#biosocial model

[funeral]

The relationship between emotion dysregulation and borderline behavior patterns, according to the biosocial theory.

Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

[long-live-astronerd-ghost-king]

DPXDC prompt: Spiritual Siblings

Bruce: My assassin kid can't be that normal!

Damian: Well, I’m completely emotionally stable by Amity Park standards. The problem is with you. Obviously.

~~~~~

Damian had long found peace and home in Amity, so he did not worry that the new family and Gotham might not accept him.

Sure, Al Ghul had lived without any contact with his biological father all these years but he could safely say that he had a happy childhood. First years were hard and he was raised more as a weapon than a human being. Even so, after that a ghost who decided to become his brother appeared and everything changed.

Damian still does not know what Ra's owes Phantom but Danny has a right to take him, without prior notification, to live with Fentons, to visit Aunt Alicia at her farm, and to make Vlad’s weekends much less calm and boring. Danny jokes that he just steals him as a hostage when Al Ghul does not pay taxes for using Lazarus Pits. Whatever the reason, he already has a family that loves him.

However, he still wanted to make an effort to fit in this one too. The model of conduct certainly was his older brother. No, not the oldest, of course. To be honest Dan wasn’t the kind of a man that could charm you from the first minute. But Danny, in Damian’s experience, had a calming effect on people. So he tried to act like him.

And, yeah, for lack of experience, he was more fun!Danny at home and super!Danny on patrol but he also really tried not to get any of his own assassin personality in his new-self and was tired of it. He couldn’t get a 100% match. Fine. Still doesn’t look like anyone in this house really likes him, so whatever.

Damian understood why Bruce didn't like his company. Jazz had long ago explained to him the importance of voluntary consent. His mother did a terrible thing. Al Ghul was not a child and therefore he was ready to admit it. However, he also understood that children were not responsible for the actions of their parents.

As a biosocial being, he wanted to be more than just a painful reminder of what had happened to Bruce. Wayne's ignoring of his existence was rude. But Damian wouldn't force this man to spend time with him just because he was legally obligated to take care of his well-being. He wasn't going to prove anything to Batman, and he definitely didn't need his attention. The care of his real family is enough.

But Damian really tried to get along with new potential siblings. He even shared Sam's and Danny’s special jokes with some of adopted kids 'cause he didn’t want them to feel like he put himself above them. He wasn't good at showing emotions but he was as open as the assassin could afford to be to strangers.

But they all obviously expected something from him. And it reminded him of the League in an unpleasant way. It was easier with Fentons. Almost everyone in Amity Park was saying what they thought, and Damian didn’t have to waste time decoding potential conspiracies.

Damian missed movie marathon nights with Sam, Tucker, and Danny. And he hoped Dani had time to bother Vlad in his absence.

It was so weird here. When Danny and Valerie were fighting, they would gather at the dinner table anyway. When Damian wanted to have combat training with Drake here, he was forced to stay in his room. A very strange punishment. And undeserved one too.

Al Ghul felt quite calm and fine sitting at his easel and painting the people he left behind. An unusual subject for his paintings. But, Ancients, he missed Amity.

He missed Jack's bone breaking hugs, Maddie's Ecto-Contaminated food, arguments of Sam and Tucker, cozy art class with Mr. Baxter and even Vlad's done look. He missed Danny telling him about the stars. He also missed sword practice with Dan's boyfriend Fright Knight and he missed Dan's stories about his other youth. He missed literary evenings with Mr. Lancer, Clockwork and Ghost Writer. He even missed the hours-long Jazz lectures. He missed the dance of death and life. He missed being looked at without expecting anything from him. He missed the crowd. In the league, he was never at one with himself and in Amity he was always surrounded by people who were not afraid of his fate as the heir to the said League. This Manor was full of people, but for the first time in his life he felt lonely. Damian has to admit that he felt left behind. Of course, he understood that people needed time to build relationships, but he could have sworn that even he didn't need that much time to connect with Fentons. Maybe this is one of the tricks of the Clockwork? Then this one is not funny at all.

~~~~~Phone call~~~~ Damian: Mom, I want to go home. Maddie: I'm so sorry to hear that, sweetheart. What happened? Damian: Just…Nobody likes me. Why was I sent here? I'm not weak. And my brothers are quite capable of protecting me from Raas. I don't need Batman for this. Maddie: We'll figure it out, champ. Moms love you, remember? I'll talk to Talia, okay? Your brothers and sisters are already on edge and ready to steal you right during the patrol. Damian: It would be nice, but it would put a bat on their tails. So lock them in thermoses if they bother you too much. Maddie: But that won't stop Jazz. Damian: I missed the part where that's my problem. Maddie: Well, it will be your problem if she comes to your doorstep with your childhood photos and moralizing.

~~~~~~~~

It's his birthday. And he was always excited about it. But now, looking at the pile of gifts, he realizes that these people don't know him at all.

And this is the family of the best detective in the world? Maybe yes, but none of them bothered to really find info about him or ask him about his likes. Damian's a stranger here, and that's obvious.

The lunch container, which he will obviously give to the Boxing Lunch when he's in the right time interval, tennis rackets that Youngblood might like, The Graveyard Book…

Valerie had already read it to him and Dani before it was published. Thanks to Clockwork for his little miracles. The book reminded him of home.

Obviously this one is from Jason. And well, Damian doesn't think it was a pun on his life in Amity, more like Hood's inside joke about death but Dami will definitely leave this thing in the room at the Manor and maybe take it with him to the GZ or Amity Park.

~~~~~~~

When they gather at the festive table, Damian realizes that he has to make some kind of speech. He tries to be as brief as possible in his report.

Damian: Todd, your gift is appreciated. And I found a potential use for items that were given by others, Bruce.

Damian never called Batman his father. With Maddie and Talia, calling both moms wasn't weird, especially when Jazz explained to his biological mom that he wasn't trying to replace her. But with Wayne, it was different. Both women took care of him, they deserved this title. Wayne provided for his needs, but his core heart didn't feel like they were close. Surely there's nothing wrong if they're just Bruce and Damian? Obviously, they both don't enjoy each other's company.

Jason: So, do you like books, little demon? Damian: Sometimes reading is quite relaxing, I should point out. I'm not indifferent to Stephen King and Lovecraft. Jason: Personal recommendations? Damian: Cujo is one of my favorites. Jason: Not a common opinion, huh. Damian: It reminds me of my family. Damian tries to smile like Danny does, but Jason's twitching eye clearly indicates that he screwed it up.

~~~~Dick and Jason synchronously drop their forks as an excuse for a conference under the table.~~~~ Dick*whispers*: How's the situation? Jason*whispers back*: If the boy asks for a dog, don't be fooled. He will be happy to dance on our graves.

~~~~Cass knocks over their heads, urging them to return to their seats.~~~~

Damian: So how good you are at fading and sliding,Todd? Jason: Why did you ask? I can't, of course. Damian: Because you're dead. It seemed to me that this was a completely understandable interest. Jason: Wow, what a jerk. Damian: I wonder why your own incompetence makes me a jerk? Even my sister could do this when she wasn't dead for even a month.

Jason, for some reason, looks awkward, although he has never been embarrassed before by the idea that a girl could be stronger than him.

Jason: Your sister? How old was she when... So it's all about age. Damian rolls his eyes.

Damian: We're the same age. It seems like it was four or five years ago. To be honest, I don't remember. I wasn't around then. I'll ask Danielle the next time I go to the cemetery to visit her. Dick: I'm so sorry, Dami. Where is she buried? We can take you. Damian: There's no need. She has no grave, as there was nothing to bury. Bruce sighs loudly and covers his eyes with his hands. Damian: It's just easier to contact the afterlife in places like this, you now? Duke: We are very sorry, dude. Damian: Don't be. People come and go, and then come back if they haven't finished annoying you. There's no point in regretting the past. Her creation was not the most ethical thing but everything is going as it should. At least that's what Grandpa says. Considering that the old man is older than time, I prefer to believe him. No one plays with fate without his permission unless they want to get hit by the clock. Tim now looks like he's going to throw up and Damian hurries to move his plate closer to him. Jason: Yes, Bruce, this is definitely your son. Damian: Did I say something wrong? Dick smiles faintly at him but still doesn't find anything to say. Damian shrugs and goes back to eating asparagus. People outside of Amity are so weird.

Signal looks at Damian suspiciously as he carefully rearranges the plate of soy sausages away from himself. Did he take him for an idiot? Everyone knows that even vegetarian sausage bite and fight no worse than those with meat when they come back to life. It's not Damian's fault that he doesn't have an ectoblast with him and wants to have extra distance from the opponent.

~~~At the same time, in the walls of Wayne Manor~~~ Dani: The operation codenamed "Get Haunted Idiot" is declared open. Danny and Dan *salute*.

~~~Several Days Later~~~

Damian: So, this is Dan. Danny says we keep him as a GIW repeller. Dick: And Danny and Dan are.. Jazz: His brothers. I'm Jazz by the way. Elle and I are his sisters. Damian: I feat the criteria to participate in their name cult, so they took me. Dan, Danny, Dani and Dami. Dan *ruffles Damian's hair* : I prefer to call this biting threat Damn, to be honest. Dami: Shut up, DaNtE, they almost wrote Dark in your passport, you idiot. I can't believe I thought I missed you. Danny: Wow. Rude. Your grandpa would be disappointed. Great job, lil one.

~~~Several years later~~~

[hauntedselves]

Clinical Formulations of Narcissistic PD

Clinical formulations and case conceptualisations are introduced in this post.

These are all generalisations and theories of how NPD develops, not something that is supposed to be true for everyone with NPD.

Psychodynamic model

Freud suggests parents either overvaluing or neglecting (or both) a child can lead to NPD & especially inability to form healthy, lasting relationships and regulate self-esteem

"In other words, [NPD] is the outcome of insufficient gratification of the normal narcissistic needs of infancy and childhood."

Kohut theorises that narcissists' ability to form a cohesive sense of self and others was developmentally arrested in childhood, resulting in grandiosity & idealising others

"Narcissistic injury" = fragmentation of the self

Kernberg suggests grandiosity & exploitation result from maternal emotional abuse

Grandiosity is an "emotional escape valve"

Grandiosity & entitlement mask the "real self" that is "split off"

The real self unconsciously holds rage, fear, envy, deprivation

Defensive structure is same as BPD but difference is grandiosity

Biosocial model

NPD is primarily the result of environment, especially "parental indulgence and overvaluation, learned exploitive behavior, and only-child status"

Special treatment from caregivers leads children to believe that the "world revolves around them", and therefore they expect the same outside the home

When special treatment outside the home doesn't happen, they "experiment with demanding and exploitive tactics and subsequently develop considerable skill in manipulating others"

"At the same time they come to believe that most others are inferior, weak, and exploitable."

NPD is self-perpetuating through sense of superiority, lack of self control, sense of entitlement, and dismissing of those who reject their world / self-view

Cognitive-Behavioural model

Key feature of NPD is self-aggrandisement

Core beliefs:

> Deserving of special treatment

> Not bound by social norms and rules

Conditional beliefs:

> Others should be punished for not recognising their specialness

> To maintain that special status others should be subservient to them

Instrumental belief:

> Always strive to demonstrate their superiority

> See themselves as special, superior, entitled to special favors and treatment, and vulnerable to loss of status

> View others as inferior but potential admirers

Main pattern of behaviour is "seeking prestige, power, position, and wealth as a way of reinforcing their image of superiority", using "manipulation and guile" if necessary

The primary schema is superior & special (/ entitlement & grandiosity)

> Superior schema "shaped by flattery, indulgence, and favoritism"

> Special schema shaped by "rejection, limitations, exclusion, or deficits"

> Common denominator is the belief that the individual is different in some way

Three subtypes:

> Self-centered impulsive type

> Ruthless impression-management type

> Acceptance-oriented impression-management type

> Each type is centred around an impulse control deficit developed in childhood

> "Specifically, these individuals learned to seek reinforcers without having to work for them. This resulted in their development as self-indulgent, egocentric, and impulsive individuals."

> Ruthless & Acceptance-oriented types focus on creating favourable impressions with others, but struggle with long-lasting healthy relationships because of their empathy deficits

Interpersonal model

People with NPD were raised in an environment of "selfless not contingent" love, leading to insensitivity to others' needs

The caregiver was over-adoring, but there was also a constant threat of a "fall from grace", with pressure to be the perfect child

The constant overbearing love means that any criticism or disappointment hits very hard

"In short, there is extreme vulnerability to criticism or being ignored, together with a strong wish for love, support, and admiration from others. Noncontingent love and presumptive control of others is expected and even demanded. If support is withdrawn, or lack of perfection is evident, the self-concept degrades into severe self-criticism."

Integrative model

People with NPD are hypersensitive

Seen as exceptional children, leading to pressure to perform

As children likely had highly developed speech and interpersonal skills

Life purpose: "I’m special and unique, and I am entitled to extraordinary rights and privileges whether I have earned them or not."

World-view: "Life is a banquet table to be sampled at will. People owe me admiration and privilege."

Goal: "Therefore, I’ll expect and demand this specialness."

Defense mechanisms: rationalisation and projective identification

Parental injunction: "Grow up and be wonderful—for me."

"The illusion of specialness, disdain for others’ views, and a sense of entitlement lead to an underdeveloped sense of social interest and responsibility. This, in turn, leads to increased self-absorption and confirmation of narcissistic beliefs."

- From Sperry, Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of DSM-5 Personality Disorders (2016)

[intersexbookclub]

Summary: Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex

For many of us, Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex (2009) turned out to be a particularly rich source of information about intersex history. So I (Elizabeth) have decided to give a fairly detailed summary of the chapter because I think it’s important to get that info out there. I’m gonna give a little bit of commentary as I go, and then a summary of our book club discussion of the chapter.

The chapter is titled “(Un)Queering identity: the biosocial production of intersex/DSD” by Alyson K. Spurgas. It is a history of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, and how it went from being a force for intersex liberation to selling out the movement in favour of medicalization. (See here for summary of the other chapters we read of the book!)

Our high level reactions:

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): Until I read chapter 4, I didn't really realise how reactionary “DSD” was. It hadn't been clear to me how much it was a response to the beginning of an organized intersex advocacy movement in the United States.

Michelle (@scifimagpie): I could feel the fury in the writer's tone. It was a real barn burner.

Also Michelle: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

Introducing the chapter

The introduction sets the tone by talking about how in the Victorian era there was a historical shift from intersex being a religious/juridical issue to a pathology, and how this was intensified in the 1950s with John Money’s invention of the optimal gender rearing model. 

Spurgas briefly discusses how the OGR model is harmful to intersex people, and how it iatrogenically produces sexual dysfunction and gender dysphoria. “Iatrogenic” means caused by medicine; iatrogenesis is the production of disease or other side-effects as a result of medical intervention.

This sets scene for why in the early 1990s, Cheryl Chase and other intersex activists founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). It had started as a support group, and morphed significantly over its lifetime. ISNA closed up shop in 2008.

Initially, ISNA was what we’d now call interliberationist. They were anti-pathologization. Their stance was that intersexuality is not itself pathological and the wellbeing of intersex people is endangered by medical intervention. They organized around the abolition of surgical intervention. They also created fora like Hermaphrodites With Attitude for the deconstruction of bodies/sexes/genders and development of an intersex identity that was inherently queer. 

The early ISNA activists explicitly aligned intersexuality in solidarity with LGB and transgender organizing. There was a belief that similar to LGBT organizing, once intersex people got enough visibility and consciousness-raising, people would “come out” in greater numbers (p100).

By the end of the 90s, however, many intersex people were actively rejecting being seen as queer and as political subjects/actors. The organization had become instead aligned with surgeons and clinicians, had replaced “intersex” with “DSD” in their language.

By the time ISNA disbanded in 2008 they had leaned in hard on a so-called “pragmatic” / “harm reduction” model / “children’s rights perspective”. The view was that since infants in Western countries are “born medical subjects as it is” (p100)

Where did DSD come from? 

In 2005, the term “disorders of sexual differentiation” had been recently coined in an article by Alice Dreger, Cheryl Chase, “and three other clinicians associated with the ISNA… [so as] to ‘label the condition rather than the person’” (p101). Dreger et al thought that intersex was “not medically accurate” (p101) and that the goal should be effective nomenclature to “sort patients into diagnostically meaningful groups” (p101).

Dreger et al argued that the term intersex “attracts the interest of a large number of people whose interest is based on a sexual fetish and people who suffer from delusions about their own medical histories” (Dreger et al quoted on p101)

Per Spurgas, Dreger et al had an explicit agenda of “distancing intersex activism from queer and transgressive sex/gender politics and instead in supporting Western medical productions of intersexuality” (p102). In other words: they were intermedicalists.

According to Dreger et al, an alignment with medicine is strategically important because intersex people often require medical attention, and hence need to be legible to clinicians. “For those in favor of the transition to DSD, intersex is first and foremost a disorder requiring medical treatment” (p102)

Later in 2005 there was a “Intersex Consensus Meeting” organized by a society of paediatricians and endocrinologists. Fifty “experts” were assembled from ten countries (p101)... with a grand total of two actually intersex people in attendance (Cheryl Chase and Barbara Thomas, from XY-Frauen). 

At the meeting, they agreed to adopt the term DSD along with a “‘patient-centred’ and ‘evidence-based’ treatment protocol” to replace the OGR treatment model (p101)

In 2006, a consortium of American clinicians and bioethicists was formed and created clinical guidelines for treating DSDs. They defined DSD quite narrowly: if your gonads or genitals don’t match your gender, or you have a sex chromosome anomaly. So no hormonal variations like hyperandrogenism allowed.

The pro-DSD movement: it was mostly doctors

Spurgas quotes the consortium: “note that the term ‘intersex’ is avoided here because of its imprecision” (p102) - our highlight. There’s a lot of doctors hating on intersex for being a category of political organizing that gets encoded as the category is “imprecise” 👀

Spurgas gets into how the doctors dressed up their re-pathologization of intersex as “patient centred” (p103) - remember this is being led by doctors, not patients, and any intersex inclusion was tokenistic. (Elizabeth: it was amazing how much bs this was.)

As Spurgas puts it, the pro-DSD movement “represents an abandonment of the desire for a pan-intersexual/queer identity and an embrace of the complete medicalization of intersex… the intersex individual is now to be understood fundamentally as a patient” (p103)

Around the same time some paediatricians almost came close to publicly advocating against infant genital mutilation by denouoncing some infant surgeries. Spurgas notes they recommended “that intersex individuals be subjected (or self-subject) to extensive psychological/psychiatric, hormonal, steroidal and other medical” interventions for the rest of their lives (p103).

This call to instead focus on non-surgical medical interventions then got amplified by other clinicians and intermedicalist intersex advocacy organizations.

The push for non-surgical pathologization hence wound up as a sort of “compromise” path - it satisfied the intermedicalists and anti-queer intersex activists, and had the allure of collaborating with doctors to end infant surgeries. (Note: It is 2024 and infant surgeries are still a thing 😡.)

The pro-DSD camp within the intersex community

Spurgas then goes on to get into the discursive politics of DSD. There’s some definite transphobia in the push for “people with DSDs are simply men and women who happen to have congenital birth conditions” (p104). (Summarizer’s note: this language is still employed by anti-trans activists.)

The pro-DSD camp claimed that it was “a logical step in the ‘evolution in thinking’” 💩 and that it would be a more “humane” treatment model (p105) 💩

Also that “parents and doctors are not going to want to give a child a label with a politicized meaning” (p104) which really gives the game away doesn’t it? Intersex people have started raising consciousness, demanding their rights, and asserting they are not broken, so now the poor doctors can’t use the label as a diagnosis. 🤮

Spurgas quotes Emi Koyama, an intermedicalist who emphasized how “most intersex people identify as ‘perfectly ordinary, heterosexual, non-trans men and women’” (p104) along with a whole bunch of other quotes that are obviously queerphobic. Note from Elizabeth: I’m not gonna repeat it all because it’s gross. In my kindest reading of this section, it reads like gender dysphoria for being mistaken as genderqueer, but instead of that being a source of solidarity with genderqueers it is used as a form of dual closure (when a minority group goes out of its way to oppress a more marginalized group in order to try and get acceptance with the majority group).

Koyama and Dreger were explicitly anti-trans, and viewed intergender type stuff as “a ‘trans co-optation’ of intersex identity” (p105) 🤮

Most intersex people resisted “DSD” from its creation

On page 106, Spurgas shifts to talking about how a lot intersex people were resistant to the DSD shift. Organization Intersex International (OII) and Bodies Like Ours (BLO) were highly critical of the shift! 💛 BLO in particular noted that 80-90% of their website users were against the DSD term. Note from Elizabeth: indeed, every survey I’ve seen on the subject has been overwhelmingly against DSD - a 2015 IHRA survey found only 3% of intersex Australians favoured the DSD term.

Proponents of “intersex” over “DSD” testified to it being depathologizing. They called out the medicalization as such: that it serves to reinforce that “intersex people don’t exist” (David Cameron, p107), that it is damaging to be “told they have a disorder” (Esther Leidolf, p107), that there is “a purposeful conflation of treatment for ‘health reasons’ and ‘cosmetic reasons’ (Curtis Hinkle, p107), and that it’s being pushed mainly by perisex people as a reactionary, assimilationist endeavour (ibid).

Interliberationism never went away - intersex people kept pushing for 🌈 queer solidarity 🌈 and depathologization - even though ISNA, the largest intersex advocacy organization, had abandoned this position.

Spurgas describes how a lot of criticism of DSD came from non-Anglophone intersex groups, that the term is even worse in a lot of languages - it connotes “disturbed” in German and has an ambiguity with pedophilia and fetishism in French (p111).

The DSD push was basically entirely USA-based, with little international consultation (p111). Spurgas briefly addresses the imperialism inherent in the “DSD” term on pages 118/119.

Other noteworthy positions in the DSD debate

Spurgas gives a well-deserved shout out to the doctors who opposed the push to DSD, who mostly came from psychiatry and opposed it on the grounds that the pathologization would be psychologically damaging and that intersex patients “have taken comfort (and in many cases, pride) in their (pan-)intersex identity” (p108) 🌈 - Elizabeth: yay, psychiatrists doing their job! 

Interestingly, both sides of the DSD issue apparently have invoked disability studies/rights for their side: Koyama claimed DSD would herald the beginning of a disability rights based era of intersex activism (p109) while anti-DSDers noted the importance in disability rights in moving away from pathologization (p109).

Those who didn’t like DSD but who saw a strategic purpose for it argued it would “preser[ve] the psychic comfort of parents”, that there is basically a necessity to coddle the parents of intersex children in order to protect the children from their parents. (p110) 

Some proposed less pathologizing alternatives like “variations of sex development” and “divergence of sex development” (p110)

The DSD treatment model and the intersex treadmill

Remember all intersex groups were united that sex assignment surgery on infants needs to be abolished. The DSD framework that was sold as a shift away from surgical intervention, but it never actually eradicated it as an option (p112).  Indeed, it keeps ambiguous the difference between medically necessary surgical intervention and culturally desired cosmetic surgery (p112). (Note from Elizabeth: funny how *this* ambiguity is acceptable to doctors.)

What DSD really changed was a shift from “fixing” the child with surgery to instead providing “lifelong ‘management’ to continue passing” (p112), resulting in more medical intervention, such as through hormonal and behavioural therapies to “[keep] it in remission” (p113).

Cheryl Chase coined the “intersex treadmill’: the never-ending drive to fit within a normative sex category (p113), which Spurgas deploys to talk about the proliferation of “lifelong treatments” and how it creates the need for constant surveillance of intersex bodies (p114). Medical specialization adds to the proliferation, as one needs increasingly more specialists who have increasingly narrow specialties.

There’s a cruel irony in how the DSD model pushes for lifelong psychiatric and psychological care of intersex patients so as to attend to the PTSD that is caused by medical intervention. (p115) It pushes a capitalistic model where as much money can be milked as possible out of intersex patients (p116).

The DSD treatment model, if it encourages patients to find community at all, hence pushes condition-specific medical support groups rather than pan-intersex advocacy groups (p115)

Other stuff in the chapter

Spurgas does more Foucault-ing at the end of the chapter. Highlight: “The intersex/DSD body is a site of biosocial contestation over which ways of knowing not only truth of sex, but the truth of the self, are fought. Both intelligibility and tangible resources are the prizes accorded to the winner(s) of the battle over truth of sex” (p117)

There’s some stuff on the patient-as-consumer that didn’t really land with anybody at the book club meeting - we’re mostly Canadians and the idea of patient-as-consumer isn’t relatable. Ei noted it isn’t even that relatable from their position as an American.

***

Having now summarized the chapter, here's a summary of our discussion at book club...

Opening reactions

Michelle (M): the way the main lady involved became medicalized really made my heart sink, reading that.

Elizabeth (E): I do remember some discussion of intersex people in the 90s, and it never really grew in the way that other queer identities did! This has kind of helped for me to understand what the fuck happened here.

E: It was definitely a very insightful reading on that part, while being absolutely outraging. I didn't know, but I guess I wasn't surprised at how pivotal US-centrism was. The author was talking about "North American centric" though but always meant the United States!!! Canada was just not part of this! They even make mention of Quebec as separate and one of the opposing regions. I was like, What are you doing here, America? You are not the entirety of our continent!!!

E: The feedback from non-Anglophone intersex advocates that DSD does not translate was something that I was like, "Yes!" For me, when I read the French term - that sounded like something that would include vaginismus, erectile dysfunction - it sounds far more general and negative.

M: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

E: it was very assimilationist in a way that was very upsetting. I knew intellectually that this was going on. There was such a distinct advocacy push for that. The coddling of parents and doctors at the expense of intersex people was such a theme of this chapter, in a way that was very upsetting. They started out with this goal of intersex liberation, and instead, wound up coddling parents and doctors.

Solidarities

M: I feel like there's a real ableist parallel to the autism movement here… It dovetails with how the autism movement was like, "Aww, we're sorry about your emotionless monster baby! This must be so hard for you [parents]!" And it felt like "aw, it's okay, we'll fix your baby so they can interface with heterosexuality!" [Note: both of us are neurodivergent]

E: A lot of intersexism is a fear that you're going to have a queer child, both in terms of orientation and gender.

E: You cannot have intersex liberation without putting an end to homophobia and transphobia.

M: We're such natural allies there!

E: I understand that there are these very dysphoric ipsogender or cisgender people, who don't want to be mistaken as trans, but like it or not, their rights are linked to trans people! When I encounter these people, I don't know how to convey, "whether you like it or not, you're not going to get more rights by doing everything you can to be as distant as possible."

M: it reminds me of the movements by some younger queers to adhere to respectability politics.

E: Oh no. There are younger queers who want respectability politics????

M: well, some younger queers are very reactionary about neopronouns and kink at pride. they don't always know the difference between representation and "imposing" kinks on others. In a way, it reminds me of the more intentional rejection of queer weirdos, or queerdos, if you will, by republican gays.

E: I feel like a lot of anti-queerdom that comes out of the ipso and cisgender intersex community reads as very dysphoric to me. That needs to be acknowledged as gender dysphoria.

M: That resonates to me. When I heard about my own androgen imbalance, I was like, "does that mean I'm not a real woman?" And now I would happily say "fuck that question," but we do need an empathy and sensitivity for that experience. Though not tolerance for people who invalidate others, to be honest.

E: The term "iatrogensis" was new to me. The term refers to a disease caused or aggravated by medical intervention.

M: So like a surgical complication, or gender dysphoria caused by improper medical counselling!

The DSD debate

ei: i think the "disorder" discussion is really interesting. in my opinion, if someone feels their intersex condition is a disorder they have every right to label it that way, but if someone does not feel the same they have every right to reject the disorder label. personally i use the label "condition". i don't agree with forcing labels on anyone or stripping them away from anyone either.

M: for me, it felt like a cautionary tale about which labels to accept.

ei: i'm all around very tired of people label policing others and making blanket statements such as "all people who are this have to use this label”... i also use variation sometimes, i tend to go back and forth between variation and condition. I think it's a delicate balance between being sensitive to people's label preferences vs making space for other definitions/communities.

We then spoke about language for a bunch of communities (Black people, non-binary people) for a while

E: one thing that was very harrowing for me about this chapter is that while there was this push to end coercive infant surgery, they basically ceded all of the ground on "interventions" happening from puberty onward. And as someone who has had to fight off coercive medical interventions in puberty, I have a lot of trauma about violent enforcement of femininity and the medical establishment.

ei: i completely agree that it's psychologically harmful tbh…. i was assigned male at birth and my doctors want me to start testosterone to make me more like a perisex male. which is extremely counterproductive because i'm literally transfem and have expressed this many times

Doctors Doing Harm

M: for me, the validation of how doctors can be harmful in this chapter meant a lot.

E: something that surprised me and made me happy was that there were some psychiatrists who spoke out against the DSD label. As someone who routinely hears a lot of anti-psychiatry stuff - because there's a lot of good reason to be skeptical of psychiatry, as a discipline - it was just nice to see some psychiatrists on the right side of things, doing right by their patients. Psychiatrists were making the argument that DSD would be psychologically harmful to a lot of intersex people.

ei: like. being told that something so inherently you, so inherently linked to your identity and sense of self, is a disorder of sexual development, something to be fixed and corrected. that has to be so harmful

ei: like i won't lie i do have a lot of severe trauma surrounding the way i've been treated due to being intersex. but so much of my negative experiences are repetitive smaller things. Like the way people treat me like my only purpose is to teach them about intersex people …. either that or they get really creepy and gross. I’m lucky in that i'm not visibly intersex, so i do have the privilege of choosing who knows. but there's a reason why i usually don't tell people irl.

M: intersex and autism have overlap again about how like, minor presentation can be? As opposed to the sort of monstrous presentation [Carnival barker impression] "Come see the sensational half-man, half-woman! Behold the h-------dite!" And like - the way nonverbal people are also treated feels relevant to that, because that's how autism is often treated, like a freakshow and a pity party for the parents? And it's so dehumanizing. And as someone who might potentially have a nonverbal child, because my wife is expecting and my husband and she both have ADHD - I'm just very fed up with ableism and the perception of monstrosity.

Overall, this was a chapter that had a lot to talk about! See here for our discussion of Chapters 5-7 from the same volume.

[opencommunion]

“Under the proposed model of medical management associated with DSD, surgery is not completely eradicated as an option for treatment of intersex, although it is generally recommended that it be avoided in most cases. Based on the debates around surgery among various players within the medical field, it is apparent also that the boundary between what is cosmetic and what is medically necessary surgical intervention is still in dire need of clarification. It is also apparent that even in current practice, this boundary is strategically blurred both by medical practitioners and by intersex activists/allies, so that what is actually culturally desired is posited as medically necessary.

When an intersex individual is surgically ascribed a discrete male/female sex, this individual often requires lifelong ‘management’ in order to continue to pass as that sex. ... In the late twentieth century, a lucrative market emerged from lifelong treatment of the post-surgical intersex body via hormonal and behavioral therapy/training, continuous aesthetic surgeries and medical surveillance. The never-ending drive to fit within a normative sex category is what Cheryl Chase has described as the ‘intersex treadmill’. Thus, the shift to DSD protocol begs the questions: How will the body that is afflicted with a disorder of sex development and which is posited as continuously in need of maintenance actually be maintained in a non-surgical treatment landscape? What new types of post-disciplinary (self-)management techniques—be they psychological/psychiatric, behavioral, hormonal, steroidal, or even neurological or genetic—will become the new modus vivendi for intersex care? What will come to fall under the rubric of ‘at-risk’ psychological symptoms, social behaviors, or types of embodiment when it comes to holding intersex in abeyance or keeping it in remission, and how will ever-expanding teams of medical specialists preemptively deal with these ‘at-risk’ individuals and their symptoms?

... According to ['DSD' medical researcher Robert] Blizzard, ‘In most instances of an intersex problem, a medical emergency is not present but a mental and/or social emergency very likely is’ (italics in original). … Thus, the new medical protocol associated with DSD takes the specter of intersex very seriously, as a threat to be guarded against. It positions the pre-/post-/intersex body as a haunted body that must be constantly surveilled and preemptively managed, so that the individual’s at-risk status is never realized, the ambiguity is kept in (profitable) remission, and the (hetero)normative identity remains secure. Who stands to profit from this production of intersex as a problem necessitating perpetual medical management, surveillance and securitization must be considered with the proposed transition to DSD. How are decisions to be made, and what is at stake in these decision-making processes—for Western technoscientific medicine, for a culture founded upon institutionalized (hetero)sexism, and for pre-/post-/intersex individuals who invariably become patients, and perhaps more importantly, become consumers in a late capitalist climate?"

Alyson K. Spurgas, "(Un)Queering Identity: The Biosocial Production of Intersex/DSD", in Critical Intersex ed. Morgan Holmes, 2009

[mitigatedchaos]

The Anti-Thought Movement is a philosophical movement which is opposed to most fiction, hypotheticals, and socialization, on the grounds that thoughts which are simulations of beings and people are 'real' (if lower-dimensional) entities, and therefore capable of suffering. The movement first arose in the late pre-War period in China.

Less extreme proponents are generally against fiction and storytelling (as simulating the lives of historical individuals is thought to be less problematic), while more extreme members are known to have ties to the Involuntary Human Extinction Movement and Neurochip Liberation Division T9, though there has been an uptick in independent philosoterrorism, such as the January 4th, 59 AW attack on the biointelligence division of the Tokyo Prediction Exchange.

Some adherents use pre-War AI chatbots to interact with other humans, attempting to reach a "zen-like state" of "thought without thought." Others approach other human beings while dressed head-to-toe in baggy, concealing clothing, and communicate using small type-written cards, in order to keep the model of themselves in others' heads as simple and limited as possible. However, most members of the movement are self-described 'shut-ins' and interact primarily with automated systems.

Some experience paranoia that others are "stealing their minds" by "simulating" them; this was a factor reported in the Dec 7, 48 AW murder of Li Ching, of Guangdong, by a member of the Anti-Thought movement who has since been institutionalized.

The Anti-Thought Movement is banned in the World Union for "promoting one of the Nine False Criticisms of Biosocialism." Particularly, it's considered a bad faith satirical argument on behalf of Criticism 3, "humanity will be reduced to a uniform pool of ooze." The idea that "simple social considerations" constitute "wetware infolife" is considered so absurd on its face that a good-faith reading has been legally deemed impossible.

The Anti-Thought Movement is generally not illegal per se in the League of States, though the behavior of many adherents is considered psychologically disordered, and a number of them have been placed into mental institutions - a recurring fear of Anti-Thought adherents.

However, even in the League of States, Anti-Thought involvement with the Involuntary Human Extinction Front, the militant wing of the Involuntary Human Extinction Movement, remains an ongoing concern, with Anti-Thought adherents often providing material support or even acting on behalf of Human Extinctionists in attacks on citizens. The movement remains heavily surveilled to this day.

"Lotus Cultivators" refers to members of the movement who focus on imagining positive scenarios; this group are the least involved in attacks. The term has become a slang pejorative in certain subcultures.

[ghelgheli]

The Stuff I Read in September 2023

Stuff I Extra Liked Is Bold

Books

Orphans of the Sky, Robert A. Heinlein

Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein

Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee

All Systems Red, Martha Wells

Artificial Condition, Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells

Exit Strategy, Martha Wells

Friendship Poems, ed. Peter Washington

Introduction to Linear Algebra, ch. 1-3, Gilbert Strang

Manga (mostly yuri [really all yuri])

Yagate Kimi ni Naru / Bloom Into You, Nio Nakatani

Kaketa Tsuki to Dōnattsu / Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, Shio Usui

Onna Tomodachi to Kekkon Shitemita / Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend, Shio Usui

Kimi no Tame ni Sekai wa Aru / The World Exists for You, Shio Usui

Teiji ni Agaretara / If We Leave on the Dot, Ayu Inui

Nikurashii Hodo Aishiteru / I Love You So Much I Hate You, Ayu Inui

Tsukiatte Agetemo Ī Kana / How Do We Relationship? Tamifull

Himegoto - Juukyuusai no Seifuku / Uniforms at the Age of Nineteen, Ryou Minenami

Colorless Girl, Honami Shirono

Short Fiction

It gets so lonely here, ebi-hime [itch.io]

Aye, and Gomorrah, Samuel R. Delaney [strange horizons]

Evolutionary Game Theory

Red Queen and Red King Effects in cultural agent-based modeling: Hawk Dove Binary and Systemic Discrimination, S. M. Amadae & Christopher J. Watts [doi]

The Evolution of Social Norms, H. Peyton Young [doi]

The Checkerboard Model of Social Interaction, James Sakoda [doi]

Dynamic Models of Segregation, Thomas C. Schelling [doi]

Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution, Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten, Kevin N. Laland [doi]

Is Human Cultural Evolution Darwinian? Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten, Kevin N. Laland [doi]

Gender/Sexuality/Queer Stuff (up to several degrees removed)

Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World, Joseph Massad [link]

The Empire of Sexuality, Joseph Massad (interview) [link]

The Bare Bones of Sex, Anne Fausto-Sterling [jstor]

On the Biology of Sexed Subjects, Helen Keane & Marsha Rosengarten [doi]

Vacation Cruises: Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism, Joseph A. Boone [jstor]

Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the “Third Gender” Concept, Evan B. Towle & Lynn M. Morgan [doi]

Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body, Siobhan Somerville [jstor]

White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence, Sunny Woan [link]

Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories, Kadji Amin [jstor]

Annoying Anthro

The Sexual Division of Labor, Rebecca B. Bird, Brian F. Codding [researchgate]

Factors in the Division of Labor by Sex: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, George P. Murdock & Caterina Provost [jstor]

Biosocial Construction of Sex Differences and Similarities in Behavior, Wendy Wood & Alice H. Eagly [doi]

Political Theory

Some critics argue that the Internal Colony Theory is outdated. Here’s why they’re wrong, Patrick D. Anderson [link]

Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism, Charles Pinderhughes [link]

The Anatomy of Iranian Racism: Reflections on the Root Causes of South Azerbaijans Resistance Movement, Alireza Asgharzadeh [link]

The veil or a brother's life: French manipulations of Muslim women's images during the Algerian War, 1954–62, Elizabeth Perego [doi]

A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare, Kenneth J. Arrow [jstor]

Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result, Allan Gibbard [jstor]

China Has Billionaires, Roderic Day [redsails]

Other

Conversations I Can't Have, Cassandra Byers Harvin [proquest]

Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492, Alexander Koch et al. [doi]

Why prisons are not “The New Asylums”, Liat Ben-Moshe [doi]

Uses of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons from a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce, Elizabeth Anderson [doi]

Boundary Issues, Lily Scherlis [link]

[femme-ressentiment]

neither the biosocial nor neurosex model can really adequately explain my case of transness. i was implanted into a boy as a larva and emerged chestburster style after eating him from the inside out

[heading-home-again]

Reading a paper titled "Linehan’s biosocial model applied to emotion dysregulation in autism: a narrative review of the literature and an illustrative case conceptualization"

and cussing at the wall. As one does when someone suggests, in polite clinical language, a few modest changes that could have wildly changed your life for the better

And also when one reads about a fellow late diagnosed autistic woman going through hell

Goddammit we need to do better than this

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10570453/

Link if you also want to cuss at the wall

[ravenkinnie]

every time I see those "did you know X is a symptom of Y" posts there's hundred comments like "omg why are professionals not talking about it" and like, a lot of the time they aren't talking about it because it's literally not true

[phleb0tomist]

the biosocial model of BPD:

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

The third wave of COVID-19: an overview on Brazil status quo

[Image description: child wearing a mask.]

According to anthropologist Merril Singer, syndemics implies the presence of a biosocial complex consisting in the co-presence or the sequence of health conditions, social and environmental factors, promoting or increasing negative effects of these conditions’ interactions. Thus, social inequalities act as cofactors determining syndemics (1). In this sense, it is noteworthy the syndemic character of coronavirus, since social inequality intensifies the health system issue in Brazilian peripheries, which are marked by the lack of drinking water and basic sanitation, associated with agglomerations in public transport, financial insecurity and unhealthy housing since 11.4 million Brazilian people have been living in irregular housing (2). Such conditions hinder the prevention and control of diseases, especially in COVID-19, once the use of masks, hand hygiene and even social isolation are unlikely measures in the absence of basic rights.

As soon as the pandemic reached the slums, accompanied by a financial crisis, wage reduction agreements and layoffs (3), the need for integrated actions and public policies to attending the needs of these residents were revealed. Given that social, economic, and health conditions are determinant to access tests, treatments and, consequently, to the survival of these populations. Under this scenario, the Brazilian government made Emergency Aid available to families in social vulnerability during the pandemic, aiming to mitigate the damage caused by the crisis, for basic needs of these families. However, if the aid guaranteed the minimum dignity, in 2021, with the third wave and the record of daily deaths, the new assistance model no longer covers ⅔ of the vulnerable population. Also its value was reduced to less than half of the initial amount, which made it insufficient, destroying millions of Brazilian citizens.

Continue reading.

[hauntedselves]

Clinical Formulations of Histrionic PD

Clinical formulations and case conceptualisations are introduced in this post.

These are all generalisations and theories of how HPD develops, not something that is supposed to be true for everyone with HPD.

Psychodynamic model

Histrionics lack relationships with maternal caregivers so turn to paternal caregivers for love and attention

Learn that they can get attention through sexualised behaviours

Men with HPD may be hypomasculine (effeminate) or hypermasculine if their paternal caregiver is emotionally unavailable

Biosocial model

Mood swings, very emotional

Biggest influences are environmental: caregivers’ reinforcement of attention-seeking & manipulative behaviours and histrionic role models

Children learn they can use cuteness, charm, attractiveness & seductive behaviours to get what they want/need (attention from caregivers)

Histrionics are externally focused and largely ignore their internal worlds

Histrionic behaviours are self-perpetuating

Cognitive-Behavioural model

Two main underlying assumptions: “I am inadequate and unable to handle life by myself” and “I must be loved by everyone to be worthwhile.” 

Need attention and approval from others, and in a similar way to DPD feel they are inadequate to look after themselves and need others

Hypersensitive to rejection & criticism (similar to DPD, NPD and AvPD)

Feel they must perform for others to gain approval and self-esteem

Thinking is “impressionistic, global, and unfocused” and leads to over-generalisation, emotional dysregulation, and splitting

Two subtypes:

The controlling type, who tries to gain control through dramatics and manipulation; they struggle with reading others’ emotions and are shallow, self-centred, and uncomfortable without immediate assurance; lack empathy.

The reactive type tries to gain approval and reassurance.

Interpersonal model

People with HPD learnt that their entertainment value and appearance was more important to others than their worth as a person

Learnt that physical appearance and charm can be used to manipulate others

Their childhood homes were unpredictable and probably involved substance abuse

The unpredictability was dramatic and interesting (unlike the “primitive” and life-threatening chaos associated with BPD)

Histrionics were likely rewarded (i.e. had their physical and emotional needs met) for their disabilities, illnesses and complaints

Histrionics “exhibit a strange fear of being ignored, together with a wish to be loved and taken care of by important others, who can be controlled through charm or guile.”

Integrative model

Histrionics experience reactive mood swings and have high levels of energy

They are hyper-responsive and externally oriented

“The self-view of the histrionic will be some variant of the theme “I am sensitive and everyone should admire and approve of me.” The world-view will be some variant of “Life makes me nervous so I am entitled to special care and consideration.” Life goal is some variant of the theme “Therefore, play to the audience, and live in the moment.””

Cargivers’ style based in reciprocity, i.e. “I’ll give you attention if you do what I want”, with minimal or inconsistent discipline and probable neglect

Internal experiences of HPD are “denial of one’s real or inner self; a preoccupation with externals; the need for excitement and attention-seeking, which leads to a superficial charm and interpersonal presence; and the need for external approval. This, in turn, further reinforces the dissociation and denial of the real or inner self from the public self, and the cycle continues.”

- From Sperry, Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of DSM-5 Personality Disorders (2016)

[songfortheasking]

When we teach the biosocial model in RO DBT, we discuss the biotemperament of people who lean to OC (high threat sensitivity, low reward sensitivity, high detail processing and being able to inhibit/delay gratification).  We then discuss how these interface with environments such as family, school, community, or vocation that instils messages that mistakes are intolerable, emotions should be masked, and that winning is essential.  The coping strategies that emerge can include an aloof and distant manner, risk aversion, and compulsive striving.   Compulsive striving is something my OC clients can easily relate to – never resting or celebrating, but onto the next degree, next marathon (no! make it a triple triathlon!), promotion, etc.  Compulsive striving can also be reflected in areas such as self care – if I am going to relax, I am going to do it perfectly! Oh, and we also see it in therapy – I am going to be the best damn client or class member! (Or RO therapist, tee-hee!)

Compulsive Striving in a time of COVID | Radically Open

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Social services as crime control “Abolitionists often emphasize the historical and political construction of crime and how crime control in the post-Emancipation era was used to limit Black people’s freedom and movement. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Y. Davis writes, “In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves.” In the field of criminal-justice studies, there is a wing called radical criminology. While not all scholars of this subarea promote abolition, they do raise critical questions about crime as a sociopolitical construction, as well as the study of crime itself.

In other words, what do people talk about when they talk about crime? Some who employ the suburb frame address this question. For example, in her recent op-ed for the New York Times, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” Mariame Kaba discusses how crime is popularly imagined versus what actually puts many people in contact with the police: “The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues.” On Twitter, Josie Duffy Rice has stressed the same.

Unlike those, such as Kaba and Duffy Rice, who underscore that criminalization is a targeted process, proponents of the suburb model like that proffered by Ocasio-Cortez reify an explanation of crime consistent with a liberal concern about deprived groups acting out. For example, in a June 10 interview on Good Morning America (GMA), George Stephanopoulos asked Ocasio-Cortez to comment on Joe Biden’s refusal to support defunding the police. Ocasio-Cortez responded by situating defunding the police as divestment-investment. As she told Stephanopoulos, “not enough resources are being put into the very kinds of social programming and investments that prevent crime and social discord in the first place.”

While acknowledging in her Instagram response that “something harmful,” including “harmful crimes” can happen in the affluent, white suburb, Ocasio-Cortez makes suggestive comments regarding the healthiness of these communities. At the Rising Majority event, she described the suburb as a place where “schools are fully funded, and there are trees in the street, and children can eat nutritious food, where their brains are able to adequately develop, and that there are policies that people fight for so that the community is healthy enough . . .”

Talk of “crime and social discord,” as well as references to “nutritious food” and brains being “adequately able to develop” run the risk of aligning a discussion of crime control with the trope of Black-on-Black violence, which started gaining traction among politicians and pundits in the 1980s. While many proponents of the Black-on-Black violence discourse are conservatives, David Wilson emphasizes, “liberals were complicit in this constructing.” Unlike political and fiscal conservatives, liberals might deploy the narrative of Black-on-Black violence to solicit support for “full-scale liberal intervention into inner cities” and in the process integrate “notions of powerful local culture with imperfect capitalist economic and political foundations.”

While Ocasio-Cortez would likely reject racist imagery depicting Black people as violent, comments about healthy nutrition and developing brains put her suburb model dangerously close to the liberal version of the Black-on-Black violence framing. It also hints at an epigenetic approach, which posits that structural factors, including racism and deprivation of needed social resources, impact social groups on a biosocial level and that this can shape sociological outcomes. Unfortunately, as Kenyon Farrow has pointed out, epigenetic discourse has become popular among those expressing a commitment to fighting racism.

Affluent, white suburbanites have different priorities During her GMA interview, Ocasio-Cortez stated, “And it may sound strange, but many affluent suburbs have essentially already begun pursuing a defunding of the police in that they fund schools, they fund housing, and they fund health care, more as their number one priorities.”

This messaging suggests that affluent, white suburbanites were once over-policed and underfunded but have taken the steps to get their priorities in order. More, the suburban model, as employed by Ocasio-Cortez, obscures how racial capitalism structures public finance, such as how racism and pro-policing politics shape national, state, and city economies in terms of the gutting of the social welfare state, the racial politics of municipal credit, corporate funding  of police organizations, residents paying for punishment, “police brutality bonds,” and taxpayer politics.

In doing so, the suburban frame fetishizes the affluent, white suburban taxpayer as leading the charge for abolition in practice.

Camille Walsh examines how, as a trope, “the taxpayer” is a citizen who is white, tax paying, and deserving. While African Americans have at times invoked taxpayer rights, Walsh shows how “the taxpayer” is a raced figure that implies “an ‘untaxed other’ who does not pay taxes and therefore has not earned rights.” Raúl Carrillo and Jesse Myerson note a related danger of the “taxpayer” frame: “Although most of us pay taxes of some kind, every time we say ‘taxpayer money’ we prolong the illusion that society depends on certain kinds of people so we can have nice things.” Ocasio-Cortez’s depiction of affluent, white suburbanites as simply pursuing different budget priorities politically puts “the taxpayer” in the driver’s seat and also suggests that affluent, white suburbanites are the vanguard of abolitionist budgeting. In this scenario, their tax revolt is against the carceral state.

Ocasio-Cortez’s suburb model and its deployment to support defunding the police treat state and city budgets as if they are balanced like a household budget. She is not alone in this approach, as many divest-invest strategies do the same. What Carrillo and Myerson draw our attention to is that there is actually enough money to fund whatever we want: “Politicians may act like the U.S. government has the same constraints as a household or business, but the U.S. government can’t go broke. It can impose silly constraints on itself, like the debt ceiling, but people who actually know how monetary operations work know the U.S. government cannot run out of dollars.” Or, as Carrillo has provocatively stated elsewhere, “The U.S. government can never run out of money in the same way that the NBA can never run out of points.”

So what does this mean for local budgets? States, cities, and municipalities are not monetarily sovereign in that they do not print their own money and, as monetary subjects, they must get revenue in ways that are legally allowed. This can involve taxes, fines and fees, municipal bonds, philanthropy, and private investment. The federal government, however, is monetarily sovereign, as it can print money. Thus, the federal government can provide funding, whether through the Federal Reserve or Congress. Some have considered how this works in relationship to defunding the police. Eric Levitz notes, “It is not possible to mount a remotely credible response to the recent uprisings over police violence and discrimination while forcing cities to slash spending. . . . Anyone who would like the United States to make meaningful progress on racial justice . . . must call on Congress to cease needlessly starving state governments of funding.” Along with calling on Congress to stop starving us, another demand can be for the democratization of the Federal Reserve, as proposed by Jasson Perez in a recent podcast.

What Levitz and Perez don’t mention is that the federal government can always fund more of everything — including both local policing and social services. Such a possibility could undercut a divest-invest strategy and means we need to make more explicit the political demand to never fund the police, regardless of the budget. What their commentaries do draw our attention to are the layers of public finance that shape the budgets cities have to work with and that are obscured in Ocasio-Cortez’s emphasis on budget priorities among affluent, white suburbanites. They also help us move beyond the taxpayer frame, which is useful since putting the taxpayer in the driver’s seat could always backfire as a divest-invest strategy. After all, those with more power and money may decide they are willing to pay higher taxes to keep policing and may weaponize their identity as “taxpayers” to do so.

While Ocasio-Cortez is familiar with modern monetary theory — which is associated with the finance approach delineated here, in her support for a divest-invest strategy she nevertheless promotes a taxpayer-driven model in which the affluent, white suburbanite serves as the paragon of moral budgeting and social innovation. In the process she obscures how affluent, white suburbanites are the beneficiaries of a racist-classist financial infrastructure whose operations remain relatively underexamined by the general public.

Abolition as the privatization of accountability Ocasio-Cortez’s suburb model posits that when crime and harmful activities happen in affluent, white suburbs, residents are committed to using different means than the police, courts, or incarceration to deal with them. On a surface level, this aligns with a basic goal of abolitionists: to address harms in ways that do not involve criminalization or captivity.

But abolition is not just the absence of policing or captivity; it is also about creating different models of accountability and harm reduction. It is about recognizing the social and political construction of crime as well as the violence and futility of captivity for trying to make us safe, while also attending to the reality that people can and do engage in harmful and violent behaviors that need to be socially addressed. Abolition, then, involves figuring out what nonpunitive accountability looks like in public.

Affluent, white suburbs are not where we should look for models of accountability. Yet this is where Ocasio-Cortez directs our attention.

In her Instagram response, Ocasio-Cortez writes, “When a teenager or preteen does something harmful in a suburb (I say teen bc this is often where lifelong carceral cycles begin for Black and Brown communities), White communities bend over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration for their loved ones to ‘protect their future,’ like community service or rehab or restorative measures.”

We can consider how Ocasio-Cortez’s narrative of white communities “bending over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration” is consistent with her image of affluent, white suburbanites being presumably more committed to other budget priorities. Also questionable is her suggestion that not being policed is a matter of self-design as opposed to not being targeted. According to her, “affluent White suburbs also design their own lives so that they walk through the world without having much interruption or interaction with police at all aside from community events and speeding tickets (and many of these communities try to reduce those, too!).”

If anything, what Ocasio-Cortez is actually describing is the way that affluence and whiteness provide these communities the means to avoid consistent targeting by the police, to ignore laws, or to evade punishment. To be able to be the target of less policing, as well as to hire attorneys and use money and networks when accused, is a thing that white affluence provides — an affluence tied up in and made possible by the racist-classist financial infrastructure concealed by the suggestion that affluent, white suburbanites just have different budgeting priorities. In cases where harm might be perpetrated, using one’s resources in terms of money and connections to avoid criminalization and incarceration can be more an evasion of accountability than abolition.

If, as Angela Y. Davis reminds us, we as a society avoid dealing with the structural dimensions of harm, when it is committed, by disappearing perpetrators in prisons, the other side of the coin is this privatization of accountability available to elites. There are notable differences, of course, as captivity in a cage is a much different and vicious form of being tucked away from public view. I would never confuse captivity with the privacy, money, and racial status shielding an affluent, white suburbanite. But a shared dimension is that each approach tries to make people, when they have committed harm, be disappeared from public view and consciousness while the structural roots of harm go unaddressed and society operates as normal. Again, abolition involves figuring out what nonpunitive accountability looks like in public. Affluent, white suburbanites being shielded from the violence of carceral systems while others are not offered the same opportunity is not a model of abolition. It is just an expression of relative power and racism.” - Tamara K. Nopper, “Abolition is Not a Suburb.” The New Inquiry. July 16, 2020.

[mitigatedchaos]

[anon]

a campaign setting where humans are the ancient, mythical race and elves are the young upstarts with loads of potential

[probablybadrpgideas]

Ah yes, Modern Day Earth.

ELF, or Extended Life Function, refers to an individual who was subject to the Karson Stage IV Protocol. [1] As the Protocol involves self-replicating biomachinery keyed to an individual's genetic code, a full application requires starting from a single cell. [2] (This was originally called the "perfect cell" in documentation, but is now referred to as the "originator cell".) [3] Elements of the Protocol can be applied to adult humans, but mutations since conception, cellular damage, and incomplete infiltration of kaitosomes, limit the effectiveness of the treatment. [2][4]

Biological Characteristics of ELF Treatment

The first full ELF human was decanted in the year 9 AW at the University of Greater Ontario, most likely on January 8th, following years of experiments with the Karson Stage III Protocol. The initial generation of 5,000 full ELF humans underwent mostly natural births and gestations over the following 3 years. [5] A follow-up study on the initial cohort in 50 AW estimated a natural lifespan of between 250 and 500 years, analogous to the Greenland shark, but this estimate is contentious, with some estimates as low as 160 years, and others as high as 1,000 years. [5][6][7] There is also dispute in the literature over what should count as "natural lifespan." [7][8] Researchers caution that although full ELF humans are resistant to biological aging, they are still vulnerable to accident, injury, and intentional death, which are likely to take up a much greater share of ELF mortality than in historical human cohorts. [1][9]

Growth in ELF humans is significantly slower than in natural humans, with some ELF humans taking over 42 years to reach physical maturity, with a mean age of maturity at 36 years. [5] Initial models projected the effects of ELF treatment to be heritable, [11] however practical confirmation could not occur until after the birth of the initial second-generation ELF cohort, with the first birth occurring in 41 AW. [5][12] Studies of the long-term effects of ELF inheritance are currently in-progress as of 63 AW, but initial results "seem positive." [13]

Economics of ELF Treatment

ELF treatment remains expensive compared to alternative life extension treatment options, due to the extensive use of computer gene forecasting and molecular engineering. [14] A 64 AW study of procedures conducted between 53 AW and 63 AW found an average cost of $1,284,000 for ELF procedures, with a low cost of $808,304 and a high of $2,806,000. This compared disfavorably with full biomechanoidization ($128,003), class IV rejuvenation ($64,234), and Centenarian Gene Therapy + class I rejuvenation ($15,464). [15]

Despite this, ELF treatment has grown substantially in popularity since its creation, with ELF financing as an emerging industry in the banking sector. [16]

Legal and Political Response to ELF Treatment

ELF treatment was banned in all territories controlled by the World Union by the passage of Resolution 206, based on Feng & Aramark's 18 AW paper on the theoretical energy limits of computer genome forecasting and implications for ELF treatment. [17][18] As the results are heritable, unlike rejuvenation therapy, integrative support, or biomechanoidization, and the procedure is expensive, with only small gains from biointelligence systems, ELF treatment was found to create (rather than ameliorate) biological inequities, and thus conflict with the establishment of a classless society. [17] Since the passage of Resolution 206, those traveling outside of the World Union to pursue the procedure for their children have been deemed "traitors to biosocialism," and in most World Union jurisdictions, forced ear modification is used to mark these individuals for social punishment - similar restrictions also apply to the ELF community in the former Argentina following the annexation and division of the territory. [19] ELF individuals are referred to as "elves" within the World Union and treated as "distinct from humans." [19]

Aside from cost, experts outside of the World Union have criticized the potential impact of ELF treatment on human evolution, as ELF treatment considerably increases the difficulty of gene therapy. [21][22]

Despite this, the procedure is legal in 94% of member polities of the League of States, where the procedure was described by League President Osmond Oruma as part of a broader, biologically diverse portfolio which would contribute to the League's dynamism and enable the League to meet the challenges of the new century. "Freedom," Oruma said, "is about taking risks." [23][24]

Though in League of States member polities, ELF individuals are classified as "human with ELF treatment," like biomechanoidization, ELF status was classified as acceptable under the 15 points of basis for the formation of an ethnopolity by court ruling in 13 AW, [25] supposing the typical rules for ethnopolity formation and polity division within the League are followed, including the requirement for contiguous cosmopolities adjacent to all ethnopolities for transport and access, the proportional ratio of cosmopolities to ethnopolities within the League, League troop force commitment requirements, and the equilibrium tithe. [26]

League polities invested ELF technology typically include citizenship for immediate family in the cost of the procedure, but 3 of the 5 largest ELF polities include additional cultural limitations, often including either integrative support + doll operation or biomechanoidization on their non-ELF minority. [27] Many require the so-called 'pointed ears' in solidarity with ELF humans in the World Union and other territories, [28] though in accordance with League policy, maximum cultural imposition is inversely proportional to polity size, and so the most extreme policies are only imposed by minipolities.

Non-Human Usage

In 53 AW, Cyberstar Interactive proposed the development of ELF-treated neurons for use in ultra-long duration biochips. In 56 AW, the announced development was rolled back from Class W, F, and C biochips to only Class M biochips. In 59 AW the program was cancelled, as the basic technology of biochips was expected to change during the next 100 years, and most ultra-long uses would be in outer space, where biochips require heavy radiation shielding. [29]

Rumors of a 'rogue' ELF-treated biointelligence based on human-derived cells (sometimes referred to as a "Class H" biochip as slang, but legally refused classification as it is illegal in all jurisdictions) have circulated since before the final development of the Karson Protocol, but these have never been substantiated. [30]