Happy pride!

 It's still Pride month; there's still time to remind queer people and allies: You don't have to worry about queer identities being called "mental illnesses" if you abolish the concept of mental illness!

You don't need a prefrontal cortex to know the planet is on fire

 Progressives: It's great to see kids these days so politically engaged! Teen Vogue has serious policy articles! Young people are protesting gun violence and climate change, good for them! Youth future!

Also Progressives: We can't blame middle-aged people for things they did or policies they advocated in their 20s, because their brains weren't fully developed.

Youth escapist media

 I wholeheartedly support the freedom of not-so-young adults to read young adult novels and consume other media aimed at younger people. Anyone who sneers at you for reading/watching something "for kids" isn't worth listening to. It's absolutely okay to read and watch whatever you want!

What isn't okay is demanding that media that isn't meant for you conform to your adult perspective.

In real life, young people have very limited agency over their lives, and virtually no agency to affect the world around them. It's entirely understandable, then, that young people would gravitate to stories in which young characters do exercise agency, fight back, and save the day. If those stories resonate with older fans as well, wonderful! But older readers/viewers don't get to demand that these fictional stories conform to their own beliefs about what the protagonists are "too young" for, or denounce the fictional adults in the fictional story for "endangering" the young protagonists, or denounce a love story on the grounds that the characters are "too young" to fall in love.

In a YA adventure story, young people are going to have adventures. In a YA romance, young people are going to have romance. If that upsets you, perhaps these genres aren't for you. Among other reasons, a story in which the main characters are perfectly safe, perfectly protected, make no significant decisions, have no strong emotions, and encounter no conflict is... a pretty boring story.

You've successfully structured real life to prevent young people from doing anything. Let them have their escapist fantasies of actually doing things.

Teachers' rights and students' rights

 Teachers at colleges and universities deserve job stability and a living wage.

Students at colleges and universities deserve to be classified as free, autonomous adult consumers of educational services.

Students' parents are entirely irrelevant and should have nothing whatsoever to do with decisions of any kind.

These are not in conflict.

The reason teachers are underpaid and struggle with poor working conditions is not that students are considered people now.

I support everyone's -- college faculty included -- right to a living wage, job stability, and decent working conditions.

But when you pair your (entirely valid!) complaints about pay and working conditions with complaints about "And we have to treat students as adult consumers instead of passive children now!" or "Parents entrust us to mold and shape their children," I have to conclude that your cause is less about economic justice for all, and more about desiring paternalistic power over students and young adults.

And since I have yet to read an article about the (admittedly terrible!) working conditions of college faculty that doesn't also include at least one aside referring to students as "children," making reference to "molding" or "shaping" or "forming" them, or complaints about being required to treat them as the paying consumers they are... I have a pretty strong inkling about what the goals of this movement really are.

Neurodiversity treadmill

 One frustrating aspect of the way that disability discourse plays out is that every term that radical anti-pathologization advocates use is appropriated and misused by pathologizers.

Eugenics organizations talk about "acceptance." Behaviorists change the meaning of "behavior is communication" while claiming to be "trauma-informed." Pathologizers worm forced drugging into the umbrella of "services" and market tracking devices as adaptive tech. "Peer support" is subsumed under the purview of professional pathologizers instead of being a radical liberation from their authority. People pretend that "Destigmatizing mental illness" is a coherent concept, as if classifying ways of thinking and feeling as "illnesses" weren't inherently stigmatizing.

I started doing brain-related advocacy as part of the autistic community, but while I still identify as autistic, the identity I now feel most strongly is "neurodivergent." Identifying as "neurodivergent" succinctly conveys that I have a brain which is pathologized by the society I live in, and that I reject classifying my brain as "ill" or "disordered."

Unfortunately, people generally assume "neurodivergent" to encompass autism and maybe some learning disabilities, but not the cognitive and emotional characteristics classified as "mental illnesses." So I say "neurodivergent/mad" to clarify that yes, I mean that too. Except that "mad," too, is whitewashed and coopted by the "recovery" movement.

We say "All minds are valid." Pathologizers rebut "Valid doesn't mean healthy." As if getting away from the "health" framework weren't the entire point.

Round and round and round we go, trying to find the words to say that all humans, all brains, all minds, all ways of learning, all ways of feeling, are equal, before our words are stolen out from under us to be distorted into "As long as they're the RIGHT humans, brains, minds, ways of learning and feeling."

It's okay to be neurodivergent, as long as you're healthy.

It's okay to be mad, as long as you're in recovery.

It's okay to be in the community, as long as it's for therapeutic purposes.

It's okay to seek peer support, as long as a licensed professional oversees it.

It's okay to promote acceptance, but only until a cure is found.

It's okay to be what you are, as long as you're working to become what you're not.

Don't let people get away with these word games. ALL brains, ALL minds, ALL ways of thinking and feeling and learning, are deserving of unqualified, unconditional acceptance. ALL means ALL.

**Obligitory preemptive response to "But what about murderers/ abusers/ rapists/ etc?" -- those are choices people make, not types of brains. No one is born with "murderer brain" or "uses the last of the milk and puts the empty bottle back in the fridge" brain. All brains are valid; all choices are NOT valid, so do the right thing, don't kill anyone, and throw away your empty milk bottle.

Privacy is for everyone

 Privacy rules aren't there to protect people from strangers. Privacy rules are there to protect people from their families.

I don't want strangers accessing my confidential information, but, outside of the very real threat of financial identity theft, strangers aren't the ones who can use my confidential information to hurt me. I might be lucky enough to have a supportive and non-abusive family, but not everyone is.

Privacy rules protect people from abusive spouses. From controlling parents. From nosy, gossiping neighbors who can get word back to abusers. From that annoying aunt who wants to remind you for the 47th time that your cholesterol is too high and potato chips are bad for you. Whatever it is, you have a right to be free from it and keep your family out of your business.

Over and over, I see people breaking privacy rules or demanding exceptions to them, because the information they want to access is their family's, or someone they know. Privacy doesn't mean THEM, right? He's her son! She's his wife! He's her neighbor she's known since kindergarten!

Privacy is supposed to mean them to. It's supposed to mean ESPECIALLY them.

Since I've started helping a consenting disabled family member with bureaucratic tasks, I'm constantly astonished and appalled by how easy it is. People freely talk to me and give me information with no attempt to verify that I have permission to access it. I don't need it, right? I'm family! I could be an abuser, a murderer, a blackmailer, anything, but as long as I have the same last name as the person whose information I want, no one interferes.

Professionals, please stop giving "family" leeway. Privacy rules exist for a reason. Please enforce them.