#Tw eugenics

[identitty-dickruption]

there is a difference between a disabled person saying “in my perfect world, I wouldn’t be disabled”, and someone saying “in my perfect world, disability doesn’t exist”

the first is understandable. being disabled can be really fucking hard. pain is not fun. fatigue is not fun. meltdowns aren’t fun. relying on constant medical intervention is not always great, either. there’s nothing that says a disabled person HAS to love themselves, and it’s not inherently ableist for a disabled person to wish that they were different

the second is eugenics. that’s the long and short of it. you wish disabled people didn’t exist? well we do exist. oh but you wish they didn’t? how do you plan to achieve that, bud? it’s just straight-up eugenics

[bodhrancomedy]

This is happening way more than is comfortable in my comments right now and I kinda need neurodivergent people (and obviously other disabled communities including my own) to be aware of lateral ableism.

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

‘In my day, we didn’t have all this Autism stuff’ ‘The last Asylum for Disabled people only closed in 2001’

Neurodivergent_lou

[thethirdromana]

I think last year I wrote something about how meaningful it is, and what a leap of faith it represents, that Mina chooses to marry Jonathan even when she has no idea when or even if he'll be able to work again. Only unmarried women could be teachers, so her ability to earn money is curtailed by the marriage; she may struggle to support them. It's both a statement of trust that Mr Hawkins will keep to his word and take care of them, and a declaration that - in a very immediate and practical sense - Mina chooses her love for Jonathan over financial security.

What I was less aware of last year is the extent of eugenicist thinking in the 1890s around the marriage of people who were mentally ill. Mina makes it very clear just how unwell Jonathan is:

He is only a wreck of himself, and he does not remember anything that has happened to him for a long time past.

And Jonathan is open about it too:

"I feel my head spin round, and I do not know if it was all real or the dreaming of a madman. You know I have had brain fever, and that is to be mad."

We know that Jonathan's experiences are real, but he doesn't and Mina doesn't. And neither of them knows if he will make a full recovery.

This was at a time when the British Medical Journal published articles claiming that "marriage was often contracted in a blind and reckless way by those who had a strong predisposition to insanity". In a wider discussion, the article suggests that doctors might advise against marriage not just for those known to be mentally ill, but even people "who come of a nervous stock".

I don't want to go into all the horrible things that the medical establishment of the 1890s believed. But I do want to emphasise the extent of Mina's devotion. She travels day and night to get to Jonathan, she spends a small fortune to do so, she sacrifices her career, she marries someone against the advice of a lot of the contemporary medical establishment, and she does it without hesitation.

Mina and Jonathan are both young. It would be entirely respectable and normal for them to stay engaged but wait to marry, to see if Jonathan recovers, to build up savings, to get home. But Mina says a massive fuck you to that and fuck you to contemporary ableism as well, and marries Jonathan precisely as he is.

[cripplecharacters]

Context:

I know the first question on your QNA says your general answer is “if you are talking about your own disability, you can talk about it however you please”, so for clarity: I am mentally disabled. I am not physically disabled. My story features characters with a range of different disabilities, many of which I do not have.

The story in question is a satire on the mental health industry and my personal experiences with ableism (especially about ableist societal pressures about needing to be “fixed”).

It follows the daily life of many characters who underwent a fictitious sci-fi “cure-all” treatment which was pushed onto mentally ill people who were considered “lost causes”. The “cure” is inherently flawed on a conceptual level, but also just doesn't work.

Here's what I'm worried about:

A lot of the featured characters wind up with disabling side effects from the “cure” (for example, two characters end up with acquired neurological disorders), or exacerbations of symptoms they had previously (some through adverse reactions physiologically to the "cure", some through the emotional trauma of the experience, etc).

I don’t want it to seem like the takeaway should be “eugenics is only bad because it makes people more disabled”, and I'm worried that might be an accidental implication here.

Do you have any advice on preventing that implication?

This isn't the whole plot, but I don't know how relevant the rest is the mention.

Hello,

Okay, so this is a matter of consent and the violation of it. Focus on that. That's an absolutely massive violation of bodily autonomy with no concern for the patient. In fact, this violates the Hippocratic Oath, which is the number one rule of science and medicine, to do no harm, but it's okay to just disregard that when the patient is disabled. That's what's messed up about this. Their bodily autonomy was violated and their bodies and minds were permanently modified without their consent in a way that caused major undue harm, and the government and doctors associations (or whoever can take away a license to practice) are okay with this because the victims of this crime are disabled people.

Focus on it that way. It's not about the resulting disability, it's about the fact that these people had their right to their bodies taken away from them because they're disabled, and they were denied basic human rights and humane medical treatment on the same basis. The resulting disability isn't really the problem, it's the fact that undue harm was done to them by medical professionals that's the problem.

You have a basic human rights issue, something that is violating the international agreement on basic human rights. That's the huge deal.

Mod Aaron

[starlightshadowsworld]

Happy Disability Pride month and a big ol fuck you to Alexander Graham Bell.

Who despite having a deaf mother who he communicated with via tapping certain things to.

And thus having an understanding that she needed something other than verbal communication to understand things.

.... Saw deaf people as "a defective race".

He wanted deaf people eradicated and at his school for the deaf, he banned the use of sign language.

Yeah he saw sign language as a foreign language.

And as he was also a racist and very against immigration, he went all "we're in America and in America we speak English and only English."

So glad thats not a thing anymore...

His answer to this was that deaf people should be unable to marry other deaf people.

Lest they produce more deaf children a which he saw as a "great calamity that could ruin humanity."

Well jokes on him because 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents.

And if you think he kept those opinions to himself... Nope.

Encouraged by him, in 1880, the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf was held.

164 delagates were in attendence, only one of which was deaf.

And they voted to banned sign language in schools.

As an "effort to encourage spoken language skills, and thus restore the Deaf-mute to society."

... By actively taking away what for many was the only way they could communicate in society.

People who had their own community that he wanted destroyed.

But the deaf community is still thriving.

Decades of campaigning resulted in British Sign Language bring recognised by the UK Parliament and passing the BSL Act.

... In 2022.

Yes it was technically recognised in 2003, and was legally recognised in 2015 in Scotland.

But not over all of the UK and did not have the same protections and recognition as it does now.

As of the passing of that bill, there were around 90,000 deaf people in the UK that have BSL as their first or preferred language.

Which I'm sure Alexander Graham Bell was rolling in his grave at hearing.

Also, he is credited as the inventor of the telephone but he may not actually have invented it.

So yeah Happy Disability Pride month and maybe learn some sign language.

[sxnshxnxxnddxxsxxs]

i really feel like we don’t discuss enough just how deep jkr’s white supremacy goes

like it’s way more than just:

cho chang’s name

almost every black character being tall and sporty

kingley’s name

the goblins

the house elves

the only south asian thing about the patil twins being their names

there’s way more but those are the talking points that are usually discussed in the white supremacy context of jkr’s bigotry.

but there’s something else that i find to be particularly insidious which i don’t see that many conversations about.

so for context when i did my a level i had had to research late 19th century pseudoscience because i was studying gothic literature. and i came across things like phrenology and the criminal mind and honestly it feels like jkr discovered these theories and just ran with them.

as a quick explanation phrenology is the theory that by studying the shape of someone’s skull you can see if they’re predisposed to criminality and lombroso’s criminal mind is the theory that criminality is hereditary and you can tell by observing someone’s physical features. it’s also the general consensus in both these theories that someone with physical ‘defects’ or deformities’ will be predisposed to criminality which also makes them incredibly ableist.

both are incredibly eugenicist and white supremacist theories because they’re essentially saying that you can tell if someone is inherently good or bad and thereby whether they deserve to be alive/within society/treated as equals by looking at their physical features.

they are both complete bullshit pseudoscience with no real basis in fact.

now where this comes into hp and jkr is that the antagonists and the villains of the series are disproportionately described as having these very negative physical characteristics.

like the very obvious one is voldemort with no nose and being snakelike.

but also the way peter pettigrew is described.

“His thin, colourless hair was unkempt and there was a large bald patch on top. He had the shrunken appearance of a plump man who had lost a lot of weight in a short time. His skin looked grubby, almost like Scabbers’s fur, and something of the rat lingered around his pointed nose, his very small, watery eyes.” (poa ch 19)

like the man is literally being compared to an animal (yes i know it’s implied in the lore that the longer one stays in their animagus form the more traits they take on but the point still stands).

then there’s marcus flint who as far as i remember is literally just a minor antagonist.

“Marcus Flint was even larger than Wood. He had a look of trollish cunning on his face as he replied” (cos ch 7)

like she really has a thing for comparing people to animals which is a very common tool in white supremacy for dehumanising people.

and then there’s greyback

“a big, rangy man with matted grey hair and whiskers, whose black Death Eater’s robes looked uncomfortably tight. He had a voice like none that Harry had ever heard: a rasping bark of a voice. Harry could smell a powerful mixture of dirt, sweat and, unmistakeably, of blood coming from him. His filthy hands had long yellowish nails.” (hbp ch 27)

now admittedly it’s slightly different with greyback since jkr is very openly saying in the narrative that he’s less than human and too dangerous for society because jkr only believes in equality for muggleborns and no one else.

but as is stands there are so many examples some big some small of the physical descriptions of villains and antagonists having negative connotations. the reason that it’s so insidious is because this is a children’s book series. and children soak up information like sponges including the implication that the further you are from the beauty standards the worse of a person you are (something that is reinforced by society). then when you place that in the context of the west where hp is most popular then it becomes the further away you are from whiteness (the western beauty standard) the worse of a person you are.

it seems like a really small thing which is why i don’t think it gets discussed nearly as much as the more overt things but even the small pebbles can have large ripple effects. besides i think think it’s incredibly important to discuss every aspect of jkr’s bigotry.

[rei-ismyname]

X-Men/Mutant Dynasties

Something I've always felt uneasy about is when offspring of Marvel mutants basically inherit their mutant gift 1:1. The X Gene (though I don't love that either) is supposed to be a naturally but randomly occurring thing in humans that causes them to develop a strong mutation. In many cases, a superpower as opposed to six toes. I'm sure people experience such minor mutations as well but it's not due to the X Gene.

A character that exemplifies the my dislike of this is Raze, the alternate reality/'future' child of Wolverine and Mystique. Them existing in a pretty ridiculous era with a constant nostalgia recycling is a factor too.

This idiot. He literally just has both parents gifts - shapeshifting, claws, and a healing factor. Keep in mind those are metal claws too - something Logan doesn't have biologically. Maybe it's a Mystique thing and she's like a ditto in Pokémon breeding because her kid with Xavier is this chump.

It's just Charles Xavier again! I'll admit part of the dislike is them featuring in such mediocre, unimaginative stories, and they're pretty transparent Nostalgia bait. Has it lead to good stories? I don't think so, not as a critical element. Could you honestly tell me what either of these idiots' motivation is without looking it up?

Also, I think taking the randomness out of it just leads to eugenics and bioessentialism - a place the x books should not go, or at least not have nominal heroes doing it. Leave it to Mr Sinister.

Mutant trait inheritance has been around since almost the beginning. Polaris has Magneto's powers but weaker, Siryn has *similar* powers to Banshee, Nightcrawler looks like Mystique (though that makes sense through retcon. Shit, maybe she IS a Ditto.) On the flip side, there's even more Mutants that inherited none of their parents' mutation.

IRL Mutation is supposed to be, well not random per se, but the result of damage to genes. In our universe it's neither a good thing nor bad thing. In 616 it's pretty muddled tbh. I'm not a scientist - I'm a writer, so I'm not going deep on something that doesn't have internal consistency. I'm always going to dislike thin characters trying to evoke familiarity through mashing two iconic ones together, but it's more than that. What's the source of my discomfort then?

Yeah, it's the eugenics. HoxPoX actually took it further, revealing that Moira and Charles intentionally sought to breed reality warpers, to the point of researching partners that would give the desired result. They were successful too, resulting in Proteus and Legion, two of the most powerful mutants alive. The ethics of these actions aren't editorialised but I think they're meant to be read as horrifying - especially when you consider the context of the 'pairings' and the lives these poor kids have had. Maybe it's not so surprising Xavier views David as a weapon and Moira seems to hate Kevin. It makes Chuck and Moira look terrible.

Pic unrelated, I just wanted to break up the text and what better than Beatnik Namor?

The superbaby schemes never come to light and they're not really punished for being shit parents. Certainly not socially. I'd love a book where they were, but the time has kinda passed. Maybe the fairy tale morality of big two comics doesn't have the framework or the desire to explore it, though I think that if you're going to put eugenics in your fiction you probably should.

I've been sitting on this draft for months because I feel like I don't have the knowledge or vocabulary to explore it properly. I'm probably missing something. I've decided it's been edited and rewritten enough and I'm posting it as is, so if you have any thoughts on this I'd love to hear them. Join the conversation!

[disabledanarchy]

disabled people buying mobility aids from Amazon are not the issue. Amazon is cheap and easily accessible. sometimes it is the best option, or even the only option.

disabled people who use plastic mobility aids are not the issue.

disabled people using plastic straws because they are unable to drink or will choke without them are not the issue.

disabled people buying thick water in plastic bottles are not the issue. (thick water is water specifically made for disabled people who have difficulty swallowing)

disabled people who use medical equipment made of plastic are not the issue.

disabled people whose medication comes in a plastic bottle are not the issue.

disabled people who travel in cars or buses or trains because they are unable to cycle or walk are not the issue.

big corporations are the issue. the rich are the issue. selfish politicians who do nothing are the issue.

get your eco fascism and eugenicist ideology out of here. disabled people are not responsible for climate change. disabled people deserve to use as much plastic and fossil fuels as they need to survive with as little suffering as possible.

[rainworldconfessions]

i dunno if this obeys all the rules but there's something very darkly ironic about a eugenicist being in the rw fandom

.

[ntls-24722]

An ancestor to the Zebrapeople!

Partial stripes, mostly brown, and kind of sapient! I don't know how to explain their level of intelligence, but like... they have stone tools, but they currently can't create language, so imagine the setbacks from there. They're also mostly octopodal, and are only hexapodal for short bursts.

Zebrapeople actually have the facial problem that we have with the rest of their genus, where smiling is actually seen as a threat for everyone else. Or at least, the way they smile. The teeth being out bothers them, but not compared to how much the gums being exposed do.

Zebraelves evolved slightly tighter lips to have their teeth slightly out gives them a background sense of order since the baring of teeth, like in our primates, is a threat, and it also made the baring of gums a lot more dramatic. But as the species began to coagulate into one giant supercolony, the baring gums was recontextualized into the basis for most of their facial expressions.

Also; the origin of their spinnerets.

Hagfish method, baby! It's gross and works! Quagga-elves originate from a much wetter environment, so they could afford the water loss when making gross protein threads inundated with the stuff. But as they moved to more arid environments, the slime got drier and eventually was repurposed as silk... in the females.

Originally, male zebraelves were supposed to have venomous spurs, but I thought it'd be better for them to still have this basal trait. Partially because they need it more!

Fraternities are a treacherous journey and male zebraelves aren't maintaining nor with their subcolony for most of the time, so it's more useful to have a gross-out factor that keeps from from being food to literally everything than to have a durable building tool/textile.

And speaking of how treacherous the journeys of fraternities are;

This queen's boytoy is no longer a boy, she's become a worker after losing her hearing due to getting an ear infection because disabilty accommodations in fraternities are, no hyperbole, nonexistant, for a combination of the unfriendly job environment and fucked up eugenics reasons! I really did try to avoid the kind of real life problems they have, partially because I didn't want to give fictional little guys the same societal burdens we go through, but also because if I talk about shit like music man eugenics i sound 10x more insane than I already do. unfortunately it becomes a reoccurring thing when making fictional societies.

Her relationship with the queen is looked rather down upon - neither of them care very much, especially the queen, who finally has someone she can talk to who gets it, to put it plainly. The two reproductive sexes in zebraelves are very policed, which is a rather large problem in zebraelf society.

Also; Bipedal bugs! The best predator against Debu.

Their method is to use those two arms to latch on and just rake their sickle toe-claws against the skin as hard and fast as they can which is very effective against Debu, who, despite their brute strength, have very sensitive, weak skin! They're small, but fast, and they do a lot of damage really quickly, which is the problem, since they'll tear through already open wounds and deepen them, even leading to infection.

Sindeer often has to deal with them, since she's a large target as a lone huntress.

i forgot her back fur. dont look

Also: today was my last day of class! Which, paradoxically, means my account is actually going to slow down? All of the almost daily music man posts are actually class doodles, and now there's going to be no more class for me to get bored in and make music man. But that means more digital artwork, which is generally higher quality, soooo???? double edged sword

[cripplecharacters]

Hi! I’m writing a story about a lady with Down Syndrome. I was wondering if you knew where I can find any resources about Down Syndrome made by people who actually have it, or any organisations that would be good to follow. Any resources made by people with intellectual disability would be really helpful as well.

I read your post about this and it was really helpful so thank you, I’m going to use it as a starting point for my research.

If you’d like some context about the story she’s literally a lady in the 1920s who’s trying to get control of her family’s estate from her brother. Shes underestimated for her disabilities and for being a women but I’m trying to not focus so much on the discrimination and work more on giving her an interesting mystery to solve with the detective she hired. I’d like it to be a bit lighthearted. Anyway, as she’s a main character I really wanted to make sure I wrote her well. Thanks!

Hi!

There aren't many resources out there unfortunately, but there is a page on the UK Down Syndrome's Association's website where members with DS share their opinions on representation in TV and film! You can read it here. For info on intellectual disability in general the best I can do is link some of my previous posts on it - there's close to nothing that's actually made by us unfortunately, everything that I was able to find is always made by someone who knows a person with ID at best. To be clear, not all of it is bad - I thought this interview (TW for abuse that happens in the movie's plot) about a movie starring actors with DS was pretty good - but it's still a sign that we aren't getting enough #OwnVoices representation. It's slowly changing though!

To learn more about DS I would probably recommend NDSS, it's one of the very few orgs that have people with Down Syndrome as board and team members (should be the bare minimum, but it unfortunately isn't). There's also information on things like preferred language and myths that often show up around Down Syndrome!

I'm not great with history, but in the 1920s she would be a subject to a lot more than just discrimination. Eugenics and institutionalization would definitely be present. Not sure what route you'll take there, but basically all the words around that time that she would be described with are currently considered slurs or pejoratives. The racist term for a person with Down Syndrome was officially used into the 60s, and the ableist one is still used legally in 2024. But if you want to skip past that, I think that's more than fine. You don't always have to aim for 100% historical accuracy, just be aware of the real history.

A detective story sounds very exciting! If you decide to publish it on Tumblr or other online site feel free to send me an ask with a link, I'd love to read it :-) !!

Thank you for the ask!

mod Sasza

I’m just popping in as a history fan for a couple bits of history notes — but again, like Sasza said, you don’t have to be 100% historically accurate if you don’t want to and if you don’t feel it’s necessary.

So, especially in the first half of the 1900s, a large part of disabled children, including children with Down Syndrome, were institutionalized very early in their life. Around this time the push that immorality caused disability was strong, and people were often convinced by doctors and professionals that the children’s needs would always be too much for them. Eugenicism was sort of reaching a peak around this time, as well—I would say it was at its most intense in the period of 1900-1940s.

Not all parents institutionalized their children, though. There was pressure to do so, but that doesn’t mean everyone fell victim to it. There wasn’t really any official support for parents who did this, and there weren’t official organizations for Down Syndrome. From my research, the current large DS organizations seem to have popped up in the 60s.

The term ‘Down Syndrome’ wasn’t in popular use until the 70s, and it wasn’t known that it’s caused by an extra chromosome until 1959.

Life expectancy in 1900-1920 for people born with Down Syndrome was 9 years old. Some of this could absolutely have been due to conditions in institutions, but likely even more relevant is that about 50% of people with DS are born with heart defects (also known as congenital heart disease) that can be fatal if not treated with surgery. Heart surgery wasn’t really feasible until the late 30s and early 40s. Another risk factor is a higher risk for infection, which isn’t easy to manage in a world that doesn’t yet have antibiotics.

I actually wanted to find pictures of adults with Down Syndrome pre-1940ish, though, to see real tangible evidence of adults being part of a community. First I found just one picture of a baby in 1925 on this Minnesota government website. But then I found a collection someone made of photos of both children and young adults, but they are not specifically dated. The first baby picture is from the 30s according to the poster!

Judging by the clothes I see people wearing in these photos, photo #4 (man with Down Syndrome in a suit next to a woman) seems to be from the 20s and photo #13 (young woman with Down Syndrome and very long hair) seems to be from about the 1910s. #18 (large family with a lot of sons, including one boy with Down Syndrome) could be from the 30s. Those three are the oldest people with DS in the photos, and they seem like young adults. A lot of these pictures show a community and aren’t just isolated kids, which I find nice.

It’s hard to find specific historical record of people with Down Syndrome from that period of time, but I wanted to show photos of real people in their communities to show, hey look! They were there, too!

Either way, I love detective stories and historical fiction and I’m glad you’re writing a story and that you care about your character’s portrayal but I totally know the feeling of that tricky balance between historical accuracy and modern acknowledgement that we should have been doing better.

— Mod Sparrow

[identitty-dickruption]

something that just keeps coming up in everything I'm reading is that distancing oneself from "the disabled" has always been seen as an effective political strategy for oppressed groups, to the point that even some disabled activism has been about distancing ourselves from "the disabled"

over and over again, groups that have been labelled by society as "defective" or "feeble-minded" choose to side with eugenicists. instead of questioning eugenic ideologies, they decide to say "there are a group of people who are too weak to participate in society, but we are not in that group". and we cannot separate those tactics from the social gains that were achieved

[agoodpairofsocks]

did you know that when eugenics was a widely popular practice in the US there was a surgeon working at San Quentin State Prison named Leo Stanley who, when dealing with males deemed "unfit for society", would surgically replace their testicles with that of a deceased male who was deemed "fit for society"

[transformedyt]

Just a friendly reminder that telling disabled people (ESPECIALLY those of us with genetic conditions) not to reproduce is ableist and is pretty eugenics-y. If YOU are disabled and do not want to have children because YOU don’t want to pass it down, then that’s YOUR choice to make. But don’t tell OTHER people not to.

If you are a doctor and have a patient wanting kids, but their disability/illness could make the pregnancy dangerous or fatal, then mention it. Make sure they know the risks. But you can’t FORCE them not to do something. Informed consent exists for a reason.

Also, if you don’t want kids, that is VALID! I don’t either. But I’m also not gonna shame anyone who does.

[lelet-draws]

All generations of Monster High didn’t explore the topic of eugenics, which honestly is such a wasted opportunity, especially when it comes to G3 Lagoona.

Lagoona is latina and in most of Latin America, people of color weren’t legally forbidden to marry white people like in the US, in fact the governments wanted them to do so. It was an eugenist tactic to make the population whiter, slowly reducing the black population through miscegenation.

It’s super common for a white family in Latin America to have black or indigenous relatives. I’m mixed and my two great grandmas fell into that trap. They were both black and stayed in marriages with shitty white men (this isn’t an attack on white people, my great grandpas really weren’t the best people).

It’s kinda implied that fresh water monsters are kinda like colonizers, so it would be cool to have this kind of situation included to open the doors for discussion.