Shifting Ideas

this is not the rolling stone article I want about holding absence 😭

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

which just. isn't even true to how autism manifests in a lot of people - back when I was a teacher, I would see parents and their kids who were both on the spectrum, and some of these parents were intensely homophobic, transphobic, and rigid in their belief systems. autism does not confer some kind of heightened sense of morality or ability to deconstruct social norms. it is a neutral facet of someone's identity that can play into existing biases that the person already holds, and it doesn't mean they're any less susceptible to social expectations.

Goncharov (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese

nancy mace is fucking garbage

Finally!

Here is the original creator!

Monster Researcher Eclair discusses Serpentfolk's Specialized Organs (not those ones)