Tag: ableism

As A Mentally Ill Person (TW: Suicide)

I feel that refusing to acknowledge that sometimes toxic behaviors are treatable side effects of mental illness is actually ableist and it fucking upsets me.

I mean like Richard Chase (TW: Pretty much everything, do not read about him if you are feeling even remotely delicate) is a really good example.  When his abusive mom took him off his meds, he did like truly unspeakable things.  After he was caught and medicated again he killed himself because he couldn’t cope with the horrific shit he’d done.  His case is obviously massively rare, but I think it gets my point across.

Like the whole “Toxic behaviors are never symptoms of mental illness” feels like NTs making excuses for demonizing people who have done fucked up shit as a result of mental illness and then calling anyone who challenges them on that ableist.

Like The Fact That Reproductive Care Provably Discriminates Against Marginalized People

and denies them access to true reproductive choice (through forced sterilization, discrimination and other nasty bs), is the other side of the coin that closes down clinics and makes the number of hoops one has to jump through to receive an abortion impossible for people without a certain amount of privilege

Both of them are statements of “I know when you should reproduce, not you”

It is an absolute necessity that we seize control over our own reproductive systems from state run institutions.  (also I think the medical gatekeeping done for trans people and trans women in particular may also be a part of this,  because trans women being women participate in social reproduction as women, even if they cannot give birth yet, and because it shares the same quality of state scrutiny of reproduction and choices pertaining to reproduction, for example the mandate that one must be sterilized to have one’s ID changed, is again the state regulating who is not allowed to reproduce, as well as deciding who must be forced to reproduce)

I also think the fact that the eugenics movement featured both positive eugenics (increasing the birthrates of certain groups) and negative eugenics (reducing the birthrates of other groups) is again very telling.  One could very well have a system where abortions are denied to some and forced upon others at the whim of the state, which is essentially what I feel to be happening.

Very few places have outright banned abortion, instead they’ve put in series of hoops one must jump through in order to be allowed one, and left more and more of it up to the discretion of doctors and the like, and you are still seeing forced sterilization of women in the massive American prison system and WOC pressured into sterilization in general, you are still seeing trans people being lied to about their reproductive options.  The curtailing of abortion rights and the regrowth of forced sterilization are not opposed to one another, in fact they are ultimately towards the same end: Control of reproduction being taken from the reproducers and given to bourgeois state authority. 

Maybe I’m outside of my lane here… but I feel like the link between these phenomenons is important.

You Know That Type Of Upset Teenage Girl Who’s Really Into Freak Shows?

You know the kind I mean?  And on the one hand I have a lot of empathy for all upset teenage girls because being a teenage girl is shitty and upsetting, but on the other hand it’s really shitty and ableist and like it’s hard to come down on her because you understand why she’s interested in them and it’s because she’s sad and alienated but on the other hand the romanticization of the whole dealio is real fucked up.