Article of the Day

Nice Lady Therapists

Sometimes it’s – crossing a physical line. Touching in a way they have no good reason to be touching. Or touching over the objections of the kid in a way that is in no way justified by therapy goals. Sometimes sexually, sometimes not. Sometimes in ways that are against ethical standards of practice, sometimes not. But intimately, invasively. And if you say no, she patiently, lovingly, explains that you have nothing to be afraid of and that everything is ok. And that if you just trust her, you will have fun and get better. And when her profession has professional training about boundaries and appropriate touch, she thinks or even says “women don’t do that.”

Some male therapists do many of these things too, but there’s a gendered version of it that usually comes from women. And that can cause a problem for people with disabilities who are recovering from this. Most things about trauma and abuse of power are about misogyny in some way. They’re about men hurting women, and taking advantage of power dynamics that favor men to do so. Those descriptions are important because that pattern is common. But it is not the only abuse pattern, and it is not the only gendered abuse pattern.

Female therapists are subjected to misogyny and the power of men just as much as any other women. But they also have tremendous power over people with disabilities, many of whom are deeply dehumanized. The assumption that women have neither the power nor the ability to hurt anyone gets really dangerous really quickly for children with disabilities receiving therapy.

And it also means that people with disabilities often have a different relationship to gender than most nondisabled people. If you’ve been harmed by women over and over and assured that you liked it, it complicates things. If you’re a girl, it can make it hard to see a group of women as a Safe Space, especially if they think the thing making it safe is keeping the men out. If you’re a boy who has been repeatedly harmed by women who believed they were powerless, it can be hard to understand that the gender hierarchies that feminists and others talk about actually do exist.

This article is from 2014, but I think it's still relevant today. It feels frustratingly difficult to talk about how the sexist positioning of women (specifically cis white women - trans white women, cis women of color, and especially trans women of color are usually not afforded this kind of assumption of passive, doe-like innocence) not only enables the abuse of women by men, but also allows specific kinds of abuse by women (to other women, to certain men) to be taken less seriously or assumed nonexistent.

It makes me uncomfortable when I see people position women and girls as "more good" or "more pure" than men and boys, and that's Why We Need Feminism - rather than that oppression and gender essententialism is fundamentally wrong. (And let's be real - when nonbinary or genderqueer people are even acknowledged, they're arbitrarily sorted back into a binary box based on the speaker's own biases.) Because I was mostly physically abused by boys and mostly emotionally abused by girls - that's what bullying is, it's abuse of children by their peers. (Though I was also physically abused by a girl a grade younger than me, in first grade. I considered her a friend at the time because, unlike other girls, she was willing to be physically near me.) And I don't think the abuse the girls did caused less damage just because it didn't leave visible bruises. I don't think my kindergarden teacher locking me in a dark closet (a thing I don't even remember, but that people in my life remember me telling them about at that age) is made better because it was done by a woman. When a next door neighbor, or second cousin's dad, was physically and/or emotionally abused by their wife, I remember hearing adults implying it the man's fault for being weak-willed and spineless, for letting her walk all over him.

I don't really see myself as having a gender, but I was assigned female at birth, and I let people perceive me as a cis woman because it's easier to not assert myself. If I started taking testosterone, and was perceived more as a "man" than a "woman", would the things I've experienced suddenly become less serious? Would they have turned out, retroactively, to not have been serious? I already feel like such a burden on other people, like I take up too much space, being perceived as a girl. When I make characters for TTRPGs, I gravitate towards small characters - kobolds and the like - I want to take up less space, that's my power fantasy, not being strong or sexy or popular. Or I gravitate towards being the token non-humanoid, because it's easier to be a mascot or a pet than a person. It feels less bad if I don't know how to relate to my peers or be taken seriously if I'm just everyone else's crusty little white dog. I'm only afforded any grace as a human (a failed human, autistic, a dog trained to walk on its hind legs) in that I'm perceived as harmless, despite all the ways that I know I'm not.

(no subject)

Interesting how the "Marsh Taur" build (and its corresponding unique sprite) has seemingly sort of become a mascot for Caves of Qud?

• On the title screen's background art, a green-bodied centaur (the Marsh Taur) is shown alongside a more typical humanoid in a trenchcoat, resembling the generic sprite for custom built characters with the "gunslinger" calling.
• Tutorial mode has the player select and play as the Marsh Taur preset.
• On the Taskbar, Qud's application icon is the Marsh Taur sprite. (Its icon on Discord, though, is the "gunslinger" sprite.)

It's not uncommon for games with customizable protagonists to have a sort of "default" version of that protagonist for the purposes of official art and other materials; however, usually that default is centered around "normal": a generic everyman with no particularly striking visual qualities. I think it speaks to Qud's sensibilities that it represents itself with the Marsh Taur, instead of any of the non-preset mutant player sprites (which are more conventionally human in appearance than the mutant preset sprites are) or any of the True Kin (non-mutant human) sprites.