#tenacious unicorn ranch

[randomrichards]

WE ARE TENACIOUS:

Ranch near small town

Safe haven for trans women

Fight off extremists

#we are tenacious #random richards #poem #haiku #poetry #haiku poem #poets on tumblr #haiku poetry #haiku form #poetic #documentary #lbgtq #transgender #ash kreis #tenacious unicorn ranch #colorado

[gorps]

Idk how many of you know about tenacious unicorn ranch, but I'm like 99% sure it's being run like a cult.

Nobody in the area really knows they're there despite what they claim. They run constant armed patrols despite there never being any credible threats against them. It just seems like a way to make everyone there paranoid.

The thread this tweet came from contained the only evidence that anyone has ever trespassed on their property.

This tweet below heavily implied that they rescued someone from a hostile environment, but instead they just picked someone up from a bar.

The person who runs all the accounts also "owns" a significant number of the people there as a BDSM dynamic. Which in of itself I have no issues with; people can be into things. The issue is of course that the whole place is more or less designed to make people paranoid of the outside world and deliberately isolates them from everyone else.

and that, combined with a power dynamic like that, means that it's really easy for some poor 18 year old freshly out and without any support to end up stuck there with no way out, no income, and no housing beyond a near-cult ran farm in the middle of nowhere, Colorado

#also on the funnier side they all have fn 57s because the owner thinks its the only good pistol lmao #i know plenty of people who were in similar situations and they all seem to think its a cult also #if its not trying to make the people there paranoid its just a grift #either way

[gothicprep]

I think she’s talking about the tenacious unicorn ranch but I’m not sure

[newlyy]

If you've never heard about the Unicorn Ranch I highly recommend taking time to search it because the whole story is insane.

In short, a bunch of ex-military TiMs with no homesteading experience whatsoever got upwards of $150k in donations to start a "trans-inclusive" ranch and (surprise!) ended up sinking the project in less than five years.

There's so much that obviously went wrong but imo the funniest thing was one member using like a third of the daily household electricity budget (they were off-grid) to run his gaming PC.

What’s interesting to me is when I look up news about them, it’s all about them being harassed by “far right militia” groups and shit and then when I click on images of the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch I get these pics of the stunning brave trans women

I can find saur little negative about this place, but when I went to the comments of a YouTube video covering it in a news segment I got this

Looked like a group of incompetent, animal neglecting, violent men. And also fucking note how these men are allowed to have their trans only ranch which they defend with guns, but women try to have any female only space and these same men put on their militant gear to threaten them.

[taangmula]

i'm really concerned about whether i'm a bad person or not. lately, with the controversy and confusion around tenacious unicorn ranch, i thought about my own attempt to house a couple of my housing-insecure friends and how badly it blew up in my face. i feel sad about it- i don't think i necessarily did all the perfectly correct things, but neither did i do things worth being publicly excorciated for- certainly not during the time i housed them, and certainly not for at least 3-5 years before them. in the intervening years, we were friends, and i genuinely had no idea that i had made this person uncomfortable.

i know it's triggers and whatnot that are partially my fault for activating, partially not proportionate to the things i did to trigger them. i don't think that placing someone else's hands around one's own throat makes me a predator. a creep, maybe. i was definitely a lonely, horny teen who wanted to flirt in edgy ways and wanted selfishly to feel things. it's the selfishness of the gesture that makes me doubt myself, though. if i'm not always acting purely in the other party's interest, am i worth anything? if i'm not completely setting aside myself, am i as bad as the r*pists that have terrorized and violently traumatized you in the past? i think there are things between yes and no. i want to say yes, but i'm so afraid of the "no".

i feel lost because i worry about whether there's a pattern there. my ex had been previously r*ped as well, and they saw parallels between their r*pist and me. we both told ourselves and each other that this was a journey of healing- sometimes ugly, sometimes painful and difficult, but ultimately a move towards something different, but the fact that that relationship ended in catastrophe makes me wonder. looking at a thing they'd written about me, and about their own ex, i felt afraid. they said that the poems i'd written had compassion fettered by being amab, like their r*pist ex. i triggered them a lot, and consoled them a lot. the first night we slept together, they asked me to touch them, then they asked me to stop. i did. i felt proud that i could take a no, but they still woke up in the middle of the night crying.

it's really fucking hard to look at someone you've triggered and feel like it's not your fault. intention has no bearing on impact, so do we have to take accountability for the impact? the friend i housed had psychotic breaks after being violently r*ped on a date with someone. it's not surprising that they might be hypervigilant and untrusting of me. they saw me with those eyes, probably knowing that i had so much power over them- they and their partner lived in the second room of my 2bed apartment, but i was ultimately the one paying for it. i thought we could get by because it was supposed to be only a year and it was 2v1 in the worst case, but i guess not.

it feels fucked up to acknowledge that i feel an affinity for people who have experienced trauma. i don't seek it out, but i often like people who are sad, thoughtful, perceptive. people who can see each others' pain and care for it rather than turn away. i think that trauma makes people on guard, hypervigilant, ready for the worst. i think i see my own worst a lot, or i edge around it because it is too much to look at directly.

at the end of that essay, my ex wrote that anything you love can be saved. it's hard to look at it now, since the relationship between us was not saved. nor was our friendship. nor even a passing acquaintanceship. it's like that with the people i housed. it feels like this outcome is my fault. when you trigger someone they see a mix of you and things that aren't you. violent abuse, manipulation, suicide, r*pe. those are not accidental projections, but they're there because of a pattern-match between you and a moment where someone attacked them, or something bad happened to them, or a moment where someone made them feel like they couldn't say no.

there's something there, and it feels prickly to try to sort out for myself which parts are and aren't me- if people draw the lines themselves, then everyone gets to be good, and to file away all of their bad parts. people get to keep hurting each other and never think about it, never learn or change. and yet- a trauma response is also an all-or-nothing moment. being triggered definitionally means that things that are not here and now become here and now. that's not your boyfriend that's a violent sadist, or your fucked up dad going to lock you in a room. this is not sex it's every time someone has hurt you condensed into one. this isn't an apartment it's a cage.

i guess i'm still working through all of it. at least theoretically, we can't be responsible for each others' emotions. still, neither can we disregard the fact that we have wounds, and that some of them are very common and very deep. if someone's bleeding, you don't wrestle them in the mud.

when my ex wrote that piece, we were still together, and there was a lot of hope in it. it's still hard to say if my presence in their life made it better (as a bulwark in tough times) or worse (being a bulwark because my presence caused them tough times). i want to say that i both did my best and that my best wasn't good enough. it was hubris to think i could save someone, but practical to do the work of taking them to 5150s, getting therapy appointments, answering desperate calls in the middle of the night, cleaning and bandaging their wrists, feeding them. the last time we talked, it seemed like they weren't having to go for psychiatric holds as often, or hadn't in a while. the other part of my brain points out that this happened once we were apart for a while. maybe it would have been better if we separated sooner. maybe it would have been fatal. i didn't want them to go then, but i don't think i want them back now. all that's left is a grief and a hope that they did actually recover. maybe i could be forgiven if that were the case.

anything we love can be saved. anything we love can be saved. anything we love can be saved.

i pray because i don't know what else to do.

#tw sa #tw rape #textpost

[samwiselastname]

hey if you find yourself wanting to spread the word about tenacious unicorn ranch being a predatory trans sex cult or whatever please just pre-emptively block me

#does it impact you? #does it make you feel good? #are there other ways you can inform other people about ongoing controversy? #is it not enough for a project to fail for mundane and painful interpersonal reasons? do we need third parties to assert it's a sex cult? #is it important for you to do that?

[antifa-terra]

Respectfully, tenacious unicorn Ranch is a cult. Please take their information off of my post about wool.

Source?

[ourlordandsaviorgojira]

The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch might have had an actual chance of succeeding if they'd actually ever intended to be a farm. They shouldn't have started with alpacas, they shouldn't have bought property in bumfuck nowhere Colorado, they shouldn't have done everything conceivable to piss off their neighbors, I could go on. As it stands, the grift cult has worse odds than a fart in a hurricane.

[dadsmell]

Is there any reason there's three separate posts about tenacious unicorn ranch going around my dash? I mean I know the content of the Posts but like, why is everyone Caring About Them Again?

#deer diaries

[antifainternational]

Long live Tenacious Unicorn Ranch!

#antifa #antifascism #antifascist action #tenacious unicorn ranch #colorado #antihomophobe aktion #antitransphobe aktion #community self-defence #usa #us #alpacas

[lady-laufey]

The folks at the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, which frequently serves as a haven for trans people in southern Colorado, have been receiving death threats lately - including a packet of white powder sent to a news station that ran a sympathetic report on them. There’s not much most of us can do in terms of dealing directly with threats from local right-wing militia groups, but now’s as good a time as any to send any donations you can their way.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/23ihgxnlc0

#right-wing violence #donation post #tenacious unicorn ranch

[josiebean42]

Mutual aid to the Pine Ridge reservation, incredibly good for us to finally start giving back!

We're doing this project for the foreseeable future so please share and donate if you can!

https://t.co/HbS0Kk5DkG for cash donations directly to indigenous families

https://t.co/jsDBTm4Nex to purchase wishlist items that will be distributed on the reservation

#mutual aid #anarchy #land back #Tenacious Unicorn Ranch

[mediumsizetex]

Listen/purchase: The Dust Car Dash - Charity Grand Prix by Dustcar Racing Syndicate

All proceeds from this album will go to Tenacious Unicorn Ranch! Tenacious Unicorn Ranch is a trans owned and operated alpaca ranch in Southern Colorado that acts as a safe haven for trans & other queer folk. As we have a similar love of Trans folk & Ungulates, we picked them to be the ones we help out with this charity album release! Check them out at  twitter.com/TenaciousRanch/  or tenaciousunicornranch.com

Album cover art by Ali Wormologist

#My Little Pony #Friendship Is Magic #Tenacious Unicorn Ranch #Ali Wormologist #wormdraws #Pinkie Pie #Rainbow Dash #Applejack #music post #SFW

[tattooed-alchemist]

Salina Grey, 38, said she found the ranch through social media. She came out as trans in October, and in May, she said she began medical leave from her job as a software architect after her mental health began “spiraling.” She left her home in Mississippi and plans to stay with friends across the country until she finds a place to settle. Visiting the ranch fit into her route “too perfectly to ignore.”

“It’s everything I hoped it would be,” she said of the ranch. Before visiting, she said she constantly questioned whether she was being “feminine enough,” even when she was by herself. But at the ranch, “all the performative expectations are just gone the second you get there, because everybody’s at different stages in their own transition,” she said. “So they get it, and you can just be.”

#trans haven #tenacious unicorn ranch #trans space

[thepotentialof2007]

You Know, There’s Plenty of Space in Rural Communities for Queer Voices

In their downtime, the ranch residents cook and eat together in the dome house, filled with food, manuals on alpaca health and bulletproof vests adorned with patches showing a rifle on the trans pride flag.

The walls in the main room are bedecked with several large rifles, a 5-foot sword and pride flags representing some of the identities of the people who live there: non-binary, lesbian, agender and asexual. There’s also a red-and-black flag stating, “Sometimes antisocial, always antifascist.” New people arriving at the ranch cry with relief sometimes when they see the flags hanging, Nelson said. It can be tedious living in a world where people see you as “other.”

“We all want to get away from everything because there is so much pressure and stress brought up by just existing,” Nelson said.

The ranch can especially be a safe place for transgender people who are transitioning and who may not want to be in the public eye during the process. Logue said she worked during part of her transition and was met with stares and many questions.

“Having worked retail from beginning to mid of my transition, I can tell you that the world is not kind,” Logue said. “It is unpleasant to be in the public eye during your transition. Offering a place to do that privately is really important. And who doesn’t want to be surrounded by alpaca all the time?” [x]

The vast majority of the community, however, have welcomed the ranchers, Nelson and Logue said. They’ve joined in with other alpaca farmers in the area to pool their fibers and have them processed in bulk to create hats and socks.

“There was a real upsurge from the leftist community in the Valley,” said Logue.  Meanwhile, they found another niche: Many residents began employing them in local handiwork and physical labor. The ranchers also provide recycling services at the county landfill. That has exponentially increased their visibility: “It’s really hard for people to paint you as ‘weird’ or whatever, if you’re just helping people,” Logue said. [x]

#tenacious unicorn ranch #transgender #queer #anarchist #collective #ranch #colorado #transphobia #armed resistance #alpaca #denver post #sometimes antisocial always antifascist #ime geodesic domes leak #but doesn't rain a lot there #custer county #very white #in a row