Don't. Touch Me.

[Please check the cws at the end of post tags before reading]

Speaking (again) as a human trafficking survivor, you cannot successfully or reliably prevent abuse with a test. It is not possible.

I spent most of my life being managed by people who were extremely abusive to me and they were smart. They were really smart. They knew exactly every way that the system would try to catch them out for what they were doing and they developed sophisticated strategies for getting around those systems, hiding their trafficking in plain sight. We could talk about their mental health for hours, but that will never produce any meaningful change or protection for other children. Because you know why?? If you gave my ex-handlers one of these "tests" they would figure out exactly what you were doing and research how to pass the test before taking it. They would lie. I watched them do it every day for multiple decades.

A test would not tell you anything reliable about their mental health or whether they should be around children.

I want to distinguish here between people who exploit children consciously an those who harm children unconsciously (without true malice or intention of harming the child). I have a lot of experience with both types people.

Let me reiterate. The most exploitative people would not get caught by a test. People who exploit children consciously are often very good at acting like they are the best person to leave your kid with. Because they want to motivate you to trust them with your kid.

The tests would "catch" people who have mental illnesses who may or may not ever turn out to abuse anyone, just because there are risk factors associated with certain highly stigmatized mental illnesses. But association is not causation. Just to illustrate one example, I have seen people with NPD and BPD take full responsibility for their behavior and stop doing things that they learned to understand were harmful to other people. In fact, one of the people who offered me the most support during the last years I spent on my handlers' leash was a person with BPD. She helped me through a lot of dark days and never harmed me. She even tried to help me access therapy. It didn't work, but she tried. We've lost touch over the years, but I still think about her and what a difference she made to my life even though she didn't fully understand my situation.

What I'm saying is that tests would "catch" people who may not be dangerous at all while leaving the most dangerous ones (the Epsteins, if you will) able to access children easily.

Stop blaming mental illness for abuse when it is not provable as the cause. Abuse is carried about all the time by people who are entirely neurotypical.

In reality, trying getting rid of mentally ill people actually results in more abuse, both to children and to the people you're trying to get weed out of parenting rights. While we waste time trying to cull mentally ill people from the gene pool (which again, will not actually prevent abuse), we are losing children.

often, i’ll find myself in scenarios that to me (and other people with physical disabilities), are inaccessible, but to others, are merely a minor inconvenience.

i have had to live with the fact that the world is not built for people like me.

once the world is accessible for disabled people, the world becomes accessible to all. the problem is, the world is typically, and majority, run by abled people.

[PT: a person should never have to go through the trouble of filling out paperwork just to have a seat. /end PT]

[PT: anti-homeless architecture is not only impacting homeless populations, but disabled and fat populations as well /end PT]

[PT: this should NOT be a hot take; even if you are able-bodied, understanding that disabled people exist and need these seats and spaces to comfortably exist is essential to being a disability advocate. /end PT]

[PT: traveling options /end PT]

[PT: for you, it may be in inconvenience to step over a pot hole, for a disabled person, it’s the thing preventing them from headed into work that day. /end PT]

[PT: the space between things /end PT]

[PT: that heavy door without a button to open it? is a wall to a person in a wheelchair. that four block walk is agonizing for a person using a cane. /end PT]

[PT: disabled people should not need to rely on able-bodied people for nearly every aspect of their live /end PT]

I have spent a significant portion of my life sick in bed. This means I have read... a lot of fanfiction. I do not want to run the numbers (for my own sanity) but there is a nonzero chance that I have read a greater volume of fanfiction than most of you will in a lifetime (yes, even in a tumblr crowd, where I have some real competition 😆).

For a number of years I was really embarrassed by this because for most of my life, I've fit best with the 'socially elitist nerd' set. You know - the ones who don't care if you make a little less eye contact, as long as your performance of intelligence can make them feel intelligent too. I "passed" there. So more than a decade of constant fluff and rom-com "junk" really felt like something I should be ashamed of.

But I've realized recently what fanfiction (or any free web fiction) really is. It's the author's hopes. It's the author's fears. It's all the things you wouldn't write to publish because they feel too sad, or sinful, or sacred.

Without really thinking about it, I've been drinking from the well of human desire - from fear, and love, and lust. I've been reading your precious wishes for family, or protection, or connection. I've been learning how you dream life could be.

Thank you to every writer whose work I have read or will read someday. Thank you for sharing the most precious parts of your heart, even when you didn't realize what you were doing. To every writer out there - every middle schooler with dreams, every suburban mom wishing her life could be something more. You reached out into the oblivion with the piece of yourself you probably don't even share with those closest. And somewhere in this world, a person noticed. Your dreams and hopes and wishes became a piece of me too.

If I want to, say, translate Polish with AI, I should have a tool that accesses lawfully licensed, specific data sets. My Polish AI translator should only look at the textbooks and dictionaries and tell me what I need to know. What we have now with things like chatGPT is more akin to asking a rando how to translate something to Polish and then the rando travels the world and steals all the books on all the subjects from all the libraries then reads them all and takes notes then narrows it down and eventually finds the Polish words to read back to me, and in the meantime I've had to give them food and water and gas for their efforts, and soon I'll have to give them my computer and appliances for them to keep thinking about everything there ever was and talking to everyone ever and hallucinating to high hell. And all I needed was a sentence translated.

It's not the user's fault that we asked for a butter knife and they gave us a nuke, but we should know not to deploy it if we can avoid it.

A person can go from no symptoms at all to being profoundly debilitated all in one day.

Some have baseline symptoms so low and flares so high, that things can go from 1 to 10 very quickly.

Hey you, intersex person reading this! You are amazing. I am so glad that you are reading this. I am very proud of you regardless of how you may be feeling today, how your life may be going lately, or anything else. I wish you a happy future full of being unapologetically yourself!