I'm not like Mad at anyone who does this and I'm obviously not in charge of how anyone else tags shit on their own blogs, whatever, but it's always bummed me out when my sex Ed posts get reblogged and tagged with 18+, minors dni, etc. personally I actually very much want teenagers to learn about their bodies and safer sex but I guess I'm just the guy who wrote the thing.

by and large I am not an angry man but once I watched a fellow sex educator present to a room full of college students and, upon being gently challenged by one of the students who objected to them describing sex as something that happens between adults, said with very palpable disdain "I don't want to talk about kids fucking." and I was so angry about it that I made myself nauseous.

not just teens, either. every couple years I give up my Sundays for a few months to teach sex ed to 4th-6th graders, unpaid. and I don't do it because it's always fun or easy or great for my health, I do it because those are human people with changing bodies and feelings who deserve to have someone who gives a shit take the time to talk honestly with them so that they might make less painful mistakes later.

ah, this has gotten notes. now we begin a game of Is Someone Going To Call Me A Pedophile For This.

and the ironic thing is that teaching comprehensive sex ed as young as possible (to an age appropriate extent of course) is like literally the best way to keep kids safe bc it allows them to know if what’s happening to them is wrong. especially since the most likely abuser is a parent. who’s obviously not going to teach them that they deserve bodily autonomy. it sounds icky but teaching kids about sex is what lets them know if they’re being raped, and unfortunately a scarily high amount of kids are preyed upon.

I feel like a lot of people don’t really fully grasp the idea that abusive parents exist and are both common and, to a degree, socially acceptable.

Like, they may be aware of the fact but have not yet actually integrated it into their worldview, personal beliefs, or policy proposals.

This becomes particularly obvious when people try to start a panic about trans charities or schools supporting trans minors “behind their parents’ backs” as if parents are just entitled to full control by default and would never do anything bad if they learned their child was trans.

If my own father had ever learned I was trans the most realistic range of his reactions would have been between “kicking me out of the house” and “literally just killing me”.

And I am far from the only one in this situation. LGBT people as a whole are disproportionately represented among homeless youth precisely because so many parents are unsupportive. Outright murder is more rare but has also happened before.

It is ridiculous to just assume parents are safe by default.

Yeah earlier I saw someone say that most people are not as opposed to child abuse as they think they are, and I’m inclined to agree.

People hate the concept but when it’s their friend, their sibling, someone else they know doing the abusing- then it’s a guilty grimace and then a hurried change of subject. Making excuses on behalf of said abuser, waving it off and minimising it. Or a half assed attempt at intervention that immediately gets quashed when the abuser inevitably turns up the charm and excuses

Or, more damningly in my opinion, when someone is dealing with a particularly unruly child and they shrug helplessly and go like “well what else am I supposed to do?” Like I am admittedly no child expert but as a Former Abused Child myself, I do know that purposefully causing a child pain and/or in any way magnifying their existing trauma is not on the fucking table. You don’t get to shake your head at child abuse, then turn around and do it yourself and still think you have the moral high ground. You’re not special.

Bit of a tangent maybe- but this is the problem, I think, with people acting like child abuse is something only Evil People do, as if Evil People is a different breed of human and therefore I, a Good Person, could never possibly be capable of that. My circumstances are different, I’m justified in doing this. (You’re not.)

I will bang pots and pans over this concept for ever and ever- most of us are raised in a society that normalises or tolerates child abuse. If you wanna “think of the children!” now’s the time to do it. Examine and challenge your fucking biases. Please.

Mara Wilson speaking the truth.

I remember: Everyone at the time knew Britney's Rolling Stone cover was incredibly inappropriate. (I was only 13 at the time and thought "Damn, that is weird to dress up a teen as a child.")

"But, she's getting paid for it! And think about the exposure! She's young but still sly enough to know what she is doing!"

Which is horrible.

The media and Hollywood are doing the same thing to Millie Bobby Brown js

She's currently only 17 and they have her dressed up and sexualized as a grown ass woman. She started going to premiers and dressing like an adult when she was 13-14. Who's watching over her?

Minors deserve to have a say in their own healthcare

This is about:

@ohpioneer1806 no I’m not a parent. I was however a minor in the past— shocking, I know.

You can’t get any healthcare services without parental consent. At all. Sometimes even trying or voicing a concern means they have to immediately inform your parents. I was denied vaccines that I wanted to get as a teenager because my mom was “worried” about them. I couldn’t get counseling through my college as a minor without parental consent— I was mature enough to get fast-tracked into adult classes, but not mature enough to know if I needed help

It is virtually impossible for kids to get mental help without alerting their parents. Secrecy is the highest priority in a lot of these cases. And who does telling the parents against the kid’s will benefit? When I was that young, I didn’t know it was a problem with my family, I thought it was just a problem with me, and I knew I very badly needed help but couldn’t take any that would alert my parents, because then I’d face repercussions at home that would make everything worse

The fact that I didn’t feel safe to go to the high school administration and ask for help is the sole reason I wasn’t put in foster care. They tried, years later, but it was too late

Who is this benefitting? If the relationship is in any way healthy, a teenager would tell their parent something like that. If it’s not, then that resource is needed even more

And with the other things on the list it’s the same. Trans kids should be able to get puberty blockers and hrt later on even if they have bigoted parents. If you don’t want teen pregnancies, then the solution is sex ed and birth control, and failing that, abortions. How is forcing a scared teenager to carry a likely very dangerous pregnancy to term benefiting anyone? Who is that benefiting?

You realize the anti-vaxxers’ kids are human beings, right? Human beings who might not wanna get sick themselves/endanger their friends but happen to have unreasonable parents who are obsessed with their kid being perfect?

ABT has been called torture but “autism mommies” just want their kid to act normal, above all else. The first time I was in a psych ward, I opened up about being gay and a nurse immediately suggested ECT. Thank God I was over 18. My parents would love to turn me straight.

I’m not saying eight year olds shouldn’t have to take medicine if it tastes icky here. I actually work with kids, and I understand how much they don’t wanna do things they have to do sometimes. I’m not saying they should be treated exactly like adults, I’m saying that a person has a right to bodily autonomy even before they turn 18

⚠️hello!! please just take a couple seconds out of your time to watch and reblog this!! ⚠️

I have a fairly good amount of followers to share this to. Here's the original thread on Twitter (you can check for updates)

‼️No one deserves to be treated like this. humiliated and misgendered like this. ‼️

i saw this on instagram and i tried to dm him, but as its impossible (as far as ive tried) to delete an instagram account, it may have just been logged out of. please boost!

ALEX IS SAFE! His mother was fired and CPS is currently involved, trying to get him to a safer place.

He is! :D

ALEX IS NO LONGER SAFE

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJrrmXpL/

Oh my god…

friendly reminder that native americans actually suffer more police brutality & police murders than any other ethnicity

friendly reminder that we got our right to vote after black ppl did

friendly reminder that up until the 19-fucking-90’s our women would have their tubes forcibly tied by doctors after they gave birth, as a way to get rid of us

Friendly reminder that most of our sacred sites have been polluted by mining, illegal dumping, or radiation. AND EVEN MORE OF THEM HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM US

friendly reminder that there is less than one percent of us left here.

Friendly reminder that even up here in Canada, there are mass amounts of First Nations women vanishing. Racism against natives is still alive and well. Residential schools were in operation until 1996. 

This is not just an American problem. 

LINK to a good article on this

Just want to let people know, this particular travesty happened in 2014.

Email the court at [email protected] to urge them to reverse their decision and send Grace home. Don’t use a template, write your own email. Alt you can call them at 248-858-0424.

Sentencing a Black child with a learning disorder to imprisonment for not adjusting well to a massive upheaval in her way of life is violence. Letting it happen is violence.

Stop using intersex bodies as weaponised shame!

Image description: the yellow and purple intersex flag overlaid with the words “Microphalia is an intersex variation. Micro-penis jokes are intersexist and you all need to stop right the fuck now. I don’t care if it’s aimed at some asshole, I promise it will hurt intersex people more.” End of image description.

I know what you mean, but there are other ways to say that racism shows evil character. Could y'all not be intersexist for a cheap joke?

Be better!

Somebody messaged me to ask why this is wrong… and I understand that on the surface it can seem innocent enough, a guilty laugh…

CW: infant surgery, intersex abuse, intersexism, medical abuse, trauma, body shaming, forced sterilisation, racism, fetishisation.

But what you don’t know is that toddlers with micro-penises are castrated and given cosmetic genital surgery because there are still doctors who think its better for society to enforce a non-existent sex binary. The idea being that you can “raise them as girls” but most such children reject a feminine gender identity… these children grow up being traumatised in an attempt to socialise them into a gender identity that is not their own and it doesn’t work, and THEN as adults they discover that they have been robbed of functional organs of sexual pleasure because doctors and parents thought their penis was too small.

You are furthering the idea that a micro-penis is a terrible thing in the minds of society, parents and medical practice. You are also causing real pain for people with micro-penises, retraumatising people who are victims of intersex surgeries, and generally WEAPONISING INTERSEX BODIES FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT.

Lets also not forget that poc have been some of the most at risk of forced sterilisation. As with all things trauma is felt most keenly at social intersections of oppressed and abused people.

Edit: And I’d say it’s bad form to make “jokes” about penis size at BLM, black men are regularly fetishised for supposedly having large penises and this is also wrong.

STOP USING INTERSEX BODIES AS WEAPONISED SHAME!

The number of people I’ve seen in the tags saying “I didn’t know, I’m going to stop doing this” and “wow I didn’t realise… good to know” is great. It makes me really happy that your eyes are open and you’re willing to take intersex people into account.

But please also educate your peers and call this out when you hear/see it, and maybe check out your local intersex led organisations and see what you can do to improve the treatment of intersex people both in society and in medicine.

Thank you, I love you all

it is actually incredibly easy to NOT attack children with chemical weapons I’ve been doing it my entire life

Crazy thought but if you have any inkling that a protest will have violence (which they seem to often have) you should not be taking them there. You as a parent are then willingly endangering your child. Kids should not be the ones fighting the battles here. Their brains aren’t fully developed and they are therefore more likely to make a foolish decision that could endanger themselves or others

Crazy thought but if your immediate reaction to learning of a war crime is to blame the victims then maybe you’re a horrible person.

adults really think they have “fully developed brains” while saying shit like “if a 10-year-old joins a protest and gets tear gassed it’s the fault of everyone except the people who launched the tear gas”

When I was a kid my mom would see a news story about a child getting kidnapped and she’d say OH THE POOR MOTHER. She sympathizes more with the mother we haven’t seen than the kid who is literally being traumatized as we speak because she is a parent.

In school I would tell teachers what was happening to me. They’d always ask my mom then say “well your mom says you’re not being abused and she seems like a nice person so I guess you’re lying” and they’d make excuses for her because she was nice to them on the phone. It’s because they have kids so they’re ready to empathize with an abuser as long as they can act decent.

When I finally got out if my mom’s house she had a breakdown because she couldn’t control me anymore. She called the cops on me because I didn’t respond to her email the way she wanted me to, she wanted to control me more. I had to talk to a cop on the phone who said “well the auckland police will support you but.. she’s still your mother..” He took her side without knowing what happened at all. Because he’s most likely a parent so he only sympathizes with the abuser.

Every time I’m out in the world a boomer tries to make smalltalk with me. They’ll Always ask about my parents and about how they feel about me leaving. As if this isn’t painful enough, they always follow it up with a speech about “IF THAT WERE MY KID ON THE OTHER SIDE IF THE WORLD WITHOUT ME I’D BE HEARTBROKEN DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH PAIN YOU’RE CAUSINGTHEM” They have kids so they automatically side with an abuser.

Whenever I go on social media I see parents defending abusing their kids. “Sometimes kids need to be hit” “if that were my kid I would have done a lot worse than smash their xbox” people with children in their profile pictures laugh at videos of child abuse that went viral, not because of how horrible it is, but because parents think this shit is funny. They have kids so they only put themselves in the abuser’s shoes, not the kid screaming and crying on the floor.

If you try to speak out against any if this they’ll say “oh you don’t have kids you don’t know what it’s like!” Well I know what it’s like to be that kid, but the kid is never what matters. You have kids for Yourself, not because you are actually willing to make the necessary changes to yourself and your lifestyle to give a kid a safe environment to live in. IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW HARD IT IS TO RAISE A KID. YOU SIGNED UP FOR ALL OF IT, THAT KID DID NOT. YOU ARE NEVER EVER THE VICTIM IN THAT SITUATION. EVER. It doesn’t matter how much you love to victimize yourselves.

This is why I hate parents. They can only ever sympathize with someone who has kids too, no matter how horribly they treat their kids. This is why there is no help for kids who are being abused, because parents have these stupid victim complexes that say that their kids having any autonomy is hurting them. I can’t go a day in my life without getting unsolicited opinions about how living my life is hurting my parents who abused me for 20 years and scarred me for life. Parents are the scum in the earth. If you don’t like that generalization then start holding other parents accountable.

the spanking debate isn’t all that complicated. you’re either ok with hitting small kids who are completely defenseless and literally at your mercy, or you’re not. supporting the first option makes you a bad and dangerous person, and unfit to be a parent, and im sorry to say but there’s no way around this, no excuses or loopholes. it is what it is

I’ve told this story before and my clam chowder is getting cold but fuck it.

A couple years ago while I was working for a care center during my ece training - we had a big thing about spankings. We went around and asked children who were spanked how they felt about it and what it told them or how it made them feel.

Then when the parents were over, we anonymously read everything that was said by the children on how they view spankings and unanimously it was found that the children never saw it as a growing experience.

It was “painful” “really scary” “I thought mommy hated me now” and we often found it never actually TAUGHT the kids what they did wrong. in fact it seemed to teach them that at any moment your mommy or daddy would just haul up and smack you until you cried and said it was for your own good.

Needless to say I’m pretty sure we changed a lot of parents opinions on spanking and SHOCK OF SHOCKS actually TALKING to their children worked far better disiplinary

I even included my own story, pretending I was telling an outside story “well, I happened to know one person who’s mother only stopped spanking them cause they got tall and big real fast so they could fight back. so there’s a lot of intimidation and fear to your children.” and just - I’ll never forget the dawning look of realization on their faces

The most common argument I hear is, “Look, my parents spanked me and I turned out fine.” Stolen from elsewhere on the internet but now my defult response:  “No you didn’t–you think it is okay to hit little kids.”

Quite possibly a very unpopular opinion, but it’s 2019 - can we stop pretending that witchcraft and belief in magic are cool and harmless hobbies? Thanks.

Also it’s 2019. Can we also stop pretending that the witchcraft is the one that made those people harm other people and not well…the people 😊

That’s like saying the knife throwers are killing people because they throw knifes. Not cause they’re just shit people.

hey op this is the dumbest take i’ve ever seen. it’s so dumb that i actually don’t feel like i have to explain why bc anyone with half a braincell can tell.

people need to stop leaving intersex people out of conversations about reproductive justice. 

intersex people are routinely sterilized at birth, and the choice of whether or not we want to have children is taken from us before we even can reach an age where we would be ready to make that choice. 

intersex people and their families are lied to about surgeries that have no medical benefit, because doctors are so worried about making sure that they uphold the binary system and create people who look “normal” instead of preserving our right to consent to what happens to our bodies. 

intersex people are often denied access to fertility treatment, or have many barriers to accessing infertility treatment because it is believed that we will not want to have children, or that we should not want to have children. 

yet, intersex issues are rarely, if ever, brought up in the context of reproductive rights, despite the fact that bodily autonomy and reproductive justice is a huge issue for the intersex community. 

if you’re fighting for reproductive justice, please consider fighting for our rights to choose as well.

This includes putting a stop to people spouting bullshit that intersex people are all or mostly inherently sterile.

Our variants aren’t what make us sterile in most cases, it’s the fucking doctors.

I work at a daycare with infants.

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.

This reminds me of a cousin of mine who ended up with her kids being taken away from her by social services for a number of reasons but mostly for nearly killing her baby daughter. How?

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

(Note. She still, to this day, maintains the view that she was right and the doctors were wrong. “They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes.” = her actual words.)

My mom had me dieting with her when I was eleven. She had me eating less than 600 calories a day because she was worried I was going to “get huge.” She even grounded me once because she found out my friends were bringing me lunches! I ended up passing out, going to the ER, and getting two IVs at once BC I was so goddamn dehydrated. Soooooo surprised they didn’t call child services… And looking back, this was the root of my anorexia. I’m nearly 22 and still fighting it. Please don’t starve your fucking children.

For fucks sake babies are SUPPOSED to be fat, what is wrong with people? It’s just stored energy, and growing children need stored energy - an 11 year old is just about to hit some major growing years. Damn. 

Fatphobia

Is

Real

and it kills

This is no joke. people will literally starve their own babies cause they don’t want them getting fat. A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick. the parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parent straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day. ONCE A DAY. A FUCKING BABY. they even had the nerve to say because they didn’t want the baby to get fat. people like this are real. they would rather have a dead baby than a fat one.

My youngest son is a very big boy and has been since he was born. When he was 10 months old I took him for his well-baby check and vaccinations. The nurse noted his weight and said, quite casually, “He is in the 99th percentile for weight so he is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that.” I said, “He is exclusively breastfed. He refuses to eat any solids yet.” What did she expect me to do? What would it mean to “keep an eye on” an exclusively breastfed baby’s weight? 

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

We need to completely eliminate weight talk from medicine, especially when it comes to children. Even the smallest exposure can have terrible consequences.

Wtf…

A friend from college had been going to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. She was told to lose weight. Over the course of several years, she went back to the doctors time and time again, telling them that she’d been sticking to the diet but because of her breathing problems she had been unable to even walk for more than 20 minutes at a time. The doctor got her into an exercise programme and told her that she just needed to really try to lose weight because that was clearly the reason for her breathing problems. By the time they found the tumour on her lungs, it was inoperable. She only lived three months after diagnosis. She was 25. She’d had the tumour for over five years. The doctor was so focused on the fact that my friend was “fat”, that they refused to look for any underlying cause. They killed her.

Weight-first treatment KILLS. Fatphobia KILLS.

I have 2 scary stories to share about fatphobic doctors & parents harming their childs/patients’ health:

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

It’s a real shame that we all have so much stories to share about this issue. A REAL SHAME.

Future doctors, interns, and residents following me:

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

Don’t let bias against your fat patients kill them!

(#and this is just when we actually go to the doctor and tell them we have problems #how many of us just give up #or won’t mention anything that seems like too much of a ‘fat’ problem)

i’d really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. fat people are already here for each other, we need you guys to help us out too. this is something i never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it’s disappointing. be there for your fat siblings, too.