In the middle of May, the Advocate, a national LGBTQ magazine, published a rare headline about Seattle. “Transgender Americans are fleeing hostile red states,” it read. “Seattle says it’s overwhelmed.”

The headline was posted to social media, picked up by other queer outlets, and pingponged around the internet, latching onto readers’ confirmation biases on every side of the political spectrum. The story eventually bounced back to Seattle, where TV reporters parroted the Advocate’s headline: Seattle is overwhelmed by trans people!

Let’s state the obvious first: We are a city that’s overwhelmed by many things. Our booming population? Sure. The tech sector? Maybe. High income earners inflating our cost of living? Most certainly. But our city of 800,000 people is not “overwhelmed” by trans people fleeing red states.

Unfortunately, that meme-able headline overshadowed what Seattle’s queer community was actually saying: The City isn’t overwhelmed, but our queer community organizations are. Seattle is witnessing the beginning of an internally displaced refugee crisis. And it’s time for the city government to step in and live up to its claims that it’s a “Welcoming City,” and be one.

The story started with an article in Seattle Gay News on May 12. Seattle’s LGBTQ Commission had sent a letter to the Mayor’s Office, City Council, and City Attorney’s Office, asking that they declare a civil emergency to address the increasing number of trans and queer people moving to Seattle from hostile states to escape anti-trans legislation, threats to personal safety, and a lack of health care and legal recognition.

Seattle is on a short list of US cities that are widely known to be especially safe for trans people. But moving here also means moving into one of the most expensive cities in the county—undoubtedly more expensive than the city they’re coming from—in the midst of a housing and affordability crisis.

Jessa Davis, co-chair of the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, tells The Stranger that new arrivals are struggling to find work and housing. “We have people who come here, and they sleep on a couch for two weeks, and then go to another couch for two weeks, and then maybe they have a car, maybe they choose to get a tent,” she says. “It’s really impossible to get the kind of money you need to rent a place on your own, and building a network fast enough where you can get a roommate or move in with someone long-term.”

There are no official (or even unofficial) numbers for how many trans people have moved here since the Trump administration poured fuel on the fire of the Repubican Party’s anti-trans campaigns took off, but local organizations have consistently reported increased demand. “In some cases, demand already exceeds available capacity,” the letter reads. And Seattle’s emergency response systems aren’t built to help people who are displaced in their own country. So they felt it was necessary to declare a civil emergency.

A “civil emergency” is largely a bureaucratic lever. Declaring one allows the mayor to throw money at a crisis without going through the time-consuming legislative process of allotting funds through City Council. And this wouldn’t be the first time the Trump administration cornered us into it: Mayor Bruce Harrell declared a civil emergency when SNAP benefits went unfunded last year.

In this case, the commission hopes that declaring a civil emergency could allow the city to financially support the organizations that are already serving trans refugees in the city with housing, behavioral health, food access, legal services, and violence prevention.

A civil emergency isn’t the only iron in the fire, and it might not be the best one. In the weeks before the commission sent the letter, City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck had already been working with community groups on an early draft of a Trans Bill of Rights that would “shape the city’s approach to welcoming trans refugees.” She supported declaring a civil emergency when SNAP benefits were on the line, because there was a clear, single-step course of action ahead of them: Use emergency funds to fund the food banks. But in a nuanced situation like this refugee crisis, the demands on the executive branch aren’t as clear. “A civil emergency only works when the executive knows what they want to do,” she says.

Davis stands by their letter. “It’s a short-term solution,” she says. “We don’t have money [for those services] in the budget today. But we have emergency funds, and we need to do something today… If we start by just talking about the future, then we are dooming the people between now and that future budget cycle to being entirely on their own in the face of potentially collapsing social support.”

After the swirl of the headlines settled, the mayor didn’t declare an emergency. Instead, she announced a first step: an “interdepartmental team” that will figure out what the executive wants to do. They’ll work in “active partnership”—whatever that means—with the commission, community groups, and city council to recommend new legislation, including Rinck’s Trans Bill of Rights.

One of the City’s biggest challenges will be assessing just how many trans people have moved to Seattle—it’s hard to allocate resources when you don’t know how many people need them. Rinck says she’s been talking to the trans mutual aid groups like couch-surfing networks that have popped up all over the city, which have the most consistent, direct contact with trans people who have fled other states. They’re able to give her verbal estimates of the number of people they’re working with, but many of them are informal and decentralized by nature. “I can’t pull from a data system and say here are the exact numbers.”

Some of that is by design. “People are surviving by staying invisible,” says Rinck. It’s true of anyone experiencing homelessness, she says, “but there’s a tremendous amount of danger that is facing trans people.”

The letter did commit to work on an “accelerated timeline,” and they plan to finish in August. When it comes to funding, though, the letter committed to nothing. “Although our city is experiencing challenging budget constraints, we will proactively search for ways to meet urgent needs while planning for a stronger future,” Mayor Wilson wrote. But both Rinck and Davis have been heartened by the City’s quick responses so far. “It surpassed my expectations,” Davis says. “It’s been met with a level of seriousness and engagement that I’m frankly proud of.” 

The post Seattle Is Not ‘Overwhelmed’ by Trans People appeared first on The Stranger.

Despite not having much belief in any specific religious system, I want to believe that the cheese enchilada is a gift from some actually-real, benevolent god who wants us to be happy, and just decided one day that shoving cheese into a tortilla and slathering it with warm sauce was the best way to do that. 

But I know the enchilada is actually rooted in more than a thousand thousand-plus years of culture, of hard work, of agricultural innovation, of perseverance. The dish’s origins date back to antiquity, and it starts appearing in literature in 1756, when Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote down the first description of enchiladas. From there, the history gets a bit messy, with each region in Mexico boasting its own recipes for the dish, stuffing tortillas with everything from picadillo to huitlacoche. There are countless enchilada iterations, and I think that’s beautiful. 

The version I first encountered at a Louisiana Tex-Mex restaurant in the 1980s was decidedly removed from the dish’s origins: bright yellow processed cheese stuffed inside an industrial corn tortilla and slathered in even more cheesy sauce. It was, in a word, perfect. Later, I would encounter more sophisticated versions of cheesy enchiladas, sometimes with roasted veggies tucked alongside the cheese for added texture, or bathed in tangy tomatillo salsa, and I devoured them all. 

For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by…

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Listen carefully to how people talk about coyotes and you'll hear echoes of language often directed at our marginalized human communities, writes Glenn Nelson.

A young person with green-streaked hair, glasses, and a black t-shirt stands outside on a paved walkway while holding rolled-up papers and a tablet tightly to their chest. They are wearing a dark knit beanie covered in numerous political and social activism buttons, while other partially visible pedestrians and a bicycle stand in the background.

No matter what brought you here—if you live with or without birds, if you have lain awake at night pondering the problem of your parrot's predilection for wanking it in the wee hours, or if you have no clue that or how a bird might whack off in the first place—I am here to tell you that yes, it is OK for birds to masturbate. In fact, it is not just OK; it is natural. As such, the birds in your life should be allowed to beat off as they please, without your permission and certainly without your hindrance. (No, a bird did not write this blog, but I certainly hope a bird would approve of it.)

These are the conclusions of four researchers who want to set the record straight about bird masturbation, with a paper that led a great Guardian headline: "Masturbation among birds is ‘natural’ and should not be punished, say experts." Go off, experts! One of said experts speaks from personal experience. (She is not a bird.) Chloe Heys, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Lancashire in Preston, England, had a pet cockatiel named Billy, who masturbated up to 10 times a day during the breeding season. "She'd rescued Billy from a pretty nasty situation, and was worried his masturbation might be a sign of unhappiness," Tom Price, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool in England, told Audubon. "On the other hand, she thought he looked like he really enjoyed masturbating."

Should Billy be masturbating? If so, how much? These questions served as the basis of the new paper out in Ecology and Evolution, which takes to task the unjustly invisibilized history of birds fapping it, in and out of captivity.