To My Uk Trans People And Allies Out There.

Art by BlueSky user Adi Fitri

“If we truly believe in bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice at this place and time, his supporters need to become pariahs. They should not be welcome where good people gather. They need to be held accountable for unleashing this hell on the rest of us. […] As in other times of historic fascist regimes, there is no ambiguity left now. The lines are starkly drawn, the factions clearly defined, the opposing values unmistakable. On one side of this battle for the soul of our nation, the safety of its people, and the welfare of the planet, is the sprawling interdependent community of those committed to healing, kindness, and the common good. And on the other side stands this historically unredeemable would-be king and those who regardless of the story they tell themselves, still inexplicably stand alongside him. Compromise is not an option, and because of that many of us are going to need to lean into our convictions and move away from people we know, love, and once respected. Sadly and tragically, that’s just how this has to be.”

—

For America’s Survival, His Supporters Must Be Ostracized

Never forget and never forgive the people who did this to us.

It is incredibly important to train yourself to have your first instinct be to look something up.

Don't know how to do something? Look it up.

See a piece of news mentioned on social media? Look it up.

Not sure if something is making it to the broader public consciousness, either because you don't see it much or you see people saying nobody is talking about it? Look it up.

Don't know what a word means? Look it up.

It will make you a better reader and a better writer, but it will also just make you more equipped to cope with the world.

So often, I see people talking about something as though it is the first time anyone has ever acknowledged it, when I've been reading reports about it on the news for months or years. Or I see someone totally misinterpreting an argument because they clearly don't know what a word means--or, on the other hand, making an argument that doesn't make sense because they aren't using words the right way.

Look things up! Check the news (the real news, not random people on social media)! Do your research! You (and the world) will be better for it.

I just learned that Jim Henson was so conflict avoidant that there was this time his lawyers were arguing and they wanted him to get involved and he said 'nope, I've got to catch a flight to London' and then he got on a plane. He did not actually have to go to London he was just trying to get away.

Ken Sample and his cougar character, origin of the fursona.

From "The Fandom" on YouTube.

The US is truly incomprehensible

I've been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, "Eugenics" is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it's not nearly dirty enough.

Here's a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn't about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren't leading with, "My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People."

The reason that's important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) "uncomfortably similar to eugenics"--- ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.

There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.

Here is an Internet Archive link to "Heredity in relation to eugenics," a work by Charles Benedict Davenport, an early eugenicist. Please read at least the first four pages.

I'm afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport's word choices may provide a "red flag" to the reader: he refers to human babies as a "valuable crop," to marriage between people as "mating." The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport's perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain---they are things.

Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: "...forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation." However, relatively few people are "fully effective" at this purpose, because a proportion of society is "non-productive"---either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.

After you read the introduction of Davenport's book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.

Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people---who were, as Davenport puts it, a "burden" on society.

Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.

But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of "public health." Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don't recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.

"Sexual deviance" is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that "normal" people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.

For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.

If you read more of Davenport's book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements---he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren't. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.

Eugenics isn't just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.

MOBILITY AIDS AREN’T BAD FOR FND PATIENTS!

Many FND patients have been told that it is unwise to use mobility aids because it will “encourage the brain to keep producing symptoms.” This is based on the idea of conversion disorder, made by Stinkmund Freud, which has been since been disproved.

Despite this idea, my experience with using mobility aids is much different than what doctors told me it would be. Personally, using mobility aids and supporting myself has actually lessened my symptoms, and, most importantly, the impact they have on my life.

My wheelchair has been the most helpful of all the mobility aids I’ve had. I started using my chair because of my paralysis, but it’s done so much more for me. It’s eliminated the worry of being stuck somewhere and not being able to walk, and prevented me from many falls.

I also used crutches and a cane once upon a time, and they helped me greatly with my needs back then. they provided support and stability, and I found that they helped me get out of flare ups easier and gave me more energy to expend on things I actually wanted to do.

Of course, what’s right for me may not be right for you. Everyone’s FND is different and will react differently to mobility aids. But I don’t want anyone to think that mobility aids are always out of the picture for usage in management of FND.

Lastly, using a mobility aid without any medical guidance can be dangerous. It’s important to get in touch with a professional who can help teach you how to use the aid. If you don’t have access, make sure you do thorough research on the topic from reliable sources.