Basically a couple of years ago I had to look for a new place because the place I was at had both a fire (at least one person died) and a months long leak from inside the walls that spawned hostile black mold and friendly shroom guys. So I started to look for a new place.
Unfortunately, at the time, I was in a legal limbo as I waited for my immigration status to be updated, since I was transitioning from temporary resident to permanent resident (also mtf), so I didn’t have all the papers and assurances that I do indeed exist and have a name and such. As I looked for places and applied to pay people to let me live in those place, it became clear that unless I could prove I existed in non-expired government documents, it would be impossible for me to pay someone to let me live at their place. People would just not take rent money unless the Right Papers existed to prove they were taking money from a Real Government-Approved Person.
Tangentially, I had been waiting for two years at that point for my Real Person Papers to come through, and would wait two more. Turns out the government entity that was supposed to process my application had decided that instead of following the Law that demanded it process my application within six months, it would just Not Do That. It would not process any applications unless specifically sued and forced to do so.
Anyway, I was in a bit of a pickle because I wanted a new place, and had to convince a property owner that I wasn’t a fictional character momentarily infused with substance, so I decided to commit tax fraud. You see, tax records indicating income were an acceptable form of existence. The income itself was immaterial, even if you could prove its existence and/or your ability to pay. The taxman’s stamp was a precondition to its existence. It was at this point I decided to commit tax fraud, so I would have paperwork that certified my humanity. However, there was a snag in my plan. I could only backfile up to three months of records before the current date. Most places required the tax papers to go back six months.
I was getting tired. After snooping around, I found a very simple vulnerability in the tax office’s website. The checks that prevented me from submitting tax returns farther than three months before the current date happened client side. It wasn’t too difficult to find because their code was mostly from 2003 (the coders put their names and dates in comments, presumably as a rudimentary form of version control) and the updates after was stuff like adding jquery. So I made it think it was a different date and it let me submit tax returns for any time I wanted. I had to change an HTML element with devtools, really advanced stuff. You can imagine how infuriating it was that I was using this discovery to submit returns that would make me have to pay more taxes than I really had to. In any case, the tax office didn’t protest that it was getting more money than it should.
These papers eventually helped me convince a couple of ghouls that I was real (and cis) and they let me rent their place. After signing the contract, they started talking about the crazy people who wanted to “change language with their pronouns” and whatnot, and I skedaddled away as fast as I could and avoided all interaction with them since, which suits us both. And that’s how I became the Fresh Princess of Bel-Air found a place to live.
What fucks me up is that there’s a ton of other people right now who are illegally being withheld basic personhood stuff who can’t just do what I did, who don’t know or don’t have the ability to sue the state, who don’t have access to basic resources like shelter because they are dehumanized by deliberately incompetent government agencies that act under the mandate of far right governments to not only slow immigration to a halt but to make vulnerable those who have already immigrated. It’s real sick shit man. ☹️ Thanks for reading I wanted to vent.