thanks for sending this in -- yeah this is exactly what that article continues to enable and defend. disabled kids are some of the most vulnerable members of society; it's always a fantasy to hope the family exists to 'protect children' but this only compounds when we're adding on ableism from the parents and the kid's doctors. the article has the gall to euphemise this multiple times, mentioning that the programs cause tension or disagreement among family members but never explicitly calling this what it is: a parent with total legal and social control over a vulnerable child, forcing that child to endure physical torment and then telling them it's their own fault for not trying hard enough when they continue not to be able-bodied. & even the 'nicer' programs the author describes are said to let the kids stay on medications "if they're helping them, other than narcotics" -- as though i am supposed to presume that treating children's pain is bad, and that it's some kind of extra nice concession to allow them to keep their other medications. these programs are evil. they ensnare plenty of adult patients, too (i know they heavily market[ed] to people dealing with long covid, with disastrous results they won't ever admit to) but children are rendered especially vulnerable because, again, their perspective is twice-discounted by virtue of being underage as well as disabled. i hope that article prompts more people to research pain clinics themselves or seek out patient criticism but honestly i fear that on balance it does a lot more harm than good because of the author's insistence on the fundamental value and epistemological soundness of these 'treatment' methods.

my observation of 99% of online covid cautious stuff is that these are groups largely made up of people extremely new to disability politics and generally very naïve to the reality of post-acute sequelae as a feature of basically any infectious disease. i think they tend to view covid messaging as existing on only one spectrum, severity of disease, where claiming it is more severe is always morally better rhetoric and claiming it is less severe is always dangerous, which leads to bizarre kneejerk moral clutching to claims like covid being uniquely capable of causing immune dysregulation or literally causing aids (i know you all think i harp on that claim. i do and it is because many people make it and that bodes extremely poorly for public health.) also i think they are just on average really bad at reading scientific literature because it's hard and requires practice and learning certain statistical skills and so forth. i have learned & continue to learn a lot from wider, generally older, chronic and post-viral illness communities, such as a lot of me/cfs groups and forums. i avoid the covid-specific ones like the plague.

"op has a gas leak" "it's the black mould talking" "were you on drugs when you wrote this" nothing new under the sun if we wanted to get serious we could talk about 'protest psychosis' too & the political utility of notions of mental incompetence more broadly

it's a bit more complicated than that & body fat / weight concerns are specifically exempted from dsm body dysmorphia as a standalone dx because they're siloed under eating disorders but -- yeah in general the concept of dysmorphia is conceptually flawed by the fact it's an individual psychological complex and therefore can never really grapple with the relationship between how one sees oneself and how one is perceived socially. eg like the bdd dx specifies the imagined flaw is not noticeable to others or appears insignificant to them. which means essentially the psychiatrist is deciding what constitutes such ugliness that distress over it is normal and expected, versus what constitutes a pathological response to a non-aberrant appearance. also even the way i'm talking about it here is insufficient because of course discourses of beauty are more complex than one designation of ingroup/outgroup, and the way people respond varies and affects the social reactions dialectically etc etc. mess but yeah diagnostic concept inextricably tied to the normal appearance category. assigned hot or not at psychiatry

🎉🎉🎉 INEBRIATION WINS AGAIN 🎉🎉🎉

i do get why people circulate stuff like this but i repeat that i don't think it is that easy to distinguish between 'elective plastic surgery' and 'gender affirming surgery' unless you are solely going by diagnostic coding, in which case -- this type of screenshot is ultimately only circulating support for the exact gatekeeping diagnostic procedures you superficially position yourself as critiquing. tell me where are these elective plastic surgeries where the decisions people make about their desired embodiment have nothing to do with gendered standards of comportment and appearance. tell me where are the gender affirming surgeries where the gendering of embodiment has no relation to other means, such as racialisation, by which beauty and desirability are articulated. define honestly a desired or an 'ideal' embodiment without reference to mutually constitutive notions of gender, race, &c. how about instead, sometimes people do things they later regret and surgery might be one of those things. and gatekeeping it for specifically marginalised trans people doesn't magically prevent that possibility, but actually just forces more people to live in miserable conditions being socially punished for embodiments they wabt to change. and doing things even if you may later regret them is generally something that you as a person are entitled to.