The Department of Justice still has their page up of immigration legal services, including pro bono immigration attorneys. Good idea to download the list now while the pdfs are still up.
The current source page has a lot of interesting information here: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/list-pro-bono-legal-service-providers
But I’ve also saved the list here: https://joejots.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/pro-bono-legal.pdf
Immigration lawyers often can help with passport issues too.
A friend I’ll call G recently wrote an impassioned post about the experience of growing up female, that this is a unique thing that trans women somehow dilute. Her post included also argued that the sheer average size of biological males argues against their right to occupy biological female space. They are incapable of knowing the fears and joys of being female, from the perspective of being biologically female from birth in the world.
As cisgender humans, G and I are incapable of occupying the spaces of other genders. Our experiences don’t allow for that – nature or nurture – but we can empathise with others’ experiences. I can start to imagine the fears of women making their way through public spaces where they’re catcalled – fears that as a cis-presenting male, I don’t live with. I can imagine those fears and be with those who have them in their space without, for example, denigrating their lived experience. Stating it this way is, I admit freely, very harsh to my friend’s position – possibly harsher than it needs to be. With that empathy I can try to a better human, advocate, partner, and friend.
I also didn’t grow up suffering any kind of gender dysphoria, but I can empathise with those who experience it now – who spend every moment with the feeling that the space they occupy, the space assigned to them, the roles society puts them in are wrong – and argue to make their existences easier and more aligned with who they are. I don’t need to live their experience to trust their lived experience. I was reading today about Brianna Titone, a trans woman in the Colorado legislature. Her childhood dream was to work for the FBI and she remained closeted until she aged out of admission to the Bureau at the age of 37. I can barely imagine the pain that cost her.
From my perspective, it matters what those initial experiences imprint on a person, but those experiences are both internal and external and shouldn’t be legislated back into the closet.
Paraphrasing from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: We can’t know the inner experiences of other people, but we can know our own hearts and by this know the hearts of others. Not what their desires and needs and fears are, but the nature of desire and need and fear. (Hobbes presents this idea in the introduction to the Leviathan. The syntax is very old-school, but it’s four paragraphs worth reading.)
This is possibly the key to the argument. G knows the nature of her fears and needs and desires as she grew into womanhood – or does if she examines her own heart, just as I know mine. We can use that self knowledge to examine the fears and needs of those who grow in a body that doesn’t feel right. Or with desires that don’t align with what the so-called majority posits are the only legitimate paths for desire.
How do we make things equitable in the public square in the face of state after state legislating against trans existence? It’s truly fascistic, in my view, and sets the stage for a full rewrite of the sexual freedoms Americans have had since Griswold. Women are already suffering as a result of restrictions on procedures and medicines that are associated with abortion even if the mother’s ability to further bear children should she survive complications of a pregnancy gone awry. It’s a demonic state of affairs. A few years ago there was a case in Dublin where a woman’s pregnancy went septic – she was denied abortion and died as a result. In response, Ireland legalised abortion and at the time was seen as a latecomer to abortion rights in general. Since then, the US has gone backwards with alarming speed.
What does all of this have to do with trans rights? Good question. Affirming that a person has the right to determine where and how they are most comfortable in their body is one place – bodily autonomy is another. Gender affirming care is a phrase, like ‘woke’ and ‘political correctness’ that has been twisted out of all recognition. G has also argued that drag in general mocks femininity rather than embraces and exalts it. Was Barry Humphries, or Ian McKellen for that matter, mocking women? Do panto dames mock women by their very existence?
G has shared a point about drag being men in ‘woman-face’ and she’s not the only one of my friends to do so. What makes drag different than minstrel shows – Al Jolson singing Mammy in black face? The sidestepping of discrimination and thereby making fun of an underclass group is partially at the heart of each one. But drag has always seemed to me more celebratory of those things that make women different than men.
In considering the arguments against trans people, I’ve wondered if autism in a similar category as gender dysphoria? In both cases, societal and medical changes developments should make it more possible to live comfortably and successfully in the world than was possible ten, twenty, thirty years ago. I can hear a case that these are totally different – one is something that you can show in a medical diagnosis and is historically identified. And the other? Very much the same.
The main problem I have with my friends expressing anti-trans or anti-drag sentiment is that trans folks and queer people in general are in the legislative crosshairs in the US and elsewhere. And the last couple of years have seen a massive uptick in these things.
There are eight trans legislators in US statehouses. None in the US Congress. The silencing and outlawing a class of queer people is happening in at least half of the states with very few voices able to stand up on the other side. And when they do stand up, they’re often silenced. The case of Representative Zooey Zephyr in Montana comes to mind. She was ousted from her duly elected seat for speaking against an anti-trans bill and is still unable to return. The bill passed and was signed by the state’s republican governor.
I read the papers everyday and above the virtual fold, always, is something about the targets on the backs of gender non-conforming people. There’s the bill in Texas trying to legislate that people working for government dress to match the gender they were assigned at birth. (This is nothing new in Texas – I had a housemate 20 years ago who fought her previous employer, the Houston office of the Internal Revenue Service for the right to wear trousers to work. If I recall correctly, she had to take them to court.)
And the BBC reports that the Proud Boys (yes, the source of five seditious conspiracy convictions this week) are now targeting drag shows.
I’m not sure of the answers and I think my lack of certainty is me being played into a more fascistic position. I’m not active in drag (though I once dated the first drag queen to run for president, Joan Jett Blakk), and I’ve never watched Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Are a bunch of queer men dressing up and making their faces exaggerations of femininity problematic in ways that I as a queer-adjacent male can’t comprehend? Are we really that different, men and women (and all human points between and beyond), that we can’t bridge this divide without othering and criminalising a valued (or any) segment of the population, without devaluing any of us? It’s the devaluing of humans for something that’s inherent (heck, even if it’s for something as harmless as drag, that’s chosen) that gets me first, whereas othering people at all takes a piece of my heart and incinerates it while I still breathe.
The rules are inconsistent and contradictory. This is by design. Following the rules does not make it more likely that your life will be easy or consistent. (Likelihood decreases the farther away your are on various spectra from being a mediocre white male.)
Talking with my mother last night, we got on the topic of Novak Djokovic, stuck in a quarantine hotel in Australia because, per the indistinct chatter of social media, he refused to get vaccinated. The bigger picture, which best beloved mentioned over supper, is that Djokovic refuses on grounds that he’s already recovered from COVID and that he was granted a medical exemption. The Australian government, feeling that the exemption was a technical foul, has detained the player.
Part of the issue with the complexity of the rules is that it makes for stories like this one that distract us from the real news going on. As Frank Zappa once put it, Politics is the entertainment division of the Military Industrial Complex. The news (and social media, for that matter) is another arm of that entertainment industry. These stories keep our eyes off the matter of the defense budget (for example). We just came to the end of the longest war in US history and the defense budget still increased. No extra money for teachers and social housing and food banks, but Lockheed Martin and GE still get there share. We saw it happen in 1990 as well. Peace dividend? Please.
Of course in 1989, we went to Panama and in 1991 to Iraq. There’s always a war to wage.
There are other sets of inconsistent rules from top to bottom. Try being Black in America and your chances of ending up like Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor are rather higher than if you’re any brand of white. Try being trans and Black. That’s the next case of the rules, isn’t it now? The one in which the rules we know are written to be explicitly against certain classes of people. Try being female in a frum (pious) Jewish community who has an idea of not being confined to those roles. Or queer in the same situation, for that matter.
Following the rules to the letter doesn’t guarantee your life safety. This is where If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to hide goes head to head with Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And Authority wins over Compassion every time. Every single time.
In the volume When I Grow Up, Ken Krimstein illustrates six stories written by Jewish teenagers in the period just before World War Two. (The tale behind this collection is fascinating in and of itself. Krimstein tells it in this episode of podcast The Shmooze.) In one of the stories, a girl tells of her father and all the worlds he opened up for her, and concludes it with how the elders shouted her down for daring to recite Kaddish for her father at his funeral. The rules for women in that place and time were different than in the conservative Los Angeles synagogue I was raised in. And such rules are probably why there are non-Orthodox denominations at all. Following them didn’t make you any more free, give you any greater intrinsic value. History is littered with those who claim there is more than one avenue to the divine.
And this brings us back around to the rules in today’s America. The vote is supposed to provide greater representation in the various legislatures. But the votes, for example, of a few thousand West Virginians steam roll those of millions of voters in other states, and provides akn object lesson in ‘why we can’t have nice things,’ as if we needed another. And this is before we talk about gerrymandering, the BS in Georgia and several other things. The right to vote, if you can exercise it within the increasingly arcane rules of the American franchise, doesn’t get you a voice.
Despite a well-publicized COVID-related ban on New Year’s Eve fireworks in the Netherlands, there were dozens of displays visible from my house alone (and injuries and deaths justifying the ban). I don’t think Leiden is an outlier, either. Throughout the day there were booms audible from carbide cannons and other noisemakers that had me and the Mrs. on edge. Note that having lived in the Netherlands for almost 15 years, this was the first year we spent NYE at home. Usually we spend it with college friends somewhere in the UK with lots of hiking. (Last year, we spent most of December near the in-laws and planned to be home before Brexit went into effect, but a testing snafu kept us two extra days and we returned on the second.)
With regards to the crazy noise making in the face of the aforementioned ban, I think there’s a connection between how we’re treated as children and how we take responsibility as adults. Parents often say, ‘if you do what you’re told, you can have this thing or that that you want.’ (There’s a different discussion that covers how and how well parents deliver on what they promise.) As adults we often treat ourselves with a similar responsibility/reward system. Freud has a few things to say about this, but I’m writing on the assumption that you often manage to get through unpleasant tasks by identifying a reward, even if it’s just ‘I can have a drink when I make it through the week.’
Societies both function and fail to function on the same principle. The current plague is a good example: If we (governments with the help of people following guidelines) keep the hospitalization numbers down, then we can reopen fun things like movie theatres and pubs. But populations act increasingly like children long denied the promised reward for good behavior. We’re aggrieved by a situation in which no amount of individual adherence prevents the punishment of further lockdowns. We take the opportunities to let off steam or break various rules because we deserve a treat, even if it means further spread of the virus (at a societal level) and further restrictions (at a personal level). Instant gratification seems to take over.
There’s a related issue where we’re told to take personal responsibility for our contributions to environmental degradation. Recently I saw the number floated that 71% of greenhouse emissions are created by corporate activity. While I’m not finding a source for this number in the moment, it’s not the first time I’ve seen similar figures reported. What this means is that even if every person made every possible change to reduce their carbon footprint, we’d still be up to our necks in the results of corporate behavior. Yes, I know this isn’t precisely true – that much personal change would redound on how corporations make their profits. It’s also highly unlikely. Most individuals, even collectively, can do bupkes to influence this issue.
No matter what we do to change our own habits, we’ll still be inundated by the news that the polar bears are still going extinct and temperatures are still going to rise and the weather is still going to mess us up.
And this being the case, we’re still going to do all the wasteful things, or engage in behaviors that are harmful to ourselves and to the community, and do so in the name somehow deserving either a treat or a lapse in responsibility for those around us. I’m not sure how expressing this makes a difference. We’ve never been good at engaging in short term inconvenience to achieve the benefit of long-term personal, much less societal, good.
Last week I mentioned Maddow and O’Donnell, Penfriend’s Attention Engineer, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy. This week I look at more music, some food, and more politics.
Martyn Ware’s Electronically Yours. Ware was a founding member of the Human League and Heaven 17, and his British Electrical Foundation project relaunched Tina Turner’s career in the early 80s. He mostly interviews his own contemporaries (Thomas Dolby, Gary Numan, Vince Jackson), but he’s gone farther afield with Sandie Shaw, and Tony Visconti. Sometimes he’s a little too fond of his own self, or he hasn’t yet decided to edit out his own meanderings, but in general the interviews are fascinating. In his interview with Tony Visconti, Ware admitted early on that Visconti had produced 12 of his 20 all time favourite albums, but he generally did a good job of letting Visconti tell the stories.
Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat (author of Salt Fat Acid Heat) and Hrishikesh Hirway. I learned of this great podcast from Hirway, I’m guessing – I think he must have mentioned at the end of an episode of one of his other podcasts, Song Exploder (which I also love). I didn’t know anything about Nosrat and her amazing cooking journey. The two of them started this podcast at the beginning of the pandemic with the idea that they’d do four episodes talking about their favourite foods and answering listener questions. Four has so far turned into 15. Really delightful and sweet. And mouthwatering.
I said I’d mention a political podcast, but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve not listened to much beyond Rachel and Lawrence. But in the category of longer form political discussion, I really like Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara. Bharara was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, fired at the beginning of the last administration. He is both articulate (not unexpected in a trial attorney) and an astute interviewer. His discussion with conservative columnist David Frum at the earlier this year was especially interesting.
Joe Jots 