I always feel bad for laughing so much and so gleefully at US idiots and being glad that we didn't have many comparable people over here, but now I can proudly present this guy. A person who thinks that Jewish people are smarter because of genes and Muslims are lazy and stupid and it's impossible to integrate them, among many other points that make the mind boggle.

He decided it'd be a good idea to give a BBC interview. If I can be bothered I'll supply choice quotes later.

• "The lack of economic and integrational success of the Damascan people are due to cultural features which are due to the Muslim faith."
• "Most of them [Arabs and Turkish people] don't feel discriminated against."
• "If you're discriminated against if you wear a headscarf that's your own choice. [...] You could as well live in the United States or in Turkey." 
• "The Turkish woman which lives in Germany told me some weeks ago, 'Please don't take these mental aggravations seriously, oriental people tend to play with their emotions and love to raise guilt in others.'" 
• "I have alienated nobody. I have just stated facts, and that's alienating nobody."
• "I think if the United States would be better off if they were careful with having two different languages in one country."

So, to sum up, we have a powerful white male German saying, "You Muslims are stupid underachieving welfare leeches, possibly because of genetics, but I'm going to mumble a bit over that point. If you're discriminated against, you're exaggerating because of your emotional nature or have chosen the bed you lie in and are welcome to move to another country if you don't like that. Gee, why don't you people integrate better and insist on keeping to yourselves?"

There are such a lot of discussions on art and violence these days which make my skin crawl so much I can't speak about them coherently and this probably clouds my judgement on them. Still, I'd like to say this: art can be harmful to people who didn't consent to be a part of it.

( Recent sexual violence in what people say is art, trigger warnings )

If people use one oppression as a ~metaphor~ for another that is harmful to the party whose experiences it exploits to express yourself. It's the limit of freedom of expressing yourself - the moment your freedom touches that of another person and you take on their voice to speak about experiences you made, and I'd like to see more self-limitation at work.

I guess the question I'd like to put to people who argue that things like these are important enough to be made regardless is if they consider the message or artistic value of this particular piece to be more important than the problematic content and exploitation of others and why.

Because I don't see it.

"Breeder" is a derogatory term for a cis heterosexual person.

Because, you see, man + woman = babbies, and because no self-respecting queer person would ever be caught having a baby. I have no idea where this term originated, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say within certain fringes of the cisgay community, given the nice focus on the reproductive organs of ciswomen there, though I am not sure if the main association is meant to be husbandry there. I can't really make myself care, either.

As someone who wants to have children, this term pisses me off incredibly. Not only is it misogynistic, it also completely erases any queer and/or non-cis couples who do have or want to have children, dehumanises children and parents alike and just generally makes you look like a fucking ass if you use it. 

I want children with Crocky. I am not sure how yet, or when, or however we'll be able to afford that, or what kind of bureaucratic nightmare that's going to be, but at some point in my life, I want to raise children with this woman I am married to. And fucking hell, this is not going to be easy, and a lot of it will be every bit as dehumanising as the term "breeder" suggests.

First, getting one half of our child's genetic material united with the other is very likely going to be done in a laboratory, or by a doctor the way it's routinely done by real life breeders on farms. Since it's "sittenwidrig", "against public policy/immoral" under German law, we'll either have to go abroad, where the cheapest ~breeding~ session still costs about €5000 (and there's no saying if this takes off the first time around).

And then, once that genetic material has happily united with its other half and my bank account lost a small fortune and we are reasonably certain that it's going to stay where it's growing, the next nightmare begins - adoption. The process takes at least a year, though stepchild adoption is the same for both heterosexuals and homosexuals. You file for it, and then someone comes round to examine your relationship, as you have to be found capable of taking care of a child by the state. Officials come into your home and interview you to see if you are fit to parent, what your emotional relationship to your child is like, how healthy you are, what your financial situation is.

For all of this, you have to have the all-clear of the errant biological parent. If they're not known, you get a waiver, though, again, the case has to be examined by officials.

And then, there's only the everyday misunderstandings and nightmares when encountering a system in which families like ours are not common (there are around 13k children living with queer parents in Germany), the stereotypes, the idiots who want to debate calmly as to whether it's a good idea at all that people like me have children, and queer idiots who think that the term "breeder" is a good choice of words when referring to heterosexuals.

I have to admit, this abstract really leaves me wanting more and raises some questions, especially about what the point of this is, really. It may be my headache, but I really feel as though I'm not getting something here.


1. Post-closet era. Post. Closet. Era.
2. How, pray tell, do you "use appearance to attain a sense of authenticity"...? I mean, I'm guessing here that they're aiming at the struggles that femme women face to "look gay enough" in the eyes of some people and the backlash that butch women get for "embodying a negative and harmful stereotype", but I'm still left with the feeling that I need to find myself a pansexual outfit ASAP. Maybe some bisexual pants? Does that mean that Crocky has to cut her hair? I just... yeah.

Also, I am not sure why they went for a qualitative study here, and I'd really appreciate if someone enlightened me. And also, the point of this. So twenty people say that they use their appearance to signify their identity ~authentically~. And now?

After initial scepticism towards these rather rigid models I have to say that I can really see part of my experience in those stages.

Cass Model of Gay and Lesbian Identity Formation (1979)

"Coming out is a life-long process of exploring one's sexual orientation and Gay/Lesbian identity and sharing it with family, friends, co-workers and the world. Coming out is one of the most significant developmental processes in the lives of Gay and Lesbian people. Coming out is short for the phrase "coming out of the closet." Coming out means recognizing, accepting, expressing and sharing ones' sexual orientation with oneself and others."

( Read more... )

If I was a heroine in a story in whatever medium I'd never, ever want to have children. That seems to be the safest way to either be disposed unceremoniously before the story even starts, or to die for my offspring, while, or shortly after my offspring are born. While having a daughter has mothers dying in childbirth to make way for the evil stepmother (especially in fairy tales), having sons seems to doom mothers to tear-jerky demises saving said sons from their future nemises.

These are the five dead movie mothers that drove home this point to me most in chronological order.

1. Bambi's Mother (Mother)Reason: tries to divert some hunter's attention from her son.
Role: I don't think she's more than an end-of-innocence boost for the story, really.


2. Littlefoot's Mother ("Mother")Reason: saves her son from his nemesis-to-be.
Role: again, she seems to be little more than a reason to kick off the plot, and an extremely tear-jerky red-shirt to show how very very dangerous Sharptooth is.


3. Quasimodo's mother (nameless)Reason: wants to save her son, instead gets wrongly accused of her son's nemesis-to-be and killed by him, though by accident.
Role: underlines how very heartless Frollo is and to show that our hero's mother, whom he never met, didn't abandon him but really cared for him. Another pointless tear-jerk moment.


4. Harry's mother (Lily Potter, née Evans)Reason: dying instead of her son, who is about to be killed by his nemsis.
Role:  supplier of backstory, subplot and hero's special superpowers. And secondary villains' love interest, much like: 


5. Leia and Luke's mother (Padmé Amidala)Reason: underlines how truly evil her husband is?
Role: dead love interest, mostly - and she's still better of than Shmi, who, in terms of plot, seems to be Reason for Revenge as well as tear-jerker.

Who is your favourite dead movie mother?

Not being an Apple user I have to admit that I never got Apple Apps, and I'm kinda hoping that this is a bad joke and the only reason that our broadsheet press picked up on it is that they're as tech-illiterate as their readers (me being one of them, occasionally), but.

Just. Wat.

Kudos on the assumption that all men are heterosexual and idiots who can't read facial expressions or, failing that, can ask for clarification.

Yeah, I'm procrastinating.

You know, if you start your Master thesis by saying that you're only going to consider male homosexuals in your study because they clearly have it worse (oh god I wish this was more of a paraphrase) as well as because there's so little data on female homosexuals (well, fair enough), because there are so many men writing about homosexuals (...?), that doesn't make you look that good to start with, but I was willing to read your paper, anyway.

But then you proceed to make your case, saying that those pesky foreigners, especially muslim foreigners, hate gay people, want to steal from them and beat them up. What the hell. I was looking for a sensitive insight into sex ed aimed at muslim students regarding homosexuality in Germany, not xenophobic garbage.

The first drafts of the DSM-V are out.

I can't say that I wouldn't have expected some of what's in there. Still. WOW. 

Let's start with something positive: I'm glad they're including Binge Eating as an eating disorder now. That's a good thing. I'm torn on Non-Suicidal Self Injury and wonder why they didn't also list this under paraphilias.

Other than that... Wow.

Let's begin with the fact that they've chosen to dispense with listing "distress" in their criteria as a measure for whether something is a disorder or a mere deviation from an abstract norm. I am not sure what is going to take its place - the way things are looking now, there is no telling where the boundary between clinical condition and deviation from the norm lies, really.
Zucker suggests that the likelihood of social ostracism is supposed to be the boundary for the norm here for his field, and my impression is that it will be really down to the estimation of the psych rather than the patient whether they have a condition that ought to be cured than the patient's distress with their situation.

Nearly all of the criteria regarding GI in children  that aren't related directly to the child's experienced gender still don't make sense and are deeply rooted in sexism, though the change in terminology is a good one. WTF is "typical masculine/feminine clothing" for children? What's wrong with cross-gender roles during fantasy play? WTF are "toys, games, or activities typical of the other gender", and what's wrong with rejecting games considered "appropriate" for your own gender?
Also, the shift in focus when it comes to the basis of this diagnosis from Gender Incongruence in adults does not make any sense to me - if behaviour appropriate to a person's gender is irrelevant in adults, why enforce it in children to this degree?

Zucker's paper... where to start. I am not an expert and I'm probably missing many things that are noteworthy, but there is still enough that is really anoying. He fails gender 101 ("if there was a social reason for girls to want to be boys, the same reason would apply to boys wanting to be girls"), it's creepy how he has as test subjects of one study comprised 500 boys who were referred to his clinic and only 79 girls - which to me seems to speak volumes of the inherent sexism of the entire enterprise and the femmephobia it engenders - his insistence that GID is a condition that ought to be cured by changing the individuals gender expression because that will cause their problems to disappear because they won't be socially ostracised anymore... there is so much that's troublesome in that paper, but his insistence that if you fix yourself, your situation will be better because your peers will react more positively to you is probably one of the least sensible I have ever heard. Would he maintain that that's applicable to other condition that cause children to be ostracised by their peers, I wonder?

Gender policing is creepy and superfluous, and it doesn't get better if people start even earlier with this nonsense. I want more freedom to experiment, especially for boys, not less. Most of my childhood friends presented with at least for of these criteria, in girl's cases five. I want back what I had when I was younger. More androgynous clothes for children, more toys that were coded as androgynous rather than marketed towards a specific gender, more room for experimenting. When I was small, nearly all of the male friends I had in kindergarten played more with their dolls than I did - my best friend, a boy called Sebastian, had a dolly that he used to take along everywhere and that was usually integrated into our games, usually in the role of his baby. Most of the girls I was friends dressed in androgynous clothes that would be perceived as "boy clothes" today because they're not sexualised, they played with androgynous and toys coded as "for boys" today, many had more friends who were boys than friends who were girls, and we all wore trousers with tears on the knees. I haven't seen any of that during my internship in kindergarten, and it's a fucking shame.

Edit: another thing I'm wondering here is what the benefit of having those extra criteria at all. I can't imagine that there many people who say that they don't feel their assigned gender is correct for shits and giggles, so surely, that ought to be enough for the medical gatekeepers...?
I guess I ought to shut up about this. I'm a cis ex-psych minor and really not informed enough to join the discussion of these issues.

So. Paraphilias.

The paraphilia-related changes in many areas actually seemed to make things worse rather than improve them. They apparently want to make a distinction between paraphilias and paraphilaic disorders - one being merely ascertained for study purposes, the other being diagnosed.

Not sure what the benefits of ascertaining something in a medical context are, especially in a Diagnosis Manual for Disorders, but fine, if they must. Still, the change in the wording for this is failtastic: for masochism, for example, according to the revising people, the difference between "real, not simulated" harm and ... well, harm, simulated or not, is pointless enough to just drop it altogether. Which means that  a lot more people now ought to go see a therapist, because there is no difference between sexual games and reality any more, if I'm reading that correctly.

Also, we have "autogynephilia" (and the continuing absence of autoandrophilia as well as notes to whether ciswomen experience autogynephilia, which they do) rear its ugly head again under "transvestic fetishism". As far as I can see from Blanchard's paper there is no reason for the inclusion of this "condition" at all, really, apart from Blanchard's own fucking creepy obsession with studies on the sexual fantasies of trans women.

Also, asexual people need to get their heads checked, and so do people who don't enjoy being penetrated, or those people who just like their vanilla sex too much.

Who else needs chocolate cookies?

EDIT: and I'm still trying to get my head around the necessity to list the symptoms of healthy paraphilias in a diagnosis manual for disorders under the title of the disorder it's supposed to diagnose, and I'm still drawing a blank.

Can anyone help me out? I must be missing something here and I hate that.