Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Straight Spouses of Transfolk

Tags: gender studies, reading
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  • 7 comments
fayanora

fayanora

September 22 2015, 22:59:41 UTC 5 years ago

Another example of a privileged group making someone else's oppression all about them. Po wittle bebes. *sarcastic tears*
fayanora

fayanora

September 22 2015, 23:00:42 UTC 5 years ago

This is right up there with the allistic parents of autistic kids being all "woe is me, look at how my child's autism affects MY life!"
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

September 23 2015, 01:53:45 UTC 5 years ago

A disability does affect people around it, and the burden falls on parents up until the child becomes able to take on the task of compensating for it personally if they ever do. So that can be very disruptive, and it's hard for parents to compensate for cognitive differences when they have no clue what's going on in the kid's head and the kid can't tell them. It's not like, say, missing legs where you can just get blueprints that say "Your bathroom needs these dimensions to accommodate a wheelchair." Of course parents are stressed.

What's not okay is harping up parental concerns to the exclusion of the children's concerns, or speaking for someone who has in fact learned how to talk.

One of my new favorite activism photos is one of autistic people lobbying for the right to speak for themselves -- and one of the guys was holding a sign written in speechboard icons instead of English text. Because he wanted to express himself the way he normally communicates. So. Much. WIN.
fayanora

Re: Well...

fayanora

September 23 2015, 05:14:37 UTC 5 years ago

What's a speechboard icon? I tried Googling it, failed.
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

September 23 2015, 01:57:55 UTC 5 years ago

I don't think that's fair, because they're caught up in someone else's transformational event that they don't get to choose. That always sucks. Plus they have to decide whether to leave the relationship or stay in it, and that means examining their own orientation in ways that straight people usually haven't done -- rather abruptly, and while stressed in other ways. And one of the ways that can play out is giving up that straight privilege if they choose to stay, because they're going to wind up with a same-sex partner. The stress is real, and there's very little support for it, and the support I've seen is ... actually far closer to what you described, the Str8t Spice stuff for people who left a transitioning partner. Support for people who stick around? Not so much. And if you want to have a functional family come out of that roller-coaster ride, there needs to be support for the very different experiences that people are going through.
fayanora

Re: Well...

fayanora

September 23 2015, 05:30:36 UTC 5 years ago

Yeah, well, I get very tired of people harping on about how hard it is for them to raise autistic kids, when if they would just pull their heads out of their behinds and try to actually think of kids as human beings with their own perspectives (ones based on different life experiences) or try to remember what it was like to be a child themselves, they wouldn't be struggling anywhere near as bad.

It's a failing of most parents in our culture and a number of other cultures, and causes problems with allistic kids too, but when you do that kind of shit to autistic kids, wel... they've got enough to deal with without added crap heaped on them, and naturally they're not going to have as much tolerance for that BS. So my sympathy for the parents is limited.

I don't blame the parents completely. Our culture doesn't teach parenting in school at all. Add that to the fact that schools in our culture break people's spirits and turn them into cogs of the machine, it's no wonder these adults have forgotten what it was like to be a kid; they've had those memories literally tortured out of them by the system.

Seriously, school was largely a pointless waste of time when I was in it, and from what I've heard from those who are stuck in the system currently, things have only gotten worse; schools have become prisons where nothing but propaganda is taught anymore. Very little of practical value was ever taught in school in my day, and from what I hear it's gone down to "NOTHING of practical value is taught anymore." They can't even do MATH right anymore. Have you seen the horror that is common core math? I don't think it's an exaggeration at all to call common core math an atrocity.

If I ever have kids, they are being homeschooled, with private tutors for subjects I'm not good at. Then maybe they'll actually be able to function in society without their souls being destroyed in the process.
fayanora

Video

fayanora

September 23 2015, 05:40:19 UTC 5 years ago