![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So last night, I was browsing through a bunch of stuff about interpreting ASL (American Sign Language), courtesy of Waywind.
I ran across a couple of disparaging remarks about Alexander Graham Bell; and thought about them for a while, as I do and have. The Deaf community's remarks about Bell had always confused me (for some reason I do reading about this in my spare time, and there's a lot of vitriol out there).
A short summary: Bell's wife was deaf; seeing the pain and hardship this caused her, he was spurred on to scientific achievement (the telephone was invented as a kind of byproduct of his experiments to try to get his wife to hear) and activisim--he was a proponent of an educational/social theory called "oralism," which encouraged deaf people to try to speak (not use sign). He was also (and ickier) a proponent of eugenics; wanting to try and stop Deaf people from marrying each other and spreading genetic deafness. (never mind that many deaf children are born by hearing parents).
So I could see why the eugenics angered people, and I could why it was bad that the theory of oralism took precedence in schools for years and years--and thus basically demolished the flourishing and happy pre-1900's Deaf community.
But my thought was: he was only trying to help, right? Don't get so uptight about it.
Then, suddenly, those thoughts bumped into other thoughts I'd been having throughout the day about my life in elementary school/highschool (ick), parenting, and draconity (hi, Gaudior).
So, there's this woman, a dragon, who's an active member in a flourishing Otherkin community, and she has a husband who's a wonderful person, but not Otherkin. He sees the pain and suffering she goes through in her daily life trying to live in a world she doesn't like and in some aspects can't understand, a world that doesn't accomodate her needs, wishes, and desires and in fact often actively works against them in harmful and hateful ways.
He wants to fix this. Because somehow he doesn't understand her, and it hurts.
He gets his wife to go to counseling, and she maybe gets put on medicine for something she doesn't have. He uses his contacts (via her) within the Otherkin community to spread the idea that 'being Otherkin' is something treatable and curable--you can live a normal, happy life, and don't have to angst that you can't fly. This idea catches on--his wife is Otherkin, after all, so he must know what he's talking about. And it would be so nice to not have those people dragging their children away from us in the grocery store because they think we're twisted sexual predators.
Eventually he spreads the idea throughout The Establishment--after all, who wants their child to be one of those things they profiled in Vanity Fair? Children who spend too much time in Kindergarten pretending to be lions are sent to counseling and put on Ritalin; the government hands out pamphlets to worried mothers of pre-teens reading "Warning signs of Therianthropy," and the remaining scattered bits of the Otherkin community have to deal with the fallout on a regular basis.
There's factions and fraction within groups--some people like the idea, after all--and infighting, and suddenely, there's not a lot that could be called an Otherkin community at all. If you're a new Otherkin, you're isolated. You can't find any other Otherkin to talk with and may not know that the idea even exists outside of your own head; and you can't find words to express yourself with anyway because the community's language and vocabulary is gone with the community.
You have no chance of finding anyone even remotely like yourself to settle down with, so you settle down with a nice human and pretend that you're human and raise your children to think that Otherkinness is a problem that can be cured. Because aren't you happy now, living a normal life?
So now you have more problems relating to the real world because of a few people's well-intentioned misconceptions, and your culture is gone to boot, and maybe in 50 years some people will see that maybe they were wrong and the culture will start building itself up again from scratch.
I have to admit, I kind of see their point much more clearly now.
I ran across a couple of disparaging remarks about Alexander Graham Bell; and thought about them for a while, as I do and have. The Deaf community's remarks about Bell had always confused me (for some reason I do reading about this in my spare time, and there's a lot of vitriol out there).
A short summary: Bell's wife was deaf; seeing the pain and hardship this caused her, he was spurred on to scientific achievement (the telephone was invented as a kind of byproduct of his experiments to try to get his wife to hear) and activisim--he was a proponent of an educational/social theory called "oralism," which encouraged deaf people to try to speak (not use sign). He was also (and ickier) a proponent of eugenics; wanting to try and stop Deaf people from marrying each other and spreading genetic deafness. (never mind that many deaf children are born by hearing parents).
So I could see why the eugenics angered people, and I could why it was bad that the theory of oralism took precedence in schools for years and years--and thus basically demolished the flourishing and happy pre-1900's Deaf community.
But my thought was: he was only trying to help, right? Don't get so uptight about it.
Then, suddenly, those thoughts bumped into other thoughts I'd been having throughout the day about my life in elementary school/highschool (ick), parenting, and draconity (hi, Gaudior).
So, there's this woman, a dragon, who's an active member in a flourishing Otherkin community, and she has a husband who's a wonderful person, but not Otherkin. He sees the pain and suffering she goes through in her daily life trying to live in a world she doesn't like and in some aspects can't understand, a world that doesn't accomodate her needs, wishes, and desires and in fact often actively works against them in harmful and hateful ways.
He wants to fix this. Because somehow he doesn't understand her, and it hurts.
He gets his wife to go to counseling, and she maybe gets put on medicine for something she doesn't have. He uses his contacts (via her) within the Otherkin community to spread the idea that 'being Otherkin' is something treatable and curable--you can live a normal, happy life, and don't have to angst that you can't fly. This idea catches on--his wife is Otherkin, after all, so he must know what he's talking about. And it would be so nice to not have those people dragging their children away from us in the grocery store because they think we're twisted sexual predators.
Eventually he spreads the idea throughout The Establishment--after all, who wants their child to be one of those things they profiled in Vanity Fair? Children who spend too much time in Kindergarten pretending to be lions are sent to counseling and put on Ritalin; the government hands out pamphlets to worried mothers of pre-teens reading "Warning signs of Therianthropy," and the remaining scattered bits of the Otherkin community have to deal with the fallout on a regular basis.
There's factions and fraction within groups--some people like the idea, after all--and infighting, and suddenely, there's not a lot that could be called an Otherkin community at all. If you're a new Otherkin, you're isolated. You can't find any other Otherkin to talk with and may not know that the idea even exists outside of your own head; and you can't find words to express yourself with anyway because the community's language and vocabulary is gone with the community.
You have no chance of finding anyone even remotely like yourself to settle down with, so you settle down with a nice human and pretend that you're human and raise your children to think that Otherkinness is a problem that can be cured. Because aren't you happy now, living a normal life?
So now you have more problems relating to the real world because of a few people's well-intentioned misconceptions, and your culture is gone to boot, and maybe in 50 years some people will see that maybe they were wrong and the culture will start building itself up again from scratch.
I have to admit, I kind of see their point much more clearly now.
