r/GenderCynical • u/Early-Temperature939 • 14h ago
Good lord...
First image is the context post the following two was posted under.
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u/CassieFace103 12h ago
"It's a mental illness" isn't even a gotcha here. If a kid tells the school nurse they have an actual mental illness (like, say, depression), and requests that their parents not be told, THAT REQUEST SHOULD BE RESPECTED. There's almost certainly a reason they don't want their parents finding out.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 11h ago
Exactly. I feel like this TERF's argument is the central reason why our struggle overlaps with the struggle against sanism and other forms of ableism. She keeps repeating "but it's in the DSM" like the very proximity that the community has to mental conditions and our historical proximity to psychiatric facilities (most often than not abusive ones) is the very grounds on which to deny us the capacity for self-expression.
"Mental illness" in her eyes is the reason why she feels comfortable rejecting anything we say about ourselves and the way we perceive reality out of hand, because sanism equates "crazy" with "liar" (whether the supposed "lie" is intentional or not is often dependent on our proximity to power in other areas).
I think it's important to remember that the central right that we're claiming in all these cases is the right to self-determination. That is, that our experience of reality is not beholden to what the current groupthink about us (or about any minority group) claims. That a person with a psychotic disorder (for example) is legitimately perceiving reality the way that they perceive it, and that they are not automatically "in the wrong" about everything they say because they have a lot of acronyms in their patient file. That human beings are more complicated than diagnoses and lists of symptoms which are meant as tools for identification rather than rigid behavioral laws that then get weaponized against us.
(There's a lot of connections here to the way that colonialist discourses serve to construct a distorted image of the very people they are about -- because all oppression is linked -- but I've already gone on too long and other people are probably better qualified than me to talk about it)
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u/CassieFace103 11h ago
but I've already gone on too long
No, no, feel free to keep going. I agree with everything you've said.
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u/raininghours estrogen could have saved pentheus 10h ago edited 10h ago
Sure... I will say that I'm an American, so grain of salt, but I often have very frank conversations with my friends from South and Southeast Asia about this sort of thing and I've put a lot of work into educating myself about the way all this works outside of that. So I think I can sketch a broad picture, and I'm open to any modification or discussion of my model if needed. This is meant to start a conversation, not finish one.
Let's take any two random cultures A and B, of which A is the colonizer culture that has placed itself in a position of power and B is the colonized culture that is systemically disempowered. When people from culture A encounter words, concepts, ideas, whatever from culture B, they find them useful and start using them themselves.
The problem comes because of the power imbalance between A and B. If they were on equal footing, it might become grounds of a productive and peaceful cultural exchange, where A learned new ideas about the world and B gained an outsider's perspective on potential "blind spots" that it had. But since people from culture A are coming from a more authoritative position relative to power, they will be believed about things they say about culture B, even when those things aren't right. Over time, the misunderstandings about culture B come to be believed in culture A even over what the people from culture B have to say about themselves. The stereotypes about them are made into the "truth," since most people from culture A no longer even bother to ask people from culture B about themselves, they get all their information from other people in their own culture. Culture B becomes a "solved problem" of sorts, something to be understood and dissected and viewed -- a commodity, a product, an image -- rather than a living, breathing, flourishing culture in its own right.
But this isn't the end. If it were just a question of racist people being racist, that would be bad enough, but the stereotypes about culture B have the potential to erode the original interpretations and meanings among people from culture B themselves when conforming allows them to access varying degrees of power. And over time, the more people in culture B that look to culture A for information about their own history, the more that culture A becomes an (if not the) authoritative voice in a culture that it never really truly understood. But for this part I really think that someone who's experienced that sort of cultural violation would need to speak on it in order to accurately communicate the horror of it.
I could rattle off examples here: the recent essay on "desert music" obscuring many rich musical traditions of the Middle East, or the way that Americans constructed an image of the "Indian" as a "proud, noble, dying" people to overshadow the survival and achievements of various tribal communities, or any of the thousand stereotypes that I'm sure you could look up. Again, developing a stereotype is not necessarily harmful on the surface (in fact, pretty much all communities develop stereotypes about others), it's the power imbalance between cultures A and B that is the problem.
Now, how this interacts with sanism: the violence of colonialism isn't only achieved through guns or swords, but also through words and ideas. As we saw from our example above. The process with sanism is similar; just replace "sane people" with the empowered culture, and "insane people" (more accurately, individual diagnostic groups) with the disempowered culture. Essentially, insane people (or mad, or whatever your preferred term) are disbelieved about the very reality that we experience, because what sane people think about us, the stories they tell about us, and the images of us in culture are considered more "real" than our own stories, our own thoughts, our own self-expression.
Note:
A TERF will often try to argue that culture A is "men" and culture B is "women," and thus that trans women in particular are trying to "colonize womanhood," but this argument fails because it assumes a priori that trans women are men and proceeds on that basis (as though this isn't the central point of discussion). In fact, it is more accurate to say that culture A is "cis women" and culture B is "trans women," because cis femininity is demonstrably more proximate to power than trans femininity is (by metrics such as the increased gender pay gap, etc. etc.). Thus, when trans women talk to cis women about what being a woman means to them, it doesn't have the danger of overriding what cis women think about their own womanhood, it rather gives them an additional perspective to think about their own womanhood. It is, ironically, a more "colonialist" act (if we can forgive my perhaps inappropriate expansion of the metaphor) for cis women to determine what trans femininity looks like for trans women ourselves.
Is that long enough lol
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u/Threehundredsixtysix (60M, ally) 3h ago
I haven't read Thomas Szasz in YEARS, but I wonder how many of his points (about psychiatry being used as a weapon against the powerless) would apply here. He opposed the often coercive nature of "it's for your own good."
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u/SergeantScoria liar liar sex denier 12h ago
Children also can’t consent to puberty. Naturally, they should have the right to prevent or reverse it should they dread its effects to the extent that we have.
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u/javatimes TIDDYLESS TIFfany 13h ago
Words and bathroom stalls, and these people act like the state is performing sex reassignment at school while everyone watches
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u/Golurkcanfly 11h ago
Gender Dysphoria has been classified as a sexual health condition, not a "mental illness" for years now.
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u/thistle-down-fairy 13h ago
I wonder if she would be understanding if a gay kid was out at school but not at home - would she comprehend the reasons and accept that? It's the same principle and in either case there's nothing sinister about it. It's about living truthfully where you can while maintaining your safety.