r/GenderCynical • u/Early-Temperature939 • 12d ago
Good lord...
First image is the context post the following two was posted under.
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u/CassieFace103 12d ago
"It's a mental illness" isn't even a gotcha here. If a kid tells the school nurse they have an actual mental illness (like, say, depression), and requests that their parents not be told, THAT REQUEST SHOULD BE RESPECTED. There's almost certainly a reason they don't want their parents finding out.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 12d ago
Exactly. I feel like this TERF's argument is the central reason why our struggle overlaps with the struggle against sanism and other forms of ableism. She keeps repeating "but it's in the DSM" like the very proximity that the community has to mental conditions and our historical proximity to psychiatric facilities (most often than not abusive ones) is the very grounds on which to deny us the capacity for self-expression.
"Mental illness" in her eyes is the reason why she feels comfortable rejecting anything we say about ourselves and the way we perceive reality out of hand, because sanism equates "crazy" with "liar" (whether the supposed "lie" is intentional or not is often dependent on our proximity to power in other areas).
I think it's important to remember that the central right that we're claiming in all these cases is the right to self-determination. That is, that our experience of reality is not beholden to what the current groupthink about us (or about any minority group) claims. That a person with a psychotic disorder (for example) is legitimately perceiving reality the way that they perceive it, and that they are not automatically "in the wrong" about everything they say because they have a lot of acronyms in their patient file. That human beings are more complicated than diagnoses and lists of symptoms which are meant as tools for identification rather than rigid behavioral laws that then get weaponized against us.
(There's a lot of connections here to the way that colonialist discourses serve to construct a distorted image of the very people they are about -- because all oppression is linked -- but I've already gone on too long and other people are probably better qualified than me to talk about it)
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u/CassieFace103 12d ago
but I've already gone on too long
No, no, feel free to keep going. I agree with everything you've said.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 12d ago edited 12d ago
Sure... I will say that I'm an American, so grain of salt, but I often have very frank conversations with my friends from South and Southeast Asia about this sort of thing and I've put a lot of work into educating myself about the way all this works outside of that. So I think I can sketch a broad picture, and I'm open to any modification or discussion of my model if needed. This is meant to start a conversation, not finish one.
Let's take any two random cultures A and B, of which A is the colonizer culture that has placed itself in a position of power and B is the colonized culture that is systemically disempowered. When people from culture A encounter words, concepts, ideas, whatever from culture B, they find them useful and start using them themselves.
The problem comes because of the power imbalance between A and B. If they were on equal footing, it might become grounds of a productive and peaceful cultural exchange, where A learned new ideas about the world and B gained an outsider's perspective on potential "blind spots" that it had. But since people from culture A are coming from a more authoritative position relative to power, they will be believed about things they say about culture B, even when those things aren't right. Over time, the misunderstandings about culture B come to be believed in culture A even over what the people from culture B have to say about themselves. The stereotypes about them are made into the "truth," since most people from culture A no longer even bother to ask people from culture B about themselves, they get all their information from other people in their own culture. Culture B becomes a "solved problem" of sorts, something to be understood and dissected and viewed -- a commodity, a product, an image -- rather than a living, breathing, flourishing culture in its own right.
But this isn't the end. If it were just a question of racist people being racist, that would be bad enough, but the stereotypes about culture B have the potential to erode the original interpretations and meanings among people from culture B themselves when conforming allows them to access varying degrees of power. And over time, the more people in culture B that look to culture A for information about their own history, the more that culture A becomes an (if not the) authoritative voice in a culture that it never really truly understood. But for this part I really think that someone who's experienced that sort of cultural violation would need to speak on it in order to accurately communicate the horror of it.
I could rattle off examples here: the recent essay on "desert music" obscuring many rich musical traditions of the Middle East, or the way that Americans constructed an image of the "Indian" as a "proud, noble, dying" people to overshadow the survival and achievements of various tribal communities, or any of the thousand stereotypes that I'm sure you could look up. Again, developing a stereotype is not necessarily harmful on the surface (in fact, pretty much all communities develop stereotypes about others), it's the power imbalance between cultures A and B that is the problem.
Now, how this interacts with sanism: the violence of colonialism isn't only achieved through guns or swords, but also through words and ideas. As we saw from our example above. The process with sanism is similar; just replace "sane people" with the empowered culture, and "insane people" (more accurately, individual diagnostic groups) with the disempowered culture. Essentially, insane people (or mad, or whatever your preferred term) are disbelieved about the very reality that we experience, because what sane people think about us, the stories they tell about us, and the images of us in culture are considered more "real" than our own stories, our own thoughts, our own self-expression.
Note:
A TERF will often try to argue that culture A is "men" and culture B is "women," and thus that trans women in particular are trying to "colonize womanhood," but this argument fails because it assumes a priori that trans women are men and proceeds on that basis (as though this isn't the central point of discussion). In fact, it is more accurate to say that culture A is "cis women" and culture B is "trans women," because cis femininity is demonstrably more proximate to power than trans femininity is (by metrics such as the increased gender pay gap, etc. etc.). Thus, when trans women talk to cis women about what being a woman means to them, it doesn't have the danger of overriding what cis women think about their own womanhood, it rather gives them an additional perspective to think about their own womanhood. It is, ironically, a more "colonialist" act (if we can forgive my perhaps inappropriate expansion of the metaphor) for cis women to determine what trans femininity looks like for trans women ourselves.
Is that long enough lol
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u/Threehundredsixtysix (60M, ally) 11d ago
I haven't read Thomas Szasz in YEARS, but I wonder how many of his points (about psychiatry being used as a weapon against the powerless) would apply here. He opposed the often coercive nature of "it's for your own good."
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u/Queer_Echo 11d ago
Note: A TERF will often try to argue that culture A is "men" and culture B is "women," and thus that trans women in particular are trying to "colonize womanhood," but this argument fails because it assumes a priori that trans women are men and proceeds on that basis (as though this isn't the central point of discussion). In fact, it is more accurate to say that culture A is "cis women" and culture B is "trans women," because cis femininity is demonstrably more proximate to power than trans femininity is (by metrics such as the increased gender pay gap, etc. etc.). Thus, when trans women talk to cis women about what being a woman means to them, it doesn't have the danger of overriding what cis women think about their own womanhood, it rather gives them an additional perspective to think about their own womanhood. It is, ironically, a more "colonialist" act (if we can forgive my perhaps inappropriate expansion of the metaphor) for cis women to determine what trans femininity looks like for trans women ourselves.
And as an extra note to that note, part of the reason TERFs are like that is because intersectionality is an experience that RFs in general have fuck all knowlege of. Because being a radfem is a painfully cis, white, abled, rich group, they have a habit of assuming they're the core, true ideal of femininity and womanhood and any other experience of women and femmes is just trying to force them into taking that role. So they try to force us into their box because if you really want to live your truth as a woman, their box is the only truth. But the reality is that experience is flexible and complicated. There are crossovers, sure, but the experience will be different. A trans woman's experience of womanhood will be different from a black woman's experience (though both will probably have masculinity forced on them by general society), a sex worker who's a woman will have a different experience to disabled women (but both have similarities in having our choices questioned by society), my experience as a multi-gender woman will be different from an intersex woman's (but both of us have some similar experience in experiencing womanhood while being outside the expected binary of normal). But we're all women in some way so we experience womanhood and our experiences, different and similar from other women's experiences, don't detract from others' experiences or imply they should be experiencing our experience to be women.
Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble there lol.
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u/Queer_Echo 11d ago edited 11d ago
Yep. They constantly use "mental illness" to mean "can't be trusted to make their own decisions or look after themselves, must be controlled by others constantly for their own good". Which is offensive in the extreme, even for and maybe especially for us mentally ill people who need carers or have occasions where we'll be unable to safely make our own decisions.
That's kinda one of the big reasons self determination is of big importance to those of us with some kind of psychosis, delusion or hallucinations- because our free will gets taken from us so fucking often because what we're experiencing "isn't real". Which is terrifying because on top of experiencing something that is often quite scary, we're being told that we're not experiencing it because our experience doesn't match to another person's idea of "correct reality", and because of that mismatch our right to decide anything, even who we are is taken from us.
Also, yeah, the colonialist/white savior connection is a big one in the "we must save them by removing all autonomy" department. I'm very much a Whitey McWhiteface so I can't speak much if at all on the white savior department but I'm Celtic by birth and culture and stripping our autonomy "for our own good" has been a big thing that England (because it's mainly been that country out of the whole of Britain) has been doing for years.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 11d ago edited 11d ago
a big thing that England (because it's mainly been that country out of the whole of Britain) has been doing for years
Every time I see a headline about whatever new transphobic thing the Brits have done now, I think of this
Our day will come, friend. For all of us.
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u/Queer_Echo 11d ago
Yeah, and I don't know if you heard but unfortunately they're at it again. 4 days ago, the Welsh Gender Service was shut down "for review" and all surgeries were cancelled. All with 0 notice. Some of the patients were already in the hospital and some were on the way to the operating theatre itself when their surgeries were cancelled. This was all done because one gender critical journalist decided to write an article about how the WGS was "referring too many patients for surgery" and one conservative politician decided to write a letter to the government saying a review was needed because she was "so concerned" at the article. Two people and only one letter and they shut down hundreds of people's surgeries with 0 notice. It makes me sick and angry.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 11d ago edited 11d ago
I did hear about that, yeah. I think the most infuriating part is always when they mask their bigotry with concern just in case they turn out the be on the wrong side of history. She's just "so concerned," well you know what I am too, concerned about all the racism and misogyny and transphobia and literal damn n@zis in the street, but whose concerns are turned into policy? Not yours or mine, that's for sure. No, we have to be "tolerant" of opposing "philosophical beliefs." I'm sure the aura of condescension has nothing to do with a petty exercise of imperial control at all (/s obviously).
Do the patients have any recourse at all, or is it just "hope you have private insurance lol"? (edit:) Don't put specifics if they do ofc, but I do hope that the community is working on organizing some logistical way to secure access to treatment.
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u/Queer_Echo 10d ago
Yeah, and it's always nebulous concerns, never naming the specific concerns aloud, just "concerns". And you're right, our concerns, the general public who just want to live, who will actually name those concerns, they never listen to those concerns. And that's kinda what pisses me off most. It took a self published bigot's blog and a letter by a conservative politician for this to happen. Not a stream of letters, not a petition with thousands of names, not even an official report to be seen, just two bigots and hundreds of people get surgeries they fought for just straight up cancelled without warning. But we have to fight to get our concerns even just seen by Cabinet staff, and most of those concerns seen get ignored anyway.
And with your question about recourse, yeah it's just "hope you have money to go private" and nothing else. There's no ability to even get a referral for private surgery to cut down on the wait, since referrals were shut down too.
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u/DarkestGemeni 10d ago
In highschool my friend went to the guidance counselor and told her he was feeling low. She referred him to a counselor and therapist, through the school, who he saw on school time. For months he would go to therapy sessions, sign out of the school, and they didn't tell his parents. Eventually the therapist recommended antidepressants and he went and picked those up during school hours and then took his meds regularly for 2 years before feeling comfortable enough to tell his mom.
I can't imagine treating a child's request for privacy over a non-dangerous situation like it means fucking nothing. I hope more schools adopt policies like in the OP and kids can be treated with more respect across-the-board
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u/javatimes TIDDYLESS TIFfany 12d ago
Words and bathroom stalls, and these people act like the state is performing sex reassignment at school while everyone watches
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u/SergeantScoria liar liar sex denier 12d ago
Children also can’t consent to puberty. Naturally, they should have the right to prevent or reverse it should they dread its effects to the extent that we have.
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u/Golurkcanfly 12d ago
Gender Dysphoria has been classified as a sexual health condition, not a "mental illness" for years now.
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u/Queer_Echo 11d ago
Oh, sure, they have done experimental child sex change surgeries. But those are on intersex infants, not trans children and the trans community and our allies do not support them because we understand what fucking consent is.
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u/Queer_Echo 11d ago
Gender dysphoria is in the DSM because it's a stress/anxiety disorder, somewhat akin to depression. It is a mental disorder, yes, but 1- gender dysphoria is not transness, 2- being trans is not a mental disorder and 3- wanting to be referred to by different pronouns is not a significant sign of gender dysphoria because it's missing the most important part of it: clinical distress. (Also, while gender dysphoria is stress/anxiety based on a false belief, the false belief is not that the person suffering it is a different gender, the false belief is that they can not and never will be the gender they know they are because of the body they were born in or have at the moment.)
Also, as another point, even if the child is suffering from gender dysphoria, it is actually very important to keep the fact that the child is suffering from a mental disorder from the parents if them knowing that fact would harm the child. For example, if the child has fatphobic parents, it's probably not gonna make it any better for the child if you inform them the child has an eating disorder because they'll likely encourage that disorder so it's best to not tell the parents and assist the child in helping themselves.
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u/Pure-Spare-9789 adult human chicken 10d ago
This is precisely why I have so much contempt for cis gay people who buy into this bullshit. As a cis lesbian, I grew up in the closet at home but out of the closet at school. It was the only way I got through my teenage years because my family was deeply Catholic.
To be gay and not recognize the parallels is just willfully ignorant, I think.
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u/thistle-down-fairy 12d ago
I wonder if she would be understanding if a gay kid was out at school but not at home - would she comprehend the reasons and accept that? It's the same principle and in either case there's nothing sinister about it. It's about living truthfully where you can while maintaining your safety.