New News: No Kitten Heels, No Novelty Foods, No Bebop

Previous: How is your Fleshbeing

😮‍💨 We… will admit to our dear readers: we dragged our feet on today’s New News, fearful that it would be Terrible News which we could not bear. It is terrible news, but from an angle we did not expect.

We are ofc referring to news on the trials of Somni, Suri, Ziz, Jamie, &… maybe Daniel?— held on the Buddha’s birthday: on April 8th.

The long & short of it is: there have been no major developments! Ziz, Jamie, & maybe Daniel have been scheduled for a jury trial, while for Somni & Suri, the judge continued a motion (CAM) to combine their two cases. What does CAM mean? 🤷🏻‍♀️ You’ve got us there! We are no legal whiz. Prob. that the cases are on track to be combined, which Suri’s lawyer is strongly against.

This is no time to play bingo, yet play it we must bc even in these dry-as-dust courtroom updates, the press cannot resist throwing in their snide, skeptical, & sensationalist opinions.

In the News on News studio today, we have Courthouse News Service— with which we have grappled before. They practically make our heart stop w/ this headline/byline:

‘Zizian’ suspect in attempted murder case claims officers are trying to kill her

[Somni] Leatham claimed that the jail was forcibly de-transitioning her, and she feared for her life in police custody before she was forcibly removed from the courtroom

This piece comes to us from reporter Matt Simons. Matt, you are not, for mysterious reasons, on X, so we will have to respond to you here & hope that it gives your ears many tingles from afar ☺️

Either you, Matt, or your editors have already deadnamed Somni in your byline— yet even as you proceed to call her “a transgender woman” in your first paragraph, you continue deadnaming her! Why, Matt? Why is the very language of your article “forcibly de-transitioning” this poor girl? Readers, if you think we are being a snowflake for laying into Matt this early in his article… we must admit sthng: we have read ahead, to make sure that our worst fears— our expected fears— would not be realized. This has led to side-effects: we know is to come, & we cannot, for the sake of good storytelling or for anything else, contain our rage at this little man.

Matt brings us terrible news: Somni has again been forcibly restrained & removed from court after making a proclamation. This time, her proclamation was that “she fears for her life in police custody (SFFHLIPC).” This makes our stomach drop, but makes Matt say only that Somni “claimed” SFFHLIPC.

Why would Somni claim such a thing? Her reasons, as we have come to expect, are quite clear— but to find them, we have to leave Matt & jump over to another article: over to SFist.

Somewhat peculiarly, it is a fiction writer & web editor, named Jay Barmann, whom SFist has assigned to this beat. We scratch our head at the logic of this, but thank him for including the meat of Somni’s “claim”:

[Somni] repeated that a Solano County jail officer had told her she "deserved to be shot for being transgender while he had a gun and I was in chains."

Back to you, Matt.

Matt, why would you omit this critical information from your story? Why would you tear out the substance of what Somni is saying? Were you snoozing for this interlude? Were you checking the apps? We hope you were— the only other option we can imagine is that you were deliberately undermining this girl’s chances of being taken seriously by your readers.

Our fears abt yr motives are not allayed by what you have to say next: by the way that you describe Somni’s statement as “laced with conspiracy and paranoia.”

This, readers, is what moved us to ragefully break the 4th wall back in para. 8. How, Matt, are you accusing this girl of “paranoia” when the very language of your article is laced w/ hostility against her? How are you accusing her of conspiratorial thinking when undeniably, there is a terrible— if uncoordinated— “conspiracy” against her in the transphobic press, in the transphobic public, &— we may readily assume— among her transphobic prison guards? Where is the “goodwill” that she, from w/in her overly-suspicious mindset, is ignoring? Show it to us, Matt— ideally, thru your actions during the rest of this article.

***

🚨This is not all that Somni has said! She has also said that “her jail has been forcibly de-transitioning her with hormones as part of a ‘quarter century’ long initiative”.

To this, Matt scratches his head & adds to her chilling statement, “…although it’s unclear what she was referring to.”

Somni was not, unfortunately, able to elaborate on this statement before being led away by officers. We agree w/ Matt that some of its details could bear unpacking— yet to us, her overall assertion is crystal-clear. Matt’s confusion is the one part of this tragic scene which boggles our mind.

Let’s work, Matt, to decode Somni’s statement together. Let’s start with the second half of it. First, we had to double-check what “quarter century” means: we are not only a non-legal whiz; we are also— unlike Somni— a non-math whiz! Indeed, it is 25 years. That brings us back to 2000. Somni says that, since 2000, Solano County Jail has been forcibly detransitioning its inmates. She says they have done this w/ hormones, which we— unable to ask her directly— may tentatively interpret as: they have been withholding hormones & hormone blockers, despite inmates having a hypothetical right to both.

So: since 2000, Solano County Jail has been denying inmates the HRT which they have a right to. That, Matt, is our tentative translation.

Why 2000? That’s a v. specific thing to say. We fell to light googling, & discovered a few things which we— having, foolishly, been a child in 2000– had forgotten.

***

2000 marked a big turning point in our nation’s “conversation” on trans rights. That is to say: it marked the start of a “conversation” on trans rights. The 1990s saw lots of heroic grassroots organizing among trans ppl themselves— who, incidentally, had largely been left out of the mainstream LGB orgs: y’know, all the ones you’ve probably heard of: GLAAD, HRC, Lambda Legal, etc.

This heroic organizing began to bear fruit right around 2000. Suddenly, policy fights & high-profile lawsuits began to emerge: abt employment discrimination, ID changes, & access to transition-related care. Bureaucracies were forced to respond! Hate crime discourse became more audible as well, after the murder of Brandon Teena in 1993, & the murder of Rita Hester in 1998 (which inspired the Trans Day of Remembrance). Those unheroic LGB orgs seen above began, at this time, to veeery slowly include trans ppl— mostly in symbolic ways… but these symbolic ways did bring w/ them greater visibility.

Now— despite having used it twice— we hate the term “conversation” in reference to tenuous & long-fought movements for change. It makes us think of an afternoon party in an early-60s den, where there is shag carpet underfoot, light jazz or bebop on the record player, & strange novelty foods on the end-tables. It makes us think of tasteful kitten heels, tastefully low bouffant hairstyles, & tasteful chitchat abt family matters & the tasteful neighborhood. Is this what happened, ca. 2000, when issues of trans rights burst into the mainstream?

No! What happened was that conservative thinktanks began deliberately including anti-trans policies in their agendas. The religious right suddenly lost interest in saying gay marriage would destroy the country, & started saying trans rights would destroy the country. Many white, liberal feminists suddenly realized: they were TERFs! There were no kitten heels, & no novelty foods. There was no bebop.

Most critically to Somni’s statement: at this same time, prisons & institutions started “justifying” the denial of medical care to trans ppl— sometimes reversing previous allowances! A survey from 2024 has shown that, in California— where Somni is held— fewer than half of trans inmates receive their hypothetically-guaranteed HRT (THGHRT), while nearly a third cite “other institutional barriers” to accessing THGHRT.

***

This light yet oh-so-heavy googling took us about 2 hours. That time includes the writeup of our findings.

Is your journalistic life, Matt, so busy-busy that you cannot spare 2 hours to parse the “unclear”* statements of your subjects?

*Looking back over Matt’s comment— “it’s unclear what she was referring to”— we see an unfortunate use of journalistese. What Matt meant to say was: “it’s unclear to me what she was referring to”. That would have been an honest statement. Instead, his journalistese has produced a dishonest implication: that Somni’s statement in & of itself was confusing. As usual, we take bitter solace in the fact that Somni cannot see the dishonest statements which are being made, publicly, abt her v. clear statements.

If your life, Matt, is that busy-busy, this 😮‍💨 leads us to an uncomfortable thought.

***

If the Times is too busy to read Ziz’s voluminous yet vital blog… & too busy to fact-check the sensational claims of The Unnamed Site, before linking to it & letting it direct the tenor of their exposé… & if you, Matt, are too busy to clarify, in your own mind, the only public statement which Somni is able to make until her next hearing… if our media machine (OMM) has grown so fast-paced… then who, who in OMM is able to steal the time that it invariably takes to understand any issue— before they are forced to write on it?

Ziz’s story is long & twisted (LAT), sure; but we doubt that it’s uniquely LAT. We rather fear it may be a standard example of what shenanigans get played w/ LAT stories in OMM. If we were a total cynic, we could say: that get played w/ stories period! 🤷🏻‍♀️ We are not a total cynic. We hope.

Ofc, one thing that makes Ziz’s story LAT is that it must bump up against all the biases & ‘phobias (BAP) in our minds. Alas, in the absence of slow, deliberate understanding, these BAP are always on hand to “explain” what it is we are seeing! It is our BAP which whisper that Somni is paranoid, conspiracy-minded, & incomprehensible. Who is writing these articles? Is it qualified journalists, or is it their BAP? Our BAP are defined by easy ways out, &— to borrow AI lingo— by hallucinations. W/ all the time we spend fretting over AI, its hallucinations, & its easy ways out, would we not be better off fretting over our BAP, its hallucinations, & its easy ways out?

😮‍💨 Anyway, back you, BA— uh, back to you, Matt.

***

Next, Matt, you deliver the third leg of Somni’s statement, which seems to walk alongside the first leg of her statement— that she, in jail, fears for her life. You say that Somni said:

“I am not suicidal. I have never been suicidal. If I am killed in police custody, it was murder!”

We, not to put too fine a point on it, are in awe at Somni’s avowed will to live after 3 years in the US prison system 😭 You, Matt, are not. You collapse all 3 legs of this Somni statement & call it an “outburst”— just as you, elsewhere in your article, call her statement from last month— which included that unforgettable phrase, “genocide of transgender people”— an “outburst”.

For what it’s worth, Matt, your tracking of these conditions caused quite the outburst in our little apartment. Our gf, once we read her your forecast, could do nothing but run to her bedside books, & quote both a surrealist & a cabal of anonymous polemicists who (so far as we can decipher them) inveigh against the alienation of modern man.

***

This latter may have been inspired by the admiration you show Judge Ellis, who took, as you say, the matter “calmly”, & “appeared used to this kind of spectacle by now”. You describe him seeming “almost bored” as he said: “Because Ms. Leatham will not behave herself, we will have to remove her”.

Being removed by officers & placed in an “isolation room” didn’t stop Somni! She continued to shout her statement thru the glass for the rest of the hearing. We have come to expect no less of her.

Finally, Matt, you zoom out on the whole sad story— adding dot after dot to our bingo card. You deadname Ziz, imply “Ziz” is a nickname, & repeat yourself, even tho your line wasn’t any good the first time around: we’re ofc referring to the way you describe Ziz’s “ideas” abt “gender” as “radical & rigorous”.

We still dk what “ideas” on gender (IOG) Ziz has— we hope yr not referring to her own gender as an idea! We still think it’s almost nice of you to call her IOG “rigorous”, but we dk what “rigorous ideas abt gender” would look like.

Do they have uncompromising standards for gender? Do they leave little room for errors of gender? Are their methods of having a gender (MOHAG) exacting, or do these MOHAG require great effort & endurance to perform? We can’t make heads or tails of it. Neither can Matt, apparently, bc he has left the News on News studio— goodbye, Matt! 👋 Until we meet again— at Somni’s next court appeara— 😮 No sooner have we finished waving goodbye to Matt than sthng unprecedented happens.

A member of our News on News studio audience (AMOONONSA) has stood up & cried, “Matt has again flubbed his reporting!”

AMOONONSA has run onstage, bringing us not one but four delicious link offerings 😋 We have chewed & reviewed them, & we have found:

***

SFGate says that Somni said:

The court has been hormonally detransitioning me for quarter of a decade as part of a state-sponsored conversion therapy program.

If this is so, then our two hours of light googling was for naught! 😞 Matt, you trickster! In this scenario, we may interpret Somni’s statement to be: for 2.5 years, she has been denied HRT, & the court has played a role in this.

What role would the court (TC) play? More 😪 light googling has revealed that in CA, inmates’ access to HRT is typically handled thru the prisons’ medical system. However, if inmates are denied HRT, or if their HRT is terminally delayed, they may bring this to TC, & argue that it violates their 8th amendment right to live free from cruel or unusual punishment— or they could argue that it violates… disability law? 🤷🏻‍♀️ Anyway, in these cases TC does decide whether they will be granted their hypothetical right to HRT. Perhaps Miss Somni has been thru just such a wringer.

***

SFG also says that Somni’s proclamations sent the Solano County courthouse (TSCC) “descend[ing] into chaos”.

We, our head spinning over these new developments, know just how Ms. TSCC feels, but rather fear that the stately & sedate life she normally leads would set her bar for “CHAOS” quite low 🤷🏻‍♀️ Her feelings are still valid.

We sadly thank SFGate for including another banger from Judge Ellis: “If defendant Leatham can’t behave herself, she can be moved to the isolation booth.”*

*Our editor has come in to whisper that we already included Judge Ellis's banger, but it again shocked us so much that we will simply continue our broadcast.

Ellis, why are you referring to a grown woman as if she’s a naughty toddler in your daycare? At any rate, we are jealou— enthused by the news that, in Ms. TSCC, were “a handful of supporters” for Somni & Suri 👏👏👏 One of them “attempted to wave at [Suri, who was appearing remotely] through the camera”.

👋👋👋👋👋 WE would like to wave at Suri, too! Hello, future Suri, if we can afford the domain renewals long enough for you to stumble on our News on News programme. We hope you are thriving & continuing to share w/ the world your prescient & clever takes on 😮‍💨 our muddle of a country.

Next, we’re unpleasantly reminded that we have grappled w/ SFGate (SFG) before!— When they repeat their immortal line:

radical Berkeley pseudo-intellectuals known as the Zizians !!!

We drearily re-draw our bingo card, as they blame this fiasco on the “Zizians’” alleged penchant for “[spending] their days online, distrustful of the outside world (TOW)”. 🥱 Who, in these early decades of the new millennium, doesn’t spend their days online? Who is not a little wary of TOW— by which we assume SFG means our spiraling civilization, & not the tender grass, leafy trees, or soaring birds which greet us each & every time we surface from our web adventures?

SFG then shocks us w/ the line:

The members’ extensive writings online (EWO) also allege kill orders, torture and sexual abuse within the group.

Oh dear oh dear! Luckily, they have made EWO a hyperlink. Excitedly we follow it, thinking it will bring us to a dark & sinister Ziz post which we have somehow missed— but no! It brings us back around to another SFG article, which we will save for 😪 a future episode of News on News 📚

Abt this article, we will say only that it opens w/ a beautifully-photoshopped pic of the Zizster sandwiched b/w who but Charlie Manson on her left, & Jim Jones on her right. It’s just like our all-time fav ✨Kate Bush✨ sings:

Re: SFG’s eye-popping interpretation of these kids’ “extensive online writings”… we, having ofc not read their full article, rather see them pulling an unfortunate stunt— or perhaps a fumble.

They seem to be asserting that the torturous & sexually abusive Alice Monday is w/in this group, when in fact this group repeatedly, thru many creative means, worked to defeat that no-good Alice.

That is, thank heavens, the end of SFG!

***

We continue our link snackery, & find the Independent agreeing w/ SFG— & ticking a number of our fav bingo boxes, but 😮‍💨 time is of the essence, we must refrain from a potential bingo win. As our dessert course— which our oh-so-lovely audience member has cautioned us to unwrap only “if [we] must”— we find Ms. Andy Ngo!

Andy agrees w/ the above, we shake our fists at her for having the budget to go down to Solano, & we are then greeted by the best news we have heard in the past 3 months:

Ms. Andy is ofc giving herself many airs here by calling herself a “journalist”. That brave member of our queer community is none other than they-who-had-waved-at-Suri— whom that fashionista Andy notes was wearing, in the style of Audrey Hepburn, all black.

Readers, we are over the moon. We have at last found ourselves (WHALFO) a friend. WHALFO a comrade. Hello, comrade! 👋👋👋👋 Comrade, we must meet & talk shop abt which expletives best sum up Ms. Andy Ngo. We have your glass slipper, but where oh were have you gone?

Are you on X? Are you on Bluesky? Are you on the ‘gram? We are not on Bluesky, but may make an account just to see if you are spreading our long-awaited counter-narratives over there. We are on the ‘gram, but under ☺️ our maiden name, which we will not reveal here. You, tho, Comrade, if you are reading this, may easily spot us there among the #zizlasota tag— just 🤫 don’t tell those mean, mean Rationalists 🖤

***

This News on News has been a roller-coaster journey! In our excitement over meeting our comrade, we threw our bingo card right out the window! This is just as well: we are a sore bingo loser 😡

We have further advised our editor to leave in our original light googling results (LGR), based on Matt’s ¿Dubious News, bc these LGR gave us much food for thought re: the plight of Somni, & the plight of our nation writ large.

Readers, if you would like to write Somni & say nice but censored things to her, here is her current contact info. Keep safe, keep warm, &— just like Somni— keep sending your voice thru the sheet-glass of all isolation rooms.

*****

Next: In a Mood for Self-Revelation

↑Back to Top