#florida adoption home study
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Good News - August 15-21
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1. Smart hives and dancing robot bees could boost sustainable beekeeping
“[Researchers] developed a digital comb—a thin circuit board equipped with various sensors around which bees build their combs. Several of these in each hive can then transmit data to researchers, providing real-time monitoring. [… Digital comb] can [also] be activated to heat up certain parts of a beehive […] to keep the bees warm during the winter[…. N]ot only have [honeybee] colonies reacted positively, but swarm intelligence responds to the temperature changes by reducing the bees' own heat production, helping them save energy.”
2. Babirusa pigs born at London Zoo for first time
“Thanks to their gnarly tusks […] and hairless bodies, the pigs are often called "rat pigs" or "demon pigs” in their native Indonesia[….] “[The piglets] are already looking really strong and have so much energy - scampering around their home and chasing each other - it’s a joy to watch. They’re quite easy to tell apart thanks to their individual hair styles - one has a head of fuzzy red hair, while its sibling has a tuft of dark brown hair.””
3. 6,000 sheep will soon be grazing on 10,000 acres of Texas solar fields
“The animals are more efficient than lawn mowers, since they can get into the nooks and crannies under panel arrays[….] Mowing is also more likely to kick up rocks or other debris, damaging panels that then must be repaired, adding to costs. Agrivoltaics projects involving sheep have been shown to improve the quality of the soil, since their manure is a natural fertilizer. […] Using sheep instead of mowers also cuts down on fossil fuel use, while allowing native plants to mature and bloom.”
4. Florida is building the world's largest environmental restoration project
“Florida is embarking on an ambitious ecological restoration project in the Everglades: building a reservoir large enough to secure the state's water supply. […] As well as protecting the drinking water of South Floridians, the reservoir is also intended to dramatically reduce the algae-causing discharges that have previously shut down beaches and caused mass fish die-offs.”
5. The Right to Repair Movement Continues to Accelerate
“Consumers can now demand that manufacturers repair products [including mobile phones….] The liability period for product defects is extended by 12 months after repair, incentivising repairs over replacements. [… M]anufacturers may need to redesign products for easier disassembly, repair, and durability. This could include adopting modular designs, standardizing parts, and developing diagnostic tools for assessing the health of a particular product. In the long run, this could ultimately bring down both manufacturing and repair costs.”
6. Federal Judge Rules Trans Teen Can Play Soccer Just In Time For Her To Attend First Practice
“Today, standing in front of a courtroom, attorneys for Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, two transgender girls, won an emergency temporary restraining order allowing Tirrell to continue playing soccer with her friends. […] Tirrell joined her soccer team last year and received full support from her teammates, who, according to the filing, are her biggest source of emotional support and acceptance.”
7. Pilot study uses recycled glass to grow plants for salsa ingredients
“"We're trying to reduce landfill waste at the same time as growing edible vegetables," says Andrea Quezada, a chemistry graduate student[….] Early results suggest that the plants grown in recyclable glass have faster growth rates and retain more water compared to those grown in 100% traditional soil. [… T]he pots that included any amount of recyclable glass [also] didn't have any fungal growth.”
8. Feds announce funding push for ropeless fishing gear that spares rare whales
“Federal fishing managers are promoting the use of ropeless gear in the lobster and crab fishing industries because of the plight of North Atlantic right whales. […] Lobster fishing is typically performed with traps on the ocean bottom that are connected to the surface via a vertical line. In ropeless fishing methods, fishermen use systems such an inflatable lift bag that brings the trap to the surface.”
9. Solar farms can benefit nature and boost biodiversity. Here’s how
“[… M]anaging solar farms as wildflower meadows can benefit bumblebee foraging and nesting, while larger solar farms can increase pollinator densities in surrounding landscapes[….] Solar farms have been found to boost the diversity and abundance of certain plants, invertebrates and birds, compared to that on farmland, if solar panels are integrated with vegetation, even in urban areas.”
10. National Wildlife Federation Forms Tribal Advisory Council to Guide Conservation Initiatives, Partnerships
“The council will provide expertise and consultation related to respecting Indigenous Knowledges; wildlife and natural resources; Indian law and policy; Free, Prior and Informed Consent[… as well as] help ensure the Federation’s actions honor and respect the experiences and sovereignty of Indigenous partners.”
August 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)
#hopepunk#good news#honeybee#bees#technology#beekeeping#piglet#london#zoo#sheep#solar panels#solar energy#solar power#solar#florida#everglades#water#right to repair#planned obsolescence#trans rights#trans#soccer#football#recycling#plants#gardening#fishing#whales#indigenous#wildlife
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what’s the girls relationship like with uncle (grandpa?) wayne?
yesss we love Grandpa Wayne 🥹
Wayne was actually the first person to know about Moe (and the only person, for a little while, because privacy is a big deal w/foster kids and the Party is notably god-awful at keeping things on the DL so Steve and Eddie didn’t loop everyone in until the adoption was complete).
Wayne was the first one to meet Moe, the first to hold her. Wayne proudly wrote the reference letter they’d needed as part of their home study to adopt her.
Wayne came up to Massachusetts from Indiana to take care of Moe while Steve and Eddie were in the NICU with Robbie.
Wayne was Eddie’s first call when Hazel was born.
When the girls are very little (toddlers/early elementary school) he’s still living in Indiana (he's in a silent feud with Hopper over who can stand to stay in Hawkins the longest). The feud only comes to an end because, when Steve’s dad passes in 2009, Eddie gets freaked out and basically insists that Wayne move closer to them.
Wayne isn’t even all that bummed about losing to Hop because it means he gets to spend more time with the grandkids. He absolutely rubs this in at any opportunity, and Hopper and Joyce make the move up north only a year or two later (Hop claims it was unrelated).
The girls adore him. He’s steady and reliable and always down for a good card game (he teaches them how to play poker just a little bit too young) and he shows up to every play and recital and all the important sports games, and he can roast their dad like nobody's business.
He has a particularly special bond with Hazel, who, like him, loves nature and being outside. They go birdwatching and fishing together (catch and release, obviously, because Hazel wouldn’t stand for anything else) and take day trips to nearby national parks and botanical gardens.
Hazel goes to Florida for college, pursuing a degree in zoology at one of the best programs in the country, and they joke that Wayne should be awarded an honorary BS with how much of her coursework Hazel relays to him (she calls him after practically every lecture). Eddie has to fight tooth and nail to keep him from moving back down to Florida to join her there.
#eddie takes actual offense to the florida thing#that only makes sense if you’ve read the series tho oop#i did write Wayne’s adoption reference letter but not sure if/when that would ever see the light of day#steddie#liv’s steddie dads verse#steddie dads#steve harrington#eddie munson#wayne munson
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20k Words Masterlist
Act Naturally (ao3) - jestbee
Summary: Phil has a quiet life studying film at university and some small dreams of being a director he’s mostly ignoring, but his whole life is turned upside down when his roommate signs him up for a game show and he meets the famously arrogant movie star Daniel Howell
all signs point to yes (ao3) - vvelna
Summary: After being fired from his job at a coffee shop in Gatwick Airport, Dan impulsively hops on a flight to Orlando, Florida, where he’s taken in by a family on holiday.
All We Seem to Do Is Talk About Sex (ao3) - truerequitedlove
Summary: In which Dan’s got a boyfriend and a tongue piercing, and Phil’s got a weed hookup and an anxiety disorder. In high school, they were labeled “bad influences on each other,” maybe that would never go away.
because we are fools (ao3) - queerofcups
He realizes it calmly at first, and then suddenly with more clarity. He’s in love with Phil. But he absolutely cannot be in love with Phil.
Breathe Fire Into My Heart (ao3) - Finally_Facing_Failure
Summary: Dan Howell lives in a world were dragons fly the skies, with riders on their backs. He has to train to become a rider, even though he doesn’t want to. The upside? A boy named Phil who trains beside him.
Chance (ao3) - cafephan
Summary: Phil Lester is a nobleman in the country of Bennia, and his family must put forward a suitor for the Princess’ hand in marriage later in the month. During his last night in Manchester, he encounters charismatic Dan Howell, resulting in them both taking a chance.
Devotion (ao3) - roryonice
Summary: Dan is a ballerina who’s practicing for an audition at Julliard, but he’s afraid of performing in front of other people. He meets Phil, who’s gathering photos for his art portfolio, and Phil helps Dan come out of his shell in an interesting way.
Do You Know How in Love With You I Am (Please Notice) (ao3) - phantasticworks
Summary: Dan works at a small paper company, but the brightside to this boring career is that his best friend Phil is just a few feet away at reception. The downside to this is that he’s hopelessly, irrevocably in love with said best friend. Oh, and Phil is engaged, too.
Feel Good Inc. - melancholymango
Summary: Dan is your local sexually ambiguous religious boy. Phil is your local bad boy that sleeps with anyone that’ll have him and sins as if second nature. Then there’s also the poor original character that gets caught between them and their ridiculous amount of sexual tension. Threesomes, eh?
from up here you can’t beat the view (just watch me now) (ao3) - kishere, maybeformepersonally
Summary: It’s 2009 and Dan finds Phil on the internet when a well-meaning mate of his recommends him to a certain site she likes. Dan quickly becomes a fan: watching Phil’s videos religiously and interacting with him on his socials. And, soon enough, Phil starts noticing him. A familiar enough story on the surface but here’s the catch: Phil has never been involved with YouTube. Phil is a camboy.
I Choose You (ao3) - Phandiction
Summary: Phil’s parents have decided to adopt and Phil’s thrilled to finally have a brother. When he meets Dan they hit it off but little did he know his parents had decided to bring home a little girl instead. Phil spends the next nine years visiting Dan at the orphanage. One day Dan unexpectedly goes outside the lines of friendship and Phil isn’t sure if he’s ready for that.
i feel a kick down in my soul (ao3) - chickenfree
Summary: “I’m going to obliterate you,” he says, taking a few long steps towards Phil.
Phil runs. It takes him a minute to realize the ball is in the opposite direction.
I Found (ao3) - wildflowerhowell
Summary: Dan Howell and Phil Lester hate each other, and everyone at the Ida Gatley school of dance knows it. So what happens when the two are paired together to choreograph and perform a duet at England’s most renowned contemporary dance competition?
I’m A Stitch Away From Making It (And A Scar Away From Falling Apart) - waverlysangels
Summary: Dan Howell is ‘the next big thing�� and Phil Lester is not good for publicity, will the increasing fame create tensions that simply cannot be overcome?
i will follow where this takes me (ao3) - curiosityandrain
Summary: Dan has a great life, he has an amazing job as a photographer and he lives in New York. Phil is an independent filmmaker who hires Dan to be his cinematographer for his upcoming feature film after his usual cinematographer was involved in an accident. The two hit it off and become instant friends. Weeks of working together everyday helps develop their friendship and slowly but surely, Dan realises his feelings for Phil run deeper than just friendship. The only problem is, Phil’s taken.
knight of wands (ao3) - dizzy
Summary: Some days are just boring.
(And some aren't.)
Love That Passes (Is Enough) (ao3) - nihilist_toothpaste
Summary: Phil is a sad divorcee who lives in a mansion. Dan starts as a nervous and weirdly loud law student hired to work part-time as Phil's poolboy-slash-housekeeper and turns into so much more.
Just go with me on this.
More at Eleven (ao3) - TwistedRocketPower
Summary: Phil Lester, the most beloved meteorologist at Southeast News, isn't sure of many things in his life. One thing he is sure of, however, is that he absolutely hates the new entertainment news anchor, Dan Howell.
No Angels (ao3) - ahsuga, danthrusts
Summary: Dan and Phil are detectives investigating the ongoing murders of citizens throughout London
Project Poliwag (ao3) - natigail
Summary: Phil hadn't intended for his garden to become a haven for rescued Pokémon, but it had happened accidentally. This particular rescue wasn't that different, even though he had never rescued 117 Pokémon at once before. But he couldn't leave the Pokémon eggs to be destroyed, and he was willing to raise a whole army of Poliwag on his own if he must.
What Phil hadn't counted on was a stranger with a lost look in his eye turning up on his doorstep and offering to help with the project.
Something So Strong (ao3) - Allthephils
Summary: Dan and Phil were the best of friends with some incredible benefits. Over a decade apart did nothing to weaken the bond between them but rekindling their friendship isn’t as simple as it should be.
The Parent Trap (ao3) - starsatellite
Summary: Alexandra Lester and Charlotte Howell are in for a big surprise at their summer camp when they realize they have the same face. After, literally, putting the pieces together they find out the big secret their parents hid from them when they were born. Now, all they want is to set them back up again - but these things aren’t always so easy.
(There’s Gotta Be) More To Life (ao3) - DisasterSoundtrack
Summary: Dan Howell finally gets a dog he dreamt of. Walking the dog every morning, he discovers many things about his neighbourhood, but, above all, one particularly attractive dad.
Unraveling - yuurisnice
Summary: Dan knew he was different from other children very early on. He never lost his ‘imaginary friends’, they only became a more integral part of his life. Living with his illness is never easy and with a secret as large as his, cracks are bound to appear. While he isn’t ashamed of his DID, he knows the consequences of telling the wrong people.
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This Tumblr Ask is mostly an excuse to interact with another human. I hope you don’t mind.
Would you say Mormonism has a better history of changing entrenched stances than other religions?
Of the religions which don’t currently perform same sex marriages, which do you think will start in the next 100 years?
Who would you guess is going to be the central orbit in your afterlife: you or your husband?
Over the past 20 years, Salt Lake City Utah has had some of the best numbers regarding changes in racial diversity and home prices in the nation. A generation ago this relationship (then known as “White Flight”) was a major and very sad problem many municipalities faced. Is Mormonism in Florida making lives better for Black people?
These are interesting questions.
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Would you say Mormonism has a better history of changing entrenched stances than other religions?
Mormonism believes in on-going revelation, and its top leader is considered to be a prophet and we also have apostles. In other words, the structure is one which suggests change is an ongoing feature of this church. Compared to where the LDS Church was in 1830 or even 1960, much has changed.
Despite this, it seems to me to be slower than others when it comes to reconsidering "entrenched stances." It didn't allow full participation by Black members until 1978. Every few years it seems to take another small step or two towards equality for women, but the slow pace of change makes it feel like it's falling further behind much of Christendom.
I think the reason for this church being slow to progress forward is that it raises questions about the role of the prophet and apostles. If the past leaders were wrong about race or the inclusion of women, what might the current leaders be wrong about? Undermining the authority & teachings of past leaders calls into question the authority & teachings of the current leaders. Can I disregard what they're saying on LGBTQ+ topics because I believe there'll be further revelation and change, even if the current leaders say that the current teachings won't change, just like the past leaders said there wouldn't be change?
The current workaround is that doctrine doesn't change, but policies do. While I know many consider the LDS Church's teachings on gender and marriage to be doctrine, they have changed many times and therefore I think of them as policies.
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Of the religions which don’t currently perform same sex marriages, which do you think will start in the next 100 years?
One of the ways churches create an identity for themselves is by what they stand for. They also can define themselves by what they are against. Unfortunately, for hundreds of years Christianity has adopted being anti-gay/anti-queer as part of the definition of what it means to be Christian. Changing this identity is difficult.
There are Christian denominations wrestling with accepting same-sex marriages. Changing their stance has roiled their denominations. While many are thrilled, some traditionalists are alarmed & dismayed and whole congregations vote to leave that particular denomination.
I think this study showing the changing acceptance of gay marriage by religions in the United States is fascinating. I think it predicts most religions in the United States will ultimately accept queer people and same-sex marriages.
This chart shows that the Latter-day Saints moved the most in the past 8 years, from 27% to 50%. This is very much related to LGBTQ+ members coming out, especially teenagers and those in their 20's. Also, we have had a wave of adults who came out & left their mixed-orientation marriages. It's been a big, messy process, but now it seems most everyone knows or is related to a Mormon/ex-Mormon who is out as LGBTQ+. Which underlines that when people actually know queer folks and hear our stories, it changes hearts.
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Who would you guess is going to be the central orbit in your afterlife: you or your husband?
Gosh, I don't know how to answer this. I'm not sure what this means to be the "central orbit" of my afterlife.
Considering I'm single and don't have a husband, I will have to say that it won't be my husband. Although, if I'm lucky, maybe one day my marriage status will change
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Over the past 20 years, Salt Lake City Utah has had some of the best numbers regarding changes in racial diversity and home prices in the nation. A generation ago this relationship (then known as “White Flight”) was a major and very sad problem many municipalities faced. Is Mormonism in Florida making lives better for Black people?
It's interesting you speak of Salt Lake City as racially diverse. When I visit, I notice the lack of such diversity. I suppose compared to where it was, it is becoming more diverse, but so is the United States.
Utah is the 34th most racially and ethnically diverse state in the nation, putting it in the bottom half of states. Forty percent of the state’s growth since 2010 has come from racial and ethnic minority populations, who are expected to account for one in three Utahns by 2060. In contrast, it is projected by 2040 that the United States is expected to have no race or ethnic demographic which is more than 50% of the population, making us a majority minority nation.
So yes, Salt Lake City and Utah are becoming more diverse, but still lags far behind the United States as a whole.
As for your question whether Mormonism in Florida is making lives better for Black people, I don't think so. I also wouldn't say we're making life worse.
I know we have talked about being more welcoming of Black people and have had some committees in my local area to discuss what changes we can make in our congregations or what contribution we can make to the Black community in the area. I'm not aware of any sustained efforts to make changes or to partner with local organizations.
Our congregations in Florida may look more diverse than the average congregation in Utah, but typically they're not as diverse as the neighborhoods where we are located. We have much room for improvement in making a space where all feel welcome and that this is their spiritual home.
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By: Leor Sapir
Published: Jun 28, 2023
A growing number of countries, including some of the most progressive in Europe, are rejecting the U.S. “gender-affirming” model of care for transgender-identified youth. These countries have adopted a far more restrictive and cautious approach, one that prioritizes psychotherapy and reserves hormonal interventions for extreme cases.
In stark contrast to groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which urges clinicians to “affirm” their patient’s identity irrespective of circumstance and regards alternatives to an affirm-early/affirm-only approach “conversion therapy,” European health authorities are recommending exploratory therapy to discern why teens are rejecting their bodies and whether less invasive treatments may help.
If implemented in American clinics, the European approach would effectively deny puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to most adolescents who are receiving these drugs today. Unlike in the U.S., in Europe surgeries are generally off the table before adulthood.
Why are more countries turning their backs on what American medical associations, most Democrats and the American Civil Liberties Union call “medically necessary” and “life-saving” care? The answer is that Europeans are following principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM), while Americans are not.
A bedrock principle of EBM is that medical recommendations should be grounded in the best available research. EBM recognizes a hierarchy of information. The expert opinion of doctors, for example, even when based on extensive clinical experience, furnishes the lowest quality — meaning, least reliable — information. Slightly higher on the information pyramid are observational studies. Systematic reviews of evidence, meanwhile, furnish the highest quality evidence. They follow a rigorously developed, reproducible methodology. They do not cherry-pick studies with convenient results, but instead consider all the available research.
Most importantly, systematic reviews don’t merely summarize the conclusions of available studies on a question of interest. Instead, they assess the strengths and weaknesses of these studies to determine the reliability of their findings. To do this, systematic reviews typically use the GRADE system (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations) and rank the quality of evidence as “high,” “moderate,” “low” or “very low.”
Systematic reviews by EBM experts in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom have concluded that there are serious gaps in the evidence base for sex modification in minors. The U.K. systematic reviews found the available research to be of “very low” quality — meaning that there is very low certainty that an observed effect, like reduced suicidality, is due to the intervention, and therefore the studies’ claimed results are unlikely to represent the truth.
Importantly, even the famous Dutch study that is said to be the “gold standard” of research in this area received a rating of “very low” due to serious methodological problems. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare has said that the risks of treating gender dysphoric minors with hormonal interventions “currently outweigh the possible benefits.”
Last year, Florida’s health authorities commissioned what is known as an “umbrella review,” or a systematic overview of systematic reviews, from independent experts at McMaster University, home of EBM. Unsurprisingly, that overview came to the same conclusion: There is no reliable evidence that youth transition improves mental health outcomes.
Because U.S. medical groups��don’t always use EBM, their conclusions can be based on studies whose fatal flaws are overlooked or ignored. Consider, as an example, a study done at Seattle Children’s Hospital and published last year. The study’s authors reported that use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones was associated with 60 percent lower odds of depression and 73 percent lower odds of suicidality. Leading mainstream publications, including Scientific American and Psychology Today, celebrated the findings. More recently, major U.S. medical associations cited the study in federal court proceedings.
But a careful look at the study’s data shows that the kids who received hormonal interventions did no better by the end of the study than at the beginning. The researchers’ claim about improvement was based on the fact that the kids in the control group, who received psychotherapy but not hormones, got worse relative to the hormone group. But even this isn’t accurate, as 80 percent of the control group dropped out by the end of the study, and a likely reason for this dramatic loss to follow-up is that many or perhaps all of the non-hormone-treated kids improved without “gender-affirming” drugs. It’s quite possible that if the researchers had followed up with all the participants, we’d see this study become Exhibit A in the case against pediatric sex changes.
Similar problems exist in studies purporting to show a rate of transition regret of less than 1 percent. The true rate of regret is not known and won’t be known for years to come. The claim that gender dysphoric teens are at high risk of suicide if not given access to “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries is likewise baseless and irresponsible. In February, Finland’s top expert in gender medicine emphasized this point to the country’s liberal newspaper of record.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ main statement on gender medicine, authored by a single doctor while still in his residency, is not a systematic review. The author himself has conceded as much. A later published peer-reviewed fact check found the AAP statement to be a textbook example of cherry-picking and mischaracterization of evidence.
The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) says in its latest “standards of care” that a systematic review of evidence is “not possible.” Instead, WPATH used a “narrative review,” which has a high risk of bias according to EBM because it doesn’t utilize a reproducible methodology. England has broken from WPATH, and the director of Belgium’s Center for Evidence-Based Medicine has said he would “toss them [WPATH’s guidelines] in the bin.” In the U.S., WPATH’s standards are widely accepted as authoritative.
The U.S. Endocrine Society has relied on two systematic reviews in developing its own guideline. But these reviews were not for mental health benefits, and in any case the Endocrine Society ranks the quality of evidence behind its own recommendations as “low” or “very low.”
All other U.S. medical groups cite these three sources when assuring the public about “gender-affirming care,” thus creating an illusion of consensus around “settled science.”
Earlier this year, an investigative report in the prestigious British Medical Journal concluded that although pediatric gender medicine in the U.S. is “consensus-based,” it is not “evidence-based.” Gordon Guyatt, distinguished professor in the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact at McMaster University, Ontario, and one of the founders of EBM, recently called American guidelines for managing youth gender dysphoria “untrustworthy.”
Consensus can be produced by misguided empathy, ideological capture or political pressures. Consensus can also be manufactured. The new president of the American Medical Association (AMA) has said there should be “no debate” when it comes to offering kids “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries.
Yale School of Medicine’s Dr. Meredithe McNamara calls the questioning of the evidence behind pediatric sex changes “science denialism.” Her protest is ironic. Science is a process of ongoing inquiry and debate, not a set of predetermined conclusions. Science depends on skepticism, especially about sensitive subjects. True science denialism means restricting rational, evidence-based debate — exactly what McNamara and the AMA’s new president want to do.
Their calls are bearing fruit. Just this month, gender activists successfully pressured a medical journal to retract a paper whose conclusions they found inconvenient. The ongoing campaign to suppress scientific debate allows a pseudo-consensus to emerge around “gender-affirming care.”
Put simply, pediatric gender medicine in the U.S. is out of control. Medicalization of gender diversity in children is a fast-growing industry that shows no signs of self-correction. Doctors and therapists who practice “affirmative” medicine consistently demonstrate ignorance about EBM principles and deceive the public about the grim realities behind the euphemism “gender-affirming care.”
A Reuters investigation last year interviewed providers at 18 pediatric gender clinics and found that none were doing comprehensive mental health assessments and differential diagnosis. Those who promote and practice “gender-affirming care” themselves tell us that their approach is child-led. “Gatekeeping” of medical transition, they insist, is pointless, even “dehumanizing.”
The author of the AAP’s position paper on gender medicine has said that a “child’s sense of reality” is the “navigational beacon to orient treatment around.” The director of the gender clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital has admitted that they give out puberty blockers “like candy.” Even the founding psychologist of that clinic has warned that kids are being inappropriately “rushed toward the medical model.”
Why the U.S. has become an outlier on pediatric transgender medicine is a complicated question, but at least part of the answer is that European welfare states have centralized health bureaucracies and public health insurance. Before medicines can be approved for state funding, their evidence base needs to be evaluated. The American health care system is more vulnerable to profit motives, activist doctors and political pressures. Medical associations claim to advocate for patient health but can have other motives as well.
The situation is so dire that when pediatric gender medicine experts in other countries want to defend their practices before a skeptical public, they sometimes say that at least they are not as bad as the Americans. That is one kind of American exceptionalism we can do without.
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[A] “child’s sense of reality” is the “navigational beacon to orient treatment around.”
Holy shit.
How can you claim that it's "settled science" and "consensus," and then leave everything up to the most immature, most depressed, most anxious, least experienced person in the room?
There are no grown ups in charge.
#Leor Sapir#gender ideology#genderwang#queer theory#medical corruption#medical scandal#gender affirming#sex trait modification#gender affirming care#affirmation model#affirmation#weak evidence#poor evidence#evidence based medicine#settled science#religion is a mental illness
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Brazil’s failed coup is the poison flower of the Trump-Bolsonaro symbiosis
The striking similarities between events at the Capitol and Brasília stem from links fostered by the former presidents and their families
In the days following the 6 January 2021 storming of the US Capitol, a Brazilian professor and expert on disinformation, David Nemer, gave an interview predicting the same thing would happen in Brazil two years later.
Sunday’s insurrection in Brasília came just two days after the second anniversary of the Capitol attack. Nemer said his prediction was not the work of a seer, but was based on analysis of the close and growing symbiosis of the hard right in the US and Brazil – a bond that was built up around the Trump and Bolsonaro families and their entourages.
“The reason why I was saying that was because the same sort of narrative that was flowing around social media in the US, it was also flowing in WhatsApp and Telegram groups that I’d monitor and that I researched [in Brazil],” said Nemer, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. For example, Bolsonaro and his supporters started planting the idea that Brazilian voting machines were rigged two years before Brazil’s presidential election.
The bonds have been maintained by family members. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have provided unstinting mutual political support, which each has used to rebuff accusations of being isolated on the world stage. Even before leaving office, Bolsonaro decamped to Florida and is now in Kissimmee, Orlando, close to Trump’s bastion at Mar-a-Lago. The former Brazilian president makes frequent appearances outside his temporary base, the holiday home of a retired Brazilian martial arts fighter, to greet adoring supporters in a mix of Brazil soccer jerseys, which Bolsonaristas adopted as their own, and pro-Trump Maga gear.
Continue reading.
#brazil#united states#politics#democracy#brazilian politics#us politics#brazilian elections#brazilian elections 2022#january 8#mod nise da silveira#image description in alt
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A town called Prose is home to || Cailan Williams || who is a || thirty one || year old, || cis man ||. They work as || veterinarian || and live in || Drew Drive||. in Prose, they’re known as the || Sean Teale || lookalike. || he/him || They were confused and startled by the recent news.
tw death, tw accident
Cailan known as Cal was born and raised in Florida. Having a love for the beach, the sun and spending so much of his life outdoors. Growing up, he was always a confident and outgoing young man. He knew what he wanted out of life. He was talkative, adventurous, and could never sit still for long. He has a good sense of humour and enjoys making others laugh. From a young age, he was always climbing things, playing baseball and other sports, teaching himself instruments and building things with his own hands. He liked to be on the go, and he liked to be busy and that has never really changed into his adult life.
As a child like many others at that age, Cailan thought he was invincible. Throughout elementary school, he liked to push boundaries and he was often getting himself in trouble, even when he didn't mean to. Though overall, he was a kindhearted and empathetic child despite his playful and reckless ways. He had plenty of friends and showed he was a loyal and good young person. Cailan is also very smart and excelled when it came to his school work, with a real strength for maths and science. His parents knew he needed to be kept busy during his childhood and gave him plenty of opportunities, whether that be sports, drama club and even going on hiking trails.
His parents loved him, despite the many times they were called into school for him pulling a prank or telling a teacher they had the wrong answer. He was close to his dad, and enjoyed working on cars with him and playing sports together. He also learned to cook with his mom and grandmother.
Though his life took a turn for the worst at just fifteen years old when a tragic accident happened. Cailan and his friend went climbing without safety gear and got into some trouble at the top of the cliff. When the rock crumbled, the boys fell. Cailan managed to hold on, but his best friend fell and all Cailan could do was watch. That memory has stayed with him into his adult life and Cailan still feels guilty, blaming himself for what happened.
For a while, Cailan let his rebellious side take over, messing about and getting himself into trouble throughout high school. The loss of his best friend had hit him hard and the young man acting out. Though in his last year of high school, finding a hurt dog out on a run knocked some sense into him and ended up showing Cailan where he wanted his life to be. He took the dog home, made sure he got medical help and looked after him. Eventually adopting the dog as his own. He knew from that moment, he wanted to be a vet, he had always loved science and had empathy for those around him. And he began working hard in school again and securing a place at Cornell University for veterinary science when he was eighteen.
Throughout the rest of high school he became closer to his family and they managed to keep him on track. He made a new group of friends and had a teenage girlfriend. He was a regular teen, despite the moments alone where the loss of his friend still hurt him more than he would ever admit to anyone. He enjoyed moving away for college. He liked the independence and meeting new people. Despite the partying and the messing about, he excelled and put everything into his studies.
Cailan works hard and he gives life his all. He's a jokester and friendly to everyone he meets though he's never really let anyone too close. He’s afraid of losing people, afraid of them seeing his vulnerabilities. The job in Prose was not one he was looking for, but everything seemed to fall into place. When the small town in New Hampshire was looking for a replacement for the retiring old owner, it felt like the perfect opportunity and it soon felt like home. He liked the small community and he enjoyed people's animals who he saw regularly.
He is now thirty one and a pretty good veterinary doctor. He has worked in the small town hospital for a couple of years now. He’s in a settled place and is genuinely happy with where his life is at. He knows he is an attractive man, he likes to flirt, he likes to make people laugh but he keeps himself out of trouble most of the time. He enjoys going out on his bike, he goes camping with his friends quite often and he likes to keep fit. He still likes to be on the go, always running, boxing and messing around with a football. Though he has his quiet moments just watching a sad movie when no one is around. He’s a dog lover and it is something that keeps him company after his long working days. He’s a friendly, happy guy, that despite everything, tries to see the best in the world.
#bio page#tw accident#tw death#about page#intro#proseintro#bioacal#yes this is an essay#i can't help myself
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FULL NAME: Josephine "Joey" Fernando - Rivera
GENDER: demi woman
PRONOUNS: she / her
AGE + BIRTHDAY: 25, April 29th
LENGTH OF TIME IN FAIRFORD: Until she was 18, then recently returned in the past month
HOUSING: Mountainside
OCCUPATION: Bartender at Daring Daiquiri
warnings for teenager pregnancy , running away , abandonment , adoption
TEEN PREGNANCY / joey's story starts with her mother: raised by a single mom in the heart of vegas, her father nowhere to be found. sin city took a toll on joey's mother, isabela, and she became pregnant with joey very quickly as a teenager with a boy in her class.
RUNNING AWAY / instead of telling her mother, isabela and joey's father ran away ... within vegas and it's surrounding areas. it was easy to get lost within the lights and the tourists that packed the streets on a summer day. joey's dad found a slew of jobs that was enough to purchase a run down van, and they would park it behind his workplace.
ABANDONMENT / they lasted for a few months. isabela was 6 months pregnant, and joey's father promised to return to the small van they had been living in but never did. isabela was 18 and alone with nothing but herself. during this time, isabela decided to move north. she hitchhiked and caught rides with drivers from nevada to washington, settling in seattle and attempting to make a life for her now - smaller family.
josephine was born in the early hours of april 29th, surrounded by only her mother and the nurses. it was only hours later that joey would be placed into foster care. it would be best for the both of them.
ADOPTION / immediately was sent to live with a family from near - birth until she was 6. it was only foster care, never an actual adoption, and unfortunately the couple who were raising joey broke up --- them choosing to relinquish her back into care.
this is how she landed in her fathers ( bastian and his husband's ) care. call her cliche, but she considers this one of the best moments of her life and will happily encourage adoption, no matter how hard people think it is or the misconceptions.
childhood stuff ....
always the active child. always doing stuff, probably the one bouncing off the walls every day all day. did all the extra curriculars. tried out for sports, dance recitals, etc.
was a Soccer Superstar from ages 8 to 17, where she played goalie and offense.
diagnosed with adhd when she was around 12, and has been taking medication for it ever since. though she tries not to classify herself as a "stereotype", mostly because she hates that feeling of being put in a box.
used to follow bastian around and "help" on his odd jobs, despite not actually helping. grew up to be semi - handy with tools and all sorts of things.
bye fairford ....
she loves her family, but joey is definitely someone who does not settle down. she wanted to spread her wings so to speak, so she went to eckered college in florida on a soccer scholarship, right on the seaside to study archology, mostly because she thought it was funny and that she thought digging up dinosaurs was cool. fulfilling a kid pipe dream and all that, y'know?
her freshman year, one of her roommates + said roommates boyfriend were in a band, that needed a drummer. joey didn't know how to drum. she thought it would be easy. so she said she could do it.
particualry awful the first few tries, she found her way after practice. and the band was born.
they were actually semi - decent, despite the rocky start. they grew in the florida scene and joey thought they were going to make it big. they were selling out small venues, word gets around, they had a spotify and soundcloud. big stuff.
after they graduated, she was left with few options because the band ... dismantled and joey didn't really have any reason to stay in florida. she stayed for about two years before deciding she needed to come back home. it was different without her friends being able to do what they used to. it was all fun and games.. now it's over.
everyone grew up -- a few of the band members were engaged, others were too busy with their actual careers, child and more to carry on with the band. joey's just the drummer. she can't run the whole show by herself.
hiii ....
has returned to fairford after around 7 years to live full time, not counting vacations / family visits during holidays.
lives in a run down fixer upper in mountainside she got for cheap, and is slowly working on fixing it up as she has the time and energy. it's good stress relief and frankly she's kinda good at it. has an eye for design and all that. she loves sims.
is a bartender a few nights a week at the daring daqiuri. she's not a huge people person so it isn't her favorite thing in the world, but she's funny and charming in a fucked up way so people kind of like her, she hopes.
has a bit of resentment to her friends and it shows. the band is definitely tainted, bitter and angry about it. she thought they were in this together. the big leagues. but they all decided to .. quiet. she doesn't think she could ever forgive them for it, despite that being a bit... not rational.
other stuff
has never met her mother and doesn't have anything of hers. has vague memories of her previous foster parents before her dads, some photos and mementos but that's about it. she's curious but also terrified as to what she might find. it's not out of the question, but she's not going to chase a dream she wants crushed.
had a bit of a wild child streak in her teenage years. definitely did things she wouldn't supposed to ...... and dealt with the consequences.
she's sexually fluid and has been with anyone who she's found attractive. it doesn't matter to her -- she cares more about the connection than anything else.
kind of guarded and jaded, but if she loves you, she fucking looooves you. puppy dog kind of love.
ONLY GOES BY JOEY......... JOSEPHINE WILL NOT BE PRETTY
wcs
siblings!!! let her be a bad influence pls pls pls pls
perhaps people from florida who somehow moved to fairford?
an ex from high school: i think it'd be really fun to have this bc i imagine it like they were truly like in loooove and what not, except joey broke it off right before she left for college.
ex friends from fairford??? or maybe they kept it touch idk
new friends:DD
regulars at daring daqiuri who make her hate her life less.. they have a ball
hook ups / flings
enemies!!!
maybe. banter - relationships. they pick on each other so bad but it's all laughs .. or is it?
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On August 1, 1966, a baby girl is born in Norfolk, Virginia. Her mother names her Melanie Lynn. She is placed in foster care for two months to make sure she has no medical issues. Then she is adopted by a couple who live a hundred miles away.
On a day in 1970, a baby girl is born in Incheon, South Korea, a port city just west of Seoul. Her mother names her Eun-hee. Eun-hee lives with her mother and her mother’s parents in Incheon until she is three years old. When she is nearly six, she is sent to adoptive parents in America.
On September 18, 1985, a baby girl is born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her mother does not give her a name. The mother relinquishes her at birth to an adoption agency. The mother is asked if she wants to hold the baby and says no.
One evening in December, 2021, Deanna Doss Shrodes had come home from work. The TV was tuned to a news segment about the oral arguments at the Supreme Court for the case that challenged Roe v. Wade. Deanna is a pastor and a director of women’s ministries at a Pentecostal church in Florida. She is opposed to abortion, and was glad that Roe might soon be overturned. But then Amy Coney Barrett asked about “safe haven” laws, which permit a mother who doesn’t want to keep her baby to drop it off anonymously in a deposit box at a hospital or a fire station.
Why, Barrett wanted to know, didn’t safe-haven laws remove the burden that was allegedly being imposed upon a woman who couldn’t obtain an abortion? The woman wouldn’t be forced to be a parent, and the baby could be adopted. At this point, Deanna became so upset that she stopped listening.
Deanna is adopted, and she has spent much of her life grappling with the emotional consequences of that. She believes that a child who starts life in a box will never know who they are, unless they manage somehow to track down their anonymous parents. It distresses her that many of her fellow-Christians, such as Barrett, talk about adoption as the win-win solution to abortion, as though once a baby is adopted that is the end of the story. If someone says of Deanna that she was adopted, she corrects them and says that she is adopted. Being adopted is, to her, as to many adoptees, a profoundly different way of being human, one that affects almost everything about her life.
“I explain to friends that in order to be adopted you first have to lose your entire family,” Deanna said. “And they’ll say, Well, yes, but if it happens to a newborn what do they know? You were adopted, get over it. Would you tell your friend who lost their family in a car accident, Get over it? No. But as an adoptee you’re expected to be over it because, O.K., that happened to you, but this wonderful thing also happened, and why can’t you focus on the wonderful thing?”
There are disproportionate numbers of adoptees in psychiatric hospitals and addiction programs, given that they are only about two per cent of the population. A study found that adoptees attempt suicide at four times the rate of other people.
“A big thing that adoptees get frustrated by is when people say that adopting kids is no different,” Deanna said. “You know, if they say, I don’t feel any differently about my biological kids than my adopted kids, I’m just a mom, we’re just a family. That is not true.” How many parents tell their adopted children, I love you as if you were my own? And how many of those children wonder, Am I not your own?
One day, when she was very little, Deanna was playing hide-and-seek with her sister. She wriggled underneath her parents’ bed to hide, and in the darkness she felt something hard and cold, made of metal. She pulled it out from under the bed and saw that it was a box. She opened it, and found a piece of paper with her name on it. The language on the paper was confusing, but she understood that it said that Melanie Lynn Alley, born in 1966, had become Deanna Lynn Doss.
Melanie Lynn Alley was another person, but also, somehow, herself. Deanna already knew that she was adopted, but she hadn’t known that she’d had another name. Was Melanie Lynn Alley the person she would have become if her birth mother had kept her? It felt as though Melanie was a part of her, but a part that she couldn’t see, that existed next to her, or behind her, like the ghost of a twin.
“Some people have no issues at all with being an adoptee,” Deanna said. “They’re happy as a lark. They don’t feel the pain, for whatever reason. But there are others who haven’t come out of the fog, or they don’t think they’re in a fog, or whatever. And they join one of the adoptee groups and they go, What’s wrong with all you people? I’m so happy, I’m so grateful, I don’t see what you’re upset about. That will create an explosion of people going, Why are you even here? This is a support group, not a place to come and talk about how happy you are.”
“Coming out of the fog” means different things to different adoptees. It can mean realizing that the obscure, intermittent unhappiness or bewilderment you have felt since childhood is not a personality trait but something shared by others who are adopted. It can mean realizing that you were a good, hardworking child partly out of a need to prove that your parents were right to choose you, or a sense that it was your job to make your parents happy, or a fear that if you weren’t good your parents would give you away, like the first ones did. It can mean coming to feel that not knowing anything about the people whose bodies made yours is strange and disturbing. It can mean seeing that you and your parents were brought together not only by choice or Providence but by a vast, powerful, opaque system with its own history and purposes. Those who have come out of the fog say that doing so is not just disorienting but painful, and many think back longingly to the time before they had such thoughts.
Some adoptees dislike the idea of the fog, because it suggests that an adoptee who doesn’t feel the way that out-of-the-fog adoptees do must be deluded. And it’s true; many out-of-the-fog adoptees do believe that. They point out that a person can feel fine about their adoption for most of their life and then some event—pregnancy, the death of a parent—will reveal to them that they were not fine at all. But there are many others who reject this—who aren’t interested in searching for their birth parents, and think about their adoption only rarely in the course of their life.
Although she found her birth mother decades ago, Deanna feels she came out of the fog more recently, because she hadn’t realized how many other adoptees were going through the same things she was. She and her husband had gone to see a movie about a girl who finds out that she is adopted at the age of nineteen. Deanna wept with fury during the movie, and when she discovered afterward that her husband didn’t understand what she was crying about, despite having been married to her since she was twenty years old, she went online and discovered that there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of Web sites on which adoptees were talking to each other.
It was a wild ferment of rage and pain, support groups and manifestos. Some adoptees were posting about lies and secrets: altered documents and birth dates; paperwork they’d been told was lost in a fire or a flood (so many fires and floods); birth parents they’d been told were dead but weren’t; things they’d been told about their past that the person who told them couldn’t possibly know. Others were arguing about whether there was such a thing as a primal wound—whether a baby bonded in utero with its mother and felt abandoned if it were given up, even if it were handed over in the delivery room. Some had found their birth parents and were in the middle of whatever that was; some were still searching and needed advice about DNA or genealogy; many were waiting to search until their adoptive parents died, for fear of hurting them. They were looking for pieces of their lives or their selves that were missing, or had been falsified or renamed, trying to fit them to the pieces they had.
There isn’t a single adoptee movement—the community is too heterogeneous for that. There is the older generation, the so-called Baby Scoop Era adoptees, such as Deanna—the mostly white children of the four million or so unmarried women who gave babies up for adoption between the end of the Second World War and the passing of Roe v. Wade. Many of those adoptions were forced, and almost all were closed—the identities of the birth parents and the adoptive names of their children were kept secret, making it very difficult for the parents and the children to find one another. There is the youngest generation, some of whom have open adoptions and have always known their birth parents, posting on adoptee TikTok. For some reason, it seems the vast majority of adoptees in the forums online are women.
One thing almost everyone agrees on is that adult adoptees should have the unrestricted right to see their original birth certificates, rather than only the “amended” ones with the names of their adoptive parents (but this is the law in only a dozen states). Many adoptees condemn international adoption, which cuts children off from their native cultures more drastically than any other kind and makes it unlikely that they will ever find, much less know, their birth parents. (Rates of international adoption by Americans have plummeted in recent years, down ninety-three per cent since 2004.) Some adoptees want to end adoption altogether, although most believe that there are situations in which it is the best option. More want to end transracial adoption—to return adoption, in some ways, to its modern beginnings.
A hundred years ago, adoption agencies tried to match children and parents so precisely that they could pass as a biological family. If parents wished to keep the adoption a secret, from the child or from the world, they could plausibly do it. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, some agencies set about persuading white parents to adopt children of color, with campaigns such as “Operation Brown Baby.” The campaigns were successful—by the start of this decade, nearly three-quarters of adoptees of color were adopted into white families. Four generations of parents loved children of races different from their own. In much of the adoption world, whose foundational premise is that love is stronger than biology, color-blindness still seemed like a precious and viable ideal. But then the adopted children grew up and some of them—though by no means all—believed that love was not enough.
Many adoptees feel that the way we understand adoption has been dominated by the perspectives of adoptive parents. Birth parents are less often heard from, though almost anyone can understand the grief of a parent who gives up a child for adoption (one study found more than ninety per cent of those who are denied an abortion keep their child rather than give it up). But understanding how adoption can affect an adoptee is more difficult, because adoptees, and the various kinds of adoptions, are so different from one another.
You can divide adoption into three main categories: plausibly invisible adoptions, such as Deanna’s, in which a child is adopted by parents of the same race; transracial adoptions; and international adoptions. Each of these has its own complexities and problems, and each is now going through a new reckoning.
Joy Lieberthal grew up just outside New York City; she had three younger sisters, all adopted from Korea, like herself. Her father was Jewish, her mother Catholic; Joy and her sisters were raised Catholic. When Joy first met her parents, she spoke no English, but she went straight into first grade and learned the language in three months. Once she spoke English, her mother would tell her stories about how Joy had behaved when she first arrived from Korea—how, when her father came home from work, she ran to pull off his jacket and shoes and take his briefcase and sit him down and give him a massage and sing for him. How, when her mother was mopping the kitchen floor, Joy gestured for her to stop, that she would do it—she ran to fetch a rag and scrubbed the floor on her knees until it was so clean you could eat off it, then wrung out the cloth so thoroughly that when she was done the cloth was dry.
Joy’s earliest memory was of leaving her mother’s parents’ house in Korea. She remembered being in the back seat of a car, banging on the window and crying, as somebody in the car rolled the window up. She could see her grandparents standing outside their house, also crying, waving goodbye. She knew that later she had lived in an orphanage for a year and a half, but she didn’t remember it well. She remembered that it had been cold—it was in the mountains. She remembered a river where she had washed her clothes and cleaned rice. She could picture the room she had slept in, with sunlight coming in.
Because Joy was nearly six by the time she left for America, she remembered the journey. First she had been taken from the orphanage to stay for a few months in a Buddhist temple in Seoul, where nuns had trained her for her new life. They taught her how to greet her American father at the door, how to give massages, how to wash clothes and floors, how to take care of younger children, how to sing for adults. She didn’t know what her life in America was going to be like, and it seemed that the nuns didn’t know, either, so they prepared her for whatever might happen.
On the day she was to leave for America, she wore a floral dress with a peacock on it. She was given a bag that contained a pair of pajamas, a pair of shoes, a notebook, a photo album that her American parents had sent her with pictures of themselves, and a gift that she was to present to her parents when she met them. The gift was a white box containing a little drawstring coin bag made of rainbow-striped saekdong silk. There were a few other Korean kids who were on the same flight, including a little girl who would become her younger sister. One of the adults with them at the airport told her to be good, to honor her parents, and to make Korea proud.
She and the other kids walked out onto the tarmac and the plane’s engine was going and it was incredibly loud. She hated loud noises, and she covered her ears and started to cry. On the plane, her ears hurt from the pressure, and she threw up on herself, then threw up again, and her nose started to bleed. The flight to J.F.K. was twenty-six hours long, with a layover in Anchorage. She didn’t remember arriving in New York, but she had seen a photo her parents took when she got off the plane, her peacock dress torn, a bloody Kleenex sticking out of her nose, her hair crooked. Her new parents were scary. They had blue eyes—she had never seen blue eyes. Her new sister ran away in the airport and everyone was busy trying to catch her.
She didn’t remember the car ride back to her parents’ house, but she remembered waking up when they got there, and getting out of the car carrying a string of lollipops and a new doll. She and her sister were led up the stairs, and at the top was their bedroom—yellow, with patchwork bedspreads. She took off her clothes and her sister’s clothes and folded them and helped her sister to put on her pajamas. They had never slept in a bed before and kept falling off, but they slept for a long time.
Her Korean name was listed as Kim Young-ja on the paperwork her parents were given, but they named her Joy. In fact, Kim Young-ja was not Joy’s original name, either—her name was Song Eun-hee. What had happened, as Joy understood it later, was that the director of the orphanage had originally promised Joy’s parents a different girl, but had been unable to deliver her. Not wanting to lose the customers, the director said that by great good fortune she had found a second girl with the same name and birth date as the first, so Joy came to her parents with falsified documents.
Joy was a good child who took care of her younger sisters. The sisters were close, but they never really talked about being adopted. Joy didn’t wonder about her birth mother, because she had been told she was dead. She was smart and worked hard in school, though there were almost no other Asian kids there, and she was bullied. She was a cautious child who tried not to be noticed.
There was something wrong with the baby. Her legs were rigid, and one of her feet was twisted sideways. A doctor in Chattanooga gave a diagnosis of spastic quadriplegia, a kind of cerebral palsy, and said that she might never walk.
The agency transferred the baby to a foster home, and the foster parents named her Jocelyn Kate. The foster parents were young white evangelical Christians. They already had two biological children but got certified as foster parents out of a sense of mission. They fell in love with the baby. They held her and touched her and rocked her and talked to her. The baby’s tiny legs were so stiff that the foster mother had to spend several hours every day massaging them, rotating her hips and stretching out her knees, to loosen them enough to change her diaper. The foster parents wanted very badly to adopt the baby, but they had no health insurance and couldn’t afford the medical care they’d been told she would need for the rest of her life. They had her for a year.
Meanwhile, the agency was looking for adoptive parents. At first they tried for a Black family, because the baby was Black, but they couldn’t find one that could take on the baby’s medical needs. After a few months, they broadened their search. David and Teresa Burt, a white couple who had already adopted one baby with cerebral palsy, were able to take a second with similar requirements. The agency wrote that their fee was normally five thousand dollars, but since this baby had special needs they would reduce the price to fifteen hundred. If that was too much, they would take a thousand.
The Burts lived in Bellingham, Washington, a small city north of Seattle. They wanted a big family, and, influenced by the Zero Population Growth movement, they decided to adopt. They had one biological child, a daughter, when they were in their early twenties, and then David had a vasectomy.
The first child they adopted, in 1982, was a one-year-old white girl with a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, who had been born weighing less than two pounds. About a year after that, they attended an event in Seattle called Kids Fest, sponsored by the state adoption office—children played, and if a prospective parent saw a child they were interested in they could try to interact with them. The Burts adopted a white boy they saw there.
A couple of years later, Teresa saw, in a binder of kids waiting to be adopted, a photo of a Black baby girl with cerebral palsy. The baby was cute, but it was the diagnosis that caught Teresa’s eye. They knew how to take care of a kid like that; they were already set up with the equipment. When the Burts arrived to collect their new daughter from the foster home in Chattanooga, they discovered that the foster parents had named her Jocelyn Kate. But the Burts thought of her as Angela, because that was the name a caseworker had put on the paperwork, and they decided to call her that. Later, the Burts went to Kids Fest again and adopted a second Black child, and a couple of years after that they took in a pair of Black sisters from foster care in Kentucky. As it turned out, it seemed that Angela did not have spastic quadriplegia but a much milder form of cerebral palsy. Her twisted-up foot slowly turned downward, and by the time she was four she was running as well as any other child.
Bellingham was a very white place. Some remembered it having been a sundown town as late as the nineteen-seventies: anyone who wasn’t white had to leave town by nightfall. It seemed to Angela that there were almost no Black kids in her elementary school. The family stood out in other ways as well—children of different races, some with visible disabilities, and sometimes a foster kid as well. There were always physical therapists coming and going in the house, and caseworkers with clipboards. One neighbor thought it was a group home. People in the grocery store would ask Teresa where she got all those children, and would say she was a saint for taking them in. Some people called her Mother Teresa. Teresa would reject these sorts of compliments, but they still made Angela feel like a charity case.
When Angela was a child, the only place she spent any real time with Black people other than her siblings was a summer program she went to with other adoptees. At home, she had Black people on TV. She saw that Magic Johnson’s big smile looked kind of like hers and wondered if he was her birth father. She wondered if her birth mother could be Brandy, from “Cinderella.” She asked her parents about her birth parents and they gave her her adoption paperwork.
She read this over and over. At first, all she thought about was her birth mother. When she was older, the fact that she had four siblings came into focus. Deborah’s fourth child, a daughter, had also been given up for adoption, and Teresa asked the agency to contact her family, to see if the girls could be pen pals, but the family said no.
Deanna grew up next to Jones Creek, just outside Baltimore. Her father worked at a post office downtown, her mother worked at the V.A. in Fort Howard. They couldn’t have kids, so they adopted two girls from different birth mothers, Deanna and her younger sister. The Dosses were conservative Pentecostal Christians, and their lives revolved around the church. Deanna often fell asleep under a pew during revival services that lasted into the night. When she was a child, sitting alone in her grandmother’s back yard, she realized that she had a calling to the ministry.
All through childhood, she wondered about her birth parents—who they were, where they lived, whether they ever thought about her. Whenever she was in a crowd of people, like at a baseball game in the city, she would scan the faces to see if there was anyone who looked familiar. Sometimes she stood outside looking at the moon and would wonder if her birth mother, wherever she was, was looking at the same moon. Every now and then, she asked her mother about her birth parents, but she felt that the subject made her uncomfortable, so she mostly kept her questions to herself.
She went to Valley Forge, a Christian college, and met her future husband, Larry Shrodes. In 1989, Deanna gave birth to their first child, and she realized that this was the first time she had seen and touched a blood relative since her own birth. She understood more than she had before what it would be like to give up a baby. Suddenly, finding her birth mother felt urgent.
She started going to meetings of the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association at a local Unitarian church. The organization had been founded in 1971 by an adoptee named Florence Fisher; Fisher had been in a car crash, and her last thought before impact was I’m going to die and I don’t know who I am. Deanna also contacted the agency that had brokered her adoption. She was told that she could petition the county court to open her records to a “confidential intermediary,” who would contact her birth mother on her behalf. She agreed, and before long the intermediary called to say that she had spoken to Deanna’s birth mother. The intermediary had told her that she would be proud of how Deanna had turned out—college educated, a pastor. The birth mother had said that she was sure she would be proud of Deanna, but she didn’t think that Deanna would be proud of her. She didn’t want to meet.
Standing holding the phone, Deanna felt her legs weaken. She thought that maybe her being a pastor had put her birth mother off—people always thought pastors were going to judge them. If only the intermediary hadn’t mentioned that. She asked if she could send her a letter, but the intermediary said no, that wasn’t allowed. Her birth mother had thirty days to change her mind. For thirty days, Deanna pleaded with God every way she knew. She fasted and prayed. But the intermediary called and told her that the answer was still no.
To be rejected by her birth mother a second time was almost more than she could take. But then, two years later, a pastor at her church told Deanna to pray about her mother again. This time, she felt God telling her that, although her birth mother had said no to the intermediary, she had not said no to her. Deanna restarted her search.
It was the early nineteen-nineties—there was no Internet that she had ready access to. But one day when she was home with the flu she saw Joseph J. Culligan, a private investigator, on a talk show. He had written a book, “You, Too, Can Find Anybody,” and guests on the show testified that, thanks to the book, they had used public information to find people for less than twenty dollars. Deanna sent Larry straight out to buy it. There were all kinds of techniques in the book, all kinds of records you could search for addresses if you had a last name—liens, leases, bankruptcies, writs of garnishment. You could write to the D.M.V. or check abandoned-property files. The best source, though, was the Death Master File, which contained the Social Security Administration’s death records since 1962. The Salvation Army’s missing-persons program told her that they knew of a source in California who could gain access to the Death Master File for only thirteen dollars. She knew that her birth mother had grown up near Richmond, Virginia. She called California and asked for records of any man in Richmond with her birth mother’s maiden name who had died within a certain period of time.
The information arrived in the mail a few weeks later—pages and pages of names. She wrote to libraries all over the city and ordered obituaries for every one of the names, looking for her mother’s father. From her adoption paperwork she knew that her maternal grandfather had been an auto mechanic with six children, and that her birth mother was the youngest. The last obituary she received in the mail was of an auto mechanic who had had six children. That gave her her birth mother’s current, married name. She dialled directory inquiries, got her mother’s number, and called her.
A machine picked up and she heard her birth mother’s voice for the first time. It was a deep, Southern voice. Deanna started crying. She called over and over. Larry came home, took one look at her, and knew instantly what had happened. At the time, they were both working as pastors at a church in Dayton, Ohio, and had two toddlers. Deanna called that evening to make sure that her birth mother wasn’t out of town; when she answered the phone, Deanna hung up. She and Larry took the kids and drove through the night to Richmond.
Deanna had been imagining this moment for years, and she knew exactly what she was going to do. She knew she had to look at her birth mother’s face at least once, so she wasn’t going to risk calling first. She had brought a camera—she would ask to take a photograph of her birth mother if it was to be the only time she saw her. The next day, in the hotel room, she changed clothes several times and settled on a pink suit. She waited until evening, walked up to her birth mother’s house, and knocked on the door.
The woman who opened the door was smiling, and blond, which took Deanna aback—the adoption paperwork had said that her hair was dark, like Deanna’s. Deanna said, Please don’t be afraid, but my name is Deanna, and I think you know who I am. The woman stopped smiling. For a long time, she stood in the doorway and stared at her. Deanna asked if she could come in.
Angela Tucker believes transracial adoption should happen only as a last resort.
Her birth mother gestured for her to sit at the kitchen table, and began nervously moving around from stove to counter and back, making coffee and picking things up and putting them down again. She said, I know you don’t understand why I made the decision I made. She started crying, and began to tell Deanna about all the mistakes she had made in her life and how sorry she was for all of them. She told her that she had made a lot of bad choices, including her relationship with Deanna’s father. She had failed in her relationship with her other children’s father, and now she was divorced. She listed other things she was ashamed of—things she’d done and things that had happened in her family.
Deanna felt God telling her, Say nothing, say nothing, just let her talk. She was terrified that something would break the spell and get her kicked out. She kept thinking, I’m still here, she hasn’t kicked me out, I’m still here.
When Deanna’s birth mother was pregnant, her parents had sent her to the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers, in Norfolk, a hundred miles away. People had treated her like a whore, and she felt like a whore. Her family was mortified by her situation, and had told her that she must keep her pregnancy a secret or she would be disowned. She was told that giving up the baby for adoption and pretending the whole thing had never happened was her only chance to redeem herself. If she gave the baby up, it would be raised in a decent home, and she would be able to pass herself off as a marriageable woman. It was the right thing to do.
There was also no other option. The baby’s father had refused to marry her or help her. While she was alone in the home for unwed mothers, he just went on with his life. She lied on the adoption agency’s paperwork: she gave them a fake name for him and a fake job; she said he worked in a drugstore. She wanted to make sure that the child would never find him, or he her.
After a long time, Deanna’s birth mother stopped talking, and Deanna said, We’ve all made mistakes, but I went to Hell and back to find you, and I would go to Hell and back to find you again. At that point, her birth mother seemed to realize that Deanna was not going to reject her. She stood up from her side of the table, came over, wrapped her arms around Deanna’s head, and wailed.
When Joy went to college, at first she mostly had white friends. Then, in her second year, she became friends with a group of Black students and began to understand herself as a person of color. Later still, she made some Asian friends, and some Korean international students asked her to start an Asian student union. She felt like a fraud, as if she weren’t really Asian, but the international students accepted her as such, and thought it was fun to fill in the gaps in her knowledge. They wanted to know whether she could use chopsticks, how high her spice tolerance was. She ate with them and found that her mouth still watered when she smelled kimchi. She tried to teach herself Koreanness. She put on a fashion show, for which she learned how to wear hanbok and do a fan dance.
After she graduated, Joy decided to visit Korea. She wrote to the orphanage where she had lived and asked if they would take her on as a volunteer. They told her she was welcome. When she arrived, in the fall of 1993, everything felt very foreign. She spoke no Korean. Things smelled bad. The water was cold. What was she doing there?
She tried to compare the orphanage to her memories of it twenty years earlier. She remembered being cold all the time; now the building had indoor plumbing and central heating. She saw that the river she’d remembered washing clothes in was actually a stream. The director of the orphanage, who’d been there when Joy was a child and was now in her nineties, asked her, Are you here to meet your birth mother? Joy said, No, she’s dead, and the director said, Oh, yes, right, right, right.
After a few months at the orphanage, she felt something in her shift. She started to understand more Korean, and to speak it. She saw how hard the children worked—in school, and on the orphanage’s farm—and how much disciplinary beating and humiliation the younger ones endured at the hands of the older ones. There was little warmth or affection in the orphanage, no joking or playing games. They worked, watched TV, ate, slept. There were only a few staff members for more than fifty children, from little kids to seventeen-year-olds, and some seemed to have no interest in the children.
She also realized that none of the kids were actually orphans. They knew who their parents were, and most of them went home on national holidays. The orphanage was a combination of government boarding school and foster care—there was no American-style foster care in Korea. Usually there had been some kind of crisis in the family, like illness, or divorce, or poverty, that meant the parents couldn’t take care of their child. Most of the children thought their stay in the orphanage would be temporary, but often it wasn’t. Many became estranged from their birth families and couldn’t find them when they aged out.
The children were unlikely to be adopted—many fewer Korean children were being adopted abroad by then. The first wave of adoptions, after the Korean War—mostly the biracial children of Korean women and American soldiers—was long over. Adoptions had risen to a peak in the seventies and eighties. When Joy was a child, the Korean government had encouraged them, as a way of ridding itself of financially burdensome children, and as a kind of soft diplomacy with the West. But at the time of the 1988 Summer Olympics, in Seoul, the exporting of so many children became a source of embarrassment to Korea, and since then the numbers had declined.
Several young people who had lived in the orphanage when Joy was there came back regularly, to visit. They had hated their time there, but now the orphanage kids were their family, and the orphanage their home. At first they assumed that Joy had been the lucky one—she could speak English, she had been to college, she lived in New York. But once her Korean was fluent enough she told them how lonely it had been growing up in a town with no Korean people. They couldn’t fathom a place with no Korean people; they couldn’t fathom that she would question whether she was Korean or not, or not know what that meant.
Toward the end of her time there, a woman who worked in the director’s office told Joy that her birth mother was looking for her. Joy said that wasn’t possible, her birth mother was dead. The woman said, No, it’s true—an investigator had called on her behalf. Joy said, If she is my mother, she will have a photograph of me. The investigator had a photograph—it was a picture of a three-year-old girl, the age Joy was when she had last seen her mother. As soon as Joy saw the photograph, she knew it was her. She felt the blood leaving her face. She didn’t know what to do. She suggested that she could sit in a park and the investigator could arrange for her birth mother to walk by her, so that she could see she was O.K. but they wouldn’t have to speak. The investigator then told Joy that her mother was dying. Joy suspected that this was a ploy, but it forced her hand. She agreed to meet her mother the following week.
She dressed for the meeting in her usual outfit of jeans, a T-shirt, and Doc Martens, but a young woman who worked at the orphanage told her she couldn’t possibly meet her birth mother looking like that. The woman took her to a store and made her buy a dress and stockings, and then, looking at her feet, said, You can’t wear those, either. Joy made her way to the investigator’s office, which turned out to be in a dirty back alley by a fish market. She picked her way through in her new shoes.
She sat in the investigator’s office, and two older women came out from behind a screen. One sat next to her, the other across from her. She looked at the women and felt nothing. The woman across from her said, I don’t think this is the right person. She asked Joy, Do you have a scar on your right leg? Joy said, Yes, I do—it’s a burn mark from an iron. The woman started crying and said how sorry she was, that it was her fault, that she had told Joy not to go near the iron but she did, and then she didn’t cry or tell anyone about her burn, because she was afraid of getting in trouble. Now the woman next to Joy started to cry, and grasped her hand—and Joy realized that this woman, not the one who had been doing the talking, was her birth mother. The other woman was her mother’s sister.
She didn’t look at her mother and her mother didn’t look at her. They both looked down. Joy asked her, What size are your feet? They had the same size feet. The mother, still holding Joy’s hand, took a ring off her own hand and slipped it onto Joy’s finger. She said, I have been wearing this ring waiting for the day I would be able to give it to you. She said she had been looking for Joy for twenty-one years. Then Joy started to cry.
She and her mother spent the weekend together. Joy had a half brother who was seventeen, and who had been told of her existence only days before the meeting, but he welcomed her easily. With her mother, it was harder. She didn’t talk much, or look Joy in the eye. They paged through photo albums, and there was a photograph of the mother at the age of twenty-four, Joy’s age, and she looked exactly like her. Joy said, I want to tell you about my life. Do you have any questions? Her mother said, The last time I saw you, you were a three-year-old child. Now you are a grown woman. I don’t know who you are.
Little by little, over years, Joy pieced together the story of her early childhood. Her mother and father had married young, before he had done his military service. For three years, while the father was in the military, Joy’s mother lived with her parents in Incheon and raised Joy, then named Eun-hee. When Eun-hee’s father came back from his service, he told her mother that he wanted a divorce. But, in Korea at that time, a child belonged to its father. Her father didn’t particularly want the child, but she was his, so he took her to be raised by his parents.
For two years, Eun-hee’s mother heard nothing from him. Meanwhile, she opened a small shop that sold cosmetics and things like cigarettes and gum. One day, Eun-hee’s father walked into the shop to buy cigarettes. She demanded to know where her daughter was. He said he didn’t know. She said, What do you mean you don’t know? He said he couldn’t talk, he had to work—he was a taxi-driver. She told him she would pay him a day’s wages if he would stay with her and explain what had happened, and eventually he admitted that Eun-hee was in an orphanage.
The mother went straight to the orphanage, which was in another town. The people there told her she had the wrong orphanage, her daughter wasn’t there. But she was convinced that she had the right one and kept going back, again and again, being told each time that it was the wrong orphanage, until finally she sat all day in the office of the orphanage school until the director came out. The director saw Eun-hee’s mother, and the mother looked so much like Eun-hee that the director knew immediately who she was. The director told her that Eun-hee had indeed been in that orphanage, but she had been adopted and was no longer in Korea.
On one visit, years after they had met, Joy told her mother that she had always believed she was dead. Joy’s mother said, Well, of course you thought I was dead. How else could a child make sense of being in an orphanage? Joy told her mother about her memory of leaving at three—of being in the car and seeing her grandmother and grandfather waving goodbye. But it turned out that her mind had altered the memory in a way that made it less painful. It wasn’t your grandfather there standing with your grandmother, her mother said. It was me.
When Angela enrolled at Seattle Pacific University, a small Christian college, she realized how different it was to be a Black woman without her white parents around. She was perfectly comfortable on the predominantly white campus, but to the other students she looked out of place. There she met Bryan Tucker, a white man she would soon marry.
After she graduated, she took a job at Bethany Christian Services, the agency that had handled her adoption. She knew that caseworkers were allowed to see adoption paperwork and thought that maybe if she was an employee she would be able to see hers, but she wasn’t. As a caseworker in infant placement, she saw other adoptees’ original birth certificates all the time. When she arranged an adoption and ordered an amended birth certificate for the child, she felt treacherous, as though she were betraying the child whose origins she was concealing.
Working at Bethany and, later, with other agencies, she realized that, although their mission statements always talked about finding parents for children, in fact the agencies were in the business of finding children for parents. She saw that the birth mother was more or less disregarded once her baby had been handed over. In meetings, Angela would ask, Did anyone follow up with the birth mother? Did anyone teach her how to stop the breast milk from coming in so she isn’t in pain? Her colleagues would sigh and say that this was a kind, sensitive thought, but they needed to think about the baby.
In most states, a birth mother had a short window of time—anywhere from a few months to ninety-six hours—in which she could change her mind. As the time passed, adoptive parents would ask Angela anxiously whether she had heard from the birth mother; then, when the window had closed, they would be relieved and happy, and, although Angela understood why they felt that way, she found it hard. She talked to adoptive parents about the merits of an open adoption, and most agreed in principle, but in practice they usually didn’t make an effort to keep in touch with the birth mother, or they cut her off on the ground that seeing her might be upsetting for the child. There was little enforcement of openness in adoption—it was up to them.
Since Angela hadn’t been able to see her original birth certificate at Bethany, she decided that she and Bryan would search for her birth mother on their own. She noticed that there were places in her paperwork where her birth mother’s last name had not been whited out—it was Johnson. A Google search for “Deborah Johnson” in Tennessee returned several million results. She and Bryan called all the Deborah Johnsons they could find phone numbers for, dozens of them, but came up with nothing.
One night, Bryan was reading Angela’s paperwork again when he noticed something that she had, bafflingly, not focussed on in the hundreds of times she had read it: the first name of her biological father. Unlike her mother’s name, it was unusual—Oterious. They could see by the size of the space that had been whited out that his last name was four letters long. They Googled “Oterious” and came up with one result in Tennessee: Oterious Bell. They searched on Spokeo, MySpace, Classmates.com, MyLife, and the International Soundex Reunion Registry, and finally found, on the Web site of a local radio station, a blog post, “Sandy Bell could use a lil help please.” It seemed that Oterious (Sandy) Bell had become locally famous, making the rounds of bars and restaurants in Chattanooga, selling flowers. He’d just been in the hospital for a month and was struggling to pay his bills. Angela found a photo of him online. He looked exactly like her.
When she was growing up, Angela had barely thought about her birth father. But, having found him, she wanted to meet him—maybe he could tell her who her mother was. She decided to fly to Tennessee, along with Bryan and her parents. Her parents had supported her through her search, and she wanted them near her for this, although one of her deepest fears was that her birth mother would consider her a racial fraud. What would Deborah Johnson think if she turned up surrounded by white people, who were her family?
When she got out of the airport, the muggy air hit her and she started to sweat. She had allergies, and her lungs felt heavy and clotted. She had fantasized that Chattanooga would feel like home, but now she just wanted to get back inside. Suddenly there were Black people everywhere, but she thought she sounded ridiculous with her Pacific Northwest accent. That evening, she and Bryan went to a bar and told people she was looking for Sandy Bell. One person after another told her what a character he was, with blue suède shoes and a bicycle decorated with bells, flags, and ribbons. Somebody said that they thought his mother lived in the Mary Walker Towers.
The next morning, standing outside the towers, she heard a bicycle bell, and spotted a man on a bicycle wearing a straw cowboy hat with a toy sheriff’s badge pinned to a faux-leather vest. She called out his name and told him why she was looking for him. He stared at her, and, reaching into his basket, presented her with a flower. Then he said, “It’s like I’m looking in a mirror.” Angela beckoned for everyone else, waiting a few yards off, to come and meet him, too. He invited them to return later to his mother’s apartment and meet the rest of his family.
That evening, surrounded by uncles and aunts in Sandy’s mother’s tiny apartment, Angela asked Sandy about Deborah. He said he thought he knew where she lived now, and his brother Jay jumped up and suggested they drive by her house right away. Looking out of the car window in Deborah’s neighborhood, Angela saw abandoned vehicles and brick shotgun houses. She wondered whether the neighborhood was safe to be in. She wondered how they looked to the people she saw sitting on their stoops—an S.U.V. and a minivan pulling up to the curb. Deborah’s house had black garbage bags taped over its front window. Angela had thought that they were just going to look at the house, but suddenly she saw Sandy jump out of his brother’s car and walk up to the front door. She’s in there! a neighbor shouted from the next-door stoop. She hasn’t come out for a while, but I’ve seen her lights come on.
The door opened and Deborah came out. She was short. Her hair was gray. Looking at the woman across the street, Angela felt as though she were in a fugue state. She opened the car door and walked over to the house. She said, Hi, my name is Angela. I think you may be my birth mother. The woman stood looking at the ground and said, I don’t have children. I’m sorry, but I’m not the person you’re looking for.
Angela had asked Bryan to film the encounter, because she knew she would be too overwhelmed to take it in. In their hotel room she played the twenty-eight-second clip of their meeting over and over for forty-five minutes, until Bryan asked her to stop.
Every adoption is a kind of conversion. When a child is issued an amended birth certificate, the child is, in one sense, born again. Christianity and adoption go back a long way. Not all proselytizing religions embrace adoption. Many Muslim countries prohibit it. A child can be taken in by a family acting as guardians, but new parents cannot take the place of the original ones. A child’s lineage cannot be severed.
Deanna found it tricky being a Pentecostal Christian among adoptees. Her anti-abortion views had lost her some friends, although her closest adoptee friend was pro-choice and an agnostic. It was striking how pro-choice the adoptee community was. A refrain you heard again and again, in various forms, was, Do not make more people like me. A lot of adoptees had been told by their parents that they were adopted because God put them in the wrong tummy, or that God had planned adoption for them since the foundation of the world. Because of this, they had rejected God. Deanna had been asked over and over, How are you a Christian?
But, as hard as it was for her to be a Christian among adoptees, being an adoptee among Christians could be even harder. Adoption was celebrated in evangelical circles as a selfless act of loving rescue. If an evangelical expressed pain about her adoption, she was likely to be reminded that all Christians were adopted in Christ. Deanna found it frustrating when Christians wanted to stop abortions but wouldn’t promote birth control.
Christians had driven much of the international-adoption business for decades. The mass adoption of foreign children by Americans had been started in the fifties by Harry and Bertha Holt, a Christian couple in Oregon whose motive was explicitly evangelical. They had chartered planes to transport children from Korea, sometimes more than a hundred per flight. But, in the more recent past, in the evangelical world, adoption had become much more important.
People often accused evangelicals of being not so much pro-life as pro-birth. Adoption was the answer to that: if there were unwanted babies, they would take them in. James 1:27—“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble”—had become a central theological imperative, though nobody seemed to talk much about the widows. Many evangelicals who already had biological children adopted for religious reasons. Some even adopted children whom they knew were not orphans so that they could be raised as Christians, then return to their homes to convert others.
Congregations were told that millions of children were languishing in orphanages and might never have parents if they weren’t rescued. Sometimes the price of adoption was referred to as “ransom,” as though the child were a hostage. The numbers talked about grew larger and larger—after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti it was claimed that there were a million orphans there, a ninth of the total population. There were said to be a hundred and forty-three million, then a hundred and sixty-three million, then two hundred and ten million orphans in the world.
Christians responded to these terrible numbers by coming forward to adopt. But international adoptions were expensive—sometimes as much as fifty or sixty thousand dollars—and where there were lots of people willing to pay that kind of money for a child it was almost inevitable that corruption would follow. Deanna had read a book, “The Child Catchers,” by Kathryn Joyce, which laid out in horrifying detail how it worked. For one thing, there was a certain motivated confusion about what an orphan was. In many countries, as in Korea, children were placed in orphanages not because they didn’t have families but because their families weren’t able to take care of them. Sometimes things would get better and the family would take them back. Most of the millions of orphans cited in the statistics were actually “single orphans,” meaning they had one living parent.
Angela holds a photograph of her birth mother, Deborah Johnson, and her adoptive mother, Teresa Burt.
In many cases, a child could have returned home if the family had had a little more money—a fraction of the cost of an adoption. And some Christian charities did do family-preservation work. But, with so much money at stake, children in orphanages were being adopted abroad without their parents’ knowledge, or parents were told that the child was going to America to get an education and would soon return home. Orphanages were paid part of the fees, so they had good reason to find more and more adoptable children. Some children were kidnapped from their families, sometimes by traffickers who viewed themselves as missionaries. Sometimes a well-intentioned American couple would adopt a child only to discover, much later, that the child had a family that wanted it back.
When trafficking allegations grew too loud to ignore, some countries shut down their international-adoption programs altogether. Ethiopia and Guatemala had done so—Guatemala (which had been sending one out of every hundred of its children to America) in 2008, Ethiopia in 2018. As news of corruption in the orphan business spread in evangelical circles, and as more countries closed their adoption programs, the rates of international adoption rapidly declined. In 2021, Bethany Christian Services, one of the largest adoption agencies in the U.S., closed its international-adoption program after nearly forty years.
But evangelical groups were active in domestic adoptions, too, promoting to American women the idea that giving up a baby was a heroic act of love. Deanna believed that, except in cases of abuse or neglect, it was wrong to adopt a child unless that child had no family at all that could take it in. She tried to persuade people she knew that the thing to do was not adopt babies but give mothers what they needed to keep them. “People will say, in social-media posts, If you’re pregnant and can’t take care of your baby, I’ll adopt them,” she said. “I want to see people making ads that say, If you’re pregnant and can’t take care of your baby, I’m opening my checkbook, I will take you in, I will foot the bill for whatever you need.” She had done that herself, taking in a child for a year while the child’s mother, a relative, was in rehab. But she hadn’t had much success persuading anyone else.
When Joy came back from her time in Korea in the summer of 1994, she was angry—angry at the Korean government for giving so many children away, and angry at the ignorance of the Americans who had told her that she had been rescued, that Korea was poor and backward, that Korean men were abusive. A couple of years later, she joined Also-Known-As, or A.K.A.—a new organization based in New York that had been started by a friend of hers, Hollee McGinnis, to create a community of international adoptees. She began spending time with six or seven women in the group, all Korean adoptees around her age.
Something was happening among adoptees. In 1996, at the same time that A.K.A. was coming together, Marley Greiner, an adoptee and a reporter at the Columbus Free Press, started posting on a Usenet newsgroup, alt.adoption, and signed her posts “Bastard Nation.” Later that year, Greiner helped to form a group of the same name, in the spirit of Queer Nation and ACT UP. She envisioned Yippie-style actions—mass burning of amended birth certificates, “practical jokes” on social workers. “For those of you dear readers who may think that I had a terrible adoption experience, I did not,” Greiner wrote on the Bastard Nation Web site. “But the closed adoption system is a system of lies which would not be tolerated in any other forum.”
In the late nineties, Susan Cox, a Korean adoptee, came up with the idea of convening adult Korean adoptees for the first time. The Gathering, as it was called, was held in Washington, D.C., in 1999. It was decided to survey the participants, and Joy, who was then working for the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a think tank, co-wrote a paper discussing the results. It turned out that many adoptees had been abused by their adoptive parents. More than a third of the respondents said that when they were growing up they viewed themselves as Caucasian.
Joy got a master’s in social work and took a job with an adoption agency. She wanted to understand how adoption worked, particularly home studies, through which agencies interviewed couples and matched them with children. She talked to couples who spoke about their years-long struggles with infertility, and realized how traumatized many of them were. She was required, as part of the home study, to ask about this. Had they mourned the biological child that they would not have? Had they reconciled themselves to that loss, enough to make room for this new child, who would be very different?
She pictured the adopted child grown up, asking the parents, How is it that everyone in this community is white, and everyone who comes to our dinner table is white? Even if she believed that the family was not going to honor the culture of the child, there was nothing much she could do about it—to be counselled out of adoption, parents had to have something serious on their record. But she felt she was playing God with the lives of children. She began to sleep badly at night, and when she did sleep she had nightmares about children asking her, What were you thinking, putting me in that house?
After a year and a half, she could no longer bear doing placements, and she moved to the agency’s post-adoption division. She paid home visits to see what the new adoptees needed, from medicine to translators. She loved that work. She felt that she was there in the trenches with the child and the parents as they faced each other for the first time, with all their fears and limitations and misunderstandings and difficult histories and longing and love.
Joy had met her future husband in college, though they didn’t start dating until later. He was Korean also, but not an adoptee. It was unusual for a Korean adoptee to date a Korean. Adoptees were greeted with suspicion by Korean families. Joy had dated other Korean American men, but all of them broke up with her after their mothers found out she was adopted. Not only was she not a real Korean girl, but how could they know she was a good Korean girl when they couldn’t meet her parents? Joy felt that she and her husband were an interracial couple.
When she got pregnant, in her mid-thirties, she prepared diligently to become a mother. She went into therapy and read a lot of books. When she gave birth to her son, she was afraid. Is he mine? she wondered. Will he love me? She had to leave him in the hospital overnight because he had jaundice. That night she sobbed, thinking, Will they take him away from me? Will I be allowed to bring him home?
Several months after Deborah told Angela that she was not her mother, Bryan suggested that they try to find someone else in Deborah’s family. She heard back from an aunt, Belinda, right away:
“There’s a lot I’ve done that I can’t explain to you,” she said. “I’m angry with myself. . . . My mother did not raise me like that.” She was angry with herself mostly for not taking care of herself while she was pregnant. When Angela was born, a doctor had told her that the baby was sick, and she was led to believe that if she kept her she would probably die. Deborah said to the agency, I’ll sign this paper on one condition: don’t show me that baby, because if you do I’m not signing anything. “The hurt that I feel,” Deborah told Angela, “it will always be there. And I’ll take that to my grave.”
Deborah remembered telling Sandy, when she found out she was pregnant, that the baby was his. She was friendly with his family—she had known his sister since high school. But Sandy had been told by a doctor that he could never have children, so he didn’t believe her. One of his brothers was a professional boxer making money, and she figured he thought she was just after some of it, so she disappeared. For a while she lived on the street, sleeping in a different place each night; then she found an apartment in a housing project. She knew her family would judge her harshly for giving the baby up, so she kept her pregnancy a secret from them.
She had already had four children. Deborah had kept her first three because she was doing O.K. then. She had a job in the kitchen of a nursing home, and her mother was around to help her. Her mother was pretty much raising the children. Deborah told them to call their grandmother Mother and to call her Deborah. She felt she didn’t deserve the title “mother”—she was just the birth mother. When she had a fourth child, a girl, the year before Angela, she knew she could not take care of her and gave her up for adoption.
After she gave birth to Angela, Deborah left the hospital on her own. She went back to her apartment and didn’t leave for a long time. Even though she believed she’d done the right thing for the baby, she became so depressed that she didn’t care what happened. She felt she had been ripped bone from bone. After a year or so, she returned to the adoption agency to ask if the baby was still there. When a caseworker told her she’d been adopted, Deborah went back home and drank Coca-Cola all day, until a doctor told her she had diabetes and if she kept drinking Coke it could kill her. She bought a baby doll, and then another, and another. She and the baby dolls watched television together.
Even a decade after that first phone call, Angela felt that she and Deborah did not have the relationship she had imagined. When she visited Deborah, she liked to have her mom or Bryan there with her. Angela felt Deborah had never really claimed her as her child. Deborah always said that she wasn’t her mother, Teresa was. Angela had almost come to accept that she had had to be adopted.
When she had first met her aunt Belinda, Belinda had told her that Deborah didn’t have a motherly instinct. When Deborah heard this she was so angry that Belinda would say something so hateful and untrue that she avoided her for years. But Angela didn’t know this, and the idea that Deborah had never wanted to be a mother lodged deep in Angela’s brain. When she was in her mid-twenties, shortly after she first spent time with Deborah, she went to a doctor to get her tubes tied. The doctor told her she was too young and wouldn’t do it, but ten years later she was still determined not to have kids.
Angela had not connected the two things at the time she went to the doctor, but now she could see it. Deborah was so different from her—they didn’t even resemble each other physically, as she and Sandy did. But not wanting to be a mother, she thought, might be something—something profound—that she and Deborah had in common. “Probably it has a lot to do with learning who Deborah is,” she said. “Wanting to be closer to her. Wanting to feel like I’m really her kin.”
For twenty years, Deanna didn’t press her birth mother on the subject of her birth father for fear of upsetting her. But time was running out—if she didn’t find him soon, it was increasingly unlikely that she would find him alive. In 2013, she wrote her birth mother a letter to ask her one last time to tell her her father’s name. Her birth mother called and said that she would take his name to her grave, and, since the only two people who also knew it were dead, Deanna would never find him. Deanna told her gently that she could try to find him through DNA.
The idea that there could be other ways to search had clearly not occurred to her birth mother. On the other end of the phone, her tone changed right away. She said that she had faked her emotions during their reunion and for years after. She said that if Deanna tried to find her father she would never speak to her again. Deanna felt as if she’d been shot. While she was still on the phone, she logged on to a private Facebook page for Lost Daughters, a group of adoptee women who blogged about adoption in public and supported each other in private. She typed, Is anybody there? Is anybody there? Several of them were online, and wrote back to tell her she wasn’t alone.
On the phone, her birth mother told her that the adoptee community she was part of was a sickness that had infected her with the belief that she had to know who her father was. She should just let it go. What nobody but adoptees seemed to understand was that not knowing who her father was wasn’t a matter of curiosity—it felt to Deanna like life or death. It was like the not-knowing of a person whose child had gone missing.
All her mother had told her was that her father was Greek. She started a private Facebook group, Finding Mr. Greek, and enlisted a group of “search angels”—adoptees or birth mothers or other people who liked to assist in searches, who knew about DNA testing or genealogy. They posted on Facebook trying to find members of her birth mother’s high-school class. They called people in the Greek church in Richmond. Deanna also prayed to God to put the name of her father into her head. At one point, she prayed for many hours over three days. At last she sensed God saying to her, Your father’s name is Gus. Deanna immediately got in touch with the people who were helping her and told them of this new development, acknowledging that some of them might think she was crazy. They decided to look for all the Guses in Richmond who were within ten years of her mother’s age. She found out that, in Greek American communities, Gus could be a nickname for Constantine, Kostas, or Konstantinos, so they made lists of all the men of the right age in Richmond with those names. There were dozens of them, but if they were alive Deanna called them. If they were dead, she called relatives. She asked many people to take a DNA test for her, and many did. But at the end of all the calls and the DNA tests none of the Guses was a match.
For almost nine years, she got no closer. Anytime someone popped up on one of the DNA Web sites as a distant match, friends would stay up late looking up genealogical records and family trees, but they never found anyone close enough to identify him. At one point, Deanna started saying to her group of searchers, He must be dead by now—we are looking for a grave. But she kept looking because, even if he was dead, there might be a sister or a brother or a cousin who could tell her what kind of man he’d been.
Then, in May, 2022, one of her searchers called her at work and told her that a Greek first-cousin DNA match had popped up on 23andMe, and she would know who her father was in a matter of hours. The searchers started building out the cousin’s family tree, hoping that his mother didn’t have several brothers. She didn’t—she had one brother. He was sixteen years older than Deanna’s birth mother. His name was Gus.
Gus was ninety-one and in a nursing home. A few months earlier, adult protective services had found him alone in his home in Richmond in terrible condition; they forced him into a nursing home, because he couldn’t take care of himself and had no one to help. Deanna arranged to meet him over FaceTime. She asked him if he remembered meeting her birth mother in 1965, and told him she was the child of that relationship. He believed her right away and started to cry.
She drove to Richmond and spent a week with him. He had been a professional ballroom dancer, he told her. He was a bon vivant, always flirting with women, but he had never married. He told her, I don’t want to die alone in here. So she made up a room for him in her house with a hospital bed. She and Larry were living in a suburban development in Wesley Chapel, Florida, just outside Tampa. She decorated the room for Gus with mementos from his house in Richmond—a pair of two-tone wing tips, his dancing trophies, a portrait of him in his younger days—and brought him home.
He’d had no idea that she had been adopted. In his Greek community, adoption was rare—there was always someone in the family who would raise a child—and he was furious that she had been raised by strangers. At first, not wanting to upset him, Deanna said nothing. But then, one day, when he was roaring about how outrageous it was that her mother had given her up, Deanna said, Gus, what did you expect? She was kicked out of her parents’ house, she had nowhere to go, and you lied to her, you never helped her. He didn’t bring the subject up again. They had seven months together before he died.
By her mid-thirties, Angela had made a life of talking about adoption in every possible medium. She had a podcast, “The Adoptee Next Door.” She had a Web series, “The Adopted Life,” in which she interviewed transracial adoptees. She posted on Instagram as “angieadoptee.” She had written a book, “You Should Be Grateful,” blending her own adoption experience with those of others. She and Bryan had made several short films about adoption, in addition to a full-length documentary he had made about her reunion with her birth parents, called “Closure.”
They lived in a two-story house in the south end of Seattle, in a quiet housing development around a small park where people walked their dogs. From home, she hosted bimonthly meetings of adult adoptees, and mentored kids one-on-one. Some of the kids she had met in recent years had truly open adoptions. One boy referred to his birth mother, who was in prison, as Mother, and to his two adoptive mothers as Momma and Mom. Kids would talk casually about staying with their birth mother for the weekend, or their birth mother coming to watch their baseball games. To older adoptees, too anxious about hurting their adoptive parents to tell them that they read blogs about adoption, much less to search for their birth parents, this was astonishing.
More recently, Angela had developed “Cultivating an Anti-Racist Support Network” workshops for parents who had adopted, or were thinking of adopting, kids of color. It was through one of these workshops that she had met Ali and Drew Fleming, who lived in New York. Ali and Drew knew they couldn’t have a baby the ordinary way, and they had thought that adoption was the ethical alternative. Since Drew and his family were white but Ali’s family was from India, they had signed up for Angela’s workshop to prepare the ground for their interracial family.
They had first thought of adopting from India, but then they realized that that would make it nearly impossible for the child to know its birth parents, and they had heard about corruption problems in international adoption, so they started looking domestically. They hired an adoption attorney, who recommended that they not go through an agency, because an agency could demand tens of thousands of dollars up front which they wouldn’t get back, even if they never got a child. Ali also discovered that, if a woman agreed to give them her baby when it was born, the agency would ask for still more money, which they would not get back either, even if the woman changed her mind. That was bad not only because they might spend tens of thousands of dollars for no baby, but also because it was so much money that it could give the woman the impression that the couple had already bought her baby, and feel pressured to relinquish. No, the attorney said, they should try to find a mother on their own.
There were ways to do this. They sent letters to churches and pregnancy crisis centers and ob-gyn offices, but Ali and Drew were pro-choice and this felt predatory to them. They created a Web site advertising themselves as potential parents—he was a doctor, she was a math teacher, they had two dogs, surely all that would look good. They hired adoption consultants who taught them how to run ads on Facebook and Instagram that targeted women who were looking for parents. Ali was advised to spell her name Allie so it didn’t sound Middle Eastern. They were advised not to post any photos of Indian holidays on their Web site, but that there should be a Christmas tree.
They were contacted by about thirty women. Some were scams, but in most cases, as far as she could tell, the women were really pregnant. Most already had kids. Ali spent hours texting with the women and talking to them on video calls. Many of them were conflicted about giving up their baby. In many cases what was preventing them from keeping it was a relatively small amount of money—a couple of thousand dollars. She kept talking women out of placing their baby, though she realized that this was counterproductive. The more women she talked to, the less she could imagine a situation where it would be better for both mother and baby if the baby came to her.
By this time, she and Drew were starting to feel nauseated and sullied by the adoption business. Reading around online, Ali had discovered that there was a “second chance” re-homing adoption market, for children whom parents had adopted but didn’t want anymore, or couldn’t keep. These tended to be older children, often from other countries. Their situation was so bleak, Ali could barely think about it. They contacted their attorney and asked about surrogacy.
When Ali DM’d Angela on Instagram to say that they had decided not to adopt after all, Angela was glad. In her conversations with prospective parents, she tried to make them see how fraught transracial adoption was. She told parents that getting a Black doll for your child, taking them to an Ethiopian restaurant, sending them to transracial-adoptee summer camp, was not enough. All that just produced a sense that you were performing Blackness, Angela would say. What Black children needed was actual Black people in their lives. Most people who found their way to her were going to agree with that, but making it happen was another matter. She said, “I hear almost every day in my consults with white parents, We know we should have Black and brown kids in our kids’ lives, but, like, how do we find them, and what do we say when we see one?”
Joy Lieberthal Rho’s birth mother searched for her for twenty-one years.
Some years before, Angela had given a talk at a conference and told the story of her adoption by white parents, and afterward an older Black woman came up to her. You are my worst fear realized, the woman said. You aren’t a true Black person. I’m sorry the system erased you from our culture. Angela was stricken. The woman had introduced herself as a member of the National Association of Black Social Workers, which in 1972 had issued a manifesto condemning transracial adoption. “Only a Black family,” it stated, “can transmit the emotional and sensitive subtleties of perception and reaction essential for a Black child’s survival in a racist society.”
Angela no longer believed that there was such a thing as a true Black person—she felt more confident in her Blackness. And, whereas when she was younger she had believed that transracial adoptees were less truly Black than people raised in Black families, she now felt that the experience of growing up Black in a white home spoke to the core of what it meant to be Black in America.
On the other hand, she had begun to wonder whether the National Association of Black Social Workers might have been partly right—that transracial adoption should happen only as a last resort. She loved her adoptive parents, and was grateful to them for supporting her wholeheartedly in her search for her birth parents, and even in her questioning of transracial adoption. But she also wished she wasn’t adopted. It was so difficult to explain that to most people.
She found that people tended to understand the problems of transracial adoption more readily in the context of Native Americans. She was closely watching a Supreme Court case, Haaland v. Brackeen, which had been argued before the Court in November, 2022. The Brackeens were a white couple who had adopted a Navajo boy and wanted to adopt his half sister, too. They had filed suit to challenge the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which made it difficult for outsiders to adopt a Native American child. They argued that the law was unconstitutional, because it discriminated on the basis of race. The Indian Child Welfare Act was a response to the removal of as many as a third of Native American children from their families, to be placed in deracinating boarding schools (a guiding motto was “Kill the Indian, save the man”) and, later, in the mid-twentieth century, in adoptive homes. Angela knew that Native Americans were a special case, but she thought it was possible that Haaland v. Brackeen would lead people to think differently about transracial adoption in general.
She had started to push against it in her work, but it was going to be difficult. In the early nineteen-seventies, at the time of the National Association of Black Social Workers manifesto, transracial adoption was rare—adoptions of Black children by white parents made up about one per cent of all adoptions. Now it was widespread—more than half of Black adoptees were adopted by non-Black families. “I was consulting with this white woman who wants to adopt, and she was, like, I don’t think I’m the best person to adopt a Black kid,” she said. “And I was, like, Great, tell your agency. This is the struggle, nothing will change until you stick by your principles. But white people are not going to do that, because white guilt starts to come out.”
For decades, agencies had been constrained by the 1994 Multiethnic Placement Act, which restricted how agencies could consider race in placements, but now some were pushing back. Bethany Christian Services had issued a statement that the act should be overhauled and race should be considered in adoption. Angela had consulted for one agency in Indiana which asked white people seeking to adopt children of color whether they lived in a racially diverse town, had identified a school in that town with both teachers of color and white teachers, and had found a multiracial church.
All of this seemed good to Angela; but what would happen to a Black child if an agency couldn’t find it a Black family, as had happened with her? There were twenty-five thousand Black kids in foster care whose parents’ rights had been terminated—what about them? Now that Angela had met her Black relatives, she saw that her birth father’s family could have raised her—agencies didn’t try nearly hard enough to find fathers. But her situation, having been given up for adoption, was unusual: the rate of never-married Black women voluntarily relinquishing babies had been close to zero for decades. Many of the Black kids in foster care were there not because their parents had given them up but because they had been taken from parents who very much wanted them, by child-protective services. And most of those children had been removed not because of abuse but due to “neglect,” which could mean a lot of things—unsafe housing, not enough food, leaving kids home alone, missing doctors’ appointments—that were often consequences of poverty. So was adoption a way for those kids to have permanent families? Or was it the escape valve that allowed the child-protection system to continue removing children from their parents without fully reckoning with the cost? It was both.
Joy now has a private therapy practice in Scarsdale, New York, consisting of adoptees and adoptive parents. About fifteen years ago, she took on a second job, as a counsellor at Juilliard. In her private practice, she sees patients in a quiet, dark room in the basement of a church.
Adoptees are overrepresented in therapy. Some worry that they might be unknowingly attracted to a relative and commit incest. Some are jealous of their own children—jealous of their own love. Some adoptees of color have had the experience, even years after growing up in a white family, of catching sight of themselves in a mirror or a shop window and thinking, Who’s that? Many adoptees have a persistent sense that they don’t exist, or aren’t real, or aren’t human—that they weren’t born from a woman but came from nowhere, or from space. Some picture themselves being birthed by a building—the hospital that was recorded on their paperwork.
“There were some international adoptees who said, My life began at J.F.K.,” Joy said. “Even if you know cognitively that’s not true, no one can prove to you that it’s not true. If, for the time before you landed in J.F.K., if the paperwork is inaccurate, if the story is falsified, if there are no witnesses, if there’s no documentation, there are no photographs, nothing—that can really fuck people up.” Some adoptees felt that way even when there was no missing time. “I remember working with a domestic adoptee whose parents were in the delivery room at the time of their birth, and they were literally handed over by the birth mother,” she said. “I met them when they were a teen-ager. They actually had by that time reunited with their birth mother, and all they talked about was, I have no idea who I am, I feel like I’m walking around with a mask on my face.”
She didn’t know why this was so, but that patient was far from the only one. “There’s one theory that if the birth mother knew she was going to relinquish, is there an intrauterine hormonal shift that begins to—were there different kinds of hormones that flowed in the amniotic fluid? Maybe.” It was known that cortisol levels in the amniotic fluid rose if the mother was experiencing prolonged stress. “Should the handoff have been so easy? Should the mother have nursed the baby? At what point did the baby feel, Wait a minute, this isn’t right, I’m missing something? Could it be that the adoptive parents had intense years of infertility, and was the adoptive mom depressed and maybe not really attaching to the baby, even though she desperately wanted it? There are so many factors we don’t know.”
Perhaps because she had lived with her mother for the first three years of her life, she did not have that feeling that she didn’t exist, but she felt something similar. “Loneliness feels more accurate to describe my experience,” she said. “One minute I’m here, the next minute I’m there—these leaps of time and space and cultures, there’s nothing that connects it. There are swaths of time that don’t exist in my consciousness, and don’t exist in anyone’s consciousness. My birth mother only knows me from zero to three. There is no person that can account for my entire existence.”
Over the years, Joy had tried to build a relationship with her birth mother, but it wasn’t easy. They sometimes texted each other on a group chat with her brother, but the texts felt formal and generic—good wishes and emojis. Joy felt that she was still basically a stranger.
In 2008, her birth mother and brother came to stay with her and her husband and two kids in their small apartment. She thought they would come for maybe four weeks, but they stayed for three months. She had heard from other adoptees that their birth mothers were nosy and couldn’t stop touching them, but her mother was the opposite. She was quiet and passive. She didn’t seem curious about anything. Even though by that point Joy’s Korean was very good, Joy found she couldn’t talk to her. She still barely looked at her. All that had been O.K. when Joy paid her short visits in Korea, but when they were crowded in together for that long in her own space it made her furious. One day, she blew up. She said, You have been living in my house for six weeks and you haven’t asked me a single question. You don’t want to know anything about me. Her mother started to cry. She said, You are out of my life. I just wanted to know where you were.
When her mother left to go back to Korea, Joy was glad to see her go. She didn’t really feel like staying in touch, but she figured she would do so for her kids’ sake. In the years after the visit, she reconciled herself to their relationship being what it was. Now all she wanted was to sit with her mother one more time without asking for anything. “I don’t need any more clarity on the past,” she said. “I’m perfectly fine with going out to dinner. I can’t— The ship has passed of trying to get her to understand me.”
Although she felt no closer to her birth mother, Joy did feel more Korean. There were a lot of Koreans in her neighborhood, and her spoken Korean was good enough now that she could chat with mothers on the playground and they never knew she was not as Korean as they were. They would ask her if she celebrated Thanksgiving, and were surprised that she knew about pumpkin pie. When she walked down the street with her husband now, she thought, We are a full Korean couple. It was weird. She had always felt more like an adoptee than anything else.
As she grew older, and fewer and fewer children were adopted from Korea, she realized that at some point the small culture she was part of would die out. “It’s just a matter of time,” she said. “In the long history of humanity, we will exist only in a span of sixty or seventy years.” She felt that she had to keep talking about that experience or it would all be lost. She had been interviewed on video as part of KoreanAmericanStory.org’s Legacy Project, and for the Side by Side project, both extensive film archives of Korean adoptees telling the stories of their lives. She had created an online adoptee community, IAMAdoptee.org.
She had heard that several hundred Korean adoptees, led by a Korean Danish lawyer, were demanding that the Korean government investigate how they had come to be adopted—if government orphanages had lied about whether they had families, or falsified their paperwork, making them harder to find. But she knew that most of her fellows weren’t interested in the history of Korean adoptions the way she was. None of her three sisters had tried to find their birth parents, or had even been to Korea. This was normal. Even the largest Korean adoptee group on Facebook had only about seven thousand members, and if you added others you got maybe twice that. But about two hundred thousand Korean children had been adopted overseas. Where was everybody else?
Soon, all that would remain of those couple of hundred thousand Korean children would be some documents that would end up in libraries, dissertations, and family albums. “How many adoptees in my generation were plastered on the Living section of their local newspaper?” she said. “Probably thousands of us. We were the sensation of the town. We all have a newspaper clipping of the arrival of the children from Korea. And in it the parents are happy and the babies all look traumatized. I look at my arrival pictures now, and I’m just, like, that poor kid—no one explained to her what the hell’s going on.”
When she thought now about that bewildered child at the airport in 1976 in her peacock dress, her nose all bloody, she found that she thought about her in the third person. “I don’t really think about this as me anymore,” she said. “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think I can think about it in the first person, because I think that would. . . .” She paused. “She’s had to stay in the past,” she said. “I don’t know that I could bring her here.” ♦
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( jesse williams, 41, cismale, he/him ) DARCY SAWYER has been living in Point Place for FOUR YEARS. Their favorite song is PAINT IT BLACK BY THE ROLLING STONES. They’re currently up to MANAGER AT CHARLIE’S BAR, but they’d rather be AN INTERIOR DESIGNER. First impressions usually stick around here, and others describe them as INDEPENDENT, UNCOMPROMISING, ALOOF . Stick around to get to know the real them. ( jack )
tw below: war, loss of limb/disability
• 𝐅𝐔𝐋𝐋 𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄. darcy richard sawyer
• 𝐍𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄(𝐒). just darcy
• 𝐀𝐆𝐄. fourty-one
• 𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐁𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐇. feb 14th
• 𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐈𝐍. miami, florida
• 𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 / 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐒. cismale ; he/him
• 𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍. homoromantic, homosexual
darcy was four when he entered the foster care system and eight when he was adopted by a loving family. his father was a teacher and his mother ran a daycare, although they’d never been blessed with children of their own. not until darcy, at least. he fit right in immediately, and they were good to him. they loved him and cared for him and really truly wanted the best for him. but their love was conditional and him falling in love with a man was too much for them. they kicked him out at sixteen, refusing to pay for his college or even help him find housing. with nowhere else to go and the korean war in full swing, he lied about his age to enlist. surely they had to know he was just a kids, the way his hands shook in training and how he cried himself to sleep every night. but suddenly, he wasn’t alone. he wasn’t the only one scared, with nothing left in the world but the men in the cots next to him. they became his new family, and he became theirs.
much to darcy’s luck, he fell in love with one of his squad mates. it was hard not to, they spent all their time together. and as long nobody found out, they could be together. the threat of what would happen if they were discovered hung over their heads like a guillotine, but it was worth it, as long as they had each other. at least, that’s what he thought. the war ended and they had made it out alive, so clearly that was a sign. they stayed in the army together, on the same team, stealing moments away to be with each other. however when darcy got shot and the wound on his leg developed a severe infection, his love was nowhere to be found. when the infection was spreading, and the leg had to be removed, he would beg god, any god, even gods he didn’t believe in. but still, his love didn’t come, and darcy was left wondering if he was even still alive. once the leg was gone, darcy was sent home, but he wrote letters every day, and every day he waited for a response. but none came, not from the one person he’d wanted to hear from.
suddenly on his own for the first time in 20 years, with nowhere to go and no one to report to, he decided to head back to miami, check on his family, but they had replaced him. they were happy, with their new children, and it seemed as if they had never given him another care after he left. he jumped around from there, trying to figure out how to live his life with one and a half legs. while he had once dreamed of being a teacher, like his father, he now had to find a new dream. so when his best friend from the army returned stateside and mentioned moving to wisconsin, he didn’t really have a reason to stay. so he followed axel here and got a job at a bar and is studying design in the hopes of one day doing interior design for restaurants and clubs.
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Hippocrates Wellness: A Look into the Transformative Health Center in West Palm Beach
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Located in the beautiful West Palm Beach, Florida, Hippocrates Wellness is a serene retreat that offers a variety of health services aimed at rejuvenating the mind, body, and spirit. Hippocrates wellness Brian clement west Palm beach, known for its vibrant culture and natural beauty, provides the perfect backdrop for a holistic wellness center. The peaceful surroundings, combined with the healing power of nature, create an ideal environment for those seeking to embark on a transformative health journey.
At Hippocrates Wellness, guests can engage in a variety of wellness programs tailored to their specific needs. The center offers everything from detoxification programs to energy therapies, guided meditation, and fitness activities. One of the center’s most popular offerings is its raw food diet and lifestyle program, which includes workshops and cooking classes to help individuals learn how to prepare nutritious meals at home.
The comprehensive approach to health at Hippocrates wellness brian clement emphasizes the importance of the mind-body connection. Emotional healing, stress management, and mental clarity are as important as physical health. Brian Clement and his team of experts work with guests to help them address any emotional or psychological blocks that may be hindering their progress toward optimal health.
A Holistic Approach to Wellness
Hippocrates wellness west Palm beach is not just about physical healing; it’s about creating lasting change on all levels. Through programs that focus on detoxification, nutrition, and mental well-being, the center offers a truly holistic approach to health. Guests can participate in a wide range of activities designed to nurture the body, including:
Raw Food Nutrition: A plant-based diet rich in living foods that provide maximum nutrients and healing properties.
Detoxification Programs: Specially designed detox plans that help cleanse the body of toxins and improve overall function.
Fitness and Exercise: Fitness programs tailored to individual needs, including yoga, strength training, and cardiovascular exercises.
Emotional Well-Being: Workshops, counseling, and group therapies designed to help individuals release emotional baggage and achieve mental clarity.
Why Choose Hippocrates Wellness in West Palm Beach?
Hippocrates Wellness stands out as a world-renowned center for natural health, largely due to Brian Clement’s visionary leadership and the center’s holistic approach to healing. By focusing on the individual’s total well-being — mind, body, and spirit — the center provides a transformative experience for those looking to improve their health and quality of life.
Whether you are interested in detoxification, weight loss, or simply learning more about how to live a healthier life, Hippocrates wellness west Palm beach offers a wealth of resources and expertise to guide you on your journey. The serene setting of West Palm Beach only adds to the experience, making it an ideal location for those who want to invest in their health and well-being.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Hippocrates wellness Brian clement west Palm beach, offers a unique and transformative health experience. With its focus on holistic health, education, and natural healing, it has become a beacon for those seeking lasting wellness and vitality. Through its dedication to the Hippocratic ideals, Hippocrates wellness west Palm beach is empowering individuals to take control of their health and live life to the fullest.
FAQ
What is Hippocrates Wellness?
Hippocrates Wellness is a transformative health center located in West Palm Beach, Florida, founded by Brian Clement. It focuses on holistic health through natural healing, nutrition, detoxification, and emotional well-being, helping individuals achieve optimal health by leveraging the mind-body connection.
Who is Brian Clement?
Brian Clement is the founder of Hippocrates Wellness and a leading figure in holistic health. He has dedicated his life to promoting natural healing, nutrition, and alternative medicine. He is known for his philosophy of “food as medicine” and his work in educating people about the importance of diet, exercise, and mental well-being.
What makes Hippocrates Wellness unique?
Hippocrates Wellness stands out for its comprehensive approach to health, which includes raw food nutrition, detoxification programs, fitness activities, and emotional well-being workshops. The center’s focus on the mind-body connection and its serene location in West Palm Beach make it a unique destination for holistic healing.
What are the benefits of visiting Hippocrates Wellness?
Visitors can experience a wide range of benefits including weight loss, improved digestion, better emotional health, detoxification, and mental clarity. The holistic approach helps individuals restore balance and achieve lasting well-being.
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Open Your Career: Top Online Nurse Educator Certificate Programs for 2023
Unlock Your Career: Top Online Nurse Educator Certificate Programs for 2023
Are you a passionate nurse looking to elevate your career and influence the next generation of healthcare professionals? The role of a nurse educator is not only rewarding but also essential for the medical field. This guide covers the best online nurse educator certificate programs for 2023 that can help you achieve your goals.
Why Become a Nurse Educator?
Becoming a nurse educator allows you to shape future nurses while expanding your own expertise. Here are some key reasons to consider:
Flexibility: Online programs provide the flexibility to balance work and study.
Impact: Educators can significantly influence nursing standards and practices.
Career Advancement: Holding a nurse educator certificate can lead to higher positions in educational institutions and hospitals.
Networking Opportunities: Connect with fellow educators and healthcare leaders.
Benefits of Online Nurse Educator Certificate Programs
Online nurse educator certificate programs offer numerous benefits including:
Convenience: Study at your own pace and from the comfort of your home.
Cost-Effective: Save on commuting and accommodation costs.
Diverse Learning Resources: Access to a variety of digital learning tools and resources.
Self-Paced Learning: Flexibility to fit your learning into your schedule.
Top Online Nurse Educator Certificate Programs for 2023
Program Name
Institution
Duration
Cost
Key Features
Online Nurse Educator Certificate
University of Florida
12 months
$9,500
Accredited, 100% online, flexible scheduling
Graduate Certificate in Nursing Education
Walden University
6-12 months
$10,000
Shortened path to a master’s degree, comprehensive curriculum
Nursing Education Certificate
Villanova University
8 months
$8,250
Hands-on practicum, quality assurance, and evaluation focus
Nurse Educator Certificate Program
George Washington University
1 year
$12,000
Advanced teaching techniques training, leadership component
Practical Tips for Choosing the Right Program
Before enrolling, consider these practical tips:
Accreditation: Ensure that the program is accredited by the appropriate bodies.
Curriculum: Review the coursework to ensure it aligns with your career goals.
Faculty Credentials: Investigate the qualifications and experience of faculty members.
Support Services: Look for programs that provide academic and career counseling.
Case Studies: Success Stories of Online Nurse Educator Graduates
Here are a few real-life success stories of individuals who benefited from online nurse educator certificate programs:
Case Study 1: Sarah Johnson
After completing her online nurse educator certificate from the University of Florida, Sarah secured a position as an adjunct faculty member. She now teaches clinical nursing courses and has developed curricular materials that have been adopted by her institution.
Case Study 2: Mark Stevens
Mark graduated from Walden University and began his career as a nurse educator in a community college. He has since spearheaded several nursing initiatives aimed at improving student engagement and outcomes.
First-Hand Experience: The Journey of a Nurse Educator
Becoming a nurse educator is both challenging and rewarding. A nursing educator who wishes to remain unnamed shared her experience:
“Pursuing my nurse educator certificate online was the best decision I made. I was able to balance my job as a hospital nurse while engaging in deeper learning about teaching. The transition to the academic world was seamless, and now I get to mentor aspiring nurses every day!”
Conclusion
Embarking on the journey to become a nurse educator can unlock new avenues in your nursing career. With numerous online nurse educator certificate programs available in 2023, you have the opportunity to enhance your skills, influence future healthcare providers, and advance your career. Evaluate your options, match them with your goals, and take the first step toward a fulfilling role in nursing education today!
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https://nursingcertificationcourses.com/open-your-career-top-online-nurse-educator-certificate-programs-for-2023/
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Trails at Hunter's Lake in Tampa, FL
Regarding one bedroom apartments for rent in Tampa Palms location, it is really necessary to find the best one. If you’re searching for an apartment home, you can start by searching online articles about apartment rental properties. As a recommendation, you can check out the website of Trails at Hunter's Lake. There, you can bring your pets with you. In that case, all you have to do is check out their pet policy. Put simply, dog and cats are welcome. However, breed restrictions apply. Moreover, you can have a maximum of two pets per apartment. Then, the pet fee is $300 for one pet, and additional $150 for 2 pets. Furthermore, the monthly pet rent $25 per pet.
Tampa, FL
Do you know anything about the economic background of Tampa, FL? Well, the economy of the city has improved as the years go by. In addition, many people want to move to the city. Interestingly, finance, retail, healthcare, insurance, shipping by air and sea, national defense, professional sports, tourism, and real estate all play vital roles in the area's economy. In addition, several large corporations, such as banks and telecommunications companies, maintain regional offices in Tampa. Apart from that, the largest credit union in Florida, Suncoast Credit Union, is headquartered in Tampa. Lastly, the said details are really useful if you want to study the specific place.
Busch Gardens Tampa Bay in Tampa, FL
Let’s talk about Busch Gardens Tampa Bay today. It is a 335-acre animal theme park located in Tampa, Florida, United States, with the entire park landscaped and designed around themes of Africa and Asia. Moreover, it is owned and operated by United Parks & Resorts. Then, the park opened on June 1, 1959. Furthermore, the park has an annual attendance consistently exceeding 4 million, often ranking second among United Parks & Resorts parks behind SeaWorld Orlando. Lastly, the park also features several rides and attractions aimed for children under the age of nine, as well as two water rides that is a river rafting ride and a classic log flume. Isn’t it amazing?
Tampa police investigating aggravated assault during attempted dog adoption
As we always discover, there are shocking news reports in the Tampa, FL. It includes a story about an aggravated assault involving a dog. Many people are waiting for more details about the topic. As reported, the Tampa Police Department or TPD is investigating an aggravated assault that happened between two women during an attempted dog adoption on Saturday around noon near the 1900 block of Meadowbrook Avenue. Moreover, it was mentioned by the police that as the transaction went on, a fight broke out and one of the women pulled out a gun. Then, the police later seized that gun. Apart from that, officers took reports from the scene and spoke with witnesses, but said that due to conflicting stories no arrests were made.
Link to Map Driving Direction
Busch Gardens Tampa Bay 10165 McKinley Dr, Tampa, FL 33612, United States
Continue to N 40th St/McKinley Dr 4 min (0.5 mi)
Take FL-582 E and I-75 N to Hunters Green Dr/Hunters Village Rd 17 min (12.1 mi)
Turn left onto Hunters Green Dr/Hunters Village Rd Continue to follow Hunters Village Rd 2 min (0.3 mi)
Trails at Hunter's Lake 8500 Hunters Village Rd, Tampa, FL 33647, United States
#studio apartments for rent in tampa palms#one bedroom apartments in tampa palms#apartments for rent in tampa palms#apartments in tampa palms
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First-of-its-kind study definitively shows that conservation actions are effective at halting and reversing biodiversity loss.
A new study published online today, April 25, in the scientific journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nature conservation successful, but that scaling conservation interventions up would be transformational for halting and reversing biodiversity loss—a crisis that can lead to ecosystem collapses and a planet less able to support life—and reducing the effects of climate change.
The findings of this first-ever comprehensive meta-analysis of the impact of conservation action are crucial as more than 44,000 species are documented as being at risk of extinction, with tremendous consequences for the ecosystems that stabilize the climate and that provide billions of people around the world with clean water, livelihoods, homes, and cultural preservation, among other ecosystem services. Governments recently adopted new global targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, making it even more critical to understand whether conservation interventions are working.
“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”
Although many studies look at individual conservation projects and interventions and their impact compared with no action taken, these papers have never been pulled into a single analysis to see how and whether conservation action is working overall. The co-authors conducted the first-ever meta-analysis of 186 studies, including 665 trials, that looked at the impact of a wide range of conservation interventions globally, and over time, compared to what would have happened without those interventions. The studies covered over a century of conservation action and evaluated actions targeting different levels of biodiversity—species, ecosystems, and genetic diversity.
The meta-analysis found that conservation actions—including the establishment and management of protected areas, the eradication and control of invasive species, the sustainable management of ecosystems, habitat loss reduction, and restoration—improved the state of biodiversity or slowed its decline in the majority of cases (66%) compared with no action taken at all. And when conservation interventions work, the paper’s co-authors found that they are highly effective.
For example:
Management of invasive and problematic native predators on two of Florida’s barrier islands, Cayo Costa and North Captiva, resulted in an immediate and substantial improvement in nesting success by loggerhead turtles and least terns, especially compared with other barrier islands where no predator management was applied.
In the Congo Basin, deforestation was 74% lower in logging concessions under a Forest Management Plan (FMP) compared with concessions without a FMP.
Protected areas and Indigenous lands were shown to significantly reduce both deforestation rate and fire density in the Brazilian Amazon. Deforestation was 1.7 to 20 times higher and human-caused fires occurred four to nine times more frequently outside the reserve perimeters compared with inside.
Captive breeding and release boosted the natural population of Chinook salmon in the Salmon River basin of central Idaho with minimal negative impacts on the wild population. On average, fish taken into the hatchery produced 4.7 times more adult offspring and 1.3 times more adult second generation offspring than naturally reproducing fish.
“Our study shows that when conservation actions work, they really work. In other words, they often lead to outcomes for biodiversity that are not just a little bit better than doing nothing at all, but many times greater,” said Jake Bicknell, co-author of the paper and a conservation scientist at DICE, University of Kent. “For instance, putting measures in place to boost the population size of an endangered species has often seen their numbers increase substantially. This effect has been mirrored across a large proportion of the case studies we looked at.”
Even in the minority of cases where conservation actions did not succeed in recovering or slowing the decline of the species or ecosystems that they were targeting compared with taking no action, conservationists benefited from the knowledge gained and were able to refine their methods. For example, in India the physical removal of invasive algae caused the spread of the algae elsewhere because the process broke the algae into many pieces, enabling their dispersal. Conservationists could now implement a different strategy to remove the algae that is more likely to be successful.
This might also explain why the co-authors found a correlation between more recent conservation interventions and positive outcomes for biodiversity—conservation is likely getting more effective over time. Other potential reasons for this correlation include an increase in funding and more targeted interventions.
In some other cases where the conservation action did not succeed in benefiting the target biodiversity compared with no action at all, other native species benefitted unintentionally instead. For example, seahorse abundance was lower in protected sites because marine protected areas increase the abundance of seahorse predators, including octopus.
“It would be too easy to lose any sense of optimism in the face of ongoing biodiversity declines,” said study co-author and Associate Professor Joseph Bull, from the University of Oxford’s department of biology. “However, our results clearly show that there is room for hope. Conservation interventions seemed to be an improvement on inaction most of the time; and when they were not, the losses were comparatively limited."
More than half of the world’s GDP, almost $44 trillion, is moderately or highly dependent on nature. According to previous studies, a comprehensive global conservation program would require an investment of between $178 billion and $524 billion, focused primarily in countries with particularly high levels of biodiversity. To put this in perspective, in 2022, global fossil fuel handouts--which are destructive to nature—were $7 trillion. This is 13 times the highest amount needed annually to protect and restore the planet. Today more than $121 billion is invested annually into conservation worldwide, and previous studies have found the cost-benefit ratio of an effective global program for the conservation of the wild is at least 1:100.
“Conservation action works—this is what the science clearly shows us,” said Claude Gascon, co-author and Director of Strategy and Operations at the Global Environment Facility. “It is also evident that to ensure that positive effects last, we need to invest more in nature and continue doing so in a sustained way. This study comes at a critical time where the world has agreed on ambitious and needed global biodiversity targets that will require conservation action at an entirely new scale. Achieving this is not only possible, it is well within our grasp as long as it is appropriately prioritized.”
The paper also argues that there must be more investment specifically in the effective management of protected areas, which remain the cornerstone for many conservation actions. Consistent with other studies, this study finds that protected areas work very well on the whole. And what other studies have shown is that when protected areas are not working, it is typically the result of a lack of effective management and adequate resourcing. Protected areas will be even more effective at reducing biodiversity loss if they are well-resourced and well-managed.
Moving forward, the study’s co-authors call for more and rigorous studies that look at the impact of conservation action versus inaction for a wider range of conservation interventions, such as those that look at the effectiveness of pollution control, climate change adaptation, and the sustainable use of species, and in more countries.
“For more than 75 years, IUCN has advanced the importance of sharing conservation practice globally,” said Grethel Aguilar, IUCN Director General. “This paper has analyzed conservation outcomes at a level as rigorous as in applied disciplines like medicine and engineering—showing genuine impact and thus guiding the transformative change needed to safeguard nature at scale around the world. It shows that nature conservation truly works, from the species to the ecosystem levels across all continents. This analysis, led by Re:wild in collaboration with many IUCN Members, Commission experts, and staff, stands to usher in a new era in conservation practice.”
This work was conceived and funded through the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) by the Global Environment Facility.
Read the paper at Science
Additional quotes
Thomas Brooks, co-author and Chief Scientist, IUCN “This paper is not only extremely important in providing robust evidence of the impact of conservation actions. It is also extremely timely in informing crucial international policy processes, including the establishment of a 20-year vision for IUCN, the development of an IPBES assessment of biodiversity monitoring, and the delivery of the action targets toward the outcome goals of the new Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.”
Stuart Butchart, co-author and Chief Scientist, BirdLife International “Recognizing that the loss and degradation of nature is having consequences for societies worldwide, governments recently adopted a suite of goals and targets for biodiversity conservation. This new analysis is the best evidence to date that conservation interventions make a difference, slowing the loss of species’ populations and habitats and enabling them to recover. It provides strong support for scaling up investments in nature in order to meet the commitments that countries have signed up to.”
Jamie Carr, co-author and researcher in climate change and biodiversity governance, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, University of York, UK “This work represents a huge effort on the part of many conservation professionals, all of whom are committed to reversing the loss of the world's biodiversity. It is encouraging to find that the past work of other conservationists has had a positive impact on nature, and I sincerely hope that our findings inspire those working now and in the future to ramp up their efforts."
Piero Genovesi, ISPRA, co-author and Chair, IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group “Species and ecosystems are facing a dramatic crisis, and the Biodiversity Plan of the United Nations is an urgent global call to action. This paper shows that eradication, control, and management of invasive alien species have the largest impact in terms of conservation, and can help reverse the current trends of biodiversity loss, potentially saving hundreds of species from extinction. It is essential that governments and donors support the struggle against invasive alien species if we want to meet the agreed biodiversity targets by 2030.”
Mike Hoffmann, co-author and Head of Wildlife Recovery, Zoological Society of London “The major advance of this study is its sheer weight of evidence. We can point to specific examples, such as how captive breeding and reintroductions have facilitated the return of scimitar-horned oryx to the wild in Chad, but these can feel a bit exceptional. This study draws on more than 650 published cases to show that conservation wins are not rare. Conservation mostly works—unfortunately, it is also mostly significantly under-resourced.”
Madhu Rao, Chair, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas “With less than six years remaining to achieve ambitious biodiversity targets by 2030, there is a great sense of urgency for effective conservation action. We can take proven methods to conserve nature, such as protected areas, and scale them up for real conservation impact. This research clearly demonstrates that conservation actions are successful. We just need to take them to scale.”
Jon Paul Rodriguez, Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission “Anyone involved in the field of conservation will have witnessed the power of nature to regenerate and grow, given a chance to do so. From fishery exclusion zones, to ecological restoration on land, and animal, fungi, and plant recovery efforts, there are numerous examples of halting and reversing biodiversity declines. Langhammer and colleagues synthesize knowledge on the impact of conservation action, and demonstrate that evidence-based conservation efforts indeed work in the majority of cases, not just in a few hand-picked examples. Much more money is spent on destroying nature than on protection and recovery. The authors show that tipping the balance in favor of nature is likely to help us deliver the world's ambitious biodiversity conservation targets.”
Gernot Segelbacher, co-author, Professor and Co-Chair of Conservation Genetic Specialist Group, University Freiburg “Conservation matters! While we so often hear about species declining or going extinct, this study shows that we can make a difference.”
Stephen Woodley, co-author, ecologist and Vice Chair for Science and Biodiversity, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas “The world needs hope that conservation action can work to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. This paper demonstrates that a range of conservation actions are highly effective. We just need to do more of them.”
#biodiversity#conservation actions#global environment facility#scientific study#biodiversity loss#biological resources#biological diversity#conservation of biological diversity#Forest Management Plan (FMP)#iucn world conservation congress
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Son of Bat! [OC Context Post]
Working on more Ash fics, but I need some time before I'm ready to post them, so in the meantime I'll introduce my other OCs!
So uh, technically, these OCs started as part of a Scooby-Doo fan thing. Later in the Hex Girls' career, my spouse and I headcanonned that they would start a record label and help other artists get started. Son of Bat is one of those bands! This later morphed into something else entirely, but technically speaking it exists in the Scooby-Doo universe lol
Son of Bat is a fictional band which I’m slowly working on making into a webcomic or some kind of longer project. The whole project is intended to explore themes like family trauma, identity, and relationships, largely based on my and my partner’s lived experiences, so each character was designed with certain traits in mind to reflect that (well, once it left the Hex Girls spin-off phase lol). There’s so much I want to say about each of them, so it’s really difficult to condense it down into something succinct and readable!
The story takes place in modern day, in a nonspecific US city, though the characters canonically grew up in Florida. The band’s music is a mix of metal, emo/alt rock, prog rock, and a few sprinkles of nu metal and EDM. In short, they aren’t as pressed about genre so much as vibe. The band consists of:
James Snyder: 25, huge af, primary writer and guitarist. James is a perfectionist and workaholic who is not only running a successful band, but also studying for a PhD and working as a personal trainer on the side. Most of his free time is spent in the gym, working out to anime soundtracks and kpop. He grew up in a shitty, abusive household, and he no longer has contact with his family. Around age 14, he got expelled from private school for once again refusing to cut his hair and getting into fights, and his family kicked him out. He became friends with Eddie in public school and was taken in by him and his mom. Vince is James’ older brother, and though they had a rocky relationship for a while, the hurt feelings are mending. James is aroace and in a queerplatonic relationship with Molly.
Vince Snyder: 29, trans man, bassist and vocalist. Vince has gone through a ton of personal growth—from leaving his abusive family, to struggling with alcoholism, to navigating transition. He’s always loved animals, even the “gross” bugs and reptiles he was told not to play with as a kid. Although his onstage personality is over-the-top and gregarious, he tends to be more reserved and laid-back with his friends. He struggles a lot with imposter syndrome and fears of inadequacy, as well as guilt from his upbringing. At this point in the story, he has married Cassandra Prince, the band’s manager, and is taking time off to be with her and work on a solo album.
Eddie Glenn: 24, drummer, short king, pansexual. Eddie is the co-founder of the band, along with James. Growing up autistic/adhd, Eddie dealt with a lot of bullying and isolation. But when he met James, they just clicked. When he found out James was functionally homeless, his mom insisted on taking James in. They essentially became brothers overnight, and that bond has remained into adulthood. Personality-wise, Eddie is a goofball and a sweetheart; this works against him sometimes, as people tend to infantilize him. Eddie is also an artist; he makes all the merch and graphics for SoB and is studying to be an art teacher. Because of his autism, Eddie struggles with selective mutism and sometimes uses ASL and AAC. He and Molly briefly dated, but realized they’re better as friends.
Molly “Moondust” Rivera-Roth: 27, nonbinary/demigirl, keyboard and mixing. Molly Moondust is her DJ name, and how she met Eddie (he was graffitiing the outside of her venue). Molly was adopted as a baby by her two loving dads, one Cuban and one Jewish. Between the two of them and the rotating variety of foster kids in their home, Molly’s childhood was extremely multicultural. She was an awkward, geeky, chubby girl growing up, finding solace in her family and her love of technology and music. As she got older and found the EDM scene, she grew more confident and honed not only her craft, but also her outgoing personality. Molly is loud, affectionate, and a great friend. Being away from her family when she went to college was really tough, and she got caught up in the party scene (and party drugs). James and Eddie’s friendship and concern helped pull her out of the hole, and she and Vince keep each other accountable. Molly loves James and is happy to be in his life however he feels most comfortable; they view each other almost like spouses, at least as far as their level of security and trust.
Cassandra Prince (name may be changed): 30, band manager/idiot wrangler, engaged to Vince. Cass met the others while working with the performance arts department at their university. James was impressed with her management skills and asked for her help. Cass is physically disabled and uses mobility aids, and she loves cottagecore/pastel goth fashion. Because of growing up disabled, she had to "grow up fast," so she often feels disconnected from her peers and struggles to lighten up. The only person she really loosens up around is Vince, who gets to see the cutesy, babyish side of her. (Cass is a late addition to the canon and isn't fully fleshed out; her details are subject to change.)
Debby Glenn: Eddie’s mom and James’ surrogate mom. Debby was a dental hygienist when Eddie was growing up, but by the time he graduated, she’d become a dentist and opened her own practice. She and Eddie pretty much just had each other since her family wanted nothing to do with her as an unwed mother, and Eddie’s dad was a stalkery asshole. She had to get a restraining order against him and move cities to get him off her back. Debby was a rockstar mom, despite having to work crazy hard to support the two of them as a single mom. She encouraged Eddie's love of percussion from a young age and always did the best she could to accommodate and advocate for Eddie—and, naturally, that translated to James as well. Debby has a big, open heart, and she took James in with barely a second thought; though she loves all the SoB kids like they’re her own, James has a special place in her heart as her second son.
That's the band! I have a handful of great whumpy scenarios for them, mostly on the milder side compared to Ash's story. I'm hoping to develop this into a full comic or web series over time, but I'm not quite confident enough yet to really give it a go. So in the meantime, I'll post the few fics I have of theirs and maybe post some slice of life stuff on another blog (I'll link it if I do that). Pictures will be added to this post later.
#whump#whump writing#writeblr#my ocs#oc stuff#band ocs#son of bat#i dont think i'll tag scooby doo here lol#whumpblr#rublewriting
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Officials from the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board Present a Thanksgiving Turkey to President John F. Kennedy. Photograph By Robert Knudsen, National Archives
Turkeys Can Swim—and Other Fun Facts For Thanksgiving Table Talk! There's Much More To America's Holiday Bird Than White and Dark Meat.
— Published: November 21, 2018 | Thursday November 23, 2023 | By Mark Strauss
Every year at Thanksgiving, families and friends gather to share personal stories and perhaps reflect on the early history of the United States. But aside from deciding whether to ask for seconds, not much is said about the guest of honor at the holiday table: the turkey. That’s a shame, since that big, tasty bird has left a significant mark on history, science, language, and culture. So maybe on this Thanksgiving, take a moment to appreciate the turkey’s story with these remarkable facts and anecdotes gathered from across the centuries.
A Cooked Turkey—in this case deep fried—is the centerpiece of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner in millions of U.S. homes. Photograph By Jim Lo Scalzo, EPA/Redux
Alpha Turkeys 🦃🦃🦃
After an exhaustive study of wild turkeys in southeastern Texas, researchers were startled to discover that the community of birds is “characterized by an astonishing degree of social stratification, greater than had previously been seen in any society of vertebrates short of man.”
“The Social Order of Turkeys,” published in the June 1971 issue of Scientific American, described an avian dystopia where the permanent status of each individual is determined in the first years of its life. Young males, for instance, engage in a grueling two-hour battle. The victor gains alpha male status and the right to bully the vanquished turkey for as long as it lives. During breeding season, the dominant males gather together and literally strut their stuff in unison before the females, like a scene out of West Side Story. But despite the synchronous display, only the most dominant of the alpha male turkeys—six out of 170—are allowed to mate.
Turkeys 🦃🦃🦃 Among the Maya
"For the Maya, turkeys were quintessential animals for feasting and for sacrificial offerings,” writes University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee art historian Andrea Stone. The reverence for the turkey among the ancient Maya is apparent in their stunning artistic depictions of the bird—with its characteristic drooping wattle—on vases and in codices. Historians had long thought that the Maya had domesticated the turkey sometime between A.D. 250 and 1000, but upon closer examination of turkey bones found in the ancient city of El Mirador, researchers at the University of Florida concluded that the Maya had domesticated the birds a thousand years earlier than previously estimated.
Text found in the Dresden Codex reveal that the Maya cooked turkey tamales. If you’d like to add a little spice to your traditional Thanksgiving meal, chef Julie Powell has re-created the recipe.
Male Turkeys Strut their Stuff to Win the Attention of Females. Turkeys adhere to a strict social pecking order established by intense sparring. Photograph By Patricio Robles Gil, Sierra Madre/National Geographic
Watch Your Language
Considering that it was once deemed indecent for a woman to expose her ankles, we shouldn’t be surprised that prurient diners adopted anatomical euphemisms while serving turkey and other poultry.
In the mid-1800s, the term “drumstick” entered popular use to avoid the scandal of expressing desire for a bird’s lower leg. Likewise, according to culinary historian Mark Morton, “Prudery was also the impetus behind the adoption of the terms ‘white meat’ and ‘dark meat,’ which arose in the 1870s as euphemisms for the breast and legs.”
All-Star Athletes
Look! Up in the sky! Wild turkeys can fly short distances at 40 to 50 miles an hour. (Domestic turkeys can’t, a factoid that was used to great comedic effect in the famous Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.) Wild turkeys can also run 12 miles an hour and, completing the triathlon, they are actually adept swimmers. They move through the water by tucking their wings in close, spreading their tails, and kicking.
Wild Turkeys are able to fly short distances at considerable speed. They can also run and swim. Photograph By Roy Toft, National Geographic
Granted, wild turkeys don’t swim often. As John James Audubon wrote in 1831, “I have been told by a friend that a person residing in Philadelphia had a hearty laugh on hearing that I had described the Wild Turkey as swimming for some distance, when it had accidentally fallen into the water. But be assured, kind reader, almost every species of land-bird is capable of swimming on such occasions, and you may easily satisfy yourself as to the accuracy of my statement by throwing a Turkey, a Common Fowl, or any other bird into the water.” (Actually, please don’t do that.)
Ben Franklin and the National Bird
Although the esteemed Founding Father once declared the wild turkey to be more virtuous than the bald eagle, there’s scant evidence that he preferred it as the national symbol of his new country.
Franklin’s feathers got ruffled when, in 1783, he learned that the Society of the Cincinnati—a group of officers under the command of George Washington—wanted to establish a hereditary order of merit, to be passed down from oldest son to oldest son. Franklin, a fifth-generation youngest son, expressed disdain for the officers and their aristocratic trappings, including their choice of the eagle as the emblem for their badge.
In a letter to his daughter, Sarah Bache, he wrote, “For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly … For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.”
But did Franklin truly regret the eagle as the national symbol? As author Elizabeth Gawthrop Riely writes in the journal Gastronomica, “The sober historian must be skeptical. After all, eight years earlier, in 1776, he himself had served on the committee with Jefferson and Adams when the turkey was not chosen, and at other instances Franklin used the eagle rather than the turkey as an emblem. No other evidence in the vast Franklin archive mentions his support of the turkey as national bird.”
More likely Franklin, knowing that his lengthy letter would probably be published in U.S. newspapers, singled out the eagle as part of a larger cautionary tale against creating aristocratic institutions.
The Turkey-in-Chief
The tradition of sending a Thanksgiving turkey to the White House began during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, who was gifted with a 34-pound bird by Rhode Island Senator H.B. Anthony on behalf of turkey growers in his state.
However, Cornell University anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö writes that the formal custom of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey began in Alabama, “where the ceremony was first invented in the 1940s as a governor’s ritual,” before it was “exported to the capital.”
John F. Kennedy is sometimes credited with the first presidential pardon of a turkey when he declared, "Let's keep him going." According to the White House Historical Association, “The formalities of pardoning a turkey gelled by 1989, when George H. W. Bush, with animal rights activists picketing nearby, quipped,"'Reprieve,' ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: It's all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn't end up on the president's holiday table.”
Talking Turkey 🦃
Turkeys produce several different distinct sounds beyond their famous gobble (more of an ill-obble-obble-obble), which is uttered to attract females and establish territory. Other “words” in the turkey lexicon: a contact call that sounds like a yelp (keouk, keouk, keouk), an alarm (putt), and a cluck that’s used as an assembly note (kut).
A Wily Opponent
While domesticated turkeys are regarded as docile dullards, hunters across the centuries, including Theodore Roosevelt, have deemed the bird’s feral brethren to be cunning adversaries.
“The wild turkey is, in every way, the king of American game birds,” the future president wrote in 1893. “[It] really deserves a place beside the deer; to kill a wary old gobbler with the small-bore rifle, by fair still-hunting, is a triumph for the best sportsman.”
This Life-size Watercolor of a Wild Turkey appears in John James Audubon's famous Birds of America, printed between 1827 and 1838. Photograph By Field Museum Library/Getty Images
Born to be Wild
Concerns that wild turkeys might become extinct peaked in the early 20th century, when the U.S. government released dire statistics on their declining numbers nationwide. “These are diminishing so fast that 1920 will see the finish of the turkey tribe unless the authorities take a hand,” declared an editorial in the December 19, 1912, issue of the Aberdeen Herald.
Some sought to save the bird through a raise-and-release program. “The experiment is being made in California, and also in New York State, where the Game Breeders’ association (an influential and wealthy organization of public spirited men), is already raising wild turkeys on a considerable scale on its breeding farms, some hundreds of the birds having been trapped in Virginia and the Carolinas for this purpose,” reported the El Paso Herald on November 25, 1911.
But the game-farm idea was a failure. "Turkeys that were raised in those situations did not have the opportunity for the hen to teach what predators would eat them,” explained James Earl Kennamer of the National Wild Turkey Federation in Edgefield, South Carolina. “It was like taking a kid out of New York City and putting him in the woods and saying, 'Go hunt.' They didn't know what to do."
The turning point came in 1951 when wildlife biologists in South Carolina devised a method of capturing wild turkeys with a net shot from a cannon—enabling the biologists to release them into habitats where wild turkeys were scarce or nonexistent. By 1973 the wild turkey population had rebounded to 1.5 million, and today it numbers nearly seven million.
Beautiful Turkeys 🦃🦃🦃
Narragansett Turkey lets it all hang out at the Knoxville Zoo. Photograph By Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark
This Brightly Colored Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris Ocellata) at Texas’ Dallas World Aquarium might remind some readers of a Peacock. Photograph By Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark
An Australian Brush Turkey (Alectura Lathami) keeps it real at Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck, North Carolina. Photograph By Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark
A Female Rio Grande Wild Turkey (Meleagris Gallopavo Intermedia) chills out at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Photograph By Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark
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