He's doomed and it's his own damn fault. Ok maybe he is warming up to the idea of having friends but you didn't hear it from anyone. He just likes making things, that's all.
There's a huge storm outside, the house is rumbling from the thunder, I am cozy in my blanket and it's the perfect, stay in bed and laze about kind of morning.
Ahem, apologies but I need to rant about this for a minute
Okay so. Humans in general seem culturally fixated on pointing out the differences between the sexes to a ludicrous degree. Our insistence that women are from mars and men are from uranus or however that goes is irritating in it’s own right, but here’s the thing that really gets me:
In the handful of cases where there IS a statistically significant (i.e. small but important) difference, we are equally determined to IGNORE IT IN THOSE CASES. Apart from a single case (muscle mass) we ignore the only scientifically proven differences, especially when they involve making a statement about a sex that goes against what we imagine them to be socially (the women being statistically more likely to survive usually lethal wounds argument, for example. Women are supposed to be delicate and fragile!). And that is BAFFLING to me. And not only that, it’s actually very harmful!
I did just reblog that post about female ADHD being different from male ADHD (duh). It’s great that we’re finally figuring this out, but I’m pretty sure I (and probably many others) could have told you this at age four, and definitely by age 8-10. We do know, that much like how men tend to be more muscular and women’s fat settles over the muscles, (I still stand by my men favor strength and women favor stamina argument) men and women’s brains TEND to develop slightly differently. We also know that brains are essentially organic computers, and as anyone who works in programming will tell you, it doesn’t take a lot of changed code to make one hell of a difference, especially if there is a bug involved.
An early place this was noted, likely because the line of code changed was the simpler, was autism. Women with autistic qualities more often went undetected, simply because most female brains are slightly better at emotional and social intelligence than men. This made the most obvious symptom, social awkwardness, less obvious except in extreme cases. Again, duh, right? This should have been obvious from the get go. We’ve known the women tend towards more social intelligence thing since basically forever.
Obviously, however, these things aren’t fixed. In the case of trans individuals, for example, they often go un-diagnosed because psychologists are looking for symptoms that correspond with the presented sex of the child, which is not necessarily indicative of the child’s preference OR of what kind of brain they have. Take me, for instance. I went to a million and a half shrinks when I was a kid. Out of the festering cesspool of mental problems I have, they only ever managed to nail down my depression. Which, is good, I suppose. I do have a genetic predisposition towards it. It was also kind of a gimme, since I’d been suicidal and self harming almost since I could figure out which end of the sharp thing to stick into myself (hint, it’s the pointy end).
They certainly never picked out the autism, despite the fact I was hovering points away from the arbitrary “line” that determines autistic from neurotypical. (because such things are always perfectly sliced, no chance of it being a spectrum, right?) I can still remember the day my smiling shrink told my parents I was far too high functioning socially to be autistic. And my parents breathed a huge sigh of relief because that meant all their son’s problems must be due to him being a shitty person, not due to some mental issues he may have been having. I also remember sneaking a look at the chart he printed showing my results, and noting that the number listed was like three away from the threshold, and thinking it was odd we were saying “nah it’s fine”. It was obvious enough to ten year old Alice, at least.
On the flipside, the only girl I know who was actually diagnosed with ADHD has some distinctive (well to someone who has a point of obsession with psych and also over-studies her friends so as to mimic them in social situations) mental abilities that are more typical of men. She’s phenomenal at conceptualizing 3d space, for instance. This is a classic difference, usually only noted by always making dad pack the trunk, rather than mom, but it’s also one of the most significant differences statistically speaking. Now, what does that have to do with ADHD? I have no idea. But again, brains are fucking complicated, and changing a line or two of code somewhere can have a lot of far reaching implications that we don’t understand! We should at least consider that every step away from the typical gendered brain we take, we also likely throw off any other set of gendered numbers that may be applied to us, ESPECIALLY if by making this shift, we might be able to help someone who is struggling with an diagnosed illness!
So, lets try and actually arrive at a point here. Obviously people can miss issues in people whose brains don’t correspond exactly with how their sex’s brain should, be they trans or cis with quirks. What does this mean specifically for diagnosing people? Well, the jury is out on that. I don’t think anyone has the numbers to really nail that down, and we likely won’t for many years. However, here’s my advice. Before slapping someone with the bubble test that can supposedly predict every issue they have, take a few sessions just to suss out what kind of brain someone has. This should be a no brainer again, get to know your patient so when the bubble test results come back, you have context for them, but it will also help to know how far away from the typical their brain shifts before you apply a typical range over the number they show. Don’t make assumptions during a diagnosis (again, duh?), even if it seems really really obvious. (trans kids will often hypercorrect! tying to be extra fem or manly if they feel uncomfortable! Suss out the braintype! Even if they are cis and very standard presenting it doesn’t mean their brain is 100% gendered!)
Second point: we as a culture and as a species need to buckle down and actually figure out what the differences are. Way way WAY too often we focus on superficial things and ignore studying things that should be obvious differences. (reproductive health, anyone?) Keeping in mind everything is a spectrum, we should find out where the sexes lean. It’s really not that hard. We’re just going to have to put aside the stupid idea we can study only men and then extrapolate women. It’s an easy fix, but I seriously doubt we can actually fix it.
“No, I live in a box to keep everyone around me from having an orgy. I still have to listen to every unrequited love and every arguement in the world you know. Or would you prefer that I curse you with the need to have sex every twelve hours or suffer death?”
so... i have to do some stuff tomorrow and i’m dreading it because like...... NO, i want to hide in my room, listen to music, make edits, and forget the world.
