I need you guys to listen so bad, but I’m at least glad people on Twitter are starting to talk about this. The government of Canada is expanding Medically Assisted Death to cull the poor and disabled, and now suicidal and mentally ill (these are usually interchangeable of course here). It is EUGENICS and every single disabled rights organization is against it.

Disability payments are $1,200 a month. The average one bedroom apartment rent in the Greater Toronto Area (greatest pop. area by far here) is $2,000 a month. People with mental illnesses are on months long waitlists to get even a single publicly funded session. Weeks to get privately funded care which costs at least $200 a session. There is no housing here for disabled people. We are in one of the worst housing crises in the world right now.

Doctors are now offering MAiD unprompted to young suicidal people. This woman is 21, a health practitioner literally suggested she kill herself.

This is one of the worst Disability Rights Violations we’ve ever seen in Canada. The government is killing us because it is cheaper than funding healthcare, cheaper than giving people housing and food and basic human rights.

w-wait why are they allowing *suicidal* people this??? that's... what??

It's been suggested to veterans, too. Essentially, it's being offered to anyone struggling to survive, even though that apparently wasn't the "spirit" of the bill. Folks in healthier and more privileged situations have tested to see how easy it is to ask for it, and been offered MAiD to solve their problems almost immediately.

I would like to add that ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program) is so little that disabled people are literally starving keeping a roof over their heads- I've seen tiktoks of folks on ODSP getting food donations, getting excited, and then opening the food and bursting into tears because nobody donates anything fresh. I've seen someone have a meltdown because after not eating for four days... the food bank gave her a moldy tub of cottage cheese. The disability support system in Ontario is absolutely horrendous, pretty much downright criminal.

tl;dr: It's eugenics disguised as making MAiD "easier to access for those who need it".

honestly even when the pandemic is over (whenever the fuck that happens), there are still gonna be thousands of people disabled bc of what covid did to their lungs, brains, kidneys, etc and we’ll probably see ourselves suffering another eugenics movement bc thats literally what happened after spanish flu, ppl were disabled and dipshits were like “these Unfit Unwell ppl are a drain on our resources”

Hi I’m one of these people! Covid gave me ME/CFS and POTS, made my (probably pre-existing) EDS much worse, and caused part of my spine to fucking dislocate (because of the inflammation combined with the EDS).

Please hold people accountable for saying eugenics type shit, including “people need to work for money,” “disabled people are taking up resources,” and “disabled people shouldn’t have kids.”

A nice summary of the problems with speech-only language approaches for deaf kids and how they came to be in the first place. Excerpt: 

TL’DR: The reasons are ableism, not understanding how language works and the fact that Alexander Graham Bell was a dick. (also money, must not forget money)

THIS!

Something that my ASL classes were constantly taught–by a woman who was Hard of Hearing and came from two generations of Deaf family members–was people who are taught ASL and then taught the oral method learn the oral method A) MUCH FASTER and B) are far more proficient in the oral method.

Contrary to what TV and movies will have you believe, lip reading is really freaking hard and most D/deaf people can’t do it and if they can, even fewer do it well.

And she had some tragic stories about kids who severely backslid in their language development because their lazy, ableist parents decided to force the oral method on them because the effort of learning ASL was too difficult for the parents and thus banned their kids from speaking Sign using the justification that the children would be too lazy at learning the oral method if they were simultaneously allowed to continue Signing. It’s utterly cruel.

From the Wikipedia article on oralism, the section on the 19th Century:

AKA: Eugenics. The reason Alexander Graham Bell wanted oral-only education for deaf children is because he was afraid Deaf people could talk freely to each other, they might fall in love, and two Deaf parents might have Deaf kids.

There’s a post that’s recirculating on my dashboard, today (17 June, 2021), aimed at animators and artists who want to draw people speaking. It’s image-heavy, I don’t have enough oomph to do all the descriptions, and I don’t want to hijack the post. But here’s a link to it:

Phoneme Chart, by TheEndisNearUS.

Take a look at the first two columns, with the phonetic symbols for human speech, along with how those sounds are spelled in English. Then take a look at the second two columns, with photos and drawings of human mouth shapes as they make those sounds.

Absolutely nowhere in that chart is a single sound made by a unique mouth / lip shape. At minimum, there are two different sounds, and some have as many as six.

This is why forcing a child to learn to lipread especially as their first exposure to language, is both absurd and abusive.

Never forget that the Republicans used the covid pandemic to use eugenics to kill off hundreds of thousands of chronically ill and disabled people by insisting we should use "herd immunity" as our response and went on about how it was okay because "most people won't die" leaving out the fact that many of those who died were chronically ill and disabled. They didn't care about the lives of the chronically ill and disabled if it meant they preserved wealth for millionaires.

I just want to add to this that the Twitter screenshot is slightly incorrect, because NOT ONLY did they refuse to consider it a war crime, but Hitler actually was INSPIRED by the American programs. They literally gave Hitler ideas.

The direct eugenic inspiration from US laws/programs was an even more grotesque convoluted mess than that, BTW.

And there likely never will be anything like the same historical reckoning. Much easier to keep brushing under the rug.

Too relevant, from the late Mel Baggs: There is ableism somewhere at the heart of your oppression, no matter what your oppression might be.

i’m gonna write down a thing about eugenics abortion later bc the way ableds on this site misconstrue it pisses me off

okay i am back let’s get into this.

when disabled people talk about combatting eugenics abortion we’re very markedly not talking about putting restrictions on abortion. because, as many people seem to at least comprehend, eugenics is a systemic process and not defined by one’s individual choice.

when we talk about eugenics abortion, we’re talking about doctors coercing pregnant people to abort disabled fetuses even if they do want the child. we’re talking about disabled and psychiatrised people being forcibly sterilised, overprescribed birth control, and coerced into abortion if they do manage to get pregnant. we’re talking about parents of disabled children being aggressively discouraged from having any further biological children, even if their child’s disability is not genetic. we’re talking about people having to choose to abort very wanted children because socioeconomic conditions would make it nigh impossible to properly raise a disabled child.

and it doesn’t stop at disability. black, indigenous and immigrant people are also forcibly sterilised, overprescribed birth control, disproportionately coerced into abortion, and given subpar and often outright negligent care during and after pregnancy and birth when they do manage to avoid all those prior complications. 

when we talk about combatting eugenics abortion, we’re talking about guaranteeing people’s reproductive rights, not taking them away. because reproductive rights are not just about choosing not to have children, they’re also about no longer being forced not to have them because society considers you and/or your child undesirable.

it was never about individual choice. it’s about systemic genocide.

The way that a lot of people visualize ‘the revolution’ to be would kill hundreds of millions of disabled people

I’m really specifically talking about leftists who are romanticizing and equating the apocalypse with revolution. If your version of ‘revolution’ doesn’t account for those who can’t breathe on their own or need access to sterile environments it’s a fucked up vision. Disabled people deserve to be a part of this world and the reality of it is that in order to seize the means of production that would enable people to stay alive we can’t just topple society in its entirety. Envisioning a state of total apocalypse as a paradise does not do marginalized people justice, it just means that we die while the rich and able live. We can have our revolution and keep the people who fight for it the most alive if we care to.

Also

THAT’S EUGENICS

Ugly Dolls is seriously underrated (spoilers)

Ugly Dolls. The trailer made it look like a cute movie, and the reviews it’s getting are pretty bad. After watching it for myself, I think it has some pretty interesting things to say about discrimination and representation. Here are some things I noticed in the movie that may not have been the intention of the creators, but can be interpreted in these ways.

This movie isn’t very hyped up and I didn’t even know it was out until earlier today, but for those of you who don’t want this movie spoiled, you might wanna stop reading.

1) Eugenics

Anyone who’s seen the trailer or read a synopsis of the general plot should know that there are 2 towns: Uglyville (where all the ugly dolls live) and the Institute of Perfection (where the “perfect” dolls live). It seems more like simple segregation at first, until you get closer to the end and find out the origins of Uglyville. Uglyville is essentially a paradise for ugly dolls filled with music and color and fun. The founder of Uglyville (Ox) later reveals that before the town was created, ugly dolls were sent to an incinerator (which is referred to as recycling in the movie to soften the implications this has for all the child viewers). Ox was extremely distraught by the discovery of the incinerator, and he boarded the entrance to it to prevent ugly dolls from being sent there, instead being redirected to what would become Uglyville. The leader of the perfect dolls (Lou) actively tries to make the incinerator look like a good and merciful option for ugly dolls, saying they’ll be remade into more perfect dolls that kids will actually want to play with. This idea sounds eerily similar to things eugenicists and autismoms say about how it’s good and merciful to euthanize disabled people so “they won’t have to suffer through life with a disability.” The result of eliminating euthanasia as an option resulted in the thriving community of Uglyville where everyone’s differences are celebrated.

Another very interesting note is that the dolls in Uglyville seems to take their community for granted, blissfully unaware of the efforts of the oldest doll in town to create this community for them. To them, their happy lives are normal, but it wasn’t very long ago that they wouldn’t have even been allowed to live simply for being deformed.

2) Discrimination in disguise

The motivation for the main character (Moxy) that drives the plot is the idea that she can some day be chosen by a child. People in Uglyville don’t believe that the human world and children exist, but Moxy never gives up hope of being adopted by a child.

When she and her friends arrive at the Institute of Perfection, Lou maintains a front of caring and wanting the ugly dolls to succeed in passing the rigorous tests that all dolls have to go through before being sent to the human world. The tests are designed in such a way that the ugly dolls will fail just by being themselves. The first test involves making sure that the dolls don’t get messy from having stuff spilled on them, and before the tests even begin, the ugly dolls were having fun spraying glue at each other. Their punishment: being thrown in a washing machine. Lou explains that each time a doll is thrown in the washing machine, they become “a little less perfect” until they eventually become unacceptable to humans and end up in the trash. The ugly dolls are fun loving and clumsy, so they get thrown in the washing machine several times. When Moxy manages to make it through the obstacle course perfectly clean, Lou slashes a permanent marker across her back when she’s not looking, so she has to go to the washing machine again even though she did nothing to deserve it. 

Also, while the ugly dolls are living in the Institute of Perfection, they’re led past a bunch of houses that look exactly the same and are on very organized streets. The ugly dolls themselves are led to a supply shack that looks pretty run down compared to the other fancy houses. They embrace their housing arrangements and are actually put off by the uniformity of the houses. 

To the people watching the movie, it’s made clear that he wants to see the ugly dolls fail and is actively sabotaging them. However, the characters themselves believe that Lou cares about the ugly dolls and is giving them a fair shot.

This reminds me of the education and prison systems in real life. Disadvantaged people (people of color, people with disabilities, etc) find themselves being unsuccessful at certain things simply for being who they are, and even managing to do everything perfectly still isn’t enough in some cases. All the while, people put up a facade of caring about their needs and wanting them to succeed, but are also hindering their success and blaming them for their own failures.  

3) Pressure to conform and High/Low Functioning Distinctions

Not even the perfect dolls who are sent to the Institute of Perfection are immune to the judgment and hatred of Lou and their other perfect peers. When Lou is introduced in the movie, he sings a song called The Ugly Truth, in which he insults perfect dolls for the most arbitrary reasons (having a slightly smaller head, a slightly longer neck, a freckle that he needs a magnifying glass to see, etc). All the perfect dolls wear the same clothing (all the girls dress one way and the guys dress another way) and live in identical houses.

The perfect dolls are made so self-conscious about their microscopic imperfections that they do their very best to hide them at all costs. One female character was about to cry when she saw that another girl had stolen something of hers, when the thief told her “Don’t cry; it’ll give you frown lines,” and this causes the doll to stop crying and smile. 

Mandy, a perfect doll, has some kind of visual impairment that makes wearing glasses necessary. However, she would rather bump into things than wear her glasses because she felt that they made her look ugly. This is indeed seen as an imperfection, and she felt more comfortable wearing her glasses around the ugly dolls because they didn’t judge her for wearing them. 

Mandy is in the position of the “high-functioning” disabled person; she experiences the effects of a disability, but is able to hide it from people so that she can experience some level of acceptance in her society. Her needs are disregarded, and trying to accommodate herself or making her disability visible would result in rejection. The ugly dolls have very easy to spot differences, making them analogous to “low-functioning” disabled people. Even when Mandy gives them a huge makeover and dresses them in the same clothes as the perfect dolls, their differences are still very easy to see, and they’re still rejected. Mandy is sympathetic to the ugly dolls’ cause and does her very best to help them succeed.  

4) Representation/Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

When the ugly dolls first arrive in the Institute of Perfection, they see the perfect dolls going though some kind of scanning device that says “You are a (Insert profession here) and a model” (this is also shown in this trailer). At the end of the movie, Moxy finally finds a home as a birthday gift for a young girl. The girl sees Moxy, looking very stunned and not knowing how to react to getting an ugly doll. And then she smiles, revealing 3 teeth that look exactly like Moxy’s teeth. In the end credits, Mandy (who’s wearing her glasses) is being held by a child who’s being given an eye exam. 

One thing I thought to myself before watching the movie (and a lot of other people thought this too) is that the ugly dolls aren’t actually ugly; they’re all really cute. It wasn’t until after actually seeing it that I realized that this is supposed to include the message that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Even though the rigorous beauty standards of the perfect dolls would categorize the ugly dolls as ugly, they’re not ugly to us. 

The girl who received Moxy as a gift shares a very subtle physical similarity with her. The girl who received Mandy has a doll with glasses, just as it’s implied that she herself will have glasses. 

Conclusion:

The ending did drag on a bit too long and had a few unnecessary moments that just felt like gratuitous additions to make it more like a conventional kids movie, but overall, I thought it was pretty great. I recommend this movie. 

I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people

also the american eugenics movement which started in the late 1800′s was a huge inspiration for Hitler, and was even where the idea of blonde hair blue eyed superiority came from, and the idea of a “gas chamber” to take care of “undesirables”. In the early part of the third reich, the american eugenics movement saw it as the logical conclusion of their ““research”” and republished lots and lots of nazi propaganda 

but yeah, nazism is so un-american uwu 

Hitler praised American immigration restrictions in Mein Kampf. When the nazis wrote the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime, they specifically modelled them after the Jim Crow Laws, the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law of the United States.  

Big chunks of the American legal system and history inspired the nazi’s in their organisation of the Holocaust. 

Welp

The Nazi racial purity laws forbade the intermarriage of “pure” Aryans (Germans) with “inferior” races (read Jews and Gypsies). Moreover, they made laws allowing for the sterilization of “unfit parents,” and the “euthanizing” of “unfit” children. Horrific laws indeed, and, yes, the ideology was drawn straight from Adolph Hitler’s prison diatribe “Mein Kampf.” But when the German government — the legally constituted German government — wanted the wording for these laws, where did it turn? To Mein Kampf? No, the preponderance of evidence indicates that the Nazi government turned to the laws of Virginia.

Also: Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilisation act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

“why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating ‘y'know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born’?”

because that’s what being in medical school does to you. i both cringed and laughed at the asker’s use of “indoctrinated” because yeah, the medical-industrial complex, including medical school, does indoctrinate people with ableist ideas of “quality of life” that lead them to conclude that it would be better if disabled people were never born.

i was in a graduate program with med and dental students. i had to take an ethics class with them. it seemed like they didn’t think of disabled people as human; i mean, i had one classmate compare the names for inanimate objects to disabled people’s diagnoses when i said that id/dd/ld people reject the r-slur. dude literally thought that disabled people have the same right to self-identify as an inanimate object. one of the issues we talked about in that class was selective abortion. long story short, i almost flipped a table, and probably would have had the prof not interceded.

i love how this doctor jokes about it as if their medical education was entirely bare facts outside of any paradigm. I’m 100% certain that opinions like “disabled fetuses are better off not being born” are presented (or understood) in medical education as indisputable medical facts.

no doctor likes to think they could be wrong about a belief so central to the paradigm in which they were educated 🙃

I’ve had too many doctors tell me or my loved ones that we’re just faking our medical problems for me to think that medical education isn’t full of intense ableism.

I did a research paper on Deaf culture in high school and one of the stories I found was that a Deaf woman who had to change doctors after the first visit with an unplanned but wanted pregnancy - after years of going to him for pelvic exams, apparently - because he would only agree to schedule an abortion, refused to offer any prenatal care, and kept going on about how she wouldn’t want to bring someone else like her into the world, now would she.

He was so caught up in his own ideas about disability and what lives are worth living and what lives are worth permitting to exist that he wouldn’t shut up and let her communicate for the one minute it should have taken to get it into his over-credentialed head that her hearing loss had been completely accidental with no even faintly plausible genetic component. Her baby had no risk factors.

Because he was the doctor and he had a medical degree and she needed to calmly accept his words about the good of the future of mankind (while not permitted to flip out about the discovery she’d been getting pelvic exams from a doctor who saw her fertility as a negative trait) and get an abortion appointment set up without pausing to consult with or notify her own husband and co-parent-to-be.

Her baby was born with the expected lack of hearing problems.

even if her baby had had risk factors wtf would be wrong with Deaf people wanting Deaf kids?! (if you were studying Deaf culture, this question is probably not even directed at you, it is more rhetorical)

Why I Believe ‘To Siri With Love’ By Judith Newman Is A Book That Does Incredible Damage To The Autistic Community (via pain-three-days-grace)

Please take the time to read the quote, and understand why the #ActuallyAustistic community is calling for a #BoycottToSiri

And the open endorsement of eugenics is nowhere close to all of the problems there.

Excellent Twitter thread from @neurowonderful, including interactions with the author which really help illustrate some attitudes 😨

Well worth checking out the hashtag (and the rest of Amythest’s feed the past couple of days) over there too. Lots of other hair-raising excerpts.

when it comes to consciousness raising you can spend time telling someone “crazy” is a slur or you can spend time explaining that what looks like “care” or “cure” or “mercy” to them is actually eugenics or abuse. one of these projects has to precede the other and i bet you can guess which one i would prioritize

you’re either going to build a base of clueless liberals who learn by rote to nitpick their language for anything with the remotest connection to ability, or you’re going to help them develop the alertness and critical eye necessary to recognize eugenics and abuse. i don’t think those things are mutually compatible in an immediate timeframe, because one locates both the root and branch of oppression in a disembodied cloud of language and thought, and the other locates it in the real material structures that we need to confront immediately in order to save actual lives. not saying “crazy” isn’t going to get anyone out of forced institutionalization

Don’t leave the question of your humanity solely in the hands of the neurotypical, lest you wake up one day to find they’ve decided you no longer qualify.

“is being gay genetic” there’s literally no good reason to ask this question. shitheel

???

what

Are you saying that “being gay is genetic” is such an obvious thing that it shouldn’t be asked? Or are you saying that “being gay is genetic” is so untrue that just asking it is offensive?

I don’t believe that being gay is genetic, partly because the studies that have been done on the subject have only been able to show loose correlative connections to being gay by conditions such as in-utero hormone levels, birth order, having an identical twin who is gay. The burden of proof lies on the person proposing that it IS true to prove it, and they have not proven it, thus there is no reasonable position to take than to say that being gay is not genetically caused.

I firmly believe that any scientific study that seeks to find the “biological causative variable” to being gay (such as a specific genetic sequence) has a VERY HIGH POTENTIAL to make it easier to commit anti-gay discrimination, anti-gay genocide, anti-gay eugenics, anti-gay conversion therapy. I do not want people to be able to be outed by a genetic test. Many minors and dependents’ safety is contingent on the fact that they are able to withhold the fact that they are gay from their parents and/or guardians. I do not want “gay” to be a part of people’s medical records, since medical records that indicate transgender status, mental illness, HIV positive status, etc, are currently used to discriminate against people. I do not want people to abort their fetus specifically because a test indicates that fetus will grow up to be gay.

I do not want the medical industry to destroy our ability to self-identify. 

What do you do if you are gay but a genetic test claims that you are straight?

I am a 24 year old lesbian transgender woman. When I was about… 15-19 years old I identified as a bisexual male. I do not want a genetic test for gayness to be done to me in order to determine which one of those identities is “fake” and which one is “real.” I do not want such a test to injure my sense of self. I know who I am. 

I believe that gender and sexual orientation are roles that are socially mandated, meaning that these are not universal labels but rather cultural labels. The idea of bringing genetics and biology into this to reinforce the barriers between different labels is horrible and invites social violence.

Gay people do not need such a test. They know they are gay, thus that test is obsolete.

A genetic test for gayness will not cure homophobia, but give it a weapon. 

Instead of homophobes believing “gay people are moral degenerates” they will believe “gay people are, genetically, moral degenerates. Now please give us your blood so we can see if you are subhuman or not.”

Again, we are not just fighting the toxicity of Trump, we’re fighting the toxicity of right-wing ideology in general.

You know that Cato study people like to trot out to prove that welfare moms earn more than police officers?

That biased, inaccurate piece of shit?

Can we PLEASE retire it now that they have explicitly revealed their agenda to repeal every fucking program the government ever implemented?

They are not an accurate source. They explicitly manipulate and distort data to fuel hatred against the government and the populations that benefit the most from government programs. Stop giving them a platform.

not just invisible disabilities, btw. most disabled veterans aren’t blind, deaf, or parapalegic either. note that under their plan, having both legs amputated above the knee does not qualify you for assistance – even if it happened in the wars these people initiated to protect their cash cows in the gulf.