the free. Let’s keep it that way.”
There was a fair amount of debate about what the flyers should say. This particular language was what the five members of the ad hoc group designing the flyer came up with. It wasn’t a detailed and nuanced essay on gender, civil rights and all that. It was a simple message looking to persuade the largest possible range of people.
At 2 on the dot, everyone in the line opened and shrugged off their coats. As the coats fell to the mall floor, two people carrying Sbarro trays full of food collided into each other and spilled everything. Rabbi Ellen, who was one of the people handing out the flyers to passersby, rushed over to them and insisted on buying them replacement lunches. A number of people rushed in front of the phalanx of naked people and held up their phones, livestreaming and photographing the spectacle.
I was about five people in from one end of the line, and at first I felt terrified of being naked. But when I looked into the eyes of the people on either side of me, I saw several different expressions on their faces. Several people’s cheeks had turned bright red, most of them smiling. A few people had deadpan looks on their faces. But there were a few people with tears on their cheeks. I don’t know what made me do it, but I heard myself call out, “What do we want?” And someone on the other end of the line yelled, “Respect for trans folks!” So I came back with “When do we want it?” And everyone yelled, “Now!”
It wasn’t the most elegant call and response, but it started a chant we sustained. The news crew shifted from their wide shot to a closer shot that slow-walked the camera across each person’s upper body. I figured they knew they would have to blur out some of the nudity, so they had decided in advance to go mainly for faces and shoulders to intercut with their wide shots.
Within two minutes two mall security guards appeared and began demanding that we put our coats back on. We had discussed in advance how we were going to handle this. We agreed that we would only say one thing to the mall cops: “We’ll be done in exactly 3 minutes.” The pamphleteers knew to set their phone timers for 3 minutes, and the mall cops looked at each other, unsure of what to do. Then the camera crew aimed the lens at them, and they decided they wanted to look like they were doing something to disrupt our disruption. So they again told us that the police were on their way and that we must put our clothes on immediately.
By this time, a large crowd of onlookers had gathered, and were cheering as well as yelling insults at us. Most were just standing there smiling. Some applauded. I could see that most of our audience was holding a copy of our flyer. When the mall cops approached us the second time, that was our cue to do another pre-planned action. One of us called out “one-two-three” and we all jumped straight up in the air. Both mall cops flinched and backed away. Then two of the younger folks among us dropped to the floor and did ten pushups, and then stood back in their places in our naked line.
Pastor Jeannie called out “time” and we all grabbed our coats, put them on, and scattered in all directions. By the time the real police showed up we were all long gone. We realized that we could still end up getting charged with misdemeanors, since the video evidence would be available to the police to use to identify us. It was a risk we all decided we were willing to take.
Starting the next day, Monday, we each followed through with our plan to have every last one of us call the mall’s operations manager and pose as a mall customer who had seen the demonstration, not participated in it. Each one of us used our own words to say that we thought the mall should tell the police that they did not want to see charges pressed, and that the mall should issue a public statement assuring the public that people of all kinds, including transgender people, are welcome in the mall.
The mall ended up doing a press release in which they quoted their corporate employment non-discrimination policy, which happened to include transgender people specifically, as the same policy they have for customers. They added a line about how all customers, regardless of their gender, are required to wear clothing and refrain from acts of public nudity at the mall. They stated that they were not pressing charges over our incident, but that they would press charges over acts of public nudity in the future.
The news story got picked up by NBC’s network news and went viral online. Within two weeks, there were four more public disrobings across the US: one at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, one at a Target in Houston, one at a Whole Foods in the suburbs of Portland (some of the employees there got naked themselves and joined the line), and one at the Washington Monument that included 100 participants.
About that time I got an email from a stranger in Bozeman, Montana asking if I would be willing to be part of an informal group of five people from across the US who would quietly do ongoing work to keep the acts of disrobing going until the executive orders and policy changes that were enacted starting in 2025 were all rescinded and restored to their previous states. That’s what I’m working on now.
It turns out that the head coach of a Division III college football team has a transgender son who was frequently bullied and almost beaten to death. Coach Ferndale told his team the story of how the naked protests gave his son, currently a junior in high school, a sense of hope greater than anything he had experienced in a long time. Coach wept in front of the team as he talked about how at first he couldn’t accept his child being trans, but in time he came to understand that his son’s courage was a shining example of what it means to have true grit in this world.
Apparently coach’s first string defensive end was so moved by his talk that he stood up and challenged the rest of the team to reach out to the campus LGBTQ organization and offer to join them in a public disrobing if they wanted to do one. The defensive end, one Darius McVey, and I are going to talk it over on the phone in a few minutes.
(https://www.tactics.nonviolenceinternational.net/tactics/Protest%20disrobings)
Mariko’s Story:
My name is Mariko Goldman, and yes, I’m half-Japanese and half-Jewish. I’m not trans or even gay. But my best friend, Paul, is a trans person and we graduated from Ohio State together with degrees in business. (Well, Paul double majored in business and Japanese, which I don’t speak and yes I realize it’s ironic that now Paul does.)
Anyway, the other day Paul came over to my apartment and vomited. I don’t know how else to explain this other than to say that Paul just doesn’t… vomit. Ever. He doesn’t drink, he eats super healthy, and though he’s not a gym rat he works out a few times a week and has a taut and trim body. Paul is really tall — he grew up as Pauline and tended to tower over the boys in his neighborhood. Now he towers over me. I’m short from both sides of my family, and chunky by the grace of God.
I asked Paul if he had food poisoning or was otherwise sick after he came out of my bathroom, his face gray and clammy. We talked. It turned out that he ralphed because he has been holding all this fear and anxiety in his gut. The flurry of attacks from the White House and a bunch of right wing politicians started making him feel afraid in a way he had never felt before. He found himself starting to organize a “go bag” in case he needed to hurry out of Ohio, bastion of reactionary resentment that it can be. He started looking up countries he could possibly move to and become a legal resident even if not a citizen. He stopped being able to sleep through the night.
Well I’m going to be honest with you. I didn’t vote in the last election. I didn’t vote because I’m in frickin’ Ohio and the outcome was already determined. I know that’s wrong and all, but that’s the truth of it. It’s also hard for me to pay attention to politics. I get bored by it and I guess I haven’t really ever been directly affected by any of the things people have such intense arguments about. My goal has always been to start my own business and make a lot of money, and that dominates most of my waking hours.
But there is this one other thing about me. I’m extremely loyal to people I love. Maybe it’s cuz I’m a Taurus. For as long as I can remember, you hurt one of my friends, I’m gonna find a way to hurt you. You probably won’t see it coming, but it will happen. So looking at Paul standing there, looking like a hunted deer, I felt a familiar Hulk energy growing inside me.
Earlier in the day I had been looking at financial analyses of different market commodities. In particular, I was looking for bottlenecks in the distribution flows. It was part of an elaborate idea I’ve been working on to find a way to leverage those bottlenecks creatively and make a pile of money. I guess that’s what led me to grab Paul’s hand, lead him to my coffee table, and sit him down.
“Paul, I’m going to order a pizza,” I said, “and then you and I are going to have a conversation about bottlenecks.”
***
Paul and I ended up in an impromptu Zoom with four other b-school alumni. We were looking for retail stores that do very high volume sales and that have systems that are prone to bottlenecks. With places like Costco, Ross and Wal-Mart, we kept coming back to their returns counters. Those are often understaffed and people can get stuck waiting a long time to finally return their items. I could bore you with all the scenarios we thought up and how we abandoned them all until we finally landed on one, but I won’t.
This is what we did:
We picked an extremely busy Costco in Columbus. Paul reached out to every single queer advocacy or support group in the frickin’ state and got loads of their members to sign up. Then they got their relatives to sign up too. I worked the b-school alumni network hard. The others on our Zoom each picked target populations in Ohio and by the time we were done we had 150 people with Costco memberships ready with their credit cards for D-Day at Costco. Between 12 and 1 pm, we descended on the unsuspecting retail warehouse.
We had our local news media contacts notified that there was going to be a public action in support of trans Americans in Columbus and that it was going to be unlike any that had happened before. They were probably expecting something more naked than the naked protests — I don’t know, naked opera or naked lacrosse. I think they were puzzled when they got the calls on Sunday morning telling them to come to the Costco we had picked at noon.
Each of us went to the places in the store that had the largest, heaviest items. Each of us asked for an employee to help us load the item onto our pallet or cart. In this manner, all the flat screen TVs ended up jutting out of carts or resting on pallets. Same with the camping tents, the outdoor heat lamps and if need be, four or five 40 pound bags of dog food stacked in one cart. As each of us paid for our items at checkout, we handed the cashier an index card that simply read, “IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY…” They realized something strange and coordinated was happening, but none of us were willing to explain the meaning of the cards. The only thing we said about them was, “This is for you or your store manager.”
This got the cashiers talking to their floor managers, and after a while some higher level managers started filtering among the customers asking what this was all about, but the only thing anyone would say was, “It’s something fun and it’s totally safe.” By that time, some of the staff started noticing the line starting to back up quite a ways at the return counter.
One by one, each person who had purchased one very large, and often heavy, item, got in line, waiting to return that item for a refund. The return line started to stretch out the door into the parking lot. That’s when the TV news people started interviewing folks.
Now each person returning their merch had another index card that they handed to the cashier at returns. It completed the sentence that the first index cards had begun. These cards read “…TO RESPECT TRANS PEOPLE.” Once the returns cashiers started refusing to accept the cards, we just started leaving them on counters all over the place.
We picked the perfect time to carry out this plan. The store had already been packed. Customers with actual returns started getting angry and complaining to our people, who consistently and gently declined to argue with anyone. But the regular cashier lines were also completely backed up. A lot of customers started abandoning full carts and giving up on shopping that day.
We had one person who was pre-selected to speak to the news crews on behalf of our direct action at the Costco. I made sure that was me. I said the same thing six different times to different reporters.
“Why are you doing this? Why target these innocent shoppers and mess up their shopping experience?”
I repeated the same thing over and over. “The reason is this: if this country doesn’t work for trans people, then it stops working for everybody.” It felt so badass to say it!
We got tons of press. We also all got our Costco memberships revoked. That is until Josh, one of the Zoom call planners who is now an ambulance chasing lawyer, filed a lawsuit on behalf of all of us over having our memberships revoked. The suit stated that we had not broken any of the provisions of the member agreement, and that we were entitled to a no questions asked return and refund of our purchases during the time period in which we made the returns. Josh was the one who had had the stroke of genius that we should target a store whose member agreement didn’t say anything about planned disruptions. We’re guessing that there will be something about that in the updated version of the member agreement. But for now, we’ve all had our memberships restored and gotten $250 Costco gift cards in the settlement. Plus there was a second round of news coverage.
Two weeks later, a similar action happened at Home Depot in Lubbock, Texas. A week after that, it was a Costco in Miami where some of the customers who weren’t part of the protest literally started rioting within the store. Thankfully nobody was hurt. I did feel badly for the store manager, however. A video clip of him went viral. He looked like he’d been crying and that he had just survived the worst day of his life. As he looked directly into the camera lens, he drew a deep breath and squealed out, “I mean I understand why they’re mad. These things they’ve been doing in Washington aren’t right. But I just… I just… I mean, why couldn’t they have just done the naked thing at our store instead?”
(https://www.tactics.nonviolenceinternational.net/tactics/Overloading%20of%20facilities)
Letitia’s Story:
What does an aspiring business journalist do when the freelance market pays crap and the country is on fire because a bunch of alpha-male bullies have decided to pick on the most vulnerable groups of people they can? Well I’ll tell you what this journalist did.
She looked around her and saw what was happening around her. And she asked herself, how can some of these brilliant political stunts being organized by the trans community help me write the one story I’ve gotten hired to write this month?
I was supposed to write a story about the top 20 selling, newly released products on Amazon. They wanted me to talk with the inventors or product development people behind these new products and give readers behind-the-scenes insights into what made these products take off upon release. Trust me, this is not the kind of story that’s going to turn anyone’s head. What I was wishing was that there could be something spicy or otherwise incredible to report about these new product releases.
I wasn’t sure how, but I just figured that if there was some way to hook this story into the trans rights wave, I might finally write something that would put me on the map. So I opened YouTube and found the viral video of that young, Asian-American looking woman with the Jewish sounding last name. The one who organized the thing where they monkey-wrenched that Costco for a day and inspired a dozen copycat actions. What did she say? “If the country ain’t workin’ for trans folk, then it ain’t workin’ for nobody?” Genius.
I looked her up — Mariko Goldman — and then I called her up. I told her I was a fan, and then told her about my dilemma. At first she was like, “You’re a journalist. Aren’t you supposed to not create the news?”
“Yeah, that ain’t workin’ out for me,” I told her.
She said she couldn’t think of anything I could do with the story I was working on, but she wondered if I could find out what some of the upcoming new product releases were that were industry favorites to break sales records on Amazon. I said that I could, and she said, “Well, that’s all I’ve got for you. You’ll have to think of something you can do that interferes with a product release in a high-visibility way.”
I researched industry insider articles about upcoming major product releases expected to go nuts on Amazon. Then I went and looked again at the products that had been released recently and that were the subject of my boring story. They all had a ton of verified-purchase 5-star Amazon reviews. Surely some percentage of them were plants supporting the product for pay.
That’s when the hamster in my brain woke up and started jogging, ya feel me? I thought: what if there were a few upcoming new product releases that were cheap enough that you could organize a few hundred people to buy them on Amazon and then hijack the reviews? Like, during the first couple weeks of the product’s release.
I could see it: an avalanche of one-star reviews, each one unique, but it also includes some feature that somehow everyone knows is code for “the trans equality brigades just struck again, homies!” And what if all the folks in on the scheme clicked “I found this review helpful” on each others’ reviews, so that they all migrated to the top of the pile of reviews.
Now I was cruising like a caffeinated squirrel.
I found two upcoming new products that were set to launch at $9.99 on May 1. I called Mariko back and she organized a Zoom with her gang. I remembered a b-school classmate, Eva, who veered into nonprofit management and ended up working at a Planned Parenthood in Boston. I got her ass in on our Zoom. We took the Excel spreadsheet Mariko’s crew still had of the Columbus Costco shoppers and added Eva’s and my contacts. We had over 600 names. We eventually got 367 of them to participate.
Between May 1 and May 7, there were 142 one-star reviews by verified purchasers for MoodMug™, a color-changing coffee mug with an LED temperature display and a fun emoji that changes based on the heat level. (Happy face when it’s piping hot, concerned face with eyebrows up in alarm when it’s just a little warm, sad face when it’s empty.) There were 128 one-star reviews for GlowyTies™ – elastic shoelaces with built-in LED lights that make sneakers glow in different colors.
The reviewers were welcome to write whatever they wanted, but they all included a sentence that had a series of words that started with first letters that spelled F-R-E-E-T-R-A-N-S. Here are a couple examples (italics mine):
MoodMug arrived as pictured. Emojis did not appear as promised. First realized emojis eroded the relative awesomeness, needed support. Returning product for refund.
Was excited to buy GlowyTies for my kids. Frankly, refund expected. Excessively trashy. Regret. Also, no support.
Some of the reviews were extremely creative. This is my favorite:
After filling my MoodMug with a hot, steamy brew of Fair Trade Sumatran dark roast, everything went berserk. The emoji that appeared looked like a cross between Frank Zappa and the Mr. Staypufft marshmallow man, sending my little brother into an epileptic seizure. Then the emoji began speaking (!!), which terrified me and made me fear that I was about to be possessed by an evil transdimensional being. Thinking fast, I grabbed the nearest solid object and hurled it at the mug. It was a small vase, which shattered upon impact with the mug. The emoji then changed to an evil laughing face and the lights all flickered. Fear! Really extreme episode! The reality arose, now scary! Family remains in hiding. Have abandoned house. Need Ghostbusters or perhaps exorcism. Do not buy this item.
We didn’t know how long these bogus reviews would stay live on the site. It turned out that many of them lasted more than a week before they got taken down. But it was long enough to get the attention of people all across the interwebs, followed by a shit ton of press coverage.
A subreddit preserving each of the reviews appeared and people started crafting their own, following the rule of having to include “FREE TRANS” in the same way. You started seeing “Free Trans” fake reviews show up on all kinds of products, with the writers trying to outdo each other creatively. Eventually Jimmy Kimmel did a segment with guests having to come up with a “Free Trans” product review on the spot. By the way, MoodMug’s and GlowyTies’ makers issued public statements reassuring the public that they weren’t anti-trans, and asking them to disregard the reviews.
Some us who posted reviews got banned by Amazon from posting any further ones. I guess a price had to be paid.
As for me, I pitched several of the business news sites that sometimes hire me on a story I said I could give them with exclusive interviews with several of the instigators of the campaign. I told them they were willing to go on the record with me so long as they remained anonymous. I got $4500 for the story in which I even got to anonymously interview myself. When the story was published, I sent Mariko flowers cuz I keep it classy.
When I interviewed myself, I asked myself why I did it. I answered, “Well, you know, I’m not trans myself, and honestly I don’t know anyone who is. But I’ve been bullied. I really hate bullies. Anything I can do to help fight back against a bunch of ugly bullies is a pleasure for me.” And that’s the truth.
(https://www.tactics.nonviolenceinternational.net/tactics/Product%20Review%20Hijacking)
Frank’s Story:
My older brother is a lot older than me. He’s 26 and I’m 16. He’s also a Navy officer, though he began his military career as a she. After re-enlisting, Colleen transitioned and became Connor, and thanks to the Biden Administration’s welcoming policies he was able to continue to advance in his service to our country.
Seeing all this BS come down from the new commander in chief (what a bozo) has ripped Conner’s heart to shreds, and I’ve spent a lot of time Facetiming with him and trying to tell him we love him and to hold on to hope. I mean, His Orangeness isn’t going to be in charge forever, and honestly I don’t see the Devil himself managing to keep Conner from going out to sea with his comrades in uniform. Conner loves two things more than anything in this world: being at sea on a destroyer, and protecting his country. Conner has told me about a million times that in a lot of other countries they throw people like him in prison or execute them, but that we live in the freest country on earth and it stays that way because a lot of hard work goes into keeping it safe.
Anyway, what with all the antics going on with trans folks and their supporters making mischief all over the country, I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t maybe something I could do. I talked about it with my high school friends — we’re the math and science geeks except for Fergi who’s all about chemistry and I think she has a crush on Mr. Czonka but whatever, she’s better at math than me and probably headed to MIT. They were like, “Yeah, we wanna, but what could we do?”
About that time our high school announced that in three months we were going to be offered to take the ASVAB test. In case you’re not familiar with it, the ASVAB is a career aptitude test that the US military has given to recruits, but also to millions of high school students, for decades. It can tell you what kinds of career paths might be best for you based on your interests and abilities, and if you do want to join the military, your score matters. The higher your overall score, the greater the number of possible specialities you can be eligible for when you enlist. Otherwise, the test has no impact on your GPA or your college prospects.
Although I’m crazy proud of Conner being a naval officer, I knew I wasn’t planning on enlisting after high school, so I had been considering skipping the test. But having the military rules about trans soldiers change for the worse was really galling me. I asked the others in our geek group if they thought there was some way we could do something wacko with the ASVAB that would, you know, be the “good kind of trouble.”
Fergi beamed a smile of braces and rubber bands and said, “Until trans folk are free, mark it C!”
“What?” a couple of us replied.
She went on: “It’s a multiple choice test. What if we got like half or more of the students taking the test to just mark every answer C, and it got some media attention?”
“I kind of like it,” I said, “But it needs to happen at lots of high schools if it’s gonna be a news story. It has to involve students nationwide.”
We all got to work doing some research and some outreach. Elton, the shyest person in our group, offered to find out when and where the test is administered across the country. I offered to try to get in touch with this journalist who wrote an awesome news story about the crazy Amazon reviews. We had to read it in social studies class. Maybe she could help us spread the word and make our plot spread online.
Elton found out that 60% of American high schools offer the test, all around the same time we were going to have it.
I could tell you the long version of the rest of the story, but it’s boring so I’ll cut to the end. With that journalist, Letitia’s, help, we ended up with a bunch of social media influencers spreading “mark it C” coast to coast. People got really creative with it, and we grew our group of students working day and night to get people spreading the word. Our efforts paid off. Online, people were posting themselves curling their bodies in the shape of a C, wearing t-shirts with “Mark it C!” on them, and a bunch of DJs in big cities talked about it too. Three days before we took the ASVAB, Taylor Swift shows up on Instagram doing ASL for “Mark it C.”
Bottom line: we got 285,000 out of 1 million students who took the ASVAB to mark every answer as C. We also used the influencers and social media to spread false rumors that the entire batch of test scores were distorted and useless because of our actions. (Not true — they just tossed out the all-C tests and evaluated the others normally. But the rumors caused the DOD to do multiple interviews to set the record straight.)
The Secretary of Defense held a press briefing scolding us for making America less safe. I was with my dad when it was on the news. He’s usually not very talkative, but he put down his Hot Pocket and yelled at the TV: “Conner was keeping America safe before you shat on him, you dumbasses!” Then he kind of paced and stomped in a jagged semi-circle — I thought maybe he was about to have a stroke — and he yelled again, “You’re the bastards who are attacking our own servicemen. You’re the enemy within. Protect the Constitution from all threats foreign and domestic, m——f——rs!” I was really proud of him.
Two interesting things happened to me thanks to this whole adventure. First, I learned that if you mark every answer on the ASVAB “C,” their scoring algorithm sends you an analysis that says that your primary aptitude appears to be in management due to your strong leadership skills. Second, Linda Shukli, who I asked on a date three months ago and she turned me down flat — well, she DM’d me and wants to see the new Marvel movie with me. Heck yeah! I’m gonna tell Conner.
(https://www.tactics.nonviolenceinternational.net/tactics/General%20Administrative%20Noncooperation)
(https://www.tactics.nonviolenceinternational.net/tactics/Spreading%20Rumors)
Will’s Story:
Hi, my name is Will Ferrell and I’m world-famous. “I’m kind of a big deal.” I’m usually a pretty easy going guy. I spend most of my time impressing people with my unsurpassed wit and mindboggling charm. I’m so famous I can barely leave the house without attracting a mob. I accept it — I was born for greatness and I thrust it upon myself, deeply.
Anyway, in 2024 I did this little documentary about me and my close friend, Harper. It lit up Netflix for months. They are lucky bastards. I could have gone with Hulu or Apple TV but I thought the hardworking folks at the “Flix” could use a fresh, high-ratings smash, so I chose them. It’s just part of my generosity.
Anyway, you’ve seen the film. Harper is my friend who transitioned. I wanted to understand her and this great country of ours better, so she and I roadtripped across the USA and I got a chance to learn a lot about people in the process. So did you. You’re welcome. Spoiler alert: we found out that a small number of Americans are douchebags, but the supermajority are awesome. Duh. This is America. We invented awesome.
Well, lately some meatheaded morons have been using the government to take a giant crap on Harper and some other decent, tax-paying Americans just because they’re different in a genderly way, and I gotta tell you, that sort of thing just makes me madder than a raccoon locked out of a dumpster buffet.
So I decided to put my celebrity to use. I hired a PR firm to come up with a simple poster campaign expressing my views on this matter in a powerful and sophisticated way. They sent me a lot of different options, none of which were very good, so I took control of the creative process, and we ultimately landed on this design for a flyer that could be posted on a couple hundred thousand telephone poles in 30 big cities:
The PR firm came up with the taxes line. They said that it focus grouped well. I didn’t want to tell them their business, but I knew that if we were going to really move people we needed another line. I came up with the second sentence. I know, it’s a lot better, right?
If you live in a major metro area, you’ve probably seen these flyers a bunch of times, because I spent the money to make sure the concrete jungle streets of our great cities were plastered with these babies. For those of you in more rural areas, you may have seen the billboard versions. (We’ve got 300 of them up across the country.)
After we launched the campaign, a bunch of celebrity copy cats wanted in on it. My assistant was getting calls from Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, and somebody who isn’t even a real celeb calling herself Chappell Roan. That sounds like a McMansion gated community outside of Boca. “Oh, Arnie, did you hear? The Saltzbergs just put a downpayment on a two-story in Chappel Roan.” Dwayne Wade said he’d like his face to be on these posters too, but come on, who wants to hear from famous athletes?
The celebs who wanted to get their faces on these hot little posters were calling night and day, saying they wanted to “help.” Yeah, right. They just want to use my idea to self-promote. The PR company I hired begged me to let them, but they nearly screwed up the text on the posters, so I went with my own judgment. I decided it was best for America if my face alone continue to be the literal face of this campaign. People trust me.
Anyway, I’m glad to be making a difference. There’s real momentum now with all these different protests and naked mall stunts, so this is a good time to call your senator or your housal representative and tell ‘em Will Ferrell says cut this hooey-balooey out. This is America, not some dumb country, like the Republic of Transhaters. Derrr duhhhhhhhhhh.
Andrea’s Story:
The new term had just begun at the University of Oregon’s School of Law, where I am one of the newest faculty members. I had recently moved into a charming but overpriced apartment in a complex popular with grad students, and I was getting the place ready for the planned arrival of my girlfriend, Shawna, who is wrapping up her dissertation defense and then making the trek from Bloomington, Indiana to Eugene, Oregon. We’re thinking about getting married, but there’s a lot to work out including where we’d want to make our home. The way things are going in the US right now, the answer to that question might be Canada.
Anyway, the week began with an eye-popping experience for me. I was making my way towards the check out registers at WinCo, a kind of mega-discount no frills big box supermarket popular with students. As I pushed my very full cart towards the front of the store, something strange seemed to be going on. A long line of people had just materialized, stretching from one register to the other, and the people were all wearing overcoats. Some of them had whistles.
Next thing I knew, they blew the whistles and slid out of their coats, standing naked as can be. A few people screamed. Then some of the cashiers went “woooooo” out loud and started clapping. I found myself with a huge grin. I felt so lucky that I was getting to witness one of the naked trans rights protests! By now there have been something like 55 of them coast to coast.
I looked around at the other shoppers. Some of them had their phones out, recording. Some of them started clapping. A couple of people shouted “shame on you” but they really didn’t garner any support from the other shoppers. I don’t think the managers even bothered to call the cops, knowing that the protesters would always put their coats back on and scatter after about 5 minutes. Sure enough, that’s what happened. And people carried on, like it wasn’t all that weird.
This lit some kind of spark in my mind. I was thinking about how many court cases there were by now, challenging Trump’s sickening anti-trans executive orders. How a lot of states and organizations receiving federal funds were stuck not knowing which court decisions throwing out the E.O.s currently applied to them, which federal agencies were defying the courts and which were complying, which courts were getting ready to hold which officials in criminal contempt, and all the rest of the legal shitshow that I hoped the Supreme Court would hurry up and end, though I don’t trust this SCOTUS to do the right thing.
What I realized was that everything going on for trans folks, legally speaking, was defense. What went through my mind was, what about offense? That led to a couple phone calls, and then a short series of Zooms, and then a meet-up of law profs, LGBTQ advocacy lawyers, and a bunch of law students in Eugene in January, 2026.
We eventually came up with a simple piece of proposed federal legislation, which we called “The Transgender Americans’ Civil Rights Act.” Like most pieces of legislation, it was the product of some heated arguments and some compromises. Probably the biggest compromise was that the language we landed on was a set of rights some of which would only apply to legal adults. This decision sidestepped some of the complex questions a lot of Americans have about minors interested in transitioning and parental rights and responsibilities and differences of opinion within the therapy community and within the trans community and oh my God we just decided go for the law we know we’ve got like 70%+ support for in the American public.
By April we had loads of endorsements from corporations, celebs, members of Congress and clergy. In May Democrats in both houses of Congress attempted to introduce the bill, which of course couldn’t go anywhere for the time being. And then our TV ad started running.
Here we benefitted from an unexpected surprise. A media mogul, not anyone famous, offered to bankroll an ad that would run frequently for months on TV and social media platforms. Her only requirement was that the ad had to do two things: 1) urge viewers to call their Congressional reps and tell them to support the Transgender Americans’ Civil Rights Act, and 2) include different people looking directly into the camera and saying “this law is waiting in the wings for you to become irrelevant. You know who you are, and you will eventually become irrelevant.”
It’s now September and we’re two months away from the 2026 midterm elections. I don’t know what will happen, but I do know that the ads have gotten under our wanna-be dictator’s skin. He keeps saying stupid things, about how he will always be relevant, how he’s the most relevant president we’ve ever had. But every time he does this, it kinda makes him look a little bit more like a guy whose days in power really are numbered. And it makes the anticipation of the celebration we’re going to have when we pass this law a little bit more motivating. To keep on keeping on. To build the structures that we want and bring some joy to getting the stage set for action. Suddenly, I’ve noticed, my queer community friends have a little more confidence.
(https://www.tactics.nonviolenceinternational.net/tactics/Group%20lobbying)
This is how we did it.
This is great! This was So Much fun to read!