Could Bigotry be a mental Illness or is that an Ableist suggestion?

Well in some comments at Questioning Transphobia i've upset a lot of people by supporting the idea that the bigotry of homophobia and transphobia are likely mental ilnesses. Caused by strongly unconciously supressing ones own homosexuality transgenderness or trans-attraction.

I had reached that conclusion because I'd read of studies that over 80% of those strongly homophobic had themselves strong sexual arousal to homoerotic imagery.

Now i was told this is ablist. Indeed perhaps i have made ablist assumptipons. Everyone does tend to accrue some logical fallacies from society so some degree of such is unsurprising and I'm happy to confront challenge and defeat any such i may not realise i have.

On the other hand it's also possible that my conclusion is correct but people understandably do not wish to in any way share a catagory with such people and wish to avoid any taint-by-association from the strongly bigoted being given an umbrella label that also applies to them. I can understand that, the thought that the murderers of Trans people might themselves be members of our own community that lash out from self hate is an unpleasant one in the extreme to me too. Though the DNA evidence on the vibrater in the Angie Zapata trial in that case at least does seem suggestive of this.

The idea of course goes into several hotly contested areas, aside from the emotional aspects, such as what constitutes a mental illness, what influences exist on behaviour, what responsibility people can have for their behaviour if/when we are all not purely reasoning beings 100% of the time which of course throws into chaos a great deal of our legal system which operates under the assumption that we are all 100% under total reasoning calm control of our every action.

One of the issues that seems to be involved is one of behaviour. To suggest that behaviour may be influenced by mental illness seems from my understanding of the comments in response to mine to be considered ablist. I certainly can understand the fear caused by past practices of institutionalisation and abuse of human rights by loss of personal agency that might fuel this. Suffering regular varying severity cognitive impairment myself caused by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome though i can certainly say that my behaviour personally does seem to be effected by my symptoms both in reflexive unconsciouis actions as well as in varying degrees of ability to reason which cn result in very different choices made under similar circumstances just with the variable of severity and type of cognitive symptoms. Something that I find the experience of profoundly distressing.

It seems to me however that to dissmiss effects on behaviour that can result from symptoms or likely ractions to symptoms of disability is itself problematically ablist.

That a dangerous all-or-nothing thinking may be involved and that attempts to avoid the stigmatisation of people with varied cognition as dangerous and needing to be removed from self control may also result in unfairly abandoning people who have behavioural effects a a consequence of their condition to rot in prisons blamed for the effects of their illness or diversity and blamed for the societies failure to cope with the possibility that individuals, all individuals I might add not just those with mental illness or neurologically diverse etc, are not wholly 24/7 in total control of their every act. If there are important shades of grey there the danger could exist that the efforts to avoid stigma and injustice for some if the shades of grey are not acknowledged and considered could result in stigma and injustice for others.

However i'm well aware i could be totally wrong about this. I may in fact have been making very ablist assumptions and therefore reaching warped and incorrect conclusions from the available data. Additionally the available data i have could be critically incomplete or plain incorrect in the first place.

So then the question is what is in error in this and why is it? Is it ablist to consider that unconsciously repressed homosexuality leading to homophobia would be a psychological illness? Is it ablist to consider that mental illnesses and other cognitiove variation could effect behaviour? Or conversely is it ablist to hold people responsible for the effects on their behaviour which may stem from such?

I have no desire to oppress disabled people, being one myself, nor the mentally ill or neurologically diverse. But that doesn't mean i cannot be disasterously wrong either.

We need better Human Rights Education

Time and time again i fnd myself explaining to people the principles behind what makes rights rights.

They are pretty simple in the main.

Total sole ownership of the self.
Informed consent required to interact with the selves of others.
Responsibilities to those unable to consent.
The social contract that forms the society we all benefit from which we are all responsible to.

All our rights stem from fairly simple principles. Which need to be consistent and not arbitrary.

Alas as usual plenty of people haven't the faintest ideas as is evidenced in this discussion I'm involved in here at Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters

Plenty of people are making arguments about rights without the faintest understanding, resulting in frequent human rights abuses.

We need far better education for the community about the principles that makes something a right or a human rights abuse.

Transphobia on TV, general life stuff etc.

Well Channel Ten played the Transphobic episode of The Cleveland Show here in Australia last night. Which i discovered channel surfing after realising the beautiful people wasn't on.

Sigh....

Thank goodness for Batman Arkham Asylum as some anger-release. Though i have to be careful I don't spend too much energy on gaming. I'm still trying to rest as much as I can to slow the holiday crash and start picking up. I wish i could get the brainfog clear enough as I really want to find an avenue for contributing positively to things some more.

There's a discussion going on about transphobia and the media actually at Questioning Transphobia finding ways to improve media coverage of transgender people both in quality and quantity is important i think to maximising the gains of recent years.

Sigh and if having insomnia while feelling exhausted and still being plenty cranky about Channel Ten and missing my girl/boyfriend being close at hand weren't bad enough I can't find my nail file and I think I left my lovely purple nail polish at Mum's place.

Dying Transgender Children and Youth.. Beyond Blue starts to do something!

As i mentioned in past posts like this there are a lot of people with blood on their hands in Australia.. the blood of Transgender children, Bisexual children, Lesbian children, Gay children, teens and youth.

Murdered by negligence. By ignoring the horrifically high stats of attempted suicide for these groups.

According to this report Beyond Blue is improving on it's handling of the issue. Will they go far enough? Will they commit the resources proportional to the high rate in figures on their own site? (Oh.. but of course those figures left off Transgender and Intersex didn't it.)

Well of the stats I've seen Trans is the worst suffering group. (Anyone got stats for Intersex suicide?) so surely rationally we should see the efforts proportional to risk... but will we see that? Will we see beyondblue ads on rural local tv about preventing the suicide of closeted transgender kids, of bi-questioning kids? Will we see them as much or more than the ads we see of preventing suicide of farmers? Because the attempted suicide rate of TQBLG Youth in australia is shockingly high and demands not one iota less than the resources appropriate to the degree of the problem!

Lets see how serious this is. Lets see if Beyond Blue start actually acting to save these childrens lives or if they continue to MURDER THEM BY NEGLIGENT INACTION!

When will we see real action? When will we see advertising in the general media to reach the rural closeted and scared and depressed and anxious Transgender, Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay teens? To get them to help before they try and die? To provide effective programs to rural doctors and to rural families and rural schools to stop the slaughter?

Well I'm waiting to see... but while everyone's waiting more children are DYING! So please do remember that when considering just how much the " ‘x’ dollars over ‘x’ period of time" Beyond Blue is comitting to this will be.

Post-holiday recovery begins

It's been a busy few weeks filled with travel and family.

Yesterday i had to farewell my girl/boy-friend flying back to the big city which is hard on us both to return to the distance thing.

Still we had a lot of fun. Getting to let my hair down at the Warner Brothers Movieworld themepark and getting our pics taken with Batman while both crossdressed was particularly moving for me, I'd wanted a pic with Batman since i was a kid.

But all this comes at a price. Muscle and joint pain, neausea, mental blanks, memory problems, exhaustion, dizzyness.. all symptoms substantially increasing. And possible returns of ones that had faded like red-fades and daylong headaches etc.

I'll have to do everything more slowly with more rest periods in between. Just like the last time and the time before that. Even with getting Tai chi in on the good days for my joints and muscles and painting more of my Tyranid army i'll be keeping up on things online and posting my thoughts.. even if they may be more rambling and less well articulated even than usual due to the more severe 'brain fog'.