Willow is always amazing and you have to read it because I cannot quote it all: Transethnicity Claims, Piracy, Faeries & Appropriation.

The 1st thing to hit me, is how mocking this is to transgendered individuals, that their situation is seen as so damn 'science fiction', somehow, that something as mocking as 'Trans Ethnic' can be set up as part of any kind of conversation. 'So, you think you're not the gender you physically appear to be / were assigned at birth? Ha! I top you. I don't think I'm the ethnicity 'assigned' to me at birth/ that I appear as. And none of this having a damn thing to do with the modification of birth certificates so that NDN people could pass as non-native for a chance at a better life. None of this gets into black who passed as white, to try and life a better, safer life within a white supremacist state. None of this gets into trans racial adoptees and their personal conflicts of identity and how they feel vs how they're treated.

[...]

Cultural appropriation seems to exist, because in order to be white and in order to be USian, various peoples several decades ago decided to put aside their cultural and ethnic heritage in order to fit in. The less you showed some distinct aspect of your identity the more it supposedly meant you were leaving it behind to embrace your new Usian life.

So goodbye, traditions, language, clothing, manners, foods, songs and stories. And now here we are, a couple generations later, with a set of people who want something to belong to, but even in this day and age of Ancestry.com (for white folk) they're not going back to research what they gave up. And I don't know if it's because the attitudes to give it up and leave it behind are still strong, if sub and unconscious. They're instead reaching towards those peoples who've fought and struggled and suffered to hold on to anything at all. And reaching towards peoples whose suffering and oppression has formed a new culture and new identity within this 'new land'. So I suppose it's not surprising so many people want to be Native American - because how much more 'belonging' to this new land could one be? Or that they want to be 'Black' which is an identity that was created on these shores (well these and other places of colonialist import of slaves).

But history and struggle, accomplishment and identity, folklore, stories and song, foods, clothing and culture are not something you can buy in a store.

[...] But whoa. Looking at the terms 'Trans Ethnic', however, makes me feel as if minority/non dominant/colonized culture and societies are somehow as mythical and unreal as fairies, dragons, and spiritual wolves and bears - because ANYONE can decide that's who and what they are and decide to pick it up and somehow 'live by it'. And while you cannot disrespect fairies and dragons, and disrespecting wolves or bears gets you murdered and dead - disrespecting non dominant ethnicities happens, is real, is hurtful and painful and dehumanizing and devaluing.

If your inner self is a water dragon, well, whatever. That's your thing. If your inner self is black? Fuck you. There have always been assholes (particularly teenagers), dressing in certain clothes, copying certain slang, listening to certain music and claiming they were down with __insert ethnic minority here__. New age dressing it up as 'Trans Ethnicism' doesn't change the asshole badge.

[...]

I said I'd talk about Trans Ablism / Trans Disablism, and I will. Disability has a culture, it has many in fact. Deaf culture, isn't blind culture, isn't the myriad wheelchair cultures, isn't invisible disability culture, isn't chronic illness culture, isn't ... the list goes on. Those cultures too? Came out of struggle and strife, dedication, hard work and more. They were created to sustain the myriad peoples who're involved in them. They have their dark ass times, their deprivations and horrors, their triumphs, their moments of weeping for joy and of pain. There are institutions, schools, lock aways, slurs, words, language, music, dance, art, etc, and yes they were all created - some of them only a couple hundred years old. But they? Are REAL. You don't get to go shopping for them either.

Cause this shopping people are doing, has nothing to do with learning the history of anything, it's just another type of entitlement. It's grubby grabby hands. It's trying to fill some lack and hole with someone else's inheritance. It's grabbing someone else's sandwich cause they dealt with the jeers and kept their food, and you threw yours aside.

Okay. I don't understand what the shit is happening with The Arkh Project. It's a shame the only game that looked inclusive enough is coming to this, but the more is coming out about the creator, the worse is looking.

I don't know. What do you people think? This is sf_drama, so the discussions are called "wank" and A LOT of the comments are a mess, but there ARE some qualms we shouldn't ignore.

ETA: Okay, frankly, the comments are making me distrust the whole post. A lot. Fucking shit ignorant people who have never heard the term Muxe before. So it's obviously ridiculous! And Two Spirits is such a stupid concept for these weeabos. I want to kill.

ETA 2: yeloson shared a better source describing the problems with Arkh (it doesn't have all the disgusting stuff going on at sf_drama). Talks about the strange stuff with the business transactions. It doesn't bode well.

Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance.

I think the combination of positive and negative reactions is worth noting, in light of Campbell’s writing on culture and disability. Mullins and Pistorius are admired for “overcoming” a perceived disability, and this admiration feels especially safe for people embedded in able-bodied culture because they are conventionally attractive in every other respect. But this is a story with which we only feel comfortable provided that it doesn’t present any kind of threat to our conventional categories of abled and disabled bodies. It is unacceptable for a disabled body to be better at what it does than an abled body. It is even slightly uncomfortable when a disabled body manages to be “just as good”.

After the images of Mullins and Pistorius, I also showed my students an image of speed skater Apollo Ohno:

[...]

Like the images of Mullins and Pistorius, Ohno’s body is explicitly being presented here as an attractive object. By most standards, Ohno is as able-bodied as one can get. But as I pointed out to my students, he manages this on the back of technology – on specially designed skates, in special aerodynamic suits, with the help of carefully balanced exercise and nutrition plans; almost no athlete is really “natural” anymore. But at least in part because of the closeness of his body to an able-bodied ideal, this presents no explicit threat to our categories. Ohno fits the accepted model of “human”. Who would look at him and doubt it? And if Mullins and Pistorius are perhaps not as close to that ideal, they at least fall into line with it, by virtue of the fact that they don’t explicitly question its legitimacy as an ideal – unless they seek to transcend it.

My point, in short, is this: we are uncomfortable with disabled bodies that question or trouble our accepted, hierarchical categories of abled and disabled, of human and non-human, of organic and machine. We are far more comfortable with them when they perform in such a way that they reinforce the supremacy of those categories. They become acceptable to us.

The shit, Feministe. What the shit.

Do you fucking know what is Celiac disease? I have at least three friends who have it. One of them is very close to me and my classmate, and she ALWAYS has problems finding accessible and cheap food for her; we just were discussing the other day how it was really bad that Supermarkets here don't even have Gluten-free bread. The woman has SERIOUS PROBLEMS when she eats gluten and she has to avoid it completely. Seriously, we even have activities about Celiac Diseases (and other autoimmune diseases) at my faculty. Because it is a serious disorder. ("Only 1% of American have it! And that sucks" uhm, okay.)

You really, really don't know shit.

(Also, what is the shit about policing other people diets? "A lot of people CLAIM to be gluten intolerant!" 1) And? 2) You obviously live in a place where gluten-free bread/whatever is easy to find.)

SI has a pretty interesting post: The Racialization of Mental Illness. (Also, about gender, and how psychiatrists described illness.)

As the urban background suggests, this fear extended beyond individual safety to social unrest. In a 1969 essay titled “The Protest Psychosis,” after which Metzl’s book is named, psychiatrists postulated that the growing racial disharmony in the US at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, reflected a new manifestation of psychotic behaviors and delusions afflicting America’s black lower class. Accordingly, “paranoid delusions that one is being constantly victimized” drew some men to fixate on misguided ventures to overthrow the establishment. Luckily, pharmaceutical companies proposed that chemical interventions could directly pacify the masculinzed, black threat depicted in advertisements like the above. “Assaultive and belligerent?” it asks. “Cooperation often begins with Haldol.”

On mental illness and crime.

Part of taking a good look at our culture is looking at how we treat those we’ve deemed insane or unstable or ill. It’s looking at how we don’t provide resources for all the people who need them, across the wide spectrum of mental and physical illness. It’s looking at how a punitive criminal justice system punishes the mentally ill. It’s looking at how a soundbite-driven media demonizes the mentally ill.

Pima County Sheriff Dupnik was on-point yesterday when he said that Arizona has become “a mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” But while we’re challenging the racist, anti-immigrant, pro-gun, anti-health-care, violent rhetoric that has come out of that state (and so many others), it’s also worth challenging the rhetoric and the assumptions we use when discussing mental illness, and especially the tenuous connection between mental illness and crime.

You would never, not in a million years, see a major pop star launch into a revenge song called “Ur So Asian” or “Ur So Disabled.” That would not and should never happen. But it is still somehow acceptable for a Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum selling major recording artist to sing a song like “Ur So Gay” in revenge as “the crowd cheered and howled in laughter.”

You would never, not in a million years, see a major pop star launch into a revenge song called “Ur So Asian” or “Ur So Disabled.” Uhm. Excuse me? And "you are so retarded" is... what? Also, why do these people always assume that gay people have to be also white and able-bodied? Because talk about whiteness, heterosexuality and ability as default.

riko writes: excuse me as i'm serious for a moment. (SPOILERS FOR SERIES LIKE HOUSE, SPN, GLEE.)

2) Persons with disabilities are not less because they have disabilities. [...] Repeat after me: Different is not less. Different is not less. Individuals with disabilities may have impairments or restrictions but that does not take away from their full personhood.

3) Persons with disabilities are not tragic, heroic martyrs. They’re people. Unfortunately, in fiction, that's rarely what they're portrayed as. Disability is often used as a narrative tool that's one step away from fridging, meant to convey a lesson, a warning, or a source of inspiration, and it's made worse because usually the message is directed at the able characters in the narrative. [...] A person's life is not a teaching moment for someone else, and pity and charity are the wrong response because, once again, different is not less.

4) The life of a person with disabilities is not tragically unfulfilled because they have a disability. This is a more contentious issue within the disability rights community, which I won't get into unless prompted because it's sort of tangential. But suffice to say that many, many, many people with disabilities do not spend their time dreaming about how grand life would be if they were just "fixed." And yet isn't that the story of just about every single character with a disability on TV at the moment? [...] Different is not less. Disability is not a problem until society makes it one. Learn these lessons, fandom and TV and society. The story of a character with a disability is not how much it sucks to have a disability and how great life is for able people. That's only what able people think it is.

5) For the love of god, just stop removing the agency of people with disabilities, okay? It's not cute or dramatic or touching when the choices of people with disabilities are removed, especially when they are removed by able people who are acting in "their best interest." [...]

6) And with all that said, disabilities are also not things to be picked up and then put down again when it stops being narratively convenient.

Able-bodied people, before crying or complaining when a previously able-bodied character becomes disabled; before saying it would be the worst thing that could happen to them, that you would hate it blahblah!! think that you are devaluating real people's lives, you are saying they are something to be dreaded. Yeah, I know it's such a shock to you that isn't the case.

That, and disabled people don't get the representation you get. So shut up.

Tracing this Body. Transsexuality, pharmaceuticals & capitalism is one of the most (if not the most) amazing, complex, and intersecting articles I have read. A must-read written in 2003 by Michelle O’Brien and still holds true and how. Seriously, I'm making a crime just quoting a bit, you have to read it (if you haven't already):

These battles over HIV, transgender health and drug use are real, with millions of people's lives on the line. Politics is changing fast around the world, as old resistance movements have disintegrated, and new forms of domination are deepening their entrenched authority. Capital flows more and more rapidly around the globe, while access to health care is strictly limited and regulated. Wars of healthcare, over the terrain of our bodies, are among the most significant political battles in the world today. Healthcare is a major site in defining, and transforming, what race and class domination mean in our day to day lives. This fight is so profound, so real, so important, precisely because it is the place where the three levels of flows come together: 1. those flows of T-Cells and hormones, of viruses and antivirals, of methadone and heroin, within our own bodies; 2. those flows of our communities, families and lives through our communities; and 3. those flows of capital and institutional power across the globe.

[...]

The politics of our bodies - as trans people, as drug users, as people living with HIV - require a sophisticated grasp of multiple contradictions. We are dependent on the very systems that oppress us. We make demands for change, and appropriate the refuse of capital for our own survival. We live in the flows, suffer in the flows, envision a new world in these flows.

Many theories of power and politics offer little to grapple with such a struggle of bodily survival. I grew up working in radical environmental movements in Oregon, using direct action to defend ancient forests. The anticapitalist analysis of many such activists relied on a fanatical commitment to purity and an attempt at a total refusal to participate or be complicit in any form of corporate rule. Veganism, do-it-yourself punk ethics, buying natural and local, Lesbian-Feminist separatism, back-to-land self-sustaining agriculture and especially eco-primitivism and other movements common around Eugene, Oregon, all frequently rely, to various extents, on a commitment to non-participation in global capitalism and certain idealized notions of purity. Since then, I've encountered similar phenomena in many political spaces, from AIDS denialists working in animal rights organizing to the MOVE family of Philadelphia, from genderqueer denunciations of medicalized body modification to the glorification of drop-out travelers by the anarchist writing network known as CrimethInc.

[...]

These languages of purity and non-participation are frequently counterposed by the glorifying ideological cheerleaders of capitalist domination. Every major U.S. newspaper, every president and senator, every corporate trade journal is aggressively advancing the absurd notion that capitalism is the best avenue to manage and stop human suffering. Believing that state power and corporate tyranny will somehow make a decent world have a major impact on the popular discourses of science, technology and industrial production. Such pro-capitalist perspectives are of no use to me.

Instead, I've tried through this paper to trace other ways of thinking through the relationship between my body and capitalism. Each step, I've tried to simultaneously recognize my participation and complicity, and trace the possibilities of resistance and liberation. In trying to describe the complexity of these relationships, I've found inspiration in Donna Haraway's essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." A truly remarkable text, Haraway's essay brilliantly cut through polarized debates characterizing science as either a wonderful tool of capitalist improvement or the evil bane of patriarchy. Instead, Haraway describes the figure of the cyborg. The cyborg is the bastard child of the patriarchal realms of capitalism, nature and technoscience. Rather than reproduce their systems of command, control and communication, the cyborg ran radically challenge, undermine and resist domination. The cyborg is a new vision of feminist consciousness, a radical means of relating to technology and science. The cyborg is never pure, never free of the systems it subverts, never belonging to a realm before or outside of capitalist technoscience and patriarchy. But the cyborg is also a revolutionary, an effective, empowered, conscious being that reworks, redirects and restructures the oppressive systems that birthed it.

This vision of the feminist cyborg has been very useful and inspiring to me in understanding my own body and in struggling to the liberation of trans people. Like the cyborg, we are both complicit in and a challenge to the biomedical industries. We are drastically rebuilding our bodies with the aid of technology, surgery and drugs. And we are doing this all on our own terms, committed to our own well being, striving to our own liberation. Far from dupes of doctors or the crude escapists of ecoprimitivism, we are living amidst the systems we are always subverting. Trans people live in that hybrid edge of technology, science, nature and capital that Haraway correctly and brilliantly identifies as a tremendously power space of resistance and movement.

We are all in the midst of structures of tremendous violence, oppression and exploitation. There is no easy escape or pure distance from them. Our ability to resist, in this world, at this time, is deeply inseparable from our ongoing connection to these very systems. But resist we do. Every day, in so many ways, we are all struggling towards a new world of liberation, healing and respect.

Here is Donna Haraway's 1991 essay: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, if you want to read it.

Buscando información en español sobre ciertos asuntos psiquiátricos me encontré con la página del Dr. Hugo Marietan, psiquiatra recibido en la UBA, y dije, "wow, responde cartas, que genial," hasta que leí un artículo escrito por él: Psicopatías e histeria. Y me dije muy ilusamente: ah, bueno, seguro el término Histeria lo usará para hablar de como eso no existe (y haciendo una búsqueda rápida en google uno puede ver como clínicamente, aunque ya no se usa oficialmente, no está ni mal visto pero para nada). Mi horror es que no solamente usa la definición arcaica y sexista del término, mi horror es en las historias que cuenta:

Cuando comencé a hacer mis primeras armas en medicina como practicante, aún estudiante, la histeria era algo realmente molesto para los clínicos. Y a tal punto que cuando llegaba un caso de histeria el Jefe de Guardia, decía “- ¿Quién es el último que entró a la Guardia? Que se ocupe así nosotros no perdemos tiempo con esto y nos ocupamos de los casos ‘en serio’”. Recuerdo a una chica llegando semiparalizada en brazos de su padre, con la madre, el novio, alguna tía y otros familiares angustiados acompañando el cuadro que semejaba más al de una opereta que al de una emergencia. La pobre histérica caía así en manos del más inexperto de la guardia, por aquellos tiempos llamado el ‘perro’ por haber sido el último en llegar, y que tenía la siguiente instrucción: a) sacarle el público, b) hacerle parloterápia, quedarse con ella y hablarle hasta que se le pase.

El Jefe de Clínica Medica de donde hacía la Unidad Hospitalaria tenía su remedio para la histeria, decía “- Cuando tengan una paciente histérica, busquen el analgésico intramuscular más doloroso e inyéctenle en la nalga a presión, de esa manera verán como deja de ocuparles el tiempo y pueden dedicarse a lo suyo”. El se consideraba a sí mismo benévolo “- Yo soy mucho más suave que mis maestros, ellos me enseñaron que había que apretar los pezones para sacarla de la crisis”.

No solo vemos el aspecto misógino y de género en "histeria" ("cuando venga una paciente"), sino también vemos que el abuso sexual y maltrato a pacientes "histéricas" que está no solo no mal visto sino fomentado. (No, el hombre no desaprueba para nada en lo que sigue de su artículo algo de esto.) Esto es profesionalismo, digo, ¿no hay algo que habla la ética sobre esa actitud condescendiente, paternalista y de burla hacia sus pacientes o qué se yo? (Y el médico que se ve en su santo derecho de apretarle los pezones a una paciente porque la ve "histérica". No es abuso sexual, ni feas dinámicas de poder, ni nada.)

Pero lo peor está por venir:

La idea de la solución de las crisis histéricas en relación a un quehacer con lo genital es algo que siempre estuvo presente, incluso fuera del modelo médico, lo mismo que la idea que la histeria está relacionada con un déficit de satisfacción sexual.

Sí. No os jodo. Esto lo dice él. Sí, esto que Freud decía hace 50 años, sigue vigente para algunos médicos.

Una noche, cerca de las dos de la madrugada, tocan el timbre de mi domicilio y al abrir me encuentro con el clásico cuadro: la hija aupada en brazos de su padre, y apretujados a su alrededor, muy afligidos, el novio, la madre, la hermana. Entran y el padre deposita con mucho cuidado a la joven de 17 años en la camilla del consultorio. Ella le sostiene la mano y no lo deja retirarse sino tras algo de resistencia. Ya a solas con ella me llamó la atención la forma de hablar como si fuese una nenita de cuatro años, y usando no solo el tono sino también la escasez de vocabulario propio de esa edad. Gesticulaba y movía su cuerpo como el de una niña contrastando con el desarrollo corporal de su edad actual. Le hable largo rato mientras como al pasar me cercioraba que sus signos vitales y motrices estuviesen normales. Ella siguió en su “personaje” de niña desvalida y átona, hasta que, para mi sorpresa pidió ir al baño, se lo permití y con gran soltura y seguridad se incorporó de la camilla y fue al baño. Pedí a la madre que hiciera una vigilancia discreta mientras yo hablaba a solas con el novio. Habían estado en uno de los bancos de una plaza de Quilmes, era una noche cálida. El contaba que, habitualmente, sus mimos llegaban hasta cierto límite que ella imponía, pero esa noche estaba más suelta y pudieron avanzar mucho más, y que cuando comenzó a aflojarle la ropa para coronar la noche escuchó, con cierto espanto, que una voz de nenita le decía: “no te potes mal con la nenita, nene malo”. Creyó al principio que era una broma, pero la cosa fue de mal en peor hasta que terminaron en el consultorio. Cerca de las cuatro se retiraron todos, ella recuperada. En el momento que debía dar el paso hacía la mujer, esa joven decidió esperar detrás de su nenita.

¿Se pueden imaginar? Una chica que quién sabe que estaría haciendo para protegerse viene a parar con semejante médico que no solo es increíblemente condescendiente con ella, sino que dice cosas como "en el momento que debía dar el paso hacía la mujer, esa joven decidió esperar detrás de su nenita". Nótese la dicotomía entre "mujer" y "nenita". "Dar paso hacia la mujer" es iniciarse sexualmente según este psiquiatra, por lo tanto el género, la mujer adulta como siempre estará definida por su sexualidad (heterosexual por supuesto).

En nuestra práctica profesional nos enfrentamos con varias tipos de manifestaciones histéricas: aquella en la que lo preeminente es la dramatización, es el caso de la histérica que comienza narrando qué le pasa con su esposo, por ejemplo, y se deja llevar por el personaje y poco a poco nos va convirtiendo en su esposo hasta que terminamos por vernos insultados en nuestro propio consultorio por una mujer furiosa. Aquella otra que es seductora y graciosa, la gracia es la armonía de los gestos, es el caso de la histérica que arma y adorna todo su discurso con la gracia de una buena actriz; sabe que lo hace bien y disfruta de tener un espectador donde desarrollar su histrionismo y seducción. Y aquella que presenta una artificialidad muy marcada pero carente de gracia y que no logra agradar a su espectador ocasional.

Otra vez, la feminización de la histeria, y la sexualización de sus pacientes. Una mujer que "ataca al psiquiatra que ve como esposo" o una "seductora." Las mujeres discapacitadas, con algún problema son tratadas de esta forma por médicos. No son seres humanos, son arquetipos, una cosa hipersexual e histriónica, o una esposa "dominante y maltratadora" que ataca al pobre médico por su odio al marido.

Esto es una gran caricatura.

Se desprende también de la práctica profesional un rasgo de inevitable presencia, la histérica demanda, los derechos son suyos, las obligaciones son de los demás para con ella y deben ser cumplidas como y cuando lo requiere. No es retributiva. Pide, abusa, tiraniza, siempre quiere más: “contentada nunca, conforme jamás”.

¿Necesito decir algo? La Histérica.

Se trata de una paciente de unos 45 años que tuvo una parálisis de su hemicuerpo. Ella me comenta “Yo estaba sentada porque no podía moverme, y veía que todos mis familiares estaban alrededor mío con una gran angustia, y yo trataba de decirles que no se preocuparan, que estaba todo bien, que estaba tranquila, no lo podía decir porque tenía problemas para articular, pero yo me sentía bien y para mí estaban exagerando”. Médico, internación, exámenes. Tenía un coágulo en la zona occipito-parietal derecha que le daba la hemiparesia. El caso presentaba las características de una bella indiferencia y era un cuadro orgánico neto.

Dios me libre. La mujer tenía un coágulo, pero su tranquilidad era por supuesto "histeria", porque una mujer haciendo cualquier cosa es histeria. Si se ponía nerviosa era histeria. Si está tranquila también es histeria!

Y las características de la histeria:

- curiosidad

- chismografía

- fantasía [...]

- sensibilidad

- representaciones hipocondríacas

- tendencia a las escenas

- tendencia al romanticismo

Aschaffenburg

- extraña mezcla de frialdad y entusiasmo, de amabilidad y hostilidad

[...] Es de destacar que lo que ya se planteaba por el año 1900 sobre pacientes histéricos puede encontrarse en diversos criterios asimilables a la histeria presentes en el DSM IV y poseen absoluta vigencia ateniéndonos a la práctica clínica cotidiana.

Aparentemente, cualquier mujer que... sea humana será "histérica" en algún momento de su vida. Porque recordemos que es un término muy ligado al género. Y. Nótese la vigencia. Palabra clave para este hombre.

Dentro de las psicopatías relacionadas con la histeria es posible distinguir los fantasiosos puros, la pseudología fantástica o mitomanía, como algunos la llaman, y los farsantes.

Los fantasiosos puros, Schneider los llama fantásticos aunque a mi parecer se ajusta mejor la nominación fantasiosos puros, son los ensoñadores, aquellos que están siempre imaginando cosas, ensoñados, idos, un poco distraídos, olvidadizos, siempre muy introvertidos y en su mundo, soñando despiertos y tratando de que el mundo de la fantasía los salve del mundo real.

Otra vez, no jodo. Esto lo dice el hombre. Adoro la patologización de todo.

La proporción de casos de pseudología fantástica es de tres hombres a una mujer, a diferencia de la neurosis histérica donde es de común conocimiento la enorme proporción de mujeres respecto de hombres

"Es de común conocimiento". Esto es ciencia y el resto son tonterías. La base es "el común conocimiento". Ah, cuantos estudios siguiendo el método científico se habrán hecho al respecto. "Es de común conocimiento que una pseudoenfermedad que se atribuyó a mujeres de clase alta debido a la asquerosa misoginia de un siglo atrás sea en la actualidad atribuida a un enorme número de mujeres con respecto a hombres".

Esta es la psiquiatría que se practica y es "vigente" en muchos lugares. Dios sabe que mis pensamientos están con esos pacientes.

Pues bien, mi reacción al encontrar esta página es "histeria" porque primero tuve la ilusión de que sería algo serio, pero al encontrarme con semejante mierda tuve la reacción contraria, liberando así mis instintos sexuales en forma de rabia hacia el pobre médico.

Y aclaremos esto, la "Histeria" es un concepto que surgió en los comienzos de 1900 en la medicina occidental debido a que la sexualidad de cierto grupo de mujeres se veía como patológica. A preguntarse.

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day 2010:



Amazing, amazing links.

This can be extremely triggering and I'm sure will be painful to read, but cis able-bodied people have to do it. Read it.

is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / or is it something worse

A little while ago, Melissa was crossing the street in front of her apartment with her roommate, bringing home groceries late at night from the store right across the way. They were struck by a car in the crosswalk in what appears to have been an innocent, freak accident. Melissa’s roommate was killed instantly. She, because there was an ambulance less than a block away at the time, made it to the hospital with a shattered leg, head injuries, and Gods know what else, comatose.

I didn’t know, when I heard Melissa’s roommate was killed on the morning news, because the news said she’d been with a man, and my first thought was oh, God, is Melissa okay, does she know what happened, she must be so worried. I left a couple of voice messages, but couldn’t get through, and it was only once I saw a report with Melissa’s old name on it that it hit me: there was not a man hit in that accident. She was comatose, with friends there, and family on the way. The prognosis was very, very bad, like “we don’t think she’ll make it till morning” bad.

She made it till morning. And the next night. And the next. We all started passing around updates of how she was doing and taking time to mourn the schoolmate who hadn’t made it. Family arrived, connected with each other, and everyone took a few deep breaths. Melissa started improving, against expectations–eyes opening, snapping fingers when asked, responding in small ways to the people present though she was semiconscious at best and could not move. They made plans to fix her leg and skull and there was talk of moving her to a specialist facility closer to home, one with real support for people recovering from comas, and against all odds she was fighting. It should have been no surprise: she was always a fighter. She was going to be okay.

[...]

They had ultimate power over her–her body, her brain, everything. She was disabled, and couldn’t speak for herself, and couldn’t express her own preferences, and they were next of kin, and they knew best, and the authority for medical decisions was in their hands. They loved her more than anyone, and had her best interests in mind, and were just looking to her recovery, just listening to the doctors.

And if she woke up as from a deep sleep, she’d wake up into a world where her best friend was dead, where her body had been forcibly edited back to its pre-transition state and given a few more years of the influence of testosterone to boot, where her memory and self were hazy and confusing and nobody was calling her by the right name and pronouns, they were in fact pretending four years of her life, the four years she finally got to be honest and true to herself, those had never happened, and shh, she’s just confused, shhhh, calm down, let’s work on fixing your memory some more.

If she was–as many people deemed unconscious, or low-functioning, or unaware by medical professionals, as many many people with disabilities who can’t communicate the “right way” are–aware in any way of what was going on, laying there helpless and voiceless while her body and life and mind were edited and mutilated by loving people, wise professional people in complete control…I actually can’t finish that sentence, because I am shuddering too hard, because I have a hard time imagining a real scenario closer to Hell.

This is not an unusual scenario. It happens all the time, and in worse, far worse, forms. This is still practically standard in the history of how people with disabilities are get violated, and the intersection with trans status only magnifies it. If I got into a car accident tomorrow and fell into a coma, it could happen to me–I can’t marry legally, and my parents who are not part of my life could walk into the hospital and have my partner removed and do pretty much whatever they please with me, a possibility that gives me dry-heaving panic attacks.

Fiona Pilkington inquest: how ableism can lead to suicide. (Yes, it's Renee. This can't be ignored though.)

According to MSNBC:

“Fiona Pilkington suffered more than a decade of abuse from a gang of youths who terrorized her family by urinating on her house, taunting her developmentally challenged daughter and beating her severely dyslexic son.

Despite repeated calls to police and desperate letters to her local lawmaker, no one intervened to stop the persecution, and Pilkington killed herself and her 18-year-old daughter when she set fire to their family car in October 2007.”

Here we had the tragic loss of two lives because of the abuse of people who were neurologically atypical went unchallenged and unheard. Socially we protect those who we value, and a refusal to intervene can only be understood as a desire to make the Pilkington family disappear. Each time Fiona reported these incidents and they in turn went unchecked by local authorities, the behaviour of her abusers was encouraged. Now, following a lengthy inquest, Leicestershire police have been found partially responsible for the tragedy. It’s too late for Pilkington and her child, though.

The differently-abled are understood to exist without power because some of them need accommodation to negotiate the world today. The accommodation can come in the form of alteration, to make the environment physically accessible and it may also come in the form of a refusal to subject themselves to the same sort of standards as a neurotypical person, depending upon the circumstances.

How many adults would stand idly by while a four year old girl was being abused by a gang? I daresay any adult within eyesight would intervene, yet the police force ignored the hate aimed at Francesca Hardwick, Pilkington’s daughter, who had the mental development of a four year old girl.

Fiona Pilkington was told that she was “overreacting” and to “draw her drapes.” It is difficult for many to believe that such cruelty is actually intentional, but those that must negotiate ableism face this sort of behaviour on a regular basis. Some of the violence is fear-based. Even though it is common knowledge that disability is not contagious, there is an irrational fear of difference that leads to rejection and a devaluation of our shared humanity.

Via the_future_modernes.

USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people's access to written material

Right now, in Geneva, at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in WIPO history, the body that creates the world's copyright treaties is attempting to write a copyright treaty dedicated to protecting the interests of copyright users, not just copyright owners.

At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn't want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it's possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?

The USA, that's who. The Obama administration's negotiators have joined with a rogue's gallery of rich country trade representatives to oppose protection for blind people. Other nations and regions opposing the rights of blind people include Canada and the EU.

Update: Also opposing rights for disabled people: Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.

Update 2: Countries that are on the right side of this include, "Latin American and Caribbean region including (Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Jamaica) as well as Asia and Africa."

PDF of the Treaty.

Via unusualmusic as always: today is blogging against disablism day. Has lots lots of amazing links.

OK. Amazon is pulling some amazing shit:

Amazon is apparently stripping the sales ranks from GLBT books, thus preventing them from showing up in some bestseller lists and searches (and potentially directly damaging their sales), on the grounds that they are "adult" material.

(This is regardless of whether they contain any explicit sex. Meanwhile, books with explicit heterosexual sex scenes retain their sales rank, as long as they're not overtly marketed as "erotica".)

And:

The idea that people with disabilities might have sex, apparently:

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Sex-Disability-Disabilities/dp/1573443042

Incidentally, this is one of the many, many "disappeared" books where the Kindle edition still has a sales rank. Funny, that.

rydra_wong also noted that, in a clearly homophobic move, they pulled off the ranks from Heather Has Two Mommies, which, as you can see, is not "adult" at all.

So people, tell me, where do I buy books? You know I have no money and international shipping is extremely expensive for my country. :/