Disability

Youth Rights and Wrongs

14th November 2019 by Finn Gardiner 1 Comment

As a teenager and young adult, I used to be active in online youth rights advocacy. I wanted to see young people be treated like human beings, not their parents’ property. I was involved with the National Youth Rights Association from the ages of 17 to 21, but I left in frustration after growing tired of unchecked racism, misogyny, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia amongst some of the membership. I felt as though I was constantly on the defensive, as though I had to prove I was equally deserving of civil rights. One of the only people who actually managed to get banned from the NYRA forums for an extended period of time was an outright Nazi who adulated Hitler and ranted about the “Zionist-owned government.” If you managed not to be a Nazi, the erstwhile executive director would let you stay around in the interest of protecting the Open Marketplace of Ideas. In particular, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and transphobia went almost entirely unchecked. News flash: people defending behaviour-modification programmes, spewing vitriol about queer people, or claiming that women are inferior aren’t acting in good faith. They want to be monopolists in the market of ideas. In retrospect, the proliferation of unchecked bigotry on the NYRA forums feels rather like Twitter and Facebook nowadays. Free-speech absolutism can result in Nazis, alt-righters, and MRAs pushing everyone else away. It’s a textbook demonstration of Karl Popper’s tolerance paradox.

The youth rights movement didn’t just have a problem with proto-alt-righters and MRAs. There were plenty of people who hung out in youth rights spaces who made excuses for child molestation, calling it “youth liberation.” There are a few radical youth rights activists who repeatedly advocate for the “right” for adults to have sex with children and underage teenagers. It doesn’t take a lot of research to find out there’s a clear reason why society frowns upon so-called intergenerational sex, and it’s not because opponents of child molestation are a bunch of uptight prudes. When I was involved with NYRA, I remember seeing a fair number of adults in their 20s making sexual advances to younger teenagers. People routinely defended teachers who slept with their students. These people weren’t part of NYRA’s leadership and the forum moderators—including me—tried their best to shut down discussion of adult-child sex, but it was still a recurring problem.

Why do people make these arguments?

I suspect that many of these radical youth rights advocates were labelled precocious, gifted, or prodigies as children. Their atypical development unconsciously influences their attitudes toward children in general, even if typically developing children have radically different experiences. If you learned how to read at 3 years old, you may very well think that it’s reasonable to encourage 4-year-olds to sue their abusers; after all, since they knew how to do it, so should other children. If you followed politics intently at 10 years old, you may think that all 10-year-olds can understand political discourse geared toward typical adult audiences. If you had the same reading comprehension as an adult at 8 years old, you might think, “Hey, if I can understand this stuff, so can every other child.” This kind of reasoning leads them to think that allowing 7-year-olds to file lawsuits against adults who have molested them is a viable option for protecting them from harm. This is the same kind of justification that child abusers make to themselves: “She’s so mature for her age.” “He’s intelligent enough to get it.” Even if these advocates may not intend to sound like child molesters trying to rationalise their harmful acts, they end up using the same self-centred arguments. It’s the old “mental age” concept lurking underneath: if precocious children can consent to sexual acts, does that mean that adults with intellectual disabilities with more life experience cannot because of their lower “mental age”?

Of course, some of these molestation defenders could just be wannabe child abusers themselves. In any case, if you think Roy Moore, Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, and Jimmy Savile did nothing wrong, there’s probably something deeply flawed with your argument. On top of that, there are also organisations that actively lobby to discredit the narratives of child abuse survivors by labelling efforts to protect children from predators as “moral panics” or “hysteria.” One can oppose Perverted-Justice-style vigilantism and still advocate for children’s safety.

Child sexual abuse is an unambiguous moral ill. Couching the right of adults to molest children and adolescents with impunity in the cloak of youth rights is not youth liberation. Civil rights encompass both positive and negative freedoms—freedoms to and freedoms from—and children and adolescents have the right to avoid exploitation by self-serving adults.

PTSD and the remnants of Cartesianism in psychological practice

11th January 2019 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

The view of trauma adopted in the DSM-V is a reflection of the Cartesian dualism that still permeates mainstream psychology. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, requires that a direct, physical threat to someone’s life occur; emotional abuse doesn’t seem to count, despite research studies indicating that emotional distress can exert the same effects as physical abuse. If emotional abuse results in the same biochemical responses as physical abuse or life-threatening accidents, then it should be included as a criterion for PTSD or other psychiatric disabilities that arise from stress or trauma. Limiting the aetiology to direct physical threats prevents survivors of emotional abuse or other forms of sustained maltreatment from receiving the help they need.

Drawing a bright line between the two seems entirely predicated on the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. This kind of crude dualism reflected in the DSM is not in keeping with current neuroscientific findings. Rather, the states of the mind and the rest of the body work in concert with one another. For example, anxiety and depression lead to the increased production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can ultimately overload the body and lead to a variety of adverse health consequences like stroke and heart disease (McEwen, 2005). The idea of a mind wholly separate from the rest of the body is an epiphenomenon of our cognition, not a tangible reality; while we may feel a separation between our thoughts and the rest of our body, the brain is still inextricable from the rest of our flesh, blood and bones. Our selfhood is immanent within the corporeal; it neither transcends it nor is reducible to it.

Admittedly, this frustration is deeply personal; I myself have PTSD symptoms from surviving years of emotional abuse and neglect, but if diagnosticians adhered strictly to the DSM, I couldn’t even be diagnosed with it. There is no official name for what I’ve gone through, even though the effects of this maltreatment still linger. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have suggested adding complex PTSD, or C-PSTD, to the DSM, but it hasn’t been added as of 2013. Leaving the scars of emotional trauma unnamed creates the potential for gaslighting, denial, and manipulation. While I’m not an unalloyed supporter of the medical model to name and identify trauma, I do think that we need ways to discuss what we’ve gone through as survivors in a systematic way. I hope the DSM-6 actually catches up with the literature and recognises the effects of long-term emotional trauma.

References

McEwen, B (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 2006, 30(5).

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) (2013).

The slipperiness of “I”: emergent properties, personal mythos, and co-creative development

21st November 2018 by Finn Gardiner 2 Comments

I’ve talked before about having psychiatric disabilities and being an abuse survivor. Today, I’m going to go into a bit more detail. This hasn’t been easy to write, but I think it’s a story that needs to be told.

It’s honestly a misnomer to say “I” in the first place; it’s more for your convenience than it is an inner truth. There are a lot of ghosts in this machine. I have a complex, intricate personal mythos; though I am very private about what that entails, it’s still a central component of my experience. I don’t feel comfortable with any of the “official” diagnostic labels that come close to what I experience, but there’s some similarity to Internal Family Systems. I’d say that the experience is more complex than that therapeutic model encourages, but it’s vastly better than anything that immediately evokes thoughts of Sybil and Three Faces of Eve.

I said this when I was 19:

It is difficult to define me in a few words; I see myself as a fissiparous, separate collection of ideas consolidated into one whole, forced to work together because of physical unity. In my mind exist multitudes of plots, characters, turns of phrase, denouements, orchestras with rousing crescendos and subtle diminuendos, the decisions and revisions of daily life, and the constant analysis of information. I’ve likened my brain to a large music-box or production factory; the ideas and influences of this world enter me, and I take them and combine them through my perception and interpretation, and take the universe and make it into [my own].

So many “psychiatric disorders” are extreme responses to a disordered, chaotic, and often mean world. To imply that the person experiencing psychiatric disability is the one who is “disordered” lets abusers, dictators, and warmongers off the hook. Our lives are intricately linked with others’. It’s important to understand individual factors, but it’s also vital to remember that we exist within systems: families, towns and cities, friend groups, countries, Earth at large. My lack of a contiguous “I”-narrator is in part a response to the circumstances in which I was brought up. I don’t—can’t—believe anything with absolute certitude, because I know my entire universe can be ruptured at any moment. It gets even more intense when you add in generational trauma: slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, and centuries of tilling the land without being able to reap the results of one’s own handiwork. This is not a stable foundation on which to build a singular sense of self, but my brain mitigated this problem by allowing for varied and co-creative senses of self to exist instead. I’m not anti-psychiatry, but I am vehemently against seeing people’s mental health as something extricable from the contexts in which people grow, live, work, and play.

A contiguous sense of self is an epiphenomenal emergent property anyway, not a concrete reality that can be used as an absolute benchmark of sanity or insanity. Because it’s all people know, they act as though it can be used to delineate what is beneficial and what is harmful. That’s not to say that there aren’t consistent tendencies, traits, and behaviours I can label as mine, but they’re the traits of a microcosm. There are plenty of other creative people who “contain multitudes,” pace Walt Whitman.

On a meta-level, it’s already pretty fucking weird that a collection of atoms can perceive itself at all. Thought itself is an intangible process generated by electrical impulses and chemical baths washing over our brains. I could continue the reduction to the sub-atomic levels: quarks, photons, and the like.

If it weren’t for the way my cognition is arranged, I don’t think I’d be alive to be telling you about this today, or if I were still alive, I think my quality of life would be greatly diminished. Having an internal support team has allowed me to pull through difficult traumas and create a better life for myself. This is deeply important to me and I am horrified by narratives that pathologise, flatten, and diminish my interiority or its positive effects on my external presentation. It’s especially galling when those judgements come from other neurodivergent people who seem to think that only some forms of cognitive difference are acceptable. Anxiety, autism, and depression are OK to talk about, but nothing else is. This is not OK. There is no point in trying to win the Oppression Olympics. Some animals are not more equal than others.

I don’t typically talk about it publicly because I have no interest in ontological debates, especially when people drag in the medical model. I’m also profoundly uncomfortable with having people apply inaccurate, minimising, and hurtful narratives to my experiences, turning a complex, multi-dimensional topological space into a two-dimensional figure or stripping it into non-contiguous pieces separate from the context in which they originally existed. It’s particularly painful to see people who know me well do it. I don’t want people to delve into extensive analyses of my personal mereology. I just want them to listen and not try to create their own—ultimately inaccurate—stories that they think supersede my own.

I refuse to allow people to denigrate me for having internal mechanisms that allow me to survive and even thrive after years of abuse, discrimination, marginalisation, and oppression. It’s time to take my power back by telling my story. Our story.

Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry

9th November 2018 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live or must be second-class citizens by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

Linguistic archetypes

23rd August 2018 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

I’ve noticed that people who are aware of language and care deeply about the way it’s used have archetypes that serve as models for all speakers and writers of a given language. I think it’s natural for people to view a familiar or idealised form of a language as a mental default; however, acting as though one’s own linguistic archetype is actually universal can lead to thoughtless or downright racist, disablist, classist or xenophobic conclusions.

For example, the archetypical form of English for me is standard British English. This is less a case of American cultural cringe as much as it is a reflection of my own life experiences. Between the ages of 4 and 7, I lived in the UK, and consequently never really developed the sense that the American dialect was the default mode for speaking and writing English. Generally speaking, my personal language archetypes are associated with the country or countries in which a language originated. The exception is Portuguese. I live in an area with a high concentration of Brazilian immigrants, so I tend to think of a Brazilian accent as the default Portuguese-speaking accent. I don’t know enough about the differences between Brazilian and Portuguese spelling for me to have a sense of what’s archetypical and what isn’t.

I feel similarly about language families, too. When I think of an archetypical Germanic language, I think of Standard High German. I think this is in part because I lived in Germany as a teenager; if I based these archetypes on the historical changes that the Germanic languages underwent, I would be more likely to treat Dutch or the other Low German languages as archetypical. High German underwent some sound changes (the ‘High German consonant shift’) that didn’t affect other Germanic languages like English, Dutch and Swedish. For example, ‘time’ is Zeit in German, but tijd in Dutch and tid in Swedish; in the High German consonant shift, /t/ became /ts/ in some words. Something similar happened with English/Dutch water and German Wasser. Italian and Spanish are my archetypical Romance languages, though that connection makes more sense linguistically than my viewing High German as the archetypical Germanic language.

People’s archetypical languages are shaped by their cultural experiences, relationships and education. People create categories by nature. The archetypes in and of themselves aren’t a problem. Actually, I think that admitting the existence of an archetype can actually help people recognise their own biases. If, say, an American views their accent, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation standards as the default and recognises that they are influenced by their education and upbringing, they’re more likely to be sensitive to other English-speakers with different backgrounds.

People treat their own languages in general, regardless of dialect, as archetypical languages. This can lead to mistakes when learning languages or creating new ones, as the syntax, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of natural languages can vary wildly. If a Chinese-speaker creates a constructed language and isn’t aware of how Chinese differs from the thousands of other languages people speak on this planet, then their conlang is likely to just be Chinese with the serial number filed off. Through their ignorance, their brain has encoded Chinese as the way language works, rather than simply being the way Chinese works. There are countless languages that refer to their speakers as ‘The People’, or their language as ‘The Language’ or ‘The People’s Language’. German is one of them; the word Deutsch comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘the people’, related to túath in Irish. The Diné, or Navajo, do the same, though their language is completely unrelated to German.

Things get dangerous, though, when personal archetypes become Platonic ideals of what languages should be, especially when those personal archetypes become models that are shared by a culture at large. The Académie Française falls into this trap. Strict prescriptivists have an idea of correct standards existing outside the confines of time and space; if people deviate from those standards, they are allowing a language to degenerate. This, of course, is patent nonsense; all languages change over time. People who believe that there is a single true way to use a particular language, or language generally, are likely to discriminate against people for not speaking ‘properly’. This has very real consequences: linguistic and cultural minorities, like the Ainu in Japan or indigenous peoples in the Americas, have experienced oppression and violence because the dominant culture devalues their languages. Speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are often wrongly stereotyped as being less intelligent or articulate because of racial and linguistic prejudice, even though AAVE is consistently different from standardised American speech. It’s not just a ‘corrupt’ version of standard English; it’s a distinct dialect that combines traits of working-class British dialects, West African languages and southern American features. Speakers of signed languages, non-speaking people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and other disabled people encounter ostracism because they’re somehow not using language properly because they need to use different methods to communicate.

I disagree with the notion that language is neutral and should be treated as such, but there’s a difference between recognising that language is non-neutral and acting as though some languages or language variants are better than others. Yes, I have language archetypes in my head, but that doesn’t mean that I think that non-archetypal forms are wrong. I don’t think that there’s an external language validator who hands down rules, and am vehemently against the idea that there is a One True Way to speak.

Disability

Why do people make these arguments?

References

Further reading: