I was starting to wonder if maybe -- despite that documentary a while back fearmongering about ADHD overdiagnosis -- I might have been overly paranoid in fearing that the professional shitheads of this world were setting us up to be the next culture war punching bag, using the same playbook they're currently using on trans people.
Then I found out Laurence fucking Fox has been on Twitter and literally going: "Look, I can make all our favourite trans tropes work on ADHD people too, even the Nazi thing -- no hands!"
I KNOW it's Laurence Fox and being elaborately awful is his entire thing. And I'm sorry to even share his words. But with the US DEA apparently engineering an ongoing global med crisis based on vibes , leading to ADHD UK estimating 6% of us in the UK being forced out of jobs ... it makes me worry that more of this is coming.
Prefacing this ask with a warning that I’ll be elaborating on mistreatment of mentally ill ppl in different parts of the world. I don’t go into explicit detail, but if you’re in a bad state of mind rn, proceed with caution.
I don’t wanna get in on that post you just responded to, but I do gotta say it feels weird to hear about the kind of medical treatment described under that specific framing when my country still uses a term for autism that was created as a tool for the genocide of mentally ill ppl and currently has a growing movement in favor of implementing ABA.
A friend of mine in america who also has adhd has had pharmacists lie to her about being out of meds, because they felt her diagnosis was probably invalid. I have had psychologists lie to me and tell me it would be illegal for them to diagnose adhd in adults.
Another friend of mine who has bpd had to go off meds cold turkey after moving because she moved out of the area of the clinic where she got diagnosed and all the waiting lists of psychiatrists are so full that they don’t even put you on them anymore, but just tell you to try again in a year.
Meanwhile in spaces where ODD is treated as an actual thing, mentally ill kids are being diagnosed with “not a submissive little angel” disorder that sets them up for abuse by any authority figure by calling every criticism or attempt at protecting their boundaries a symptom of “child psychopathy”.
Ppl with addiction problems are imprisoned all over the world because their mental health is treated as a moral deficit. People with personality disorders, or psychosis are branded as dangerous at all times and basically subhuman, with every desire for autonomy being seen as a violent tendency. Being suicidal, or having eating disorders can have people instantly revoke your legal right to freedom and have you imprisoned in many places.
You can be given medication against your will if doctors deem you unfit to decide for yourself, and there is no obligation to care about the consequences. (I have a friend from the UK who could tell you so many horror stories about the shit that happens in mental institutions there especially).
Again, ABA exists and is wildly normalized and accepted in many places.
I could go on, but I really don’t want to feel like I have to. Abuse and discrimination do not abide by clear lines in target demographics.
The Southern Chantry and Blood Magic: Ableism, the Patriarchy, and Human Supremacy
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Fear of blood magic has stigmatized academic dissection [...]
Tome of the Mortal Vessel
The rise of the Chant of Light and the subsequent fall of the old Imperium has led to blood magic being all but stamped out
Codex entry: Blood Magic: The Forbidden School
The aim of this essay is to ask a simple why: Why did the Southern Chantry ban and demonize blood magic? The idea that blood magic is inherently evil and dangerous and attracts more spirits than normal magic has been debunked again and again and again. This essay supposes a different explanation: The ban on blood magic is part of a vast and interdependent system of control that, at its core, unites the Southern and Northern Chantry more than it seperates them.
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1. Systemic ableism
Blood magic has a vast array of potential healthcare applications. From healing eyesight to closing wounds, there are forms of healing blood magic known in canon. Operations to improve eyesight are highly complex processes; the eye is anatomically complex and requires immense precision to work with. Blood magic, canonically, can be incredibly precise in its applications. If it can, at minimum, fasten the process of blod clotting, as the closing of wounds implies, could it also reverse it? It would imply the ability to stop or at least lessen the effects of heart attacks. As the phylacteries are powered by blood magic, we also know that blood magic can give information about the blood it works with. Could blood magic be used to gather information about the components of the blood it uses? Could it be used to predict blood-related illnesses?
The exact dimensions of the medical potential of blood magic remain unknown, but even if we only talk about the ability to restore eyesight and close wounds, these are major treatment options that should be offered to those who might want them. One could, as a counterargument to this essay, reiterate the question “Why did the Southern Chantry ban blood magic?” as “If it is as useful as you say, why would the Southern Chantry rob the populace of these options?”. Which is actually a good question to ask!
The answer is that the Chantry does not care about helping disabled people to gain agency; the Chantry, in fact, uses at least one system of structural disabling to control its tools of mass control.
Disability and addiction can be strongly interconnected. Oftentimes, prolonged substance abuse has disabling effects. That exactly is the case for Lyrium addiction; whereas prolonged use can lead to memory loss and paranoia, prolonged withdrawal is physically disabling. As the Southern Chantry forces templars to use lyrium and maintains a surface monopoly on the substance, templars are dependant on the goodwill of the Chantry; therefore, ableism is part of the Chantry’s mechanism of control.
The Chantry does not care how much freedom of choice could be awarded to disabled people with blood magic; it demonstrates a vested interest in keeping the agency of disabled people low to maintain its own power.
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2. The Patriarchy
It will take some sentences to explore how Girlboss Catholicism is deeply patriarchal.
It is easy to see how the Chantry maintains the system of nobility. The Orlesian population is beholden to the Throne and the Maker equally. The Fereldan monarch is annointed by the Grand Cleric of Ferelden. To a large degree, the right to rule of the southern monarch is close to a divine one; the nobility explains its status through recurrent references to Andrastianism. One of the most important tools with which nobles maintain their power intergenerationally is inheritance; the right to the throne and to rule is intertwined with one’s connection to the bloodline of the dynasty. Dynastical rule therefore becomes dependent on clear and defined relations of family; the institution of marriage is a part of the noble system of power. And the Chantry ultimately controls this institution.
This Andrastian marriage is defined as strictly monogamous and aims to create children with determinable parents. This does not only ensure that nobles maintain their power through generations, it also maintains intergenerational poverty. The marriage of the Chantry defines small social units of at minimum two people, disjointed to some degree from other families. Whereas the Dalish entertain largely communal systems of care that often span multiple clans, in which ressources are shared and parents often take care of children not their own, Andrastian families often fend for themselves.
So, as it is now established that the system of marriage not only maintains noble power but also the powerlessness of commoners, where does the patriarchy and blood magic come into play? Enter bioessentialism.
A lot of the writing of Dragon Age is mired in hatred and exclusion of trans people (Kristjanson). But the Chantry itself, in universe, defines gender through a bioessentialist perspective. (Again, Kristjanson). The demonization and ban on blood magic creates am atmosphere of fear in which a supposedly natural state of bodies is upheld (see the codex entry on the tome of the mortal vessel quoted above). Not only does that reinforce the beforementioned ableism, it also is a necessary component of that system of marriage as a tool of social organization. With power and powerlessness assigned to bloodlines and parentage, bodily autonomy becomes limited.
Systems of power, connected to a specific definition of family and reproduction, are weakened by practices that diversify relations to gender, family, bodiedness, and reproduction. Guess what, such a practice is blood magic, as Krem points out.
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3. Human supremacy
Any discussion on legal limitations of bodily autonomy cannot be complete without a look at their interdepedence with racialized systems of supremacy. As stated above, the Andrastian definitions of marriage and family maintain the power of the nobles and the powerlessness of their subjects; in the Thedosian context, this means exclusively humans as nobles and elves exclusively as subjects. The entirety of modern Thedas is built upon the colonization of the Elvhenan; every social institution is designed to uplift humans over elves and supress elves.
My partner wrote a magnificent breakdown how essential mages and magic are to Dalish culture, and we know that Arlathan and the entire Elvhenan were built around the free practice of magic. One must understand the ban on blood magic as a larger push to marginalize and criminalize those gifted with magic, a process undermining and criminalizing elven cultural practices.
The Chantry’s projects to other and restrict mages and magic are manifold, restricting the general public’s contact with mages to a maximum by incarcerating them in the circles. Not only does that give the Chantry free reign to paint mages as violent, power-hungry, and dangerous, without anyone able to proof the opposite. It also means that any free mage is automatically pushed to the margins, automatically criminal by the virtue of existing, and will find no employment and be pushed to collaborate with the underworld in order to survive; the criminalization of mages is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the existence of members of a social group is painted as criminal, they will never have any option to fully fit the category of lawfulness.
Blood magic is immensely powerful, as a word in the mouths of the Andrastian clergy. By designating a form of magic as the most criminal one, it creates categories of magic considered less evil, met with slightly less violent. This tiered system of othering creates and upholds the illusion of assimilation; mages in the circle are supposed to distance themselves from blood mages in order to be considered good mages. Of course, such assimilation only opens the doors for more Chantry control, as circle mages are often drafted into armies.
The Southern Chantry’s demonization of magic has been one of the founding principles of the modern Orlesian empire. The Orlesian empire in the early Dragon Age could not exist with such power without having invaded and annexed the Dales. Long before the full invasion of the Dales, the Orlesian empire, in full cooperation with the Chantry, began violating the sovereignty of the elves of the Dales by sending templars into the territory. Templars, no doubt, under the guise of hunting mages and demons. The ideological framework under which Orlais expanded its empire fully incorporated the demonization of magic and especially blood magic.
Still in the Dragon Age, templars harass Dalish clans taking in apostates from the city. Still to this day, the Chantry maintains its violence over elves by pointing to blood magic as a scapegoat. As the Chantry and the Orlesian empire have been founded together, they function interdependently with each other. The empire has been built and expanded upon the destruction of the elves, their culture, their homeland, their lives. The elves are violently pressed into a class of exploitable subjects, every project of imperial expansion and maintenance has been achieved with the violent exploitation of elven labor. If they were cut off from their ability to exploit elves, the Orlesian empire and Southern Chantry as we know them would collapse.
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4. Conclusion
The codex entry Blood Magic: The Forbidden School in Origins says the following: “The rise of the Chant of Light and the subsequent fall of the old Imperium has led to blood magic being all but stamped out—as it should be, for it poses nearly as great a danger to those who would practice it as to the world at large.“ One might ask, given the Chantry’s constant yelling about blood being used to enhance magic, where one can find an outcry about the rivers of elven blood being spilled daily to maintain the power of Orlais. Nowhere, is the obvious answer, since both the Southern and the Northern Chantry use blood magic as a tool to maintain their power - the only difference is that the latter uses it as a weapon and the former as an excuse.
The way people have treated you over the c-punk discussion is so far out of line. I'm not sure what the support of a stranger means at a time like this, but you have mine, at least. Hope the perpetrators back the heck off and leave you be <3
It's really disturbing, honestly. Dude is fucking obsessed with me, and not in a cute or funny way. Like, truly, deeply, unnervingly obsessed.
To turn this into something positive, though, at least in the form of advice: if you're the target of this kind of harassment campaign, which unfortunately has happened to me more than once in the 30 years I've been on the internet, one of the best ways to keep shit from overwhelming you is to ask trusted others for help. If you have someone you trust to monitor the situation so you don't have to, whatever that means - whether it's documenting obsessive behavior (cw violent ableism, violent threats/graphic wishes of death and physical harm, genital terms as demeaning slurs, use of intellectual disabilities as insults) somewhere you don't have to see it unless necessary, handling your notes/mentions/ask box, or anything else that puts a layer between you and the harassment.
With that said, I'm going to place a moratorium on talking about this once I clear this batch of asks currently in my inbox. I don't need to feed his weird obsession with an attempt to kick me out of a movement I've been in for... 5 years? (More? IDK, I made the patch in 2017.) because I believe that all disabilities are physical disabilities because the brain is a part of the physical body. I really don't. At this point it's pretty clear that he's abusive in his behavior and really, really needs help and to get off Tumblr for a while, because it's clearly not good for him if this is what he thinks is okay behavior.
I really feel sorry for him. I genuinely do. But feeling sorry for him doesn't mean I need to volunteer to be his personal obsession point and feed this thing that is clearly a manifestation of whatever has been going on with him.
I hope he gets help, and both keeps my name out of his mouth and stops contacting me through new blogs when I've made it clear in so many words that I don't want to hear from him ever again.
Oh, uh, and repeatedly using a genitals term to talk about a transmasc who may have dysphoria triggered by that is, um. Cute. I mean, I don't. But it's just -- classy, baby.
Hey, sending an ask to answer because I was having a conversation in good faith.
"well, if it's a short drive it's fine" doesn't apply here. If I can't see properly while driving *I am putting other people in danger*, even for a short ride. That is not my decision to make. Thinking "well, I probably can't do this properly, but what is the worse that can happen" is a dangerous way of thinking when you involve other people. And BDSM isn't a short ride. There are many BDSM practices that can create lifelong debilitating injuries if done wrong. When you are doing those things to another person, you are responsible for them. If that person is in a state of mind - for whatever reason - where they can't do safety checks or properly respect limits (including their own), then you can have a huge mess. That is all I am saying when I talked about the "sane" aspect. It's going by the dictionary definition of "being able to think and reason clearly", and it is talking about the moment of play. It does not mean people with any sort of neurodivergence are excluded from BDSM. But that *everybody* should do an honest check of where they are mentally and what they are about to and if those things are compatible.
Lastly, to the original point of the post, RACK and SSC are different philosophies, RACK wasn't "created to replace SSC". I recommend reading the RACK wiki, it describes the differences in philosophy and history pretty decently.
Anyway, sorry to prolong this. Like I said, I was having those conversations in good faith, so I imagine you wanted a response? If not, just ignore this ask, please. I'm really not looking for a fight.
yeah, you're right, driving with even the most mild and insignificant of impairments is not a great comparison
it goes something like "calling you low functioning denies you have agency, calling you high functioning denies you have difficulties" and probably one of the reblogs explains how often "low functioning" and "high functioning" apply equally well to the same autistic person on different days
but I don't remember the exact phrasing, and good luck getting tumblr search to find it with exact quotes, never mind without
