#labels

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There's a subtle sort of discrimination to how a lot of plural spaces treat system kids/littles. Especially those in adult bodies, or with a particularly large gap from their body's age.

"Littles must always be supervised in online spaces or else they'll bother adults and be preyed upon." "There must be an adult in your system if you're bodily an adult- they should handle life while the kids go away to never be seen by adults again. Littles should only talk to other littles. Anything else is unsafe and sometimes pedophilic. Right?" "Littles shouldn't be in charge. They're supposed to be cared for by everyone else and kept out of sight." "You're welcome here! You just have to only ever talk in the Baby Zone that no adults ever visit to talk to you. Yeah, it's empty and no one will answer. But you want to talk, right?" "Sorry sweetie, the adults are talking and you can't be here. Even if you're capable of understanding, consenting, etc. You're not allowed to be here with us if you're not a real adult." "Littles can't take care of themselves or handle any adult responsibilities, ever!" "Is there an adult I can talk to?"

Blue, an anthro cat sitting down, looks angry at the above phrases.

What are adult-bodied systems with no "brain adults" supposed to do? Drawing of a family of stick figures, all of whom are either child-short or hunching to be shorter.

What about systems whose caretakers are their children? Systems where there is no older person to supervise? Systems finding ways to live an adult life when no one inside aligns with it? What are you supposed to do when a 5-year-old does your taxes and drives you home?

"Just grow up." Do I get a choice, or are you ripping that away from me too?

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Why is "mental age" the bar people are using to decide whether someone is worthy of autonomy and respect, anyway? Where does the concept of mental age come from in the first place, and why does it exist?

From Wilson, R. A. (2024). Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c9a5f080:

"Eugenic traits: Prominent among the eugenic traits found in sterilization laws were those concerning cognitive ability and mental health. These traits, ordered in terms of their frequency in U.S. state and Canadian provincial sterilization laws, included feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, criminality, imbecility, idiocy, sexual perversion (or depravity), mental unfitness (or deficiency), and moral depravity (or degeneracy). As this listing suggests, these laws especially targeted those perceived to have some kind of cognitive limitation or psychiatric condition on the grounds that they were unfit and would propagate these eugenic traits to their children; approximately 70% of all eugenic traits mentioned in sexual sterilization laws in the United States and Canada concerned cognitive ability or mental health. Given this, there was a clear role for psychologists in programs of eugenic sterilization, given their expertise in psychological testing (Rose, 1985). Such testing and subsequent sterilization were conducted through emerging forms of institutionalization, such as “training schools for the feeble-minded,” especially as eugenics gained state-level backing (Miller et al., 2015). One of the roles of psychologists was to develop ways to measure those who were cognitively or psychiatrically subnormal. Emerging intelligence tests were adapted to quantify and classify those deemed “feeble-minded”or “mentally deficient” (Thomson, 1998; Trent, 1994). Binet’s famous test of intelligence, for example, incorporated the more specific existing folk categories of “imbecile” and “idiot,” adapting these to designate developmentally delayed children with mental ages, respectively, of 3–7 and 2 years. Following the translation of Binet’s test from French into English by Henry Goddard in 1908, “moron” was coined in 1910 to pick out those in the general population with a putatively fixed mental age of 8–12 years. This resulted in a three-tiered schema of intellectual subnormality—moron, imbecile, idiot—that came to be widely used in the eugenics movement. In the hands of the psychologist Lewis Terman, what became the Stanford-Binet test initially was deployed in selecting army recruits near the end of World War I (1914–1918) before being used on the general population. The three-tiered scheme was accordingly fed into the newly minted idea of an intelligence quotient (IQ) that remains with us 100 years on, with the fixed mental ages of moron, imbecile, and idiot mapped onto standard deviations from a normalized IQ of 100. From the 1920s, these tests were widely used to identify children who were candidates for eugenic sterilization, whether they were already housed in segregated institutions or within the regular school system or general community."

From Asilverm, & Asilverm. (n.d.). What’s My Age Again: Why Mental Age Theory Hurts People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.disabilitywisdom.com/2018/12/21/whats-my-age-again-why-mental-age-theory-hurts-people-with-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities/:

The concept of “mental age” was first introduced by Alfred Binet, co-creator of the first IQ tests, in the early twentieth century. Generally, “mental age” has been measured by comparing an individual’s score on a standardized IQ test with the average performance of their same-age peers. For people with IDD, “mental age” may also be estimated by comparing the person’s demonstrated physical, speech, adaptive or cognitive skills against the average for various age groups. Not surprisingly, “mental age” came about alongside the eugenics movement in the United States. Mental ages were used to classify various groups of “feebleminded” individuals by severity: Adults with a mental age of 9-12 years were classified as “morons”; those with a mental age of 6-8 years were classified as “imbeciles”; and those with a mental age of 2-5 were classified as “idiots.” Individuals from any of these groups were thought unfit to reproduce."

A drawing of Blue looks annoyed and concerned. It's labelled, "TFW it's eugenics again. :("

Oh yeah. Why is it always eugenics?

To be clear: I'm not saying anyone is ableist or practicing eugenics for having a sense of their own internal age. I am pointing out how systemic ableism affects how system kids are treated, how the concept of mental age stems from ableism in the first place, and how terribly many cultures treat children and deemed-children to begin with: how children and disabled people are often regarded as objects, burdens, or annoyances who don't know enough to have a say about their own needs. Is this really how we want to assume all system kids should be treated? How anyone should be treated?

How much of how system kids are treated ties back to some form of ableism, in the end? I wonder about this a lot and I feel like I never see people talk about it.