#and against sexism. which i would generally solidly agree with

[cazort]

I agree to this post to a large degree but I disagree with the absolutism with which it is worded, like saying "debarred at the tiniest discrepancy" makes me uncomfortable.

Imagine licensing boards enforcing a strict orthodoxy of views. Imagine it now becoming near-impossible to find a doctor who disagrees with even a single aspect of accepted medical knowledge.

That is NOT what I want.

Medical knowledge and practice will always have some degree of uncertainty in it. Sometimes there are old doctors holding onto views that have been solidly proven harmful by science. But also, there are sometimes isolated doctors standing up against the existing orthodoxy, resisting the corrupting influence of big pharma, etc. Keep in mind that as recently as 20-years ago, medicine was totally on board with an orthodoxy pushing fat-free foods, problematic measures like BMI and standards with fatphobia built into them, and medical orthodoxy is still tainted by things like racism and sexism.

Also, even when the general idea behind the orthodoxy is correct I could see bad ways this plays out. For example, I'm a huge supporter of vaccines. But what about someone who has a rare, but dangerous vaccine side-effect that is poorly documented and thus absent from most medical literature? Especially in a fast-paced environment like we had with COVID and the various vaccines for it? A licensing board or review board couldn't possibly keep up with all the relevant facts. And I would seriously worry about a doctor getting punished or un-licensed because they were listening to a patient complaining of experiencing serious side-effects in an environment where the medical orthodoxy was pro-vaccine.

I agree with the overall sentiment of the OP here but I also worry that if we created boards to review doctors like this, we need to be very careful about what standards are being used to carry out something like delicensing of doctors. And I would be very uncomfortable with it being too easy to delicense a doctor, particularly I would not want them to be delicensed for minor discrepancies with medical consensus. I would only want it when there were major discrepancies with points on which there were a strong medical consensus in society, and when the doctor had shown a refusal to listen to the patient and/or a refusal to respond to or seriously engage with accusations of ignoring medical consensus. However I would want to allow the possibility of doctors disagreeing with accepted medical consensus when they can point to good reasons for doing so.

I'm so extremely serious when I say doctors should be put through an extremely extensive reliscensing process every 10 years. Doctors should have their knowledge scrutinized against current medical research and be de-barred at even the tiniest discrepancy. Too many old doctors absolutely refuse to stay up to date on research and dismiss patients because of their personal experiences. Too many people die every year because doctors don't take us seriously and refuse to listen to people who KNOW something is wrong. Too many people are told their problems are nothing and come back in a year or more with serious illnesses and doctors are just like "lol everyone makes mistakes" but doctors mistakes routinely cost people their lives! I'm tired of medical malpractice being swept away under the guise of "mistakes were made."

[garden-of-succulents]

Kent and Andy: thoughts about marriage and children.

(Content notes: Uhhh… biphobia, mention of abortion, Carrie Fisher quote, general cultural sexism? But this is pretty fluffy)

Andy’s extremely wary of the idea of getting married. Her parents didn’t give her a great example to go on. She’s also just generally nervous around a lot of compulsory heterosexuality, and freely broadcasts the opinion (to dates, but also the Twittersphere at large) that anyone who publicly proposes to her gets punched and rejected. The more staged and public it is, the harder the punching.

Kent, meanwhile, would probably have married super young if he hadn’t been hung up on Jack. He loves the idea of permanence, stability, intense work to build a life together. He wants commitment, something grounded, someone he can build a future with.

At the end of the first season of them really dating, they co-rent a house in Henderson near the Aces practice facility (and on the street of some Aces staff and players) and Kent sublets his apartment. Together they adopt a small and enthusiastic-but-stupid dog named Cummerbund, who never quite understands when the cats (Kit and a geriatric and cranky Sydney) take refuge on high ledges to escape him.

They agree with each other that it would be… preferable to them, politically, if they were of the same gender, because it’s so awkward being bisexual in the public eye; Kent would like to be able to come out in a really bold and unequivocal way, that couldn’t be written off as “He fooled around and then settled down with a nice girl.” Andy would like not to have the caption “Kent Parson’s Girlfriend” floating perpetually over her head. But at the same time those politics don’t take away the fact that when they sit at their kitchen table with coffees after dinner and talk about strategy and messaging for an LGBTQ youth initiative, about household chore schedules, about Andy saving for a down payment on a house and Kent managing his private foundation, they fit together so solidly, so earnestly ally and support each other, that it’s… worth giving up the ability to not be misread. They know what people think about them when it comes to queerness, and they can’t help that; walking away from each other would still be a greater cost. For Kent it’s a little bitter, to swallow his dreams of leading the field in out hockey players; he has to smile and let Jack step into the spotlight, and know he’s being written as an incidental also-ran.

Andy agrees to marry him, spring of their second year dating. It’s during one of those calm and rational kitchen table coffee conversations, but when Kent puts the ring on her finger she surprises herself by crying with happiness. It frightens her when he gets a tattoo to commemorate it, and to be honest it frightens him too, because it’s a lot to take on faith that someone’s going to stay–but like Carrie Fisher said, stay scared and do it anyway.

He’s so good with kids, gentle and patient and humble and amusing, and he dotes on his godchildren, frames their artwork and keeps track of their interests. After a day where he’d gently tumbled children over and around him when they swarmed him on a back lawn, he leans against Andy on the couch and says, “You ever think about kids?”

Andy’s thought a relative amount about kids, actually. She’s thought about child abuse, about her parents, about people who think they’re good parents but actually aren’t. She’s thought about how lucky she is, not to have to sacrifice her career the way other women she’s known has. She’s thought about the women she’s known whose children’s fathers were lacking or absent, about their rage at having to do so much work alone. She’s many times over the years pressed her hand to the stomach with the silent gratitude that she still lives in a time and place where she could get an abortion, if she wanted to. Because it’s never felt like children were something she could afford.

Which she says to Kent, and he nods amicably. Why, she thinks, would anybody want kids? They always seemed like… an inevitable disaster, something you had to work harder to escape than obtain. 

And then she remembers being a young girl, before she learned about all the reasons she shouldn’t want them, picking out her future children’s names, imagining their hopes and dreams and hobbies. Rarely did she picture them as babies; she wanted them to be growing, confident and strong, into adulthood, taking big bites out of the future.

And she thinks that Kent as a father would be very, very different than the people who raised her.

It becomes a subject of discussion between them, all the reasons they’re afraid to be parents, and the things they’d do differently with children of their own, fed by close observations of coworkers’ children, by Kent’s godchildren and nieces, by Andy’s work with young athletes and their parents. The laborious set of assumptions around children becomes a little lighter for Andy.

Kent tries very hard to keep his chill but honestly–when Andy gets pregnant, he is thrilled. As much as he knows his own father dumped him, and good riddance… unless he fucks things up really bad, he’s always going to be a part of this child’s life. No matter what, he’ll always have a role here. And that’s exactly what he’s always wanted. He goes into the as-yet unoccupied nursery sometimes and makes silent promises. I’ll let you dye your hair if you want. I’ll be happy if you grow up to be a garbage collector. You’re going to grow up knowing that we’ll support you 100% if you’re gay or a different gender than we thought. I just want to love you.

And anyway, he got to be a martyr for a worthy cause after all; the Aces had traditionally defined “paternity leave” as a maximum of three missed games directly surrounding the birth of a child. That’s the first piece of bullshit he sics his agent on Andy tells him she’s expecting–and the new head coach still acts hurt and surprised when Kent doesn’t report for training camp in August, because of a child born in July.

Andy says that not many other players could win that kind of fight against management, but he manages it both because he’s a player of exceptionally high calibre, and because public opinion is on his side; Kent thinks he wins because they realize that if they said that he would have to choose between being the father he wants to be and never playing hockey again, he would pick up the baby and leave, and they know better than to bully a man who can call their bluff.

“You wanted this,” Andy says unwisely, as he pads down the hallway with a screaming child on his shoulder. “You went out of your way for this.” But she hands him a travel mug of coffee to sip as he does so.

But he did; he really, really did. And he made the right choice.

They surface, somewhat, the next summer; he gets back in condition for hockey, and she agrees to set the date for the wedding, two years hence. These things take a long time to arrange.

(I don’t know much about that baby. I’ve thought a few times that Andy would be a good mother for Sophie Parson; on the other hand, I can also picture these two with a small, serious boy who watches figure skaters with stars in his eyes, or a lot of other possibilities. But I do know–)

Their wedding is perfected by a three-year-old whose official role in the ceremony is brief and largely based around their proclivity to walk towards Mommy and Daddy; while the boring adult stuff is going on, the kid sits down at the front of the crowd and plays with a toy truck. At one point they get bored and want to be held; Kent kisses his wife with his child on his hip.

And there are… a lot of worse plausible futures all of them could have dreamed for themselves, than this.