“I was arrested on June 2nd, 2020 with around 100 other protesters in Los Angeles. While I was ziptied and facing the wall, two male officers joked behind me about my gender presentation: "Do you think it’s a female? Are you sure?”
They then proceeded to start patting me down—touching my breasts and my front/back pockets, still laughing. Finally, one of them admitted,“ We shouldn’t be doing this.” Then they called over a female officer to search me. Their names are Officer Cho and Codilla of the LAPD.
I was not the only gender non conforming protestor to be called “it.” There were trans/non-binary protestors divided into the ‘male’ and 'female’ buses and deliberately misgendered. I was also not the only protestor to be sexually harassed or made uncomfortable.
After being held for over 4 hours—with protestors vomiting, fainting, forced to pee in their seats, losing circulation in their bruised wrists/arms—many began to advocate. We demanded access to bathrooms, water, and medical attention. We held them accountable to the law.
The only response was an officer telling us to “stop acting like high school girls.” We were held even longer, watching other buses with prisoners being processed and released. When I got off the bus, an officer said, “Now that you’re acting reasonable, we let you off the bus.”
We spoke up about LAPD abuse and were punished for it. They heard us begging and screaming for medical attention and chose to keep us there for 5 ½ hours to silence us.
After the zip ties were cut off, I was threatened by an officer who said: “Stop it with the attitude. This is us being nice—I can make this much worse for you.” In response to us advocating for our rights, they told us: “You have no rights here.”
This is what protestors are facing. This is the violence and harassment police have been using to silence us, wear us down, and force us off the streets. Even without rubber bullets, tear gas, and batons, they have other means of physical and emotional violence.
This is just a taste of the brutality that black and brown people experience with police. It is a privilege to be shocked by this. It is a privilege to be violated and humiliated for the first time. And I’m sure that my whiteness protected me in custody as it did on the street.“
Under normal circumstances, visitor revenue makes much of what we do possible, including our exceptional day-to-day care of over 80,000 animals and plants, our rescue and rehabilitation of stranded sea otters, and our work to tackle the greatest threats to the health of our ocean planet. But our ability to continue this vital work is uncertain due to the unprecedented loss of revenue during our closure.
I’ve shared posts like this before, but I’m sharing it again. AZA zoos and aquariums are hurting right now, with a massive loss of revenue and animals that still require round the clock care, specialty food, veterinary care, and expensive life support systems.
Zoos are maintaining their high animal care standards even through this tragedy, often cutting the pay of higher ups so that money can be funneled into paying for animal care and animal care staff, but they can’t keep it up forever.
Please tell your representatives to include AZA zoos and aquariums in COVID-19 relief legislature. The link above will take you to a page where all you have to do is type in your information and it will auto generate letters to all your representatives.
we didn’t remember what was happening and our brain made something up we only later realized wasn’t true.
no one believes us when we tell the truth so it’s easier to lie.
we didn’t realize we were lying until the words were already out.
we have a complicated relationship to truth in that we rarely know what it is until we’re told/have it affirmed to us.
We’re embarrassed
we’re gonna get yelled at for telling the truth anyway (because it involves some ADHD fuck-up or other)
the crushing fear of rejection we think will happen if we dont give the “correct” answer even if there is literally no wrong answer
oh. Oh
- Look, you yelled at us and insisted that “I forgot” was a lie - when it wasn’t - so many times that we threw up our hands and said “Fuck it”. Who even knows what the truth is now? Certainly not us, APPARENTLY.
- It’s not necessarily a lie as such, but if I’m in the middle of a low-key panic attack, *something* will come out of my mouth and it may or may not be the whole truth, or the truth from a certain point of view, or somewhat random and unrelated, because I’m currently devoting most of my higher brain functions to keeping the panic from becoming A Problem
“I just spent the last 24 hours in Tempe and Phoenix police custody for spraying 'Penis Man,’” Shomer wrote. “They raided my condo and vehicle and swarmed my entire complex in west Phoenix with 25 heavily armed SWAT officers, and pointed a silenced assault rifle in my face.
"Anyone with any doubt who the bad guys are here … be certain it is the City of Tempe, City of Phoenix, and police forces valleywide. There is no excuse for pointing an AR-15 in the face of a non-violent offender.”
Shomer added in further posts that he spent a night at Maricopa County’s Fourth Avenue Jail following more than five hours in Tempe police custody, during which time he was giving “nothing to eat.”
He wrote that he was “told I wouldn’t receive medical attention after requesting it, even though it was posted on the wall to ask if desired. I was having a panic attack, cause they put a fucking assault rifle in my face (that’s illegal, both denying medical attn, and excessive force).”
Shomer also wrote in his post-arrest screed, “For the record, I hate the institution of the police. But, I do not think every single cop is a bastard. To say they all are, is imo, stooping to their level of profiling. Some of the detectives I met seemed to be genuine penis man fans.”
“Penis Man is neither man nor woman, you nor me,” Shomer wrote in one post. “We are ALL Penis Man.”
