Fwoosheye

Here we go again!

the most dogshit useless decimated search engine in the entire world:

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

you lived, now what? is i think one of the more interesting questions we can pose with fiction, and i think it's maybe one of the powerful vehicles for conveying the notion that there is no point at which you stop being a person. the most unforgivable irreparable harms are caused by people making choices. and we will make bad ones and keep making them. you're not immune. no one you love is immune.

and crucially, we don't necessarily build a better world by defining criterion for forgiveness, redemption, punishment, penance. forgiveness is relational and as much about the person who has been harmed as it is about the culprit. punishment's effect is rarely improvement. societally, our ideas of redemption and penance are firmly rooted in legalistic notions of judgement — whether based on human morals or divine — where personhood and worthiness are contingent on ticking off boxes that we could argue endlessly about redefining and relitigating.

if you move the story out of that frame, though, it's not a story about "making it up." its a story about living. it's a story about making choices. it's about reflecting on the ones you've made. it's about their impact on your relationships, your sense of self. and i think that inherently has value.

My parents pulled me for the fourth grade, and I was homeschooled until the end of high school. Nine entire years. They pulled me from the public schools for a perfectly reasonable reason — my mental health was in the toilet and I needed to be away from other kids who might hurt me as they had spent all of my third grade year doing. My mom has a fucking PhD in neuroscience and tutors math professionally. She was, during the ten years that my siblings and I were homeschooled, the best, kindest, most caring, understanding, lovely teacher you could ask for.

But I'm still broken. That's the thing about homeschool. You can have the best experience possible in homeschool and still come out a fundamentally broken person. My social development stopped at the age of 10. I'm a 22 year old adult woman with the social skills of a 10 year old. That's not to say that that COULDN'T have happened in public school, but being homeschooled only made it more of a certainty. Both of my siblings and I have fewer coping strategies on average than our peers with similar neurodivergencies because we basically did not live in the real world for a decade during key developmental years.

Don't ban homeschooling because of the religious nuts. There are plenty of them. Hell, I KNEW plenty of them. But there are also plenty of quote unquote "good" homeschool families. Ones that do everything you would hope the model homeschool family does. And they are still hurting their children, even if unintentionally, because homeschooling is an inhrently traumatic experience. It's isolating. For seven entire years of my life, I had no friends. Not because I was a social outcast, but because I didn't even SEE anybody regularly enough. But, nonetheless, I knew people. You generally do if you get involved in the community.

Ban homeschooling because it breaks and utterly destroys everyone who goes through it.

Everyone.

1) Figured this out.