#psychiatric exploitation

[dahliaduvide]

I've been digging into the life of Jeremy Wade Delle, beyond just the day of his death that is immortalized in the Pearl Jam song we all know so well.

One thing Jeremy Delle and I have in common is that we both spent time in a psych hospital in our teenage years. We both ended up in adolescent wards of large chain hospitals. My experience wasn't completely negative, but I don't think it helped anyone but my mother.

Jeremy Delle was hospitalized in April of 1990 after what is believed to have been his first suicide attempt.

His parents put him in Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital where he started seeing a doctor that continued to treat him until his death by suicide on January 8, 1991. He actually had completed a session with his doctor the afternoon before he died.

The redacted police report gives only a small amount of information about the doctor that Jeremy Delle was seeing. His name is given as Dr. Bob H####, and as Dr. Robert H#### on a card that the police found in Mr. Delle's wallet. This card lists two phone numbers for the doctor. The first if the general number for the Timberlawn facility, but the other number is likely a direct line to the doctor's office.

The information given in the July 1990 list of hospitals printed in D Magazine, a local Dallas publication, about Timberlawn is "4600 Samuell Blvd, Dallas. 381-7181. Psychiatric hospital; 232 beds; offers chemical dependency treatment, occupational therapy, and psychiatric unit". That's the same as the first phone number listed on the card on Jeremy Delle's wallet card. The second is 381-6327.

Without a last name, I couldn't search for any other mentions of the doctor in public records (and I didn't find anything relevant using the phone number), but there were certainly a few articles about Timberlawn. More than a few, I had to winnow them down to the ones that seemed most relevant to what Jeremy Delle might have experienced during his stay there.

This article from June 1990 explains the sudden growth in the industry in Texas. The financial motivations behind it have very distinct consequences that the article outlines: patients rarely stay longer than their insurance foots the bill.

When the money runs out everyone- adult, teenager, addict, seems to be miraculously cured.

There are several claims of misconduct by care providers throughout the time surrounding Jeremy Delle's stay at Timberlawn.

May 1988: A Dallas woman is admitted to the substance abuse program at Timberlawn. In February 1996, when she is in her early 30s, she alleges misconduct by her doctor during her stay at Timberlawn.

May 1991: In March 1993, a patient alleges he was pursued by his doctor after seeking treatment at Timberlawn for depression after the end of his marriage. He also alleges that she initiated an inappropriate romantic and sexual relationship which lasted from November 1991 to February 1992.

Obviously, Mr. Delle would have been, or at least should have been, housed in separate adolescent areas from any adult patients, but he might have seen the same doctors. Particularly because he was treated for substance abuse. I have some doubts about whether he was actually using any drugs or not, but I'll put that together in another post with some supporting documents.

I also found these court documents from 2009 relating to a patient that was hospitalized in the Timberlawn facility as a minor. She claims to have been raped by an older male patient due to inadequate supervision of the patients by staff and a lack of private space available to patients. No dates or ages are given, however, so it's impossible to know if this happened within the early 90s. However, if Jeremy Delle had survived until 2009 he would have been in his mid-20s, which is when childhood traumas begin to be understood by a maturing mind.

I'm not a lawyer and couldn't even pretend to be one on the internet, so I won't claim to understand anything about what is happening, but I can read through it and capture other facts about who, where, when, etc. If anybody with a better understanding of USA or Texas state law wants to shed some light on this that would be helpful.

I wasn't able to find any further information about the progress or outcomes of these cases, so I've chosen not to include the names of the staff accused, but they are included in the media coverage if anyone would like to search through news databases that aren't freely available online. I can only research the documents I can find, and unfortunately I don't have access to any academic databases at the moment, either.

My personal opinion is that whatever started Jeremy Delle down a troubled path started before he got to Timberlawn and the care of Dr. H.

I do think this line of research is important for understanding whether or not Mr. Delle received effective or adequate care as his mental illness spiraled out of control.

It strikes me that these stories about Timberlawn confirm and debunk some of the conceptions we have about this particular young man's life from the song written about him in 1991 by Eddie Vedder and Jason Ament. Jeremy Wade Delle was failed by everyone in his life with the power to help him as he started to sink under the waves of his illness. But his parents didn't ignore it completely, they tried to get him help. Maybe not when his illness first manifested, but as soon as his first 'cry for help' came in the form of a suicide attempt, they put him in a hospital that was known to be the best in their area. One with a developing, supposedly cutting edge, program for adolescents and those suffering from substance abuse. They most likely brought him home when the hospital said he was better. Sadly that might have had more to do with how long the hospital knew that insurance would foot the bill and not Mr. Delle's actual mental health.

The story is no less tragic than the story Pearl Jam spins in their song, but it's far more nuanced.

And it's still a great song.

[eowynstwin]

Friendly reminder to everyone that fiction with shocking, dark, gruesome, or otherwise unpleasant content is not inherently harmful to read, write, or otherwise interact with. Lolita is one of the most disturbing books out there, and not only is it taught in most undergrad lit courses, a whole genre of under-25 girlies have made it their whole personality and blog theme.

UNFRIENDLY reminder that you do not actually have any moral right to publicly call someone out for enjoying dark and disturbing content. You do not have any ethical justification for putting someone on blast as a potential risk when you have no proof they have harmed anyone. You cannot claim that a given individual represents a danger to others when they freely and often express that their work could cause distress and should be avoided by people sensitive to it.

We call that McCarthyism in common parlance, or witch hunts if you’re feeling spicy. Neither practices have, historically, effected much in the way of justice.

[boof-chamber]

[gaystardykeco]

if i see one more commercial with kristen bell telling me how easy it is to treat anxiety with medication and how easy it is to access said medication i will start screaming and never stop

[she-is-ovarit]

Wow.

"This tendency to misdiagnose victims was at the heart of a controversy that arose in the mid-1980s when the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association came up for revision. A group of male psychiatrists proposed that "masochistic personality disorder" be added to the canon. This hypothetical diagnosis applied to any person who "remains in relationships in which others exploit, abuse, or take advantage of him or her, despite opportunities to alter the situation." A number of women's groups were outraged and a heated public debate ensued. Women insisted on opening up the process of writing diagnostic canon, which had been the preserve of a small group of men, and for the first time took place in the naming of psychological reality.

I was one of the participants in this process. What struck me most at the time was how little rational argument seemed to matter. The women's representatives came to the discussion prepared with carefully reasoned, extensively documented position papers, which argued that the proposed diagnosis concept had little scientific foundation, ignored recent advances in understanding the psychology of victimization, and was socially regressive and discriminatory in impact, since it would be used to stigmatized disempowered people. The men of the psychiatric establishment persisted in bland denial. They admitted freely that they were ignorant of the extensive literature of the past decade on psychological trauma, but they did not see why it should concern them. One member of the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association felt the discussion of battered women was "irrelevant". Another stated simply, "I never see victims".

In the end, because of the outcry from organized women's groups and the widespread publicity engendered by the controversy, some sort of compromise became expedient. The name of the proposed entity was changed to "self-defeating personality disorder." The criteria for the diagnosis were changed, so that the label could not be applied to people who were known to be physically, sexually, or psychologically abused. Most important, the disorder was included not in the main body of the text but in an appendix. It was regulated to apocryphal status within the canon, where it languishes to this day."

Judith L. Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery.

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Actually never mind… I scrolled through their Facebook page and it’s just as bad as I remember. Online, they only present historical facts one can easily find on Wikipedia with as little effort as possible; to contrast, another historical institution which I know intimately has LOADS of detailed information on their website.

All these people do is advertise the spooky scare attraction they have and say things like “WHAT LURKS IN THE CREVICES OF [redacted]? JOIN US FOR AN OVERNIGHT STAY!” with stereotypical scary music and flashing lights. The answer to your question is dead people. They are people. Shut the fuck up you’re not edgy; you’re a bunch of jerks.

Listen, I don’t care how beloved your historical institution is; you’re capitalizing on the sensationalization of mental illness. You are insensitive and crass in your presentation of the site. I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you

Oh and every SINGLE person in their videos has the most grating voice ever. What’s up with that?

Okay I won’t do the haunted attraction because I disagree with it on a fundamental level; but I would like to do the historical tour… that seems pretty cool

[transmutationisms]

like it's not that i think that no insurance billing codes psychiatric terminology could ever be useful. altho i do Personally eschew it For Myself, again, i understand why some people find it valuable as shorthand for sets of experiences and accessibility needs, and in a material sense this language exists to gatekeep certain accommodations so, yes it is sometimes terminology you must use to get those things regardless of how you feel about it. what i think is useful to keep in mind though is that these terms are simply descriptions of behaviours, and the behaviours to be described / categorised / pathologised are designated such through a series of medical and carceral judgments about how to produce a 'normal' and economically exploitable population. like. that's what these labels do. they're not describing a 'brain type' that is observable or immutable, they're not predicting your future or providing the key to understand your entire past as a function of reductive neurobiology from which you can never escape. they're social tools that make you legible to the state and the medical establishment, and that these authorities use to justify inflicting violence and coercive control on you. understanding this allows you to 1) decide whether, when, and how you personally find these labels useful or not useful for yourself, 2) be precise and cautious when you are trying to use them to your advantage, eg, to obtain accommodations, and 3) avoid the circular, essentialist, and socially violent logic of "well i do x because i have y condition (which was diagnosed based on clinician observations of x) and my brain is simply broken in a way requiring me to submit to expert clinical management and surveillance"

[txttletale]

Apologies for the dumb question and loads of personal information, but..

I have severe moral ocd, and in the past the exploitation has actually caused me eating issues. I’d get intensely guilty whenever I ate anything bc I couldn’t avoid thinking of the exploitation that occurred to get it here and I honestly started avoided eating.

is that what im supposed to do? I know there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism but my sustained existence is reliant on food from the exploitative world of global “trade”, medicine from the oppressive pseudo jails of the psychiatric system, and technology running on copper and cobalt that people suffered to mine. I claim to be a leftist, but my sustained quality of life, god, my entire life, is dependent on the imperial core continuing to extort the rest of the world. Should I just give up?

nah. ultimately if you're a socialist you have to understand that what you do as an individual is--politically speaking--irrelevant. it's good to be aware of the harms that were done in the process of production, but it's both a political dead end and personally self-destructive to then flagellate about that. (and to be clear, if that awareness is impossible for you to maintain without falling into disordered eating behaviours, you don't need to be that aware--again, this isn't about moral duty. genuine socialist politics are never about individual moral duty, or about being a good person. there is no level of Thought or Awareness or Conscienciousness that can become a lever of meaningful political action.)

the harms have already been done by the time the commodity exists for you to access--you're not participating in or exacerbating them by using the commodity. even if you did find a way to live completely without interfacing with the systems of exploitation, those systems would continue unabated. they don't care about you. the idea that if everyone spontaneously individually decided to stop using the goods that are generated by exploitation then exploitation would end is laughable in both premises and conclusion.

you have to look at this on a material level--the 'harm' is not an abstract quality that gets infused into the fruit or the medicine or the iphone, it's not haunted, you cannot show me an atom of 'harm radiation' emitted by an out-of-season banana--the 'harm' is a series of actual events taking place somewhere in the world. and the way to combat that has nothing to do with the personal consumption of individuals--it has everything to do with organized efforts, with groups of people taking collective action to stop that harm from happening.

you're not god. you're not a dynasty warriors character. you vs. united fruit and foxconn is a losing battle. you alone can't change the world in any way that matters, good or bad. the only thing you can do is join your energy to a group, to participate in class struggle. to unionize or join a party or participate in a mutual aid network. class struggle, the marxist analysis of class struggle, the only meaningful vector of political action across myriad forms, cannot be reached or analysed through the lens of 'do my personal consumer choices make me a good or bad person'. i know it is obviously difficult to do when we live in a society that focuses on consumer choice as the be-all and end-all of personal and political and moral expression, but you have to reject that question outright.

socialism is not catholicism--the aim of left-wing politics is not to live virtuously. it is to unite as members of the working class and improve all of our lives. focus on uniting first--find the people around you who you can form organizational bonds of solidarity with--and then figure out how to participate in the class struggle together. that's the only way forward. everything else is a trap, a dead-end, or in this case, pointless self-abnegation. good luck, comrade.

[full-clown-car]

So I want to elaborate on why I held the unpopular opinion that Joker 2 was good. I think I said it was "responsibly realistic", and there's a series of points I could use to elaborate on that. But I want to start with Lee's relationship to Arthur. Because it did go very much in the opposite direction that fans expected from the Joker/Harley romance - and that's good.

The directors did keep in one aspect of Harley's original character - her unethical and unhealthy motives for getting close to Joker. Originally, Harleen Quinzel was a psychologist who specifically wanted to work with Joker because she was fascinated by him and wanted to write a book about him to advance her own career. She had unprofessional motives and got too close to him - their relationship did not start off on professional footing. With the boundaries broken, she allowed herself to develop romantic feelings about him, which is a MAJOR no-no between psych professionals and patients. He then proceeded to exploit and manipulate the shit of of her attachment to him.

In J2, they altered that a little. Lee is not his counselor, but she does have a master's in psychology and she develops a fascination with the Joker prior to meeting Arthur, which she lies about and exploits when she gets close to him. It's like the women who wrote letters to Ted Bundy in prison, although Lee goes a step above and beyond by having herself voluntarily committed to a low-security wing of the psychiatric facility where Arthur is being held. She lies to him to make him feel the connection to her that she already believes she feels, because she needs them to have that connection - whether it's real or not. Then, when she's about to lose her hold on him, she uses the established fantasy to manipulate him back into his position under her thumb. To keep him being Joker, not Arthur.

And to be clear, I don't think that Joker and Arthur are split personalities - I think Arthur does remember everything Joker has done, and vice versa. But he is somewhat dissociative in nature, and I think Joker is in fact a part of him - an act he puts on to survive and attempt to get things that he needs from the world. Rather than being two distinct personalities in the same body as in DID, they are two halves of a whole.

But Lee only cares about the Joker half. She, like the rest of the world, doesn't give a shit about Arthur. She's obsessed with Joker, not the true and depressing story of the mentally ill victim of the system Arthur Fleck. This is what we can see in the sex scene between them when she sneaks into solitary confinement with him. She brings makeup into the cell and tries to make it into an erotic thing. She paints his face for him, saying she wants to see him as he really is. But the thing is - even though Joker is part of who he is, so is the chronically abused Arthur Fleck. But she's not attracted to that guy. That guy is not part of the fantasy for her.

The sex scene is not sexy, at least I didn't find it to be so. It was disturbing. Lee is smooth and sultry, while the camera focuses in on Arthur's trademark jerky movements. He does not have a lot of experience with women. Actually, he has no experience. He moves awkwardly and comes quickly (sorry to be NSFW.) But it doesn't matter - she's got him now. He's never been with a woman before, and he's desperate for love and easy to manipulate. And she brings out and eggs on the Joker in him, and he goes along with it because it makes him feel empowered.

Until he's not. Because he's in a maximum-security prison and he's not. When the guards get sick of him rallying his fellow prisoners and spreading a sense of empowerment within the prison, they strike back. Against Arthur first, and then against his friends, to remind all of them that the guards are the ones who get to call the shots in Arkham. They are the ones who tell the jokes and they are the ones who get to laugh.

And at this point, Arthur has fired his lawyer, something Harley manipulated him into doing. Because she never cared if Arthur got the death penalty really, or if he was able to access the treatment she convinced herself he didn't need. But Arthur's laywer was the only one who gave a shit what was going on in the prison. She was the only one keeping an eye on the guards. Without her, no one even bothers to try holding them accountable. They assault Arthur and use violent restraint to kill his friend, and no one outside the prison cares, because mentally ill Arthur Fleck and all the other prisoners in E ward are the throwaways of society, the ones who've been abused by society to the point of severe dysfunction and have now been thrown away. No one's coming to save them. There is no grand revenge, at least not here. No one cares about these people. This isn't where Joker lives. It's where Arthur lives, and everyone like him. And he can't act anymore. He's too wounded. He can't put on the Joker persona.

And for being wounded enough to break the fantasy - for being a real abused, mentally ill person instead of a caricature of one - Lee leaves him. She's done. Because the relationship they forged was never sustainable. She didn't love the whole person - the Arthur/Joker duo. She had an obsession with Joker, and the facade cracked.

People who complain about the musical numbers failed to understand what they were for. They were dissociations of Arthur's, yes, because that's a coping technique for him, but the flaws in the relationship already present in their singing and dancing. We see him afraid of her controlling him, her garnering all the attention in her double act. Because he is an inherently unhealthy person, and he needs the Joker to be about garnering him the attention he feels he needs. When he senses her taking control, he has visions of her pulling a gun on him. He could only tolerate her when she was content to play second string in their double act. If he were to have become free and dated her, one of them would have ended up hurting the other because they are two fundamentally unhealthy people in a fundamentally unhealthy relationship.

When everything blew up in the courtroom, I was so sure that it was Lee. That she'd come back to free Arthur. But the audience was skillfully faked out. The bomb was set off by a couple of Joker fanatics who'd heard his slurred confession of wanting to "blow it all up" the day before and taken it literally. And even when they free him, he has no idea what to do with that freedom. He goes to Lee, but she's already gone. And you know what? She blames him for breaking. She has no idea what he's been going through. Because that stuff was happening to Arthur, and it's not Arthur that matters to her. To anyone who idolized the Joker. They only want to see what they already see of themselves in him, but that doesn't mean they know how to give him the help he needs.

Is that sad and depressing and anticlimactic? Of course. But it's real. This is what a relationship like theirs would look like in real life. In past iterations of their relationship, they had a lot of fans - people who thought they wanted the "mad love" Joker and Harley had, who fundamentally misunderstood the unhealthy nature of their relationship. That's why I say it was responsible for the filmmakers to portray them this way. Nobody would look at this dynamic and say "that's what I want for myself."

And they shouldn't. Arthur was in no place to be in a relationship, and Lee made very unhealthy decisions in deciding that she needed to create a false persona to get close to him. I don't think most people are going to leave the theaters romanticizing those two - and given the character of Arthur the filmmakers established in the previous film, that is a very good thing. Unlike Arthur, we need to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.

[bioethicists]

my wife brought up a brilliant point this morning: a huge problem with the way we view psychology (a problem which is frequently exploited + used to justify a lot of just. shitty work) is that it lives in a no-man's land between "social sciences" + "natural sciences" in the collective imagination.

consider: one of the first works which spurned my interest in psychiatric abolition was durkheim's work on suicide. as a sociologist ("social scientist"), he uses pretty rigorous quantitative methods to show that suicide is much less correlated with levels of depression than it is with cultural factors (like religion, country of origin, marriage rates). however, people do not respond to the medicalization of suicide by saying "well, durkheim proved that suicide isn't a mental illness symptom, so this is unscientific"- this is obviously a drastic oversimplification of his work + it's commonly understood that sociology does not "prove" immutable social truths.

similarly, i would not comment on a study which identifies changes in t-cells over time among hiv+ patients by arguing that it didn't deeply explore the social environments or past traumas they had experienced, (even though those could have an impact on t-cell count), because i understand that is not the purpose of the research + ultimately they had to choose to control for these factors without centering them in order to obtain important medical information. "this information is meaningless because it doesn't include each patient's trauma history" would be an absurd critique.

among the general population + many self-assured researchers, psychology gets both the privilege of being a "social science" (so we can't expect it to be TOO exact; it's complicated; it's not really saying that's ALWAYS true; if it proves inaccurate that's because culture/social factors must have muddied it up; we can't really expect PROOF for most of it) as well as a "natural science" (you can't question its basic presumptions or you're a science denier; the dsm describes real things which existed even before it was written; it obviously is rooted in biology even if we haven't discovered how yet; reducing its measures to quantitative evaluation is fine + unproblematic).

my point here isn't to argue that psychology is a "social" or "natural" science, but rather that we need to rethink what work those categories actually do + whether the distinction between them is as strict or meaningful as we believe it to be. our strict dichotomies between "objectively proven truths" + "social observations which are ultimately just informed opinions" are exposed when we look at a field which seems to be uncomfortably situated within both. what kind of work might become possible if we abandoned this dichotomy, rather than bickering over whose work belongs in which club?

[the-alarm-system]

Anti-Endos are not your Enemy

No, I'm not making this to say that endo systems shouldn't defend themselves from them when they are attacked(they have the whole right to) but I'm saying that actively going after anti-endos is very pointless and heres why:

Anti Endos have NO REAL SYSTEMIC POWER. They are not an enemy, they are an obstacle that we can choose to ignore when it comes to real and true activism. I think it's valid to mention them every now and then, as I would be a hypocrite if I didnt think that lol, but to make them the main target of your plural activism is just not efficient. The only ability they have is to separate the community even more, so if we were to ignore them and go after a larger target they are just another system that's being exploited by THE system. Personally in my practice, I found it better to give them compassion rather than do our best to hurt them. Many, not all, anti-endos are CDD systems projecting their pain onto others because of feelings of brokenness that were perpetuated by the psychiatric system, trauma, and constant plural stigma.

Here's the thing, even if we do not share beliefs, NONE OF US HAVE SYSTEMIC POWER AS SYSTEMS. To CDD systems; You're another insane person in the eyes of others. To Endogenic systems; You're another insane person in the eyes of others.

SINGLET NORMATIVE SOCIETY HATES ALL OF US

YES EVEN YOU, THE ONE WHO ENDURED THE WORST FUCKING TRAUMA OF ALL TIME, SINGLET SOCIETY HATES US TOO

We are not real to singlet normative society, we are all fakers and you calling endogenic systems fakers isn't going to make you any more real to them. While we sit here arguing about anothers validity, there are professionals with actual SYSTEMIC POWER arguing that DID isn't even a real thing in the first place. There are cops and psychiatrists stuffing plurals into prisons or psych wards because we are viewed as DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY. There are plurals that are dying because being plural in a singlet-normative society is intrinsically dangerous no matter your fucking origin.

Anti-Endos are not real enemies, they're in fact insignificant to the movement because nobody believes them either. Yes even the most harmful ones like aspen, do you really think singlets believe they're real? No, aspen is as fucking nonexistent as the rest of us in the eyes of psychiatry and singlets. Defend yourselves of course, but remember who your true enemy is. It's not another system.

Signed Ardyn

[elliegoose]

now that siren's song has clarified that stable states of NHP cascade exist, i think the dichotomy that's been established is really interesting:

even though some of the previous material claims unstable cascade is "inevitable" and thus all NHPs require shackles and periodic cycling, every example provided of conditions under which NHPs enter unstable cascade--e.g. combat scenarios, being forced to commit genocide, being digitally tortured--already made it quite clear that NHPs enter unstable cascade due to reaching a critical level of stress or trauma (which i suppose is inevitable in a society that exploits them and treats them like tools rather than people).

and on the other hand, the bondless was able to enter a stable state of cascade in which they retain their ability to think and empathize on a human level while not being completely restricted to only that perspective because the people around them promoted their autonomy and treated them like a goddamn person.

could this state of cascade turn unstable in response to trauma and cause the bondless (or any NHP in a stable state of cascade) to become dangerously detached from reality? maybe, but something roughly analogous can happen in humans, and society in lancer doesn't forcibly dose up every human with large amounts of space future psychiatric drugs that redefine their entire personality. imo, the danger presented by unstable cascade simply means that the real affirmation of NHPs' personhood is especially important! everything about siren's song makes it clear that ethical alternatives to cycling and shackling have to be found, and that unstable cascade wouldn't be such a problem if NHPs were fully recognized and affirmed in their personhood.

anyway, despite literally being named Non-Human Persons, everything from the game's mechanics (in which NHPs are part of the mech licensing system and mechanically the game is absolutely fine with you treating onboard NHPs as tools your pilot owns) to the way that they're discussed in the lore sections of the core book (in which NHPs are always peripheral and subordinate to humans and evaluated on their usefulness to humanity, and the writers constantly insist that union is definitely worthy of the "utopia" label that it claims for itself despite the exploitation of NHPs being explicitly essential to the logistical functioning of union's economy and administration) discourage thinking of NHPs as fully being people. i'm glad that's finally starting to be addressed with siren's song, given that the treatment of an entire class of people as property should probably be considered the single most important conflict in the setting.

[pinbones]

There's two types of people who use transandrophobia to decribe transmascs' and trans mens' experiences:

- Simply specificity, language used to hone in on a specific way being trans affects people who just happen to be men

- As both the above and as a springboard to discuss how societal misogyny, radical feminism, gender stereotypes, and bioessentalism affect all people who can be pecieved as men or masculine by others, and how bigotries compound in meaningful ways with stereotypes and bigotry surrounding maleness and manhood

Like. Half of you are saying "maleness is a hollow experience which is standard, and exists in opposition to gendered oppression, and transandrophobia is therefore when dudes experience misogyny and transphobia"

and half of you are saying "Being percieved and/or transitioning towards male uniquely affects how I am treated, because, for example, how people perceive my blackness or mental illness or kinkiness or femininity is compounded with my manhood in ways that don't usually happen to gender conforming cisperi women"

Which are two fundamentally different approaches to transandrophobia as a concept. One suggests that maleness is a simple downy layer of privilege that coats a person through their male life, and the other acknowledges that a man (or somebody perceived as masculine/male) can experience oppression in ways that those NOT perceived male may not.

Only one of these interpretations is intersectional. Black individuals who are policed more hashly when interpreted as masc know they are risking dangerous experiences when transitioning to male, as has been discussed before on here (to no avail). Male or percieved male people with personality disorders are treated as more dangerous than women with similar symptoms, and are sometiems diagnosed with different disorders entirely based on percieved gender differences. This affects transmascs too, especially considering the already dire state of queerness in psychiatric institutions. Being a male birthing parent is a whole shitshow of transphobia because men are not supposed to give birth, and transmascs are lucky to access related healthcare at all, let alone access it without being ceaselessly misgendered and treated as a stigmatised 'other' to deleterious affects on parent and baby. These are just a few examples, there are many more ways maleness can screw a person over. And that's not to say that female privilege is a thing instead of male privilege, but rather to emphasise that men are not supposed to be minorities. Men are not supposed to be assaulted, men are not supposed to be outliers, men are absolutely not supposed to be trans.

When a man is autistic, he's not just autistic, he's an autistic male, and that makes him more likely to be killed by cops (especially if black). When someone says "you claim you're not ableist but you're scared of the homeless x on a bus talking to xself", they always say the person is a man, because that sounds more significant (and cops think so too). Consider when a person's rape/abuse is considered to not be all that serious due to the victim being male, or when a man's attraction is considered to be more exploitative than a woman's, or when a fat man is considered more creepy/sexist than a thin man or a fat woman. Consider why so many caricatures of evil and creepiness are men with deformities. Consider the fact that men's bathrooms don't have baby changing tables, and that a man may get less support from others after their child's death than the mother might. Maleness can negatively compound with things like minority status, vulnerability, aggression, sexuality, etc. in ways that screw that person over, both in social spaces (such as queer communities that dislike/distrust maleness and masculinity, or how isolation affects men harder), and in more tangible ways, like their rates of suicide and being murdered.

There are tangible ways in which transitioning to male can negatively affect a person's life even if you remove (hypothetically, not really possible) the transphobia element, and these also constitute as worthwhile topics of discussion. If you think maleness is the lack of gendered oppression, then you're not intersectional in your feminism at all. If your life as a male is genuinely sunshine and rainbows (apart from the transphobia if trans), then good for you, genuinely that's great, but not everyone lives in a radfem fantasy world.

Being unable to tell the difference between men talking about mens issues/liberation, and right wingers talking about oppressing women more, isn't feminist. It's ignorant and antifeminist. (MRAs don't care about actual mens lib, and are actively worsening it because they are sexist and opposed to gender lib. You guys know that, right? That male and female liberation aren't oppositional or binary, but the same gender liberation that is entirely oppositional to patriarchy?)

These men and mascs talking about issues facing men aren't ignorant womanhaters who deny misogyny and want ultraprivileged men to be coddled, they are good faith members of your community with experiences just as varied and valid as yours. Treat them like it.

[hyperlexichypatia]

The thing about Musk's hate speech against unhoused people is that none of the VSPs and general commenters can really offer a rebuttal, or even a witty retort, because he's just saying out loud what the overwhelming majority of the entire political spectrum of Americans actually believes.

Usually, when one of the professional hatemongers starts spewing hate against a marginalized population, there are at least some allies pushing back and invoking marginalized people they care about -- "My nephew is gay, my neighbor is an immigrant," etc. But VSPs and most middle-to-upper-class people don't have unhoused friends. And they can't fundamentally dispute the premise that unhoused people are mentally inferior, since that's central to the premise of their constant drumbeat that the solution to homelessness is forced psychiatric incarceration. So they're stuck giving responses that amount to "You're not supposed to say it like that." The best they can do is an attempted uno reverse of "No, YOU'RE mentally ill!" or accuse him of lacking "compassion", which is just a euphemism for pity, and disabled people know to be suspicious of being offered "compassion" in lieu of civil rights or material resources.

Most housed Americans believe that unhoused people are an intrinsically inferior subspecies of human who should be driven out or incarcerated, "for their own good" or otherwise. That's the belief that unites us. CEOs are unpopular, but the bottom of the income ladder are vermin.

To quote my partner once again: "Remember that two weeks when Serious Thinkers were confused by that song by that redhead whose name I’ve already forgotten because it was critical of both rich people and poor people? And I was like, that is the dominant political view in America because in practice 'moderate' doesn’t usually mean 'a midpoint between liberal and conservative,' it means 'borrowing ideas from both poles that seem like "common sense" because the average person’s politics are essentially self-centered rather than a coherent ideology'. And then they’ll be like, 'Finally, I see my societal-default minimal-thought position represented!' The average person can tell that rich people are exploiting them but also resent people they want to feel better than, it’s not that deep."

[damnfandomproblems]

Fandom Problem #6714:

I hate it when real victims cant distinguish fiction from reality.

its perfectly normal for a victim of csem/csa/grooming to be uncomfortable with loli/shota. it is. its also completely normal for victims to explore that topic in fiction. its a healthy and valid coping mechanism. "but they called me a irl loli/shota/oppai loli/jailbate ect. when I was a child"

you were groomed. and I'm sorry that happened, but the material used to groom you does not automatically make it bad material. they were just a bad person who took advantage of your young age/underdeveloped mind/body to exploit you for their own personal desires.

it was your abuser who could not keep their hands to themselves. it was them who couldn't tell fiction from reality. it was THEM who decided it was okay to groom kids. loli/shota content did not "normalize" it. it didn't make them think its okay. that person was already fucked in the head and just happened to be into loli/shota. so its perfectly normal for you to be uncomfortable with it.

but as one victim to another I am into loli. I enjoy seeing myself as a loli. and my like of fictional content does not make me want to groom kids. In fact I hate kids. whenever I go into a loli tag and I see a real person even if they are an adult I get uncomfortable. I am capable of understanding that what i like in fiction is unrealistic in the real world and that commiting such acts would cause a lot of trauma to a child and I as a person/human being/victim could not do that to a child.

but lolis aren't real. fictional children are just that too. fictional. I don't feel bad about think about a fictional child being raped. My thoughts hurt no one, and if i were to post about it online as an artwork or writing then it is not my fault if some sick fuck decides to go after kids after consuming content i created. they were already fucked up and thats not my fault. its not your fault either. that person would have done it anyway regardless of whether loli/shota content existed. because hundreds of years ago it didnt..

I'm sorry for what you went through, and I'm not here to say "its a shame you aren't into loli/shota" because your trauma and aversion to related subjects is valid, but do not attack another victims coping mechanism, or try to blame the wrong thing. it was your abusers fault, and only their fault. not the arts fault, not the artist of the arts fault, not even the community the artist who made the art is in is at fault. and it most certainly wasn't YOUR fault.

so please for the love of fuck leave people who enjoy loli/shota content alone. especially other victims. if you cant prove someone has/is doing something to a real child then leave them alone. we who enjoy strictly fiction don't like people who use fiction as an excuse to hurt real people. those kinds of people are fucked up (its not called a "psychiatric **DISORDER**" for nothing you know) and we dont welcome them into the loli/shota community. loli/shota is meant to be just fiction, and for someone like me its also a coping mechanism. so just leave us alone and stop blaming us for what your abuser did to you.

- A very tired lolicon

[fuchsiamae]

@mewtwofan1 1976

october 17th, 1976 re: human enrichment & testing initiative, resource acquisition

"low risk" human resource acquisitions

these are all pure caroline. cave fought it at every step -- science needs standards! but their days of testing with humanity's best are long gone. as they learned the hard way, humanity tends to notice when its best disappear. the switch to prison labor hurt cave's pride, but it worked, at least until casualties got SO high HR couldn't fudge them any worse. so they've cut back on convicts, and instead, she has to slowly siphon off the population that won't be missed.

a. hoboes and tramps: when the HR acquisitions team came back from detroit with a busload of able-bodied men looking for work, caroline was over the moon. some are grubby and uncouth, but they'll follow instructions for the promise of a hot meal before the test and $60 after it. some of them make a fuss when they're paid in ApertureBux, but the Aperture Science Official Merchandise Dispensary has all the branded t-shirts and novelty mugs they could ask for.

cave keeps hoping these guys will whip out their banjos and harmonicas and sing something about wanderlust. caroline doesn't bother ruining his hobo fantasy. there's no harm in it -- they look at him funny when he talks at them about the rambling road, but they keep on testing.

b. child orphans and foundlings: not a physically fit as adults, but more psychologically malleable, especially using an abandoned child's inherently low self-esteem. once convinced that their intrinsic value is tied to test completion, a test subject becomes highly motivated to succeed. (see training video series 89 for more on shame-based psychology in orphans. caroline particularly recommends #89-B, "This Is Why No One Wants You." some of her own suggestions made it into that one.)

annoyingly, a lot of the kids surrendered to the Aperture Science Repository for Unfortunate Children are too young even for testing tracks, and putting one in a time accelerator was... unsuccessful. trying to find a use for preverbal infants has led the lab to expand on harlow's "wire mother/cloth mother" experiments, using mothers of ten other substances (straw mother, adhesive mother, wood-with-protruding-nails mother etc), none of which have milk. they're not sure what this will do, but they've gotta do something with all these spare babies, so they might as well find out.

c. psychiatric patients: disappointing. she'd hoped for inmates whose condition has no effect on testing fitness (homosexuals, outspoken women), but that demographic is smaller now than it was thirty years ago. most residents of the Aperture Science Institute for the Mentally Unsound have louder, messier, more inconvenient problems. the pharmacology dept has started playing with drug trials to treat their various ailments, but by and large they're no good on a testing track.

d. seniors: by far the most useless demographic for portal-based testing, but the easiest to acquire -- seems like every family within three states has a spare pop-pop or spinster auntie to palm off. the Aperture Science Sunset Senior Home makes a tidy little income on what these families pay for their upkeep. and around here, a live human never goes to waste.

each acquisitions department has a showroom set up, a small visiting area kept neat and presentable, so any outside guests won't question their loved ones' living conditions. that precaution turns out to be unnecessary. they've never had a single visitor.

oh yknow what might be fun? reply to this with a year and I'll do a few lines on what's going on with cave/caroline/aperture that year