Mads "Old Main" Viande @byttyrs@queer.party

bool to be signed
in the right typecast

I am led to understand that other people "type" to make posts? is this true? y'all are tapping little levers or keys or whatever to put "letters" in a specific "order"? I have never heard of this and I do not understand the reasons

*at caveman cocktail party*
Them: what do?
Me: gather
Them: ah.. me hunter
Me: ah..

@selfsame [Caveril Lavine voice] he hunt. she gather. more obvious... how?

i dont have a deadname. not anymore anyway. after killing it, i disposed of it. its of no use to me, and i hate useless things

Mastodon (built using the Unity engine)

transitioning from trying desperately not to fail as a boy to failure of a girl and liking it

I can barely make a single statement about what I'm working on for school without an enormous collection of caveats. So many unknown unknowns. It's exciting to study complicated, highly connected systems, but a part of me is uncomfortable with the massive amount of ambiguity involved in neuroscience.

I've been meditating on this discomfort with ambiguity and I'm surprised to realize it has to do with gender and even more the way I'm racialized in the US.

Some part of me has noticed that if I say something correct, a large percentage of people view it as inconsequential or a fluke. But if I say something incorrect, people remember it and associate it with me as a fundamental characteristic. This tracks with US superstitions and emotional conditioning around race.

People in the US have been conditioned their whole lives to see the socioeconomic challenges affecting black folks as a fundamental internal defect, whereas the same challenges in white communities are treated as systemic/public health issues that do not reflect some sort of fundamental internal flaw.

The responses to the opioid epidemic vs. other drug epidemics is a perfect example of this.

The US government was just as culpable in the crack epidemic as pharmaceutical companies were in the opioid epidemic. But the recent opioid epidemic was mostly considered a public health crisis, whereas the crack epidemic of the 80s, opium use in the 30s, and alcohol use in Indigenous communities were treated as internal 'racial failures' and used as an excuse to brutalize or take resources from communities of color.

US culture essentializes the so-called success of white USians as a racial trait and dismisses disproportionately white problems as systemic while doing the opposite with black/brown folks. This leads to genocidal thinking - to ignorant folks, PoC aren't just having a rough historical moment because of wave upon wave of systemic, often intentional abuse. To the ignorant, typical effects of abuse and marginalization are treated as an internal defect.

So I find myself in class or lab, and I observe that many people in academia are also susceptible to this oversimplistic race science-style essentialization. And I know that if I say something about neuroscience where each experiment is laden with ambiguity, many folks will hyper-focus on the caveats becase they've failed to address their conditioning to view folks who are racialized like me as defective.

And I worry about all the little black and brown kids in school right now, how this affects their voice and their comfort with making the mistakes necessary to learn. How even being correct is a risk. And the emotional violence implicit in racialization ('excel or you deserve to be mistreated like them') even for kids viewed as 'model minorities' within the current version of US racial hierarchy.

So I guess I'm just deeply unimpressed with a lot of folks in academia. I'm skeptical of whether people who are this uncritical/unaware of their assumptions can conduct good scientific studies. I know questioning white supremacy/anti-blackness can feel like an emotional risk, but so is questioning the theoretical bases of lifelong research in a field.