#which. is ableism and eugenics. but i did not know that

[thejacespace]

randomly thinking about that one assignment during the lord of the flies unit in 10th grade english where we were given a hypothetical: 4 people are stranded and their boat can only carry 3, who do you leave behind? and idr a lot of specifics but 1 character was asthmatic and 1 was diabetic and at the time i didn't know how to articulate how fucked up that was and said something to the tune of "you're asking us to play god and i'm not okay with that"

eugenics.

my teacher was asking us to do eugenics based on ableist bullshit.

[spot-the-ableism]

https://www.tumblr.com/homochadensistm/762029424206020608/do-not-open-this-persons-archive-and-go-to-october

just was made very uncomfortable with the use of the r-slur (especially as an autistic person)

“The R-word, also known as the R-slur, is a hurtful term that remains prevalent throughout social media, according to a Kantar Social Listening study. The research shows that when social media users are posting about people with intellectual disabilities, 7 in every 10 of those posts are negative, and 6 in 10 contain a slur.  The R-word is a form of hate speech that stands for “retard,” “retarded,” or other offensive words ending in “-tard.” While “mental retardation” was originally introduced as a medical term in 1961 for people with intellectual disabilities, in the decades since, the R-word has become an insult used all too commonly in everyday language. Those who use the R-word often do so with little regard for the pain it causes people with intellectual disabilities—and the exclusion it perpetuates in our society.” -source

there’s not exactly any perfect resource I can point to that explains everything correctly so I will explain, since I will be @‘ing homo with this information I genuinely do think it’s that because their first language is not English they probably don’t know about the reason why people are upset, so I am using the benefit of the doubt.

“Retard”, “retarded”, “retardation” and “retardant” are all words that mean to slow or delay something. It’s originally a French-ish word.

there are many different contexts that the word is used, not all times is it a slur.

But the reason it is, is due to almost a hundred plus years of systemic abuses to intellectually disabled people, epileptics, people with learning disabilities and people with autism and schizophrenia.

for almost a 100 plus years people were sent to institutions or asylums to live out the rest of their lives abused or dying, many many people died in those institutions.

they were diagnosed with “mental retardation” which is actually an umbrella term for all sorts of mental and neurological disabilities, many people with Down’s syndrome, facial deformities and differences, people without the use of their vocal cords and more were also treated in these asylums and institutions and were among the many effected by the rampant systemic ableism and eugenics of the time.

there is this idea that asylums and institutions are not bad, when in reality it’s been almost 200-300 years of them and you can have families and friends and people who wrote books about it and they’ll tell you what it is. Hell.

so why did I give you that context?

well the reason “retarded” or “retard” is a slur is because of those institutions and asylums treatment of people they called the R slur.

their autonomy was taken away, they had no rights, anyone calling out the abuses of institutions were for a long time also penalised, and the eugenics of the time had swayed way too many peoples opinions of the rights of the neurodevlopmentally disabled.

over time things got better and the eugenics of it all started to be penalised, but the fact remains that the r slur is incredibly hurtful and harmful to people still to this day.

there is generational trauma that comes with being neurodevlopmentally disabled or having intellectual disability.

so a lot of people are very insulted and upset at the usage of the word as a slur to insult or belittle others.

I hope that makes sense to you @homochadensistm

[fluideli123]

Watching the Paw Patrol movies is actually a really interesting phenomenon between looking at cute puppies experience found family and seeing dog camps and eugenics just casually thrown into the plot so well that you have to spot and point while your jaw drops.

Like, what do you mean Chase was abandoned by his original owners in Adventure City? Shows Megalophobia and even Agoraphobia because of it? What do you mean this CHILD was nearly ran over? Near death? Like did we truly just brush past that?

And not to mention Skye? Girl was born different from everyone else and faced dog ableism for being "small and weak." She faced worth issues because of how she was born and so it caused her to believe she needed to "fix" or "enhance" herself in order to be worth a damn? Also she ALSO nearly died in a blizzard?

I need more movies, because what the fuck happened to the rest of the pups? Like jesus christ how can the lore get even darker????

Also I can and WILL analyze Ryder for HOURS! That boy obviously went through some shit to always be pulling his lil dog children away from danger and thinking completely side lining them in okay without a proper discussion. Like! Sure! I get you, but, sir you could do so much better what held you back??? What happened in your life that you would know how to get your hands on high tech and merchandise like it's your passion?

Also, my live reactions to the movie so ya'll understand how far the illness goes:

[IMAGE ID: The following images are messages between myself (A), dakota (D), and pyro (P). I start the conversation:

A: ...I'm sorry dog camps? Chase can you stop being relatable

D: Dog camps?

A: Humdinger literally is rounding up all the dogs in the ity and putting them into a "reformed" obedience school and it's- it's giving dog camps

D: Oh. /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: PLEASE! Okay but humdinger is the embodiment of capitalism and ecological terrorist

P: oh he is /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: GIGGLES! Also I think Ryder is a blunt guy but his intentions aren't ever mean. He also is so one to explain after an event is over [why] he chose a decision but it's not what the pups agree with because they're impatient and because Ryder has a flaw in it

P: Amen

A: Headcanon that Ryder grew up in a strict household so his pup parenting is affected. Not that it excuses it but it just explains his tone and such

P: Truth

A: I am so invested in Paw Patrol lore I regret nothing /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Me when- me when Chase is believed in, told he is brave and deadass jumps an entire broken off building just to get to his dad Ryder

P sends a crying cat emoji

A: I am so not okay, something about the second movie makes me think [Ryder] learned from Chase about "we do it together" and "giving second changes and not putting people on the side lines easily"

P sends mant crying cat emojis along with: The silly dog movie made me feel so much /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: P: Rocky I love you so much oh my GOD. Diagnosing him with the 'tism

A: Please do PLEASE! Chase is giving MacKenzie from Bluey about abandonment

D: God why do you inflict this damage upon us-

A: Because it's the truth and I only speak the truth /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Something about the scene with Rocky and Chase sleeping and her shaking her head [and in the second movie wanting to] constantly prove her abilities gives me Trans Vibes I don't know /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: I agree!! Plus, it fits into the eugenic themes in the second movie and [Skye's] story. Still hung up on doggy camps gotta be honest. That shit was a weird click in my brain

D: Well, camps do have a certain history for the world so, makes sense

A: Yeah, no I agree, which is why I keep thinking about it. Like collecting mass groups of beings you despise and think are lowly into a confined and horrible area to be dealt with?? Yeah, man, I don't know

P: That sure was something

A: For real, like, I don't know, it's definitely Chase lore and if we're gonna connect that to something than that's a can to spill /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Mhm mhm!! Also something about Rumble knowing science is my favorite thing ever. Boom!Knuckles and Movie!Rumble need an entire series dedicated to them being them(tm) /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A series of images on the same topic read:

A: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE! I also believe Zuma gives biracial vibes, don't ask me why

P: YOURE RIGHT! Zuma keeps being forgotten i think that should be fixed

A sends a gif of Zuma dancing while stating: I agree I could never forget that sweet pea. I headcanon him as afro-latino Asian, the pup gods told me so

P: I'm the pup gods

A sends a gif of Marshall filling a kiddie pool with Chase, Skye, Rumble and Zuma, stating: WHEEZE! Chase gets to be white passing Latino. Skye gives Cajuns decent. Marshall is the only white boy. Rumble is only half white and I don't know what the other half is

D: Filipino, why? Because you couldn't decided and I'm a whore for Filipino representation

A: YES! I AGREE WITH THIS! Chase is Latino, Skye is Cajun, Zuma is Asian Afro-Latino, Rumble is White and Filipino, Marshall is White! "Why are you giving dogs race and ancestory" BECAUSE I CAN AND I WILL

D: Because it feels right /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Something Something Liberty trying to define herself by others around her and not herself. ALSO! "Amplify things about us" and it's about Skye flying and being strong, something something, she was always strong and deserving of her title and position she was just the only one who thought she had to be more /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: Two images on the same topic that state:

A: Also Liberty always enhancing or being a double example of the main lesson and theme and even plot is something that is important to me

P: Liberty is very important to me. She's also the oldest trust, I'm the dog nerd

A: In the first [movie Liberty] wanted to join something she admired and wanted to serve something bigger than herself which enhanced Chase's story about worth, that fear is something to overcome and not stop you, to get back up again and fight for what you want.

A: Also Liberty pushing Lil kids to get their potential reflecting and enhancing the theme of how much Skye pushes herself because she has something she wants and always thinks she has to prove it by pushing and doing things on her own [when she] shouldn't have to /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Also to add into the eugenics themes, Skye believing she has to be "enhanced" (made better) to have her full worth and power to display just because she was born differently than everyone else

D sends a deeply concerned emoji

A: Chase's story being about bravery and Skye's about Bodily Worth /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: P: Ryder actually makes me so mad. I'm sorry I try hard to love him but he makes me SO MAD

A: Ryder when he took Chase to when he nearly got ran over, Ryder not letting Chase or Liberty or Skye join when they're having a hard time, always putting even pups he doesn't know very well first about their will being by ending a program and it makes me think so AGGRESSIVELY that he's afraid of losing them and so he keeps thinking leaving them in safe places is what is best when it's NOT

A: NO SAME! Ryder "to ensure everyone's safety I have to leave people behind" Papa. I need to analyze him so bad. What happened to you to make you like this bro

P: I see where he's coming from but oh my god he makes me so mad /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: No, I agree, in the next movie I need [Ryder] to learn, man. [Skye is taking all [the crystals] SKYE DON'T! Don't over compensate for something you don't even need to :(((. The eugenics hit her hard. Also they're so found family coded, Ryder saw all these kids and adopted them and helped them find themselves and their purpose and supports them so heavily and I need to bash my head in about how much they mean to me /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Skye's movie is also about how accessibility and community is important but putting her worth in your "incapabilities" because you were born different. Also ableism [from Victoria saying] "need me to slow down Lil pup" /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Also Victoria's parallel to Skye using her "madness" aka mental instability and personality disorder and Skye's physical disabilities. I am right give me my Paw Patrol award /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: Token girl [Skye] becomes an actual fucking character I adore and love and need more of

P: Token girl proves she's not just a diversity hire

A: With her own movie too! Oh, this scene, this scene makes me GO INSANE. Ryder "I need you safe my daughter please come back to me." No pups too small go girl go! Skye against ableism- Ryder thinking he lost his daughter and her brothers thinking the same thing! Trans girl power! "How can a puppy be trans" Because I said so!

P: And you are right!

A: Doesn't she have trans vibes?! Like I cannot explain it [she is] Trans because she was Born That Way(tm)

P: She does! She does! /END ID]

[IMAGE ID: A: "Protect all those who need our help!" Skye against ableism! I love her so much! She's healing! 10/10 movies, man. Also something something the pups cars and armor being symbolism for disability accessibility

D: Okay now make an essay about it right now/j

P: /srs /END ID]

All in all, if there's one thing to take away from this post it's the following screenshots

[IMAGE ID: A: I need to start making Paw Patrol fics now

A: I am about to feed the paw patrol fandom /END ID]

[intersexbookclub]

Discussion summary: Trans-Intersex studies

On 2023-09-29 we met to discuss our first foray into academic intersex studies! We read three chapters from Transgender and intersex: Theoretical, practical, and artistic perspectives, edited by Stefan Horlacher (2016).

Overall reactions:

Dimitri: I liked there were perspectives I don't normally think about or see

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): I found the Costello chapter really useful because I've wondered why there isn't more trans and intersex connections and this explained it for me

Michelle (@scifimagpie): it tapped into and articulated a larger strain in the queer community “the people who want to have a gender” vs “the people who want to destroy gender, there is a fundamental struggle in that can only be dealt with through tolerance and acceptance

vic: multiple chapters make clear that intersex is made by doctors. This thing happens when you give birth and you don't know what to do and conveniently there’s someone confidently giving you a (usually really bad) answer…  we're foisting off this thing that doctors aren't trained to deal with it properly plus have medical arrogance

Connections to Disability Studies

Though the book was intended to get intersex studies and trans studies in dialogue, we made many connections to disability studies throughout the discussion.

Elizabeth: The book talks about the dynamic that the doctors are the ones who socially construct intersex, which is similar to how doctors contribute to the social construction of disability. 

Elizabeth: And also how in our society, when it comes to who is listened to most on disability/intersex, doctors come first, followed by parents, and it's those of us actually affected who come last (disability/intersex)

Michelle: it was interesting to see the arguments against eugenic abortion… The amount of eugenicist propaganda that's still around in our society, the text addressing the fact that people would abort an intersex foetus didn't surprise me but did alarm me

Elizabeth: Coming from disability studies I felt the question of who is/isn't intersex isn't actually a productive question, in DS we posed those questions for a minute before realizing it's not productive, to instead focus on ableism

Dimitri spoke about the idea of seeing your body as a garden that you tend to, rather than a machine to be fixed, and how it’s been a helpful framing

Michelle: one thing about accepting my intersex identity is that my body isn't broken for having a hormonal imbalance and it's just a way of being

The social and medical models of disability were invoked by Costello in chapter 4, to show contrasting models of intersex (social vs medical) and transness (social vs medical).

-=-=-

Chapter 1: Introduction by Stefan Horlacher, Pages 1-27. 

This chapter gave a brief overview of the state of trans studies and intersex studies, and the motivation for putting these two research areas into dialogue. 

We didn’t talk much about this chapter.

Elizabeth: I personally learnt a new word, repronormativity, from this chapter! Per Wiktionary, it refers to the “assumption that all humans want to have children, especially within the context of a monogamous heterosexual relationship”

vic rather aptly described it as “so GERMAN”

-=-=-

Chapter 4: Intersex and Trans* Communities: Commonalities and Tensions by Cary Gabriel Costello, Pages 83-113

This chapter reports on a sociological study of trans and intersex communities on Second Life, noting commonalities as well as tensions between and within the communities. 

Everybody found this the easiest chapter of the three to read lol 😅

vic: “I really appreciated the breadth of voices that were included. The author clearly has an argument, but still lets people speak. Like with the person who said ‘I'm not intersex’ and the author was like ‘this could come from fragile masculinity’, it was neat.”

Costello’s conceptual framework

To understand both intersex and trans communities, Costello employs a framework which differentiates a:

Medical framework, in which being intersex/trans is framed as “as a biological problem: a physical lack, superfluity, or malfunction” (p98). While Costello doesn’t use the word “truscum”, this is how many of us are used to referring to people who understand transness through this lens.

Identity framework, in which being intersex/trans is “framed as social in nature: social stigma is directed toward those who are in some way physically variant.”

An important insight of this study was that to understand the relationship between the trans and intersex communities, you have to realize there are four communities at play, not two:

Medical framework trans people (truscum)

Identity framework trans people

Medical framework intersex people 

Identity framework intersex people (who are the only ones who use DSD)

And as Dimitri summarized, “the tensions [between the communities] arise in the disorder framework, a lot of the problems lie in the disorder framework, and it's pretty important to make that separation”

In Costello’s study, anti-trans sentiment was linked to the intersex-as-disorder framework 

Costello writes about how the majority of intersex people are trained from birth to employ the disorder framework, which can easily result in anti-trans sentiment. Many intersex people are raised in a way where the slightest gender deviance is punished, and feel threatened by gender deviance. 

Multiple people noted how the intersex participant “Anna” from Costello’s study had misplaced anger at trans people, that it’s unfair to blame trans people for trans fetish porn when trans people have such difficulty getting conventional employment, and that the demand by cis & perisex people is more at issue

Elizabeth: so many intersex people are told they're intersex by a doctor and that they're disordered and the doctor will fix them so they're not given any community because the doctor is like "I'll fix you" and people are just used to the disorder framework because that's what they've only ever seen.

vic: Yeah, being born visibly intersex getting framed as a medical emergency

Elizabeth: really liked the dig that the shame of the parent comes above everything else

Dimitri: many parents don't know what's going on when their intersex baby is born and they're kinda pressured into the surgeries…  the parents might have veered to a more neutral stance on their own, maybe they have some hesitance about having a kid being different, that the surgeries are such a pile-on by everyone around them.... the parents of the kids need their own support, what do the parents need or could have had to make them not make those choices

Similarly, intersexism from trans people was linked to the trans-as-disorder framework

Costello discusses how many disorder-framework trans participants made statements along the lines of wanting to be intersex, or have an “intersex variation of the mind”, mistakenly thinking that this means they may be entitled to free gender affirming therapy (it actually makes it harder to access gender affirming therapy).

Costello explains why this sort of sentiment from trans people is poorly received by intersex people: “It alienates intersex people employing the identity framework by working against their mission to recast physical sex variance as diversity rather than disorder. It alienates intersex people employing the disorder framework by implying that trans-identification [...or] gender-confusion should characterize the intersex person. And the stories told by some trans* people employing the disorder framework about having an impossible intersex history angels intersex people of all camps.” (p107)

Michelle: To be intersex is to have a medicalized gender, and how any gender nonconformity is medicalized… it makes sense why so many trans people would cling onto a misunderstanding of intersex

Michelle: the medicalization of being transgender and you need surgery to fix a flaw in your brain, and the medicalization of intersex, they both need an anti-eugenics approach of let people be a little broken/different

Elizabeth: as a disabled intersex person it's been confusing that trans people would want medicalization like they don't know how terribly medicalized ppl are treated, and the chapter helped me realize they are already medicalized and they're trying to get a more "legitimate" medicalization rather than realizing they’re trying to play a rigged game

vic: transness is medicalized, too–the diagnosis is gender dysphoria and the treatment is transitioning. Also transitioning is only seen as a viable treatment because literally everything else doctors did to “cure” trans people didn’t work (they tried *so* many things). Trans people treating medicalization as something that’s desirable sucks, but I feel so deeply for anyone who was put in a place where that seems like their only option–people who feel like their only way forward is to claim things that don't make any sense. They're like “please, I'll do anything, I'll lie out of my ass, help me”. Those poor people!! And, of course, they also cause harm. It's all so sad. 

Criticisms of Costello’s chapter:

Elizabeth: I felt a weakness was not talking about the hypervisibility of trans people vs the invisibility of intersex people. Like trans people who have huge platforms to talk about gender stuff and should know better than to perpetuate perinormative ideas about sex.

vic: transmascs tend to really minimize our own difficulties. We're not well studied, and when we are, the data consistently shows we have the worst outcomes of any gender (in things like health, mental health, employment…). Disheartening to see Costello buy into it at times.

-=-=-

Chapter 5: Transgender and Intersex: Unavoidable Essentialism and the Normative Struggle for Recognition by Sebastian Jansen, Pages 115-140

High level notes

This chapter makes the argument that it’s impractical, if not impossible, to avoid essentialism of some form when theorizing about sex/gender, and so academic gender studies scholars should spend less time trying to avoid essentialism and focus more on improving the material circumstances for intersex, trans & LGBA+ individuals.

vic: I think they were saying that we can't do it because it can't be done without throwing trans & intersex people under the bus

Elizabeth: ch5 was how I realized that in the social [identity] model of intersex where we see intersex as a natural variation it is essentialism and I'm okay with it thanks to this chapter

We all agreed this was a challenging read. As vic put it: “it was very ‘as you know’ and I didn't know”, and that the author was probably nervous about writing it.

Jansen’s chapter got us talking about the nature of gender

Michelle and vic talked about how finding out truth about gender is building houses on shifting sand

Michelle: I liked the stairwell metaphor [that female is one level of a building, male is another level, and there’s a stairwell in between]... I don't like the idea of female and male in opposition, they are categories, you can be both/neither/change

Elizabeth: I did like how ch5 talked about how gender isn't just a thing in your brain, it's made through interactions of people interpreting your gender in interactions and they didn't talk about euphoria and I think gender euphoria is that feeling of people seeing you for the gender you are

Michelle: [Judith Butler’s]  gender as conversation reminded me of how art and research are forms of conversation... is gender a form of art?? [we then spent some time talking about this]

Elizabeth: I like the idea that gender should be like hair colour - it's there, you can change/experiment with it, it affects how people see you, but we don't organize society around it and I agree that's a good goal

vic: my gender is contextual - it's different depending on whether in an arts context vs. in interacting with landlord, etc

vic: in War & Peace there are four pages spent describing the beauty of a woman with a moustache–Tolstoy waxes quite poetic about how beautiful & beauty-enhancing her moustache is.

Elizabeth: yeah so many cultures see women's mustaches and/or unibrows as beautiful and hate how current Western culture hates hair

Elizabeth: yeah it's SO RECENT the idea that women shave legs, the Gillette company had saturated the men's market and convinced women that their hair is bad

A main critique of Jansen’s chapter was how it only considered Western perspectives

Elizabeth: ch5 was so Western, based on a mind/body dualism and I wanted there to be a discussion of other cultural constructions, like in cultures without mind/body dualism from what I can tell it's often that trans and intersex are not separated. 

We then spent some time talking about different cultural ideas about sex/gender such as Two-Spirit and hijra, and the intense medicalization of transness in Russia

Dimitri described how Russian/Slavic culture is big on repressing any kind of sexuality, and being queer is deeply tied to perversion, which kicked off a discussion of Left Hand of Darkness

Elizabeth: another reason I wanted postcolonial stuff was it'd be useful to have strategic essentialism discussed (Spivak), which seems really relevant to a discussion of essentialism.

Overall we were all glad we got to give our brains some exercise, and we’ll be reading more intersex studies in November! 😅 Join us for a discussion of Holmes’ Critical Intersex on Nov 24.

[sepdet]

To nobody's surprise (except followers of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party), this excerpt is chilling:

In May 2020, Fred attended a meeting with Trump at the White House alongside several health advocates, as well as Trump’s former Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Brett Giroir, the former assistant secretary for health. At first, things were going well.

[CW: extreme ableism and gratuitous cat photos below the cut. The latter is in no way meant to make light of the former.]

“The meeting I had assumed would be a quick handshake hello with Donald had turned into a 45-minute discussion in the Oval Office,” Fred wrote. “Donald seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members, who were constantly in and out of the hospital and living with complex arrays of challenges.”

After the meeting concluded, however, Trump called his nephew back in to speak with him.

“I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members,” Fred wrote. “But I was wrong.”

He recalled his uncle’s words to him: “‘Those people …’ Donald said, trailing off. ‘The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.’” Fred wrote that he hadn’t known how to respond to the former president’s comment, so he quickly left

But Trump’s callous, inhuman attitude toward Americans with disabilities did not end there. Fred recounted a later interaction with his uncle, where he had called the former president to ask for help buoying the fund that supported his son’s care.

Fred wrote that his uncle didn’t seem convinced. “‘I don’t know,’ he finally said, letting out a sigh. ‘He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.’

“Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Donald say that. It wasn’t far off from what he’d said that day in the Oval Office after our meeting with the advocates. Only that time, it was other people’s children who should die. This time, it was my son,” Fred wrote.

This time, Fred hit back, he wrote. “‘No, Donald,’ I said. ‘He does recognize me.’”

Oop, there it is: Donald Trump, eugenicist.

Childless cat lady reaction:

You can't imagine what it was like going through the pandemic as a medically vulnerable person, watching the President encouraging people to drop precautions against spreading a deadly disease. He forced me to self-isolate even more, because I couldn't enter any building without encountering unmasked people before there was a vaccine. "Childless cat lady?!" Fuck you, Vance, that cat was my life support when Trump threw us under the bus.

Which reminds me, I need to order the next $6000 injection I've had to take since COViD plus arthritis turned my immune system into a hit squad against my own organs.

Trump would tell my father, who pays my medical bills, to let me die.

And I'm keenly aware how lucky I am to have family to support me, unlike all the people like me who did die.

@pumpkin-belly passed away peacefully in my lap in May. I spent more on an elderly cat’s medical bills than a billionaire was willing to spend on his own great-nephew. That bighearted orange fluffball was worth infinitely more than the orange carbuncle running for president.

Whom I don't trust not to follow through with his notions of eugenics if he is reelected.

Avenge Pumpkin. Defend disabled people. Vote blue. (Please)

[newhologram]

Spiritual vloggers say things like, “I was diagnosed with PTSD and depression but I don’t claim those.” I know everyone has their own process but it kinda makes me sad? Spiritual bypass doesn’t allow your practice to do anything if you deny what your nervous system survived.

I see the same kind of bypass with chronic illness and autism (“Oh, I’m not neurodivergent and traumatized by an abusive and cruel world, I’m actually a Highly Sensitive Starseed!”) and it all stems from ableism no matter how sparkly you make it sound.

Look, I don’t resonate with most of humanity either. I genuinely feel alien, I do not feel from here. It is comforting to use otherworldly archetypes to process my existence. I think this is the point of existing; our hand-stitched inner mythology.

But… it’s okay to have a disability. It doesn’t make you “out of alignment” or “low vibration” or anything like that.

A higher, more evolved version of humanity is not one in which disability doesn’t exist at all. It’s one in which disability is adequately accommodated for so that we can live comfortably and thrive.

Please keep ableism and eugenics out of spiritual teachings but also out of your inner talk. It does you no good to think of parts of yourself as bad (being punished) in the same way toxic religions and capitalism tell you about these things. “You’re disabled because you sinned” and “you’re not disabled, you’re lazy” are ways we’re taught that disabled people did it to themselves and don’t deserve compassion, much less assistance getting medical care or basic needs met.

Also no shade but when astrologers who study/teach Chiron speak this way I’m like. What.

[siphonophoresupernumerary]

You gots to have the patience to teach, walk people through things. It looks like a LOT of people did not understand the full ramifications of their vote, and they need someone to explain it to them. A lot of conservatives are conservative because they don't feel like they are welcome amongst the left, and while they weren't so conservative before, they became more conservative later as they spent more time away from people they thought rejected them. And to be fair a lot of them are complex people with bad beliefs and not enough experience in cultural diversity to play ball with communists and anarchists, but so long as they feel welcomed or at least tolerated they will find their spots, some will become anti-fascist and allies and some will become left leaning centrists. And that is ok. Massive action hardly ever happens, it requires everyone to be on the same page and it worries me how everyone is forgetting that you only KNOW the things that you HEAR, and there's so much conflicting information to hear! And everyone gets caught up in how they feel and what they've heard before and what they've heard before creates ideological momentum in what they will believe next. No one is immune to this effect.

In high school I was a homophobic fascist who hardly knew any better and couldn't grasp how these beliefs, when acted on by others I helped put into power, would effect the world and those around me. But I was also a self described communist. I recognized the power and unity of fascism and the mutualistic power and unity of communism. I still had a lot to learn about myself and political ideologies. Coming out of high school I was a sexist too depressed to be a fascist(other people get depressed into fascism, I'm probably weird) socialist-communist who has started to put together theories on small mutualistic communities being fairly stable governmental structures, but my depression told me that there would be a constant backslide into power grabbing and pain and war.

Had I not been friends with my partner (something my ex was against) I would have wandered amidst whatever ideologies came my way over the internet and at the pulpit at church and on the radio(which was always NPR thanks to my parents). My parents gave me a liberal christian upbringing, an oddity among christian culture, but I was able to deviate from that all on my own, to good and bad places. My partner who was already gay and trans and poly and not Christian, who had built up trust over the dark days of quarantine and was not afraid to correct me gently enough to not hurt my feelings (though she will claim he was mean about it) led me by the hand farther left than my parents.

There is a world where instead of the nonbinary mostly pan transwoman who is proud of her weirdness, I am a man full of hate from high school that never healed, a strict judge, a nationalist with a penchant for authoritarianism. I could have strayed into racism, transphobia, ableism, as it was I struggled to let go of my eugenics ideas until I understood that the slippery slope can taint any belief. Being able to gene edit your children leading to Gattaca (1997) or the eugenics wars in Star Trek. The socialist Soviet Union failing because it was an authoritarian nationalist state with a growing oligarchy rather than communism simply not working. No governance works off paper for too long, even anarchy will eventually create a government on it's own.

What helped me most was a firm belief that no one deserves to die, and no one deserves to suffer, and no one gets to chose to kill or inflict pain on others. Christians believe in Loving Thy Neighbor, but they also believe in hard work and earning their way into earthly prosperity and heaven after they die. Some suffering is ok, it's just god testing us. What you need to do is impress upon them the importance of loving thy neighbor. It is second only to "Loving the Lord Thy God". A lot of christians won't be moved by this, and that is ok, conserve your patience and energy to apply it where it is needed most. You cannot be mean if you want them to join you, and I know they can be so so annoying, but the constant sniping and yelling only serves to solidify factions, which is what the rights leadership wants. They want us to divide and fight between eachother. It is up to us to be kind, but also take no shit. Some values you will not be able to change, but if you can make them feel more comfortable with us than them then they'll get closer to us and see things our way.

The issue with conservatives is that their leadership is lying to them, about so much. Their system of beliefs is so much about faith in unreachable authority figures, and their leaders know this and manipulate it. And now we see illegal immigrants who voted for Trump getting reported by their Trump voting neighbors and deported. The economy is genuinely in a bad spot but to them it's so much more dramatic and they're promised fixes if they just have faith and keep voting red. At the ground floor, christians are generally Nice, though not necessarily Kind, and that is welcoming for a lot of people who are looking for community, safety, and direction.

The issue with liberals (and by that I mean literally anyone left of center) is that they love to nitpick and talk and argue. They're Kind but not Nice and that drives people away. Plus they tend to reject any bandaids because it's not the perfect size bandage for any given wounds, and so things don't get done in a hurry and no one is happy with what you actually end up with. Also the aforementioned fractioning of factions helps induce this inability to compromise with eachother, and the people on the right who create their rhetoric draw acceptable lines in unique places depending on who they are and who they appeal to, creating so many levels of acceptable variations. Then when that rhetoric meets the leftist shores it feels disjointed and impossible to appease, and that's true of the most staunch supporters. In reality most people have their own unique nuances and lines that they've made, and they can be reached.

There IS racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and antisemitism and more in both groups. You would be surprised to see how little in some conservative spots, though on the whole the left has more of a handle on it, though again, they're Kind but not Nice and that gets them into trouble and fractioning with themselves.

My mother's side of the family lives in the poorest county in the state, directly on the bible belt, mormon for generations even, some of them went west with the pioneers. That land has been in the family since it was colonized, and I'm told it was purchased from the indigenous people who lived there, though whether it was a fair deal I have no way to know. Most everyone there is a republican and Trump supporter to boot. But my family has been a pillar of liberalism in spite of it all around them. Generations back a great great great (or so) grandmother wrote a feminist essay about how she ought to be treated the same as men, women were always a huge influence in the family, it was the wife who had the family move back from out west, they are educated, almost all women in the family on recent generations were and are teachers of one form or other. They hold such beliefs as "military bad actually" "Universal Basic Income is really good and also The Future" and "illegal immigrants are literally our neighbors. Be nice to them they're normal people". They vote blue, and they try to have civil conversations with their red neighbors, they don't always get queer stuff but they were fine that I have a trans boy partner, and have attended pride events.

City leftists love to hate on rural folk, and honestly they have earned the ire, but so many of them are ignorant, stuck in the rut of Fox News feeding them stories of terrorist immigrants and litterpans in schools. They care a lot about economy because they're poor. From what I hear from city folk complaining about things they've heard about country folk, it appears to me to be influencers wearing the trappings of poor working class country folk while they have spotless or neatky cluttered kitchens and time to wear makeup all the time. My family has lived next to a burned up husk of a house for around 15 years. I don't remember the last time they had a clean house and I was around shortly after it was built. Drugs run rampant in the country, anything to distract from your own poverty and give you some feeling of control until it tears families apart.

You HAVE to be kind, you HAVE to be patient. If you don't have the energy then just ignore them. Stick up for yourself, and be willing to give them time to change on their own too. A mind isn't usually changed in just one day, especially when its a long held belief that has been unchallenged, or refined in the fires of seeing weirdos on the other side and being told what they think and why by people who don't have their best interests at heart or are cynics who call themselves realists. Be firm, but also open minded, sometimes they'll agree with you in a really annoying way, show that you do care about them and their feelings, but don't roll over and let them walk all over you. If they won't listen then they won't listen, you have done what you can.

Good luck out there

[applesandbannas747]

hi there ✧⁠◝⁠(⁠⁰⁠▿⁠⁰⁠)⁠◜⁠✧

I've been getting into fence recently, and got given the novels for my birthday today, and I was wondering...where do they fit into the canon of the comics, and the reading order?

also, follow up....are they going to ruin the comics for me, because I've read a lot about mischaracterisation, ableism, racism and worse in them recently?

Hey friend! Welcome to Fence!! And of course happy birthday—I hope it’s been a great one! 💜

So the novels exist in a weird pseudo-canon black hole. I honestly believe they were supposed to be more canon than they ended up being but either Pacat realized that he let the author of the novels, Sarah Rees Brennan, get ahead of the story in his excitement OR because of fan reaction/further consideration after Disarmed came out, Pacat ended up backtracking. The novels are meant to take place after RIVALS (volume 4) and before RISE (volume 5) and cover a couple of weeks in that stretch of time. However, RISE picked up right after RIVALS with no hint of any adventures having happened. The novels are not referenced at all—the biggest nod to it is Seiji wearing a watch. That’s the only acknowledgment of it at all, which is strange because some pretty substantial developments happen in the duology that could not be ignored. That is to say, RISE continues to develop something the novels conclusively resolved with no explanation other than the events of the novels simply never happened. Pacat has said that the novels are 80% canon, but the events clearly aren’t included in that 80%—the characterization from the novels does carry over to the comics, so if you notice a difference between volume 3 and RIVALS (volume 4), that’s where that came from. (Striking Distance was written before and during RIVALS (volume 4), despite being published after it.)

The novels are completely unnecessary to read and irrelevant to the plot. So if you read the novels, it’s for your own enjoyment. You probably came to them the same way most Fence comic fans did—through a love of the story and the characters and a desire to spend more time with them. Some people loved the novels, finding them fun and easy read. Some people love what SRB did with the characters. That’s cool for them, but fair warning that the characters are one dimensional caricatures of what they were in the comic and are painfully stupid. Like they are emotionally and cognitively at the level I’d expect to see in 8 year olds. The way Nick is treated by the narrative is incredibly belittling of poor people, treating them like idiots who don’t know anything and are unable to solve their own problems—but good thing the rich people are there to take care of him! Seiji’s obviously written as autistic in the worst way. As someone that’s autistic, I cannot articulate in a way allistic people can understand how much it hurts to have your special interest betray and mock you/what you are. Seiji is like is Sheldon Cooper and Miranda Sings had a child. And the narrative thinks it’s god’s gift to autistic people for it. His entire personality is stripped away and replaced with the author’s idea of autism and it sucks. SRB knows so little about the characters that she looked at Eugene, saw a brown kid, and labeled him Mexican through implication—also had him not understand racism against Asian people despite being Asian too. She implied that Nick’s gay as well rather than his canonical bisexual. Aiden’s honestly bordering on abusive toward Harvard during Striking Distance, and Williams has a really fucked up interaction with some of the boys that’s literally sexual harassment even though it wasn’t framed that way by the narrative. Beyond that, in my opinion, SRB doesn’t know how to write chemistry and in fact turned me heavily off Aiden and Harvard as characters as a ship. She also dented Nichoji’s appeal for me when I consider her characterization. So you’re not even getting any good moments there for the trouble imo.

If I were you, I’d skip the novels. They don’t add anything to canon and you’re not missing any context by ditching them. And you’d be saving yourself a lot of cringing, discomfort, and anger of varying degrees depending on where you fall on things. If you want specifics, please feel free to message me on or off anon! I tried to be as spoiler free as possible here haha

If you want to explore more on your own, you can check out some other asks/thoughts! (These all contain novel spoilers)

My full review of Disarmed

Autism representation in Seiji

Seiji in general

Eugene

Eugesse as a concept in Disarmed

Eugesse interactions in Disarmed

Nick's bisexuality

Coach Williams and sexual harassment

I also found an ask from someone saying they regret reading the novels while going through my posts to compile this list, which I thought was too hilariously on-topic to omit

(PS a birthday song for you to enjoy uwu)

[charliethemanticore]

please tell me about sayer and bernard roth, and do not pretend to be normal about it 🩷

okay okay okay, anon I am giving you a little kiss on the forehead. I am gonna be going back through my notes so if this takes a hot minute, that’s why.

Update: This is… getting very long so I’m going to do this in sections. Your introduction lies below the readmore. Because I’ve hit 850 words. It really needs an edit. I am not doing that. Have fun. There will be another installment later.

So. Corsets (and Why We're So Weird About Them)

So, a few things need to be established here to understand the roots of modern anti-corset rhetoric. I will be dealing with sexism, ableism, and likely touching on racism within the medical field during the 19th century. If you’re anything like me, you will be angry by the end of this, just hopefully at some guys who have been dead a really long time, and not me. I’m just some guy who is three arbitrary credits off having a degree in History (with High Distinctions, btw. I’m very proud of my disabled ass for my current 6.0 on our 7-point scale)

France, America, and the UK in the 19th century were very Christian in the 19th century. The research I’ve done mostly focused on these countries, however I did briefly dabble in German history because the medical dress reform movement more or less started there, but more on that later.

As many of you know, it is a fairly standard belief in (many denominations of) Christianity* that if you do something Wrong™ then you will be Punished™ with misfortune. During this period, if someone was ill then they had Done Something To Deserve It™. This meant that, often, your physical condition was treated as a shorthand for your moral standing.

* For the purposes of this discussion, Catholicism is included under the “Christianity” blanket, I know many Catholics disagree with that categorization, but I am not writing “Christians and Catholics” fifty times

The medical field was professionalized to a recognizable degree in the 19th century. A lot of that professionalization resulted in super fucked up ideas about gender, race, and disability. The professionalization of medicine was parallel to the rise in global eugenics movement. This will probably surprise no-one but needs to be stated, nonetheless.

Many disabilities are more frequently observed in Women* than Men*. Scoliosis, which was the focus of my research for my major work, was one of these conditions. It followed, therefore, that women were doing something Bad™ that men weren’t** and the easiest options were exercise and corsetry. Now, doctors genuinely believed that women were more delicate and susceptible to disease and injury (both to the physical and spiritual being). For the most part, many doctors did NOT want women to be doing as much exercise as they were recommending for men. So corsets were Public Enemy #1

* I’m nonbinary, I know that the binary is bullshit and biology is weird soup, but I am using the terms applicable to the medical understanding and discussion of the period, it’s just easier when referring to primary texts.

** Many men did actually wear corsets. I want one of the advertisements as a tattoo. They’re great.

Right. So now that we have the basic facts outlined, onward. I will include a reference list below. I might put some of my recommended reading in a google drive or smth if anyone wants that.

So. First of all we should probably talk about what a corset is. “Oh by Charlie I know what a corset is” shush. Maybe you do. Maybe you know what a modern corset is. This is my ted talk and I will be as obsessive about my definitions as I like.

For the purposes of SEO algorithms, a corset is a generic term that could refer to bodies, stays, corselets, true corsets, and anything you can find on google when searching for a fast fashion corset top. A generic term that can be applied wantonly for a thousand different garments from the 16th century to today is not very helpful.

When I say “Corset” I mean a garment that began to evolve from stays in the 1820s and had established itself as the popular foundational garment by the 1840s and remained so until the 1920s. For simplicities sake, a corset is a “rigid bodice” supported by vertical boning (Usually baleen/whalebone. Sometimes steel, sometimes reed, sometimes cording)(1). Its primary function was to support the bust, but they also formed the foundation of popular fashions (2).

Corsets work by distributing weight of the bust (and also clothing) across the entire torso, supported by resting on the hips (think of the difference between cradling a toddler – or a heavy box - and sitting them on your hip)(2). They also formed a smooth surface so that clothing could be tight to the body while limiting wrinkling but, more importantly, IT STOPPED WAISTBANDS NEEDING TO DIG INTO THE BODY TO STAY UP. They could be tight to the body, but the corset would not allow them to dig into the body. They were (USUALLY) custom made to the individual and (USUALLY) only worn to the tightness comfortable for the level of activity for the individual. (I will talk about exceptions later). Tight lacing wasn’t hugely common. Usually the drastic shape was achieved through optical illusion and padding (Bust improvers, bustles, bum pads) (3)(4). If you make the hips and bust appear larger, the waist will naturally appear smaller, regardless of actual measurements.

God this is going to be so long I haven’t even got to the Bernards. Okay so this might have to be in installments.

REFERENCES

1 Steele, Valerie. Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Kindle ed. Charles Schribner’s Sons, 2005, p. 290

2 Waugh, Norah, and Judith Dolan. Corsets and Crinolines. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, Ny, Routledge, 2018, p. 75.

3 Kunzle, David. Fashion and Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body Sculpture. Sutton Publishing, 2004, p. 89.

4 Steele, Valerie. Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age. Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 62-63

[vensnus]

tw: ableism,eugenics, mention of n//zi rhetoric,victim blaming.

.

.

I came to call out a tiktok account here on tumblr: ( @/rxme0real2 ) for ableism towards the autistic community,supporting eugenics and doxxing someone.

beforehand, I want everyone here to keep in mind he's 14-15 (not justifying his actions ofc) this is just a call out post for the nasty stuff he has said but I'm not encouraging anyone here to harras him.

one of my mutuals (Tyler, who is autistic) made a video ranting about autistic ppl get victim blamed for getting abused, and out of nowhere (since he didn't talk about eugenics or sm related to it) got a comment that said how eugenics was okay for some autistic ppl, made by the user (@/rxme0real2), which ofc Tyler respond with a video calling him out.

(Tyler's video calling him out)

as you can see, there are like 130 comments since the other dude commented in the called-out video, causing my mutual and I to get into a fight with him ( I didn't knew he was 14-15,until I checked his account)

It baffles me that he is also autistic (and calling himself high-functioning). started to blame autistic people who have higher support needs for the ableism that the neurodivergent community (especially autistic ppl) face.

Dude, you are autistic too. You should be fighting by autistic ppl's side not against them. what the fuck

and it gets worse because when I told him how harmful are the eugenics beliefs (because it wants to cure autism,and the user wanted to "cure" autistic ppl w/ higher support needs) and how they were similar to what Hans asperger (a n4z1) did: basically separating autistic ppl into what he considered " high and low functioning", sparing the first ones just so he can use them, and killing the ones with higher support needs, because for him, they were useless.

he (@/rxme0real2) agree and said how Hans did the correct thing?, basically he agreed with n4z1 rhetoric idk what would be correct term, but he agreed with a fucking n4z1.

Tyler got fed up with his bullshit , blocked him and remove his comments ( after I took the screenshots,ofc).

digging a bit more to do this post, I visited the account (@/rxme0real2) and found out he has video with gross hashtags and I also found he doxxed someone because they were cosplaying PC principal for South Park.

this is just so messed up,istg. He is 14 to 15, he knows he has internalized ableism but doesn't acknowledge it??. I wonder if his parents knows what kind of stuff he does on the internet,or just trust him like that and gave him too much acess or if his parents think like he does.

because this situation left me flabbergasted (disgusted too)

[neechees]

lysandra action how she refuse to follow the ableist norm of killing disable baby. in history children with disability being murder because it consider shameful, unworthy to be consider human etc. In greek mythology hera threw hephaestus as a baby some people think the reason why toward hephaestus is not being pretty or atractive but i think he both disable and conventionally unatractive after hephaestus grow up he take he's revenge on hera

I don't know that it falls specifically under ableism in Calliope's case since she was born sick with a plague or skin disease (or do physical illnesses also count? I'm able bodied so I have no say in this), but it is definitely eugenics. People in history also did this if they thought their child wouldn't live long or if they didn't have the medical advancement in order to save them (which doesn't make it okay, that's still terrible, that was the logic behind it), which Calliope also falls under, yet Lysandra refused to let them kill her.

With Hephaestus, there's different versions as to why he's disabled in mythology, & in one there's a misogynist level to it as well as ableism. God of War 3 goes with the explanation that Hephaestus became disabled & severely disfigured due to torture & beatings from Zeus after he refused to tell him where Pandora was, which is a little similar to (& mught be inspired by) one version in which he becomes disabled after being thrown from Olympus by Zeus because he tried to protect Hera from him. In the misogynist version, Hera essentially asexually produces Hephaestus on her own out of revenge for Zeus birthing Athena himself, but Hephaestus is born disabled because it's almost a "punishment" or "lesson" for Hera that she even attempted to do this, and that she cannot create life on her own, but Zeus can because he's a man, and that Greek women "needed" men. & then there's the version you mentioned

[livefromtheelephantsfoot]

I've had this sitting in my drafts for over a week bc I AGREE and I have SO many thoughts abt this.

I think one of the underlying reasons is a failure to engage with the fact that, to a lot of people at least, eugenics makes intuitive sense. I remember as a kid when I first had natural selection explained to me, and it didn't take much for me to wonder "huh, what does that mean for humans? does that mean it's a bad thing that we've insulated ourselves from stuff like disease?" (Obviously 8yo me wouldn't have said it like that, but I did wonder.) I'm almost afraid to point it out, but I really don't think it's just a me thing.

Later I learned abt Eugenics, that it was this bad evil thing that lead to genocide, and I was horrified. If I could empathize with the proponents of it, at least early on, what did that say about me? But it didn't actually answer my question. So now I had this first idea, evolution, that was obviously true and explained so much about the natural world, and this second idea that still seemed to naturally follow from it but was Bad. And I didn't know what to do with that.

And I started to notice how common the second idea was, too. The most pervasive thing I noticed was how common "Darwin Award" jokes are-- the joke, of course, being that people who die doing something stupid are making a positive contribution to the human gene pool. I don't really like those jokes. I ended up with the impression that eugenicists were right abt the human gene pool being a thing that we ought to be concerned about damaging, but they just went Too Far. You'll notice people who think this way disagree on where Too Far was. It made me uncomfortable that there could be an idea that was right, and if ignored would cause problems down the line, and at the same time acting on it was morally wrong, and everyone agreed it was a bad idea but only when called by a particular name--otherwise it's just common sense.

I don't think it was until high school that I started to understand that eugenics was, in fact, bad science. It makes sense with a surface level understanding of evolution, but the more in-depth you go, the more it falls apart. Artificial selection in dogs is such a great way to point this out. "It worked so well in dogs, why not try it in humans? Oh, wait..."

Eugenics requires the assumption that natural selection is at once a great and powerful force worthy of abandoning all morals in order to worship, while being so fragile that human civilization is at risk of overthrowing it within a couple hundred years.

Of course, the truth is that eugenicists weren't and aren't abandoning their real values in favor of what their understanding of natural selection would suggest. Eugenics was built on racism and ableism, and there is no escaping that. People latch on to ideas that validate their preexisting beliefs. You know what we can say, pretty confidently, about what's "healthy" genetically, for dog breeds and for humans? Variation. You'll notice that you don't see a lot of eugenicists advocating for interracial marriage. Even setting aside the (very important) ethical considerations for their methods, if eugenicists had their way, humanity would be barreling toward an artificial bottleneck that would REALLY fuck us over genetically.

Even that is missing nuance, though-- we're still in the realm of stick figure drawings. Genetics are really complicated. All this requires you to pretend that we fully understand what all of our genes even do, and we just don't. And that's ok! We do not, in fact, have to base public policy on whether G exists!

Natural selection is still happening to us, and if its slown down lately then I'd chalk that up to a global civilization mixing up our gene pool (which, again, is unambiguously a good thing from a genetic perspective) more than modern medicine helping disabled people have kids (which is not a new thing! we have been helping each other for millions of years). The human genome is not at risk of collapse.

We haven't even touched on poverty being a structural issue that requires people to exploit (ie, if all the poor people disappeared poverty wouldn't end, the next group up would be moved into their place) or the question of what mental health issues even ARE (I'm a proponent of the idea that, of the disorders/cases that are primarily caused by genetics, most are just the extreme ends of traits that are necessary to the general population and can't actually be removed-- extremely simplified example: everyone needs a sprinkle of neuroticism to function, sometimes someone gets a heavier dose and winds up with clinical anxiety, and every once and a while someone gets way too much and had OCD. even if environment weren't a factor at all, and even if anxiety were such a simplistic trait that we could track it with a very high degree of confidence, keeping the person with OCD from having kids wouldn't stop OCD from existing. they might be more likely to have kids with OCD, but them not having kids does nothing to the fact that OCD is a product of inherent variation that it would be a VERY bad idea to try to eliminate), or delving into IQ [even longer rant redacted].

I think sometimes people think eugenics is bad but its still true, like thinking that if people with certain traits have children it will change society for better or worse based upon what traits are promoted. I think its important to emphasize that eugenics is not only wrong morally it's also fake and stupid bullshit

Like eugenics was supposed to be based on the idea that "If it works with animals to select only the best ones to breed, why wouldn't it work with humans?"

well it doesn't work with animals, that's the thing. applying the eugenics ideas to domestic breeds of animals hasn't made better animals it's just made animals with more extreme expression of certain traits. turns out that when you decide which traits are the "best" and become obsessed with the genetic purity of the animals that have the "best" traits, you might well end up with some sad suffering creature like a Pug, or the Persian cats with the smashed faces that are in constant pain because their teeth and airways and brains are getting crushed by their skulls, or those meat chickens that grow so fast they can hardly even stand up after a few weeks old, or inbred race horses with tiny feet and fragile toothpick legs

like almost all traits are neither "good" or "bad" they're way more complex than that. a long tail or a long snout or a stubborn, independent personality can be good or bad depending on the situation. Who gets to decide what is a "good" trait or a "bad" trait? It's arbitrary and selecting for traits that are "good" in your opinion will often have both "good" and "bad" outcomes because the "good" and "bad" are part of each other and not separate its just part of being alive

Obviously oversimplifying everything but you get it. we did eugenics with dogs and how did that go? not very well

[burning-sol]

Watched Gattaca for the first time in full and the real horror of it is that some people watch Eugene DIE at the end and think to themselves... "Oh! This is an inspirational movie! Eugene killed himself because he 'accomplished his life goal' by helping Vincent succeed!" Really shows how utterly entrenched in ableism society is if there are people who watch a man DIE but that doesn't take away from the movie's "aspirational" ending because the guy who isn't a wheelchair user got to live his dreams happily in space :)

I didn't have subtitles on so my auditory processing issue caused me to miss integral lines (so I am relying on other people's notes about the dialogue on the imagery I missed, since I haven't had a second watch through yet), but holy shit. Even I having missed core pieces of dialogue could understand the ending when I'd thought about it because like... Think about what Eugene said. "I gave you my body and you gave me your dreams." There is an equal exchange here, it's mutual gain. The characters both have an established dichotomy. How could you see one of them die and not infer the other died too? ..besides the obvious ableism.

And there's an extra layer of frustration there too because Vincent IS disabled as well. Have you fallen victim to the able-bodied mask he put up - that you're meant to be reminded IS a mask throughout the film - because he was able to get so far? Because he can walk while the other disabled person can't? Fuck youuu.

I'm actually really interested what disabled people think of the movie because it's actually a really conflicting ending tbh. In the end, the disabled characters die and don't get to live more of their life when really they deserved so much better... Which is sad. But it's also a spit in the face to inspiration porn and it doesn't reward the characters for being exceptions to a discriminatory system. This video about Coco was really illuminating for me because... Yeah. Being an exception to a system IS a win, but only for that individual, meanwhile many others like them are still dealing with the same withstanding system and we're usually just shuffled past that like it isn't a big deal.

I would say that in terms of ableism, the movie overall does very much feel like it suffers from "catgirl racism" in terms of premise - but narratively it doesn't? It's got a weird vibe to it. Btw I call catgirl racism the phenomenon of people trying to make narratives where they talk about discrimination but they use substitutions as if to make the subjects more "sympathetic" to the majority audience - e.g when people try to talk about racism but instead of having black characters they make them pale skinned catgirls, or in this case if someone were to try to talk about ableism but instead of disabled people you have people who are able-bodied but aren't "genetically perfect". Bonus negative points if they treat the actual marginalised people in their work poorly see RWBY's treatment of black people or the misinterpretation of Gattaca's ending where the guy in the wheelchair dies and that's just meant to be fine I guess.

There's still a lot more analysis I want to read up on and reviews of the movie... Interviews and I didn't get to look at the special features so that would be cool. There's a lot I wanna get to know about this film because I think it's pretty neat.

Something about the movie I thought was pretty neat is the people along the way that helped Vincent, because he does die in the end but it's kind of hopeful in a way? Like, yes, the system is still intact, but there are so many more people against the system than you think and will have your back even at the risk of their own livelihoods.

And if I had to state a downside it's that idk I wish Irene felt a bit deeper in terms of character because I find it hard to believe she didn't clock Vincent sooner than what she actually did. I had thought she already knew before the investigator came to Eugene's place, but then there's this whole "I don't even know who you are!!" thing?? I really find it hard to believe between him throwing away her hair and the road crossing and him sneaking out of bed to go scrub himself free of skin on the beach and so on... I also wish there was a bit more it said about sexism considering there IS some presence of it in the movie, and yet that doesn't become a subject of bonding between her and him?? You know, society telling them that there are certain things they can't be? (Which feels very pertinent considering they specifically work in a space agency...)

Yeah. I guess I think overall it's a good film but there's certain things that probably could have been refined to make it even better. So anyways...

[rjalker]

anyways.

Here's an archive of the replies from this post.

The timestamps are wonky because obviously they'd change every time I copied the new one into the document but I can't be bothered to remove them or do any math to figure out what they should actually be.

Edit: oh wait. there's people still going with the ableism. Lol. in some way. tumblr is so glitchy.

(archived read-more link)

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After multiple people have explained that the original writing prompt is talking about eugenics, and that if you’re going to write something like that you have to portray it as horrifying as it is, not a cute silly fun thing that’s harlmess:

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chickenmilk120 13m

(at) lilybug-02 [originally in all caps] Why are they beefing about a wereyorkies?????

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rjalker 12m

(at) chickenmilk120 if you'd read our posts you'd figure it out.

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lilybug-02 9m

(at) rjalker You are actually beefing on wereweiner dogs sweet pea.

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thenixkat 9m

(at) chickenmilk120 there's no problem with writing weredogs but why do you need eugenics to get weredogs when weredogs are already a thing in folklore?

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chickenmilk120 9m

(at) rjalker i cant read sorry

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rjalker 8m

(at) chickenmilk120 are you joking about not being able to read, or would you like an actual explanation of the problem?

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thenixkat 7m

(at) lilybug-02 you already acknowledged the eugenicist implications of the original post you can't really pull back from that.

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thenixkat 7m

(at) chickenmilk120 so how do you even know what's happening on the post or that you even got a reply?

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pet-shop-of-horror-fan 7m

OP thinks she can UwU her way out of eugenicist writing.

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lilybug-02 7m

(at) chickenmilk120 omg same owo

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lilybug-02 6m

(at) pet-shop-of-horror-fan [originally in all caps] What?????? What?????? What????? Where the fuck did I say humans were specifically breeding the werewolves????

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thenixkat 4m

(at) pet-shop-of-horror-fan after acknowledging that the prompt has eugenicist implications which is wild. Its not that hard to just apologize for missing the implications.

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beanieboi12 4m

some of y'all need to go outside omg

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poplasia 4m

My main thought seeing the accusatory responses is just like... Do they not think the werewolves could be selecting for themselves? Do they not think that the werewolves (and/or human partners) might themselves prefer partners with self-control and soft fur? There's definitely a chance for there to be messed up stuff in such a setting, but "selecting for" preferred types in a partner is (akaik) very much something regular people do as well.

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pet-shop-of-horror-fan 4m

(at) lilybug-02 Not at all what I said but okay.

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thenixkat 3m

(at) pet-shop-of-horror-fan like its not that hard to just write a story with nonagressive werewolves, people aready do it plenty without needing to have creepy eugenicist shit in their worldbuilding

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pet-shop-of-horror-fan 2m

(at) thenixkat I know, right?

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ejsuperstar 2m

Woah guys can we please like. Calm down???

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thenixkat 1m

(at) poplasia the op already aknowledged that there were euginicist implications that multiple people caught. There doesnt need to be any selection for anything, just write nonagressive werewolves. If they're sentient, breeding people to have certain traits is fucking weird and fictional characters cant choose shit the writing would still have eugenicist implications

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thenixkat 4m

(at) beanieboi12 whee ableist insults? who could have saw that coming? Ok, I'll take my laptop outside and continue to type b/c computers can go outside in this modern age

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rjalker now

(at) ejsuperstar we're very calmly explaining that eugenics is bad. Do you think simply criticizing eugenics is going overboard?

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thenixkat 2m

(at) ejsuperstar Everyone is calm here and using fairly polite language. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that eugenics is fucked up

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thenixkat 36s

i do question why folks would rather defend a prompt with eugenicist implications when you could literally just write werewolves that arent agressive or werewolves with dog-like traits, like there's no canon for werewolves as a monster. All it takes is a little creativity and like looking outside of werewolf horror works to see what people are doing with nonmonstery werewolves

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chickenmilk120 25s

(at) rjalker ngl guys me personally, i would never let someone named eugine tell me how many weredogs i can or cant marry

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awesomecat42 1m

Love how everyone is talking about the ethics of werewolf eugenics meanwhile my first interpretation of the original post was just that different populations faced different evolutionary pressures that resulted in branching evolutionary paths. The word "domestic" doesn't even necessitate intentional artificial selection, it just means they they have the traits of domestication syndrome (which, I should mention, IRL humans do as well).

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unstablezeldafan 3m

Guys, are we not considering the possibility that this just happened naturally through evolution and that someone seperate from the werewolves were not forcing this to happen? I know eugenics is a possible interpretation of this but what if it kind of just happened, like how humans gradually just un-monkeyed with evolution. It kinda just seems like it was a random silly idea and these implications weren't thought that deep when posted. I dunno, man.

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thenixkat 5m

(at) unstablezeldafan humans were never monkeys, we just share an ancestor and you could literally write weredogs which are already a thing in folklore without having unfortunate implications in yer worldbuilding if yer not gonna portray that as horiffic as it implies

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thenixkat 4m

(at) chickenmilk120 if you cant read how are you interpreting text even that badly?

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chickenmilk120 3m

(at) thenixkat im a weredog duh

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junoeevee 3m

This idea is horrific and I mean it in the most complimentary way possible, I love it /g When will people realise that just because you suggest smth fucked up doesn't mean you agree with it morally 😭

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thenixkat 46s

(at) junoeevee the op said it was supposed to be interpreted as a cute fun idea, not something fucked up. Portaying it as a fucked up dystopian thing would be interesting and you could have a fun story with domesticated werewolves teaming up with wild werewolves to stop it

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poplasia 44s

(at) awesomecat42 (at) unstablezeldafan Same here! That was my impression as well. Some folks calling out potentially harmful interpretations on a work is very good an an important skill, but as this is just a very short prompt/idea, it's really just jumping to the worst conclusions of a theoretical non-existent larger work. Perhaps the post could have been worded better, but there's no way this is really, like, advocating for eugenics.

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thenixkat 9s

(at) chickenmilk120 and I'm a bird monster so?

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full chronological chain broken by the OP deleting the post or blocking people or something.

fragments remaining:

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chickenmilk120 10m

(at) thenixkat do birds also talk about eugine? Or is that only for the dogs? How manywoodchucks can you eat?

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unstablezeldafan 7m

(at) thenixkat They aren't defending eugenics, from what I've seen, everyone has agreed the eugenics interpretation means this is a bad thing for the werewolves . They're just saying that there's many other ways this can be interpreted and that the OP isn't a bad person or something for making an idea that could lead to this.

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unstablezeldafan 7m

(at) thenixkat Bad thing is definitely an understatement, was editing it but it sent instead of deleting, damn phone.

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chickenmilk120 6m

(at) lilybug-02 oh this was super fun i was having a great time🤣🤣

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unstablezeldafan 5m

Oh. It's gone. I skidaddle.

[tarobytez]

disability in the Six Of Crows Duology; an analysis of Kaz Brekker, Wylan Van Eck, and the fandom’s treatment of them.

****Note: I originally wrote this for a tiktok series, which im still going to do, but i wanted to post here as well bc tumblr is major contributor to what im going to talk about

CW: ableism, filicide, abuse

In the Six of Crows duology, Leigh Bardugo delicately subverts and melds harmful disability tropes into her narrative, unpacking them in a way that I, as a disabled person, found immensely refreshing and…. just brilliant. 

But what did you all do with that? Well, you fucked it up. Instead of critically looking at the characters, y’all just chose to be ableist. 

For the next few videos paragraphs im going to unpack disability theory (largely the stuff surrounding media, for obvious reasons) and how it relates to Six Of Crows and the characterization of Kaz Brekker and Wylan Van Eck, then how, despite their brilliant writing, y’all completely overlooked the actual text and continuously revert them to ableist cariactures.

Disclaimer: 1. Shocker - i am disabled. I have also extensively researched disability theory and am very active in the disabled community. Basically, I know my shit. 2. im going to be mad in these videos this analysis. Because the way y’all have been acting has been going on for a long ass time and im fuckin sick of it. I don’t give a shit about non-disabled feelings, die mad

Firstly, I’m going to discuss Kaz, his play on the stereotypical “mean cripple” trope and how Bardugo subverts it, his cane, and disabled rage. Then, I am going to discuss Wylan, the “inspiration porn” stereotype, caregivers / parents, and the social model of disability. Finally, I will then explain the problems in the fandom from my perspective as a disabled person, largely when it comes to wylan, bc yall cant leave that boy tf alone.

Kaz Brekker

Think of a character who uses a cane (obviously not Kaz). Now, are they evil, dubiously moral, or just an asshole in general? Because nearly example I can think of is: whether it be Lots’O from Toy Story, Lucius Malfoy, or even Scrooge and Mr.Gold from Once Upon A Time all have canes (the last two even having their canes appear less and less as they become better people)

The mean/evil cripple trope is far more common than you would think. Villains with different bodies are confined to the role of “evil”. To quote TV Tropes, who I think did a brilliant job on explaining it “The first is rooted in eugenics-based ideas linking disability or other physical deformities with a "natural" predisposition towards madness, criminality, vice, etc. The Rule of Symbolism is often at work here, since a "crippled" body can be used to represent a "crippled" soul — and indeed, a disabled villain is usually put in contrast to a morally upright and physically "perfect" hero. Whether consciously on the part of the writer or not, this can reinforce cultural ideas of disability making a person inherently inferior or negative, much in the same way the Sissy Villain or Depraved Homosexual trope associate sexual and gender nonconformity with evil. ”

Our introduction to Kaz affirms this notion of him being bad or morally bankrupt, with “Kaz Brekker didn’t need a reason”, etc. This mythologized version of himself, the “bastard of the barrel” actively fed into this misconception. But, as we the audience are privy to his inner thoughts, know that he is just a teenager like every other Crow. He is complex, his disability isn’t this tragic backstory, he just fell off a roof. It’s not his main motivation, nor does he curse revenge for making him a cripple - it is just another part of who he is. 

His cane (though the shows version fills me with rage but-) is an extension of Kaz - he fights with it, but it has a purpose. Another common thing in media is for canes to be simply accessories, but while Kaz’ cane is fashionable, it has purpose.

The quote “There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken.” is so fucking powerful. Kaz does not want nor need a cure - its said in Crooked Kingdom that his leg could most likely be healed, but he chooses not to. Abled-bodied people tend to dismiss this thought as Kaz being stubborn but it shows a reality of acceptance of his disability that is just, so refreshing.

In chapter 22 of SOC, we see disabled rage done right - when he is called a cripple by the Fjerdan inmate, Kaz is pissed - the important detail being that he is pissed at the Fjerdan, at society for ableism, not blaming it on being disabled or wishing he could be normal. He takes action, dislocating the asshole’s shoulder and proving to him, and to a lesser extent, himself, that he is just as capable as anyone else, not in spite of, but because he is disabled. And that is the point of Kaz, harking back to the line that “there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken”. 

I cried on numerous occasions while reading the SOC duology, but the parts I highlighted in this section especially so. I, as many other disabled people do, have had a long and tumultuous relationship with our disability/es, and for many still struggle. But Kaz Brekker gave me an empowered disabled character who accepts themselves, and that means the world to me. 

Keeping that in mind, I hope you can understand why it hurts so much to disabled people when you either erase Kaz’s disability (whether through cosplay or fanfiction), or portray him as a “broken boy uwu”, especially implying that he would want a cure. That flies in the face of canon and is inherently fucking ableist. (if u think im mad wait until the next section)

Next, we have Wylan.  

Oh fucking boy. 

I love Wylan so fucking much, and y’all just do not seem to understand his character? Like at all? Since this is disability-centric, I’m not going to discuss how the intersection of his queerness also contributes to these issues, but trust me when I say it’s a contributing factor to what i'm going to say.

Wylan, motherfucking Van Eck. If you ableist pricks don’t take ur fucking hands off him right now im going to fight you. I see Wylan as a subversion another, and in my opinion more insidious stereotype pf disabled people - inspiration porn.

Cara Liebowitz in a 2015 article on the blog The Body Is Not An Apology explains in greater detail how inspiration porn is impactful in real life, but media is a major contributing factor to this reality. The technical definition is “the portrayal of people with disabilities as inspirational solely or in part on the basis of their disability” - but that does not cover it fully. 

Inspiration porn does lasting damage on the disabled community as it implies that disability is a negative that you need to “overcome” or “triumph” instead of something one can feel proud of. It exploits disabled people for the development of non-disabled people, and in media often the white male protagonist. Framing disability as inherently negative perpetuates ideals of eugenics and cures - see Autism $peaks’ “I Am Autism” ad. Inspiration porn is also incredibly patronizing as it implies that we cannot take care of ourselves, or do things like non-disabled people do. Because i stg some of you tend to think that we just sit around all day wishing we weren’t disabled. 

Another important theory ideal that is necessary when thinking about Wylan is the experience of feeling like a burden simply for needing help or accommodations. This is especially true when it comes to familial relationships, and internalized ableism.

The rhetoric that Wylan’s father drilled into his head, that he is “defective”, “a mistake”, and “needs to be corrected”, that he (Jan) was “cursed with a moron for a child” is a long held belief that disabled people hear relentlessly. And while many see Van Eck’s attempted murder of Wylan as “preposturous” and overall something that you would never think happens today - filicide (a parent murdering their child) is more common than you would like to believe. Without even mentioning the countless and often unreported deaths of disabled people due to lack of / insufficient / neglectful medical care, in a study on children who died from the result of household abuse, 40 of 42 of them (95%) were diagnosed with disabilities. Van Eck is not some caricature of ableist ideals - he is a real reflection on how many people and family members view disability. 

Circling back to how Wylan unpacks the inspiration porn trope - he is 3 dimensional, he is not only used to develop the other characters, he is just *chefs kiss* Leigh, imo, put so much love and care into the creation of Wylan and his story and character growth that is representative of a larger feeling in the disabled community. 

That being said, what you non-disabled motherfuckers have done to him.

The “haha Wylan can’t read” jokes aren’t and were not funny. Y’all literally boiled down everything Wylan is to him being dyslexic. And it’s like,,,, the only thing you can say about him. You ignore every other part of him other than his disability, and then mock him for it. There’s so much you can say about Wylan - simping for Jesper, being band kid and playing the fuckin flute, literally anything else. But no, you just chose to mock his disability, excellent fucking job!

Next up on “ableds stfu” - infantilization! y’all are so fucking condescending to Wylan, and treat him like a fucking toddler. And while partly it is due to his sexuality i think a larger portion is him being disabled. Its in the same vein of people who think that Wylan and Jesper are romantically one sided, and that Jesper only kind of liked Wylan, despite the canon evidence of him loving Wylan just as much. You all view him as a “smol bean”, who needs protecting, and care, when Wylan is the opposite of that. He is a fucking demolitions expert who suggested waking up sleeping men to kill them - what about that says “uwu”. You are treating Wylan as a burden to Jesper and the other Crows when he is an immensely valuable, fully autonomous disabled person - you all just view him as damaged. 

And before I get a comment saying that “uhhh Wylan isn’t real why do you care” while Wylan may not be real, how you all view him and treat him has real fucking impacts and informs how you treat people like me. If someone called me an “uwu baby boy” they’d get a fist square in the fucking jaw. Fiction informs how we perceive the world and y’all are making it super fucking clear how you see disabled people. 

Finally, I wanted to talk about how the social model of disability is portrayed through Wylan. For those who are unaware, the social model of disability contrasts the medical model, that views the disability itself as the problem, that needs to be cured, whereas the social model essentially boils down to creating an accommodating society, where disability acceptance and pride is the goal. And we see this with Wylan - he is able to manage his father’s estate, with Jesper’s assistance to help him read documents. And this is not out of pity or charity, but an act of love. It is not portrayed as this almighty act for Jesper to play saviour, just a given, which is incredibly important to show, especially for someone who has been abused by family for his disability like Wylan, that he is accepted. 

Yet, I still see people hold up Jesper on a pedestal for “putting up with” Wylan, as if loving a disabled person deserves a fucking pat on the back. It’s genuinely exhausting trying to engage with a work I love so much with a fandom that thinks so little of me and my community. It fucking shows. 

Overall, Leigh Bardugo as a disabled person wrote two incredibly meticulous and empowered disabled characters, and due to either lack of reading comprehension, ableism, or a quirky mix of both, the fandom has ignored canon and the experiences of disabled people for…. shits and giggles i guess. And yes, there are issues with the Grishaverse and disability representation - while I haven’t finished them yet so I do not have an opinion on it, people have been discussing issues in the KOS duology with ableist ideals. This mini series was no way indicative of the entire disabled experience, nor does it represent my entire view on the representation as a whole. These things need to be met critically in our community, and talked about with disabled voices at the forefront. For example, the limited perspective we get of Wylan and Kaz being both white men, does not account for a large portion of the disabled community and the intersection of multiple identities.

All-in-all, Critique media, but do not forget to also critique fandom spaces. Alternatively, just shut the fuck up :)

happy fucking disability pride month, ig

[whilereadingandwalking]

Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn is a superb addition to my health feminism and bias in medicine bookshelf. Cleghorn works to track the history of medicine, and the history of misogyny within medicine, to show how it’s all connected. In a masterwork choice, she ends with her own illness story, which shows the reader how all of these threads extend into the present.

How did witchcraft become hysteria become hormones become psychosomatic? Cleghorn in excellent, readable language outlines how the way medicine surveils, approaches, and policies women and their bodies over the course of its history. It is specific to Western medicine, and while Cleghorn’s primary focus is cis-women, she does make some reference to issues that impact queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people as well. I appreciated hearing more about doctors and people in medicine over history who have advocated and fought for women and their bodies, names that I didn’t know. 

She traces the idea that women’s bodies (whether it be specifically the uterus, the clitoris, the ovaries, the hormones) have minds of their own—are unruly and not in women’s control. The idea that women don’t know their own bodies, and need male authority and guidance—that we are unreliable narrators when it comes to our own bodies and testimonies. She traces the silencing of women through various forms of shame, including the idea that may women’s diseases, pains, or ‘abnormalities’ are due to women daring to separate themselves from their ‘biological purpose’ of reproduction and marriage.

This was an extremely valuable book, one of the most valuable I’ve read on this topic, in both the sheer information it gave me and the genius analysis. It connects me to a long history of women who spoke up and weren’t heard, and gave me a lot of insight into how we got to this place where women are routinely dismissed and traumatized, and where the diseases that impact them are woefully unresearched. A huge thank you to Cleghorn. I’ll return to this one often. 

Content warnings for descriptions of medical torture, sexual assault, forced sterilization, dismissal, misogyny/misogynoir, ableism/racism, eugenics.