Gordon Ecker

elegentblacksmith:

everythingbutharleyquinn:

liz-the-wiz:

thatfeministdyke:

transawareness:

The above article is an update.  Her mother went to appeal to keep her out of the psychiatric ward and lost.  She will be institutionalized because of her expression of her gender.  She will be held until she conforms to male gender and then released to foster care, not her mother who was supporting her.

Please, if you haven’t signed the petition, sign it, reblog it, ask your friends to sign it. We’ve managed to get 40K signatures for a pageant model, we’ve only gotten 11K for a little girl about to have her life ruined.  Lets get on the ball and spread the word.

Sign It.

I want to throw up. I’m so fucking angry. Sign this shit.

signal boost because this is one of the most disgusting occurances invloving a child i have ever heard of. please sign it.

Sign this. It will take you 5 seconds. A CHILD is about to be institutionalised because her gender does not match the one society has assigned to her.  INSTITUTIONALISED.

Please.  We need more people to sign!  We are at 27,341 at the moment!  We need 7,659 more to reach the goal!  Please guys!  We can make a HUGE difference in this girl’s life!

The appeal court judge rejected the mother’s request for a proper psychiatric evaluation, instead trusting the opinion of a biased and unqualified Youth Welfare Office nurse. And reparative therapy is harmful quackery which was debunked long ago. This is just disgusting.

(via eccentricbotts)

codeman38:

The mother of a four year, eleven month old boy saw that program that afternoon. She noted the list of symptoms that the expert gave and concluded that there was something seriously wrong with her son. She and her husband decided to take their young boy to UCLA for treatment to prevent him from growing up to be gay.

That young boy came under the care of a very young grad student by the name of George Alan Rekers. The boy’s treatment would become a subject of Rekers’s doctoral thesis, and the astounding success that Rekers claimed in curing the young boy would mark the start of a very impressive career. Rekers would write about “Kraig” in at least twenty publications during his career, a career which included becoming a very important activist in the promotion of anti-gay causes.

Hit the link to read further details of this… rather scary experiment.

If some of the concepts behind the experiment sound familiar from a different context? One of the doctors who led the experiment was named Ivar Lovaas. Those of you who’ve done research about autism might be familiar with that name.

Yeah, it’s the very same guy who came up with one of the most popular behaviorist programs to make autistic kids act more neurotypical.

And yet…people don’t see the parallels whatsoever…

Perhaps the most disturbing part is the parallels between Rekers and Lovaas’s quackery and regular old-fashioned gender policing and anti-gay bullying.

(via queeringautism)

tal9000:

allies-person:

(Link has ableism, discussion of ABA.  Post includes discussion of ableism against autistics and homophobia, transphobia, gender policing.)

ABA supporters continually tout ABA as “evidence-based”….and yet, the most-cited study supporting ABA is still a 24-year old study with huge ethical and methodological problems.  See this article, discussing the issue of insurance mandates for ABA, for an example.  It starts by discussing Lovaas’ finding that almost half of his study participants (which was actually only nine children) “had no visible signs of autism by first grade.”

Where to begin with this?  I feel like the critique of Lovaas has been so well-established in autistic/neurodiversity circles that it hardly bears repeating…and yet clearly this is necessary.  In short:

1. No visible signs of autism ! = not being autistic.  It just means that the autistic person has better learned how to fake “normal,” which I know from experience to be hugely stressful and exhausting.  How wonderful.

2. These children did not appear autistic according to lay observers who presumably didn’t know much about autism.  Probably a lot of children currently diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition wouldn’t come across as obviously autistic to uninformed lay people, with or without 40 hours a week of ABA.

Which brings us to…

3. The diagnostic criteria for autism have altered considerably since 1987.

4. Lovaas’ study eliminated autistic behaviors through adversives, which are supposedly no longer used today.

So given all of that, why is Lovaas’ study still pointed to as the Golden Proof of ABA?  Is there really no other study which is more recent, more scientifically thorough, and less obviously unethical?  Because looking at the ABA propaganda…it’s kind of easy to get that impression.

The (mis)representations of Lovaas’ work also raise another question regarding historical memory: why is his non-autism-related research forgotten while Lovaas is glorified as a hero?  Namely, why do no mainstream media outlets mention Lovaas’ other “success” story: He (supposedly) was able to make “feminine boys” appear more outwardly “masculine” (in the socially acceptable way, of course).

Curious that the advocates of 40-hours-a-week skirt over this important historical context when glorifying Lovaas.

To celebrate Lovaas, and to use his findings as scientific evidence for the efficacy ABA, without acknowledging the sorry history of ableism, abuse, and homophobia, transphobia, and gender policing in his work is intellectual dishonesty, plain and simple. 

Yes, this.

When autistic people compare curebieism to the people trying to turn gay people het or trans people cis, we aren’t exaggerating. Often it’s the same people, using the same tools.

I’ve known about this one for years. It’s pretty disturbing that this quackery isn’t subjected to stricter scrutiny, especially considering its origins.

(via queeringautism)

chuggameowmeow:

striderprovider:

Via Unicorn Booty: “A desperate plea from an 11-year-old transgender girl in Germany has lit up the interwebs today. Her father, backed by an anti-gay organization, intends to commit her to a mental institution in the impossible hope of changing her gender identity…

No no no no no no. Reblog, guys.

How many times are we going to need to debunk this “reparative therapy” quackery before it stops? T_T

(Source: inothernews, via brokenblumenkind)