Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1.  Toy Story 5 | Official Trailer | In Theaters June 19 (February 20) Part of me is like "why are they making another Toy Story movie" but also part of me is like "I'm going to watch it."

2. How the devil was disguised in the SBC and Paul Pressler's Conservative Resurgence (May 6, via) "By 1998, I had been so convinced of the rightness of the religious right and the conservative movement that when news of the Clinton-Lewinsky abuse case broke, I thought the leaders who spoke against Clinton and sought his impeachment actually cared about the immorality of it all." This is so real.

Add this to the "it was all fake" pile of evidence. All that talk about submitting your life to Jesus, every part of your life, every decision, even your thoughts, sitting in prayer and listening to God, willing to do whatever God wanted, no matter the cost, killing your sinful and selfish nature- and meanwhile, the leaders at the top are lying, sexually abusing people, and chasing political power.

Maybe this is the case any time you have religious people who totally believe "I have to do whatever God says, no matter how hard it is"- we are extremely vulnerable to any leader who comes along and claims "this is what God wants." Especially when they frame it as "I'm just simply telling you what the bible says- if you question or disagree with me, you're disagreeing with God" which I've heard so many times.

What to do about this? I guess if you're a religious person who believes "I have to do whatever God says, no matter how hard it is," you need to maintain some amount of independence, like "I'm going to use my own brain and only believe 'this is what God says' if there is a good reason *that makes sense to me*." You run the risk that you might refuse to obey something that turned out to be a valid command from God, but I think it's better to err on that side, rather than be manipulated by leaders who can claim anything is "what God said" and our feeble human minds aren't supposed to understand the reasons and that's why faith is so important.

3.  How terrible is this family? Family therapist takes on THE PARENT TRAP (May 22, 28-minute video) Yessss, I watched "The Parent Trap" on Disney channel so many times back in the day. 

"There's emotional realism in this film, which the actors kind of like, concoct out of thin air. ... there's no emotional realism in this premise. And everyone's just kind of like, well, your dad and I had a fight, so we got divorced, and we each took a kid, and then they're never gonna see each other. And I as a parent am not gonna see my other child. Ever."

"And apparently there are many adults in both of these adults' lives who know this and are cool with it."

4. Ancestral Genomes (May 29) From xkcd.

5. A cancer vaccine made just for you. mRNA is back and it's fighting melanoma (June 1) This is great news! Sounds like it's still being tested, but hopefully soon it will be widely available.

6. Enhanced Games claim ‘we changed the world’ but only one record broken and three clean athletes win (May 25) "While the vast majority of the 42 competing sprinters, swimmers and weightlifters were taking banned substances such as testosterone, EPO and anabolic steroids, three athletes who were competing clean also won."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Donald Trump’s Horribly Broken Propaganda Film (May 31, 31-minute video) "It's rare to see a bit of art that literally should not exist, that is, in and of itself, morally wrong." Oh good, Big Joel watched "Melania" so the rest of us don't have to.

2. Justice Department says it will abide by court order pausing its 'anti-weaponization' fund (June 1) "A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia last week temporarily blocked the creation of the anti-weaponization fund after a lawsuit from Democracy Forward and others."

3. One by one, U.S. civil rights agency dismantles tools to fight discrimination (June 1) "Protecting U.S. workers from unlawful discrimination — already a hard task — could become significantly harder if the government no longer has that data within arm's reach, Gilbride says."

4. Federal judge ends Kennedy Center name change, bars two-year closure plans for now (May 30) "'Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,' Cooper, an Obama appointee, wrote of the federal law establishing the Kennedy Center in his 94-page opinion."

5. Immigrant detainees sue over 'horrific' conditions at Texas ICE facility (May 30) "'No human being should ever have to go through this,' Angye said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizations representing the detainees. 'I have already experienced torture in my home country of Cameroon and I never thought I would experience such severely violent treatment by guards here in the United States of America.'"

6. CA Gov Candidate Tom Steyer Calls Out Dems Capitulating On Trans People: "I'm Totally In Favor Of Trans Athletes" (May 28) "Steyer responded with a full-throated defense of transgender youth—and, specifically, of transgender athletes."

Also from Erin in the Morning: New York State Budget Released: $0 For Transgender Care Access (May 29) "'As the Trump administration continues to pose an existential threat to the transgender community, we are profoundly disappointed that the FY2027 New York State budget invests zero state dollars to support access to the health care many transgender, gender non-conforming, nonbinary, and intersex people rely on to live in their bodies with dignity and health -- a complete failure to meet the moment,' said Allie Bohm, NYCLU senior policy counsel about the lack of passage."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. These evangelical men saved sex for marriage – they weren’t well prepared (June 17) "The experience has shaped how the couple are raising their six-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. 'I want my daughter to have full information about her body – I don’t want her to go through what I did,' said Katy. As for their son, 'I just want him to understand that women are people,' said Nate."

2. This abortion method doesn't involve doctors — and many of them consider it safe (June 22) "Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the hotline has only grown. It now has dozens of volunteers, including clinicians as well as people who provide logistical support. The hotline gets thousands of calls and texts every month."

3. A cancer center in Jordan treats kids from Gaza, but only a few dozen have arrived (June 20) "All of Gaza's hospitals have been either damaged or destroyed in Israeli airstrikes."

4. Do You Want to Build a Snowman - 10 YEARS, SAME ANNA! (2024) OH MY GOODNESS this is amazing.

5. What’s the Right Way to Translate Chinese Dish Names? (June 20) "Semantic translation, on the other hand, conveys meaning rather than form. Traditionally, it prioritizes fluency and naturalness in the target language, even if that means departing from the original wording — rendering the Chinese shizitou as 'meatball,' for example. However, semantic translation can also mean literal translation, even if the result seems foreign or puzzling — such as translating shizitou as 'lion’s head.'"

Hmm. Yeah I would describe shizitou [狮子头] as a meatball, but 丸子 are also meatballs, but they are different. I guess then you have no choice but to translate 狮子头 as a lion head meatball? It's pork, though, okay.

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Protest sign that says "No kings / Yas queens!" Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Relief and a raised fist as Mahmoud Khalil goes free – but release ‘very long overdue’ (June 20, via) I'm glad to hear this. But it's not over- his immigration case is still ongoing.

Mahmoud Khalil emerges from airport security with his wife Noor and newborn, legal team and Rep. AOC.

[image or embed]

— Gwynne Hogan (@gwynnefitz.bsky.social) June 22, 2025 at 1:37 AM

'They wanted to separate me from my family': Mahmoud Khalil speaks after ICE release (June 23) "They absolutely showed me nothing. They had over 100 days to do that, and I dare Trump, [Marco] Rubio, and their administration to substantiate these claims with anything, because they did not refer to anything."

2. One daughter's search for a father detained by ICE (June 21) "Urizar had no idea where her father was being held or how to reach him."

3. The Antisemites In and Around the Trump Administration (June 17) "I mean the kind who proudly performs a Roman salute or two on a national stage, like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, sure, but you already knew about those. There are many, many more."

4. U.S. Supreme Court allows — for now — third-country deportations (June 23) "In a searing dissent, the court's three liberals accused the conservative majority of 'rewarding lawlessness.' Writing for the three, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said 'The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone, anywhere without notice or an opportunity be heard.'"

"Afraid of the Doctor" (I read this book because I have medical trauma)

Book cover for "Afraid of the Doctor."

I recently read the book Afraid of the Doctor: Every Parent's Guide to Preventing and Managing Medical Trauma [affiliate link] by Meghan L. Marsac and Melissa J. Hogan. This post is my review.

So, the reason I was interested in this book is, I have medical trauma. In my case, it's because I'm autistic, so a lot of normal medical procedures are extremely invasive and unbearable to me (and that was even more true when I was a child). I have a little son now, and I hope I can help him to navigate this better than I did as a child. I am very interested in a framework for what consent should look like for children in a medical setting (as I wrote about in this post: Boundaries With Dentists). 

It turned out that the focus of the book was on children with serious, long-term medical conditions. For example, a child who has cancer, a child who has diabetes, a child who was in a car accident and needs to go through months of treatment to recover, etc. These children are likely to develop medical trauma because they have to go to doctor's appointments so frequently that it kind of takes over their lives, and the treatments are much more intense than what the average healthy person typically experiences (for example, needing to have blood drawn every single time, having a portacath implanted in the skin, etc).

So, not really my situation, which is that I just do the normal medical things that healthy people do, but they are often overwhelming and invasive to me, because I'm autistic.

So there were parts of the book which weren't relevant to me at all, but would definitely be useful to parents who are in that situation. Like big-picture stuff about how to plan your family's life around your child's medical condition and all the appointments you have to take them to. And psychology stuff about how to take care of yourself and how to help the child's siblings cope with all the changes. All very useful, but not related to the reasons I was reading the book.

And the book didn't say anything about consent as it applies to the child. It did talk about how parents should gather information and take an active role in working with the doctors to make the treatment plan better fit the child's needs. So that was good, but that's just about the parents being able to advocate for their child and consent on behalf of their child. It didn't talk about how to teach your child to stand up for themself.

But anyway, when it talked about specific techniques to help your child handle medical treatments better, there was a lot of useful advice. Here are some of the things it talked about:

Working with the medical team to make things easier for the child: The book says that parents should not be afraid to ask questions, and if something is difficult for their child, the parent should ask if it's possible to do it in a different way. A lot of examples in this book were about timing. Maybe the doctor says that the child needs to wake up at 7 am and take medicine, but the child has a really hard time waking up so early. The parent can ask, does it really need to be 7 am, or could it be later? Some medicines really do have to be taken at certain times, but some can have a more flexible schedule. Definitely ask the doctor if it's possible to change the schedule, if that would make it easier for your child.

Don't just go along with whatever the doctor says- if something is difficult for your child, ask the doctor if there's any way to do it differently to make it easier.

Visual schedules: The book spends a lot of time talking about how to explain the process of doctor's appointments to the child in a way the child can understand. One way to do this is with a visual schedule, which has a sequence of pictures that represent the things that happen at the doctor's appointment. I really like how much emphasis there is on communicating this to the child and making sure they understand what's happening. 

Some keywords you can search, to find examples of visual schedules and other things along those lines: visual schedule, teaching story, social story, social skill story.

Medical play: You can buy toy versions of medical equipment, so your child can play with them and become more familiar with them, and less scared. I think this is a great idea.

(Also, this doesn't seem to be an example of medical play, but could be useful: One of the authors of this book, Dr. Marsac, created Cellie Coping Kits, which include an odd-shaped stuffed animal named Cellie, and cards related to medical conditions, to help encourage kids.)

And there were some other good, practical ideas too, besides these. Basically, part 4 of the book was the part with the actual concrete strategies. That's the part that I felt was very useful. The other sections of the book were mainly about really big-picture stuff about how if your child is diagnosed with a really serious problem, this affects the whole family's life, and how do you face that? So, that's useful for people in that situation, but not relevant for me.

One thing that I found kind of, uh, disturbing, was the term "therapeutic hold." This is when you physically hold the child to physically force medical treatment on them. I do think it's sometimes necessary, but isn't that a f***ed-up name for it? When my son gets a vaccine, I hold him forcefully because he does not consent to the vaccine, and it sucks, but it's because he's too little to understand the benefits of, you know, not dying of measles.

It's better if I don't have to do that, but as I said in my post Boundaries With Dentists, even if I use some strategy to convince my son to accept a vaccine, it's still non-consensual. It's definitely better if I don't have to physically force him, but still, either way, he doesn't have a choice. And it has to be that way, because he's a child, but I don't want him to internalize the idea that people have the right to do things to his body as long as they are being "nice" and "reasonable" about it.

If I have to physically force him to get a vaccine, that's nonconsensual. If I have a long conversation with him about how he needs to "be good" and how he has to do this and I don't give him any other options, and finally he agrees to it and allows the nurse to give him the vaccine, that's also nonconsensual. If it happened to an adult, we would call it coercion. I need to make sure he knows that just because someone has a long conversation with you, very kindly explaining why you have to let them do things to your body, and how you need to "be good" and agree to it- NO, that doesn't mean you owe them ANYTHING. 

I've seen a few books for children about consent, and they are very much like "your body belongs to you, no one can do things to you without your consent" and I can't get behind that because it's just SIMPLY NOT TRUE. For children, they really DON'T have the right to own their own body, and they really CAN'T, because, like I said, it's very important to me that my child doesn't die of measles or whatever, but he's too little to understand that. 

And, I don't know, maybe somebody will make the argument that medical situations are an *exception* to the teaching about consent. And maybe someone will say that actually the real goal of teaching children about consent is to protect them from sexual abuse. All the "your body belongs to you" stuff is a lie, and what we actually want to teach is "if someone sexually abuses you, that's wrong and it's not your fault", nothing more, nothing less. I'm autistic, and when I was a child, there were always people touching me in ways that I didn't like, and I understood that I was the one who was being "too sensitive" and unreasonable. I understood that when adults said "if someone touches you in a way you don't like, tell your parents" they didn't actually mean that; they actually meant if someone touches your "private parts." It had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with whether *I* didn't like the way someone was touching me. No, that was me being unreasonable, and nobody was obligated to care about that or respect my boundaries, because it wasn't sexual so it didn't matter.

So I very much disagree with the idea that teaching kids about consent is mainly about protecting them from sexual abuse. No, I believe that if someone is doing non-sexual things to you that you don't like, that is bad in and of itself. It's not "oh if you force your kid to hug grandma, that's bad because then what if they apply that same logic when someone tries to sexually abuse them, and they don't realize it's wrong"- no, forcing the child to hug grandma is bad in and of itself, not because of its potential to make the child more vulnerable to sexual abuse. 

And as an adult, medical situations are the area of my life where consent is THE MOST important. This isn't an "exception" where the normal concepts of consent shouldn't apply- this is where they should apply THE MOST. And I believe this is also very important for children. But how do you define consent for children, when they actually don't have the right to say no to medical procedures that their parents want them to have?

Yeah, those are the questions I really want to talk about it. I think there's A LOT to be said about the link between childhood medical trauma and nonconsensual medical treatment. This book wasn't about that though.

Anyway, that's my take on this book. I think the most useful idea is that the parent should take initiative to gather information, ask questions, and ask for things to be done differently, if the standard process doesn't work well for their child. Advocate for yourself and your child, instead of just doing whatever the doctor says. Also, there were many useful, practical strategies for helping children feel safer and less scared about medical procedures. (I feel these are helpful, as an autistic person, even though overall the book is targeted at parents whose children have very serious diagnoses like cancer.) What I really want to talk about, though, is what consent could look like for kids in a medical context, and the book wasn't about that.

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Related:

Boundaries With Dentists 

Doctors (part 3 of Autism & Teaching Kids to Protect Themselves)

On Gynecologists and Angry Turtles

Sea Monsters on Land, and My Life With Vaginismus 

I Don't Want My Baby To Be "Brave"

Blogaround

A very happy dog, with 2 tiny flowers perched behind its ears. Image source.

1. Abigail and the Courage to Take Charge (posted May 19) "Of course in modern times, a good complementarian wife would have given gentle input before simply submitting to her husband even if she disagreed with his choice. But not Abigail."

2. Josh Harris Apologizes (posted May 11) I don't hold anything against him- he was only 21. I publicly advocated a lot of super-Christian stuff when I was 21, stuff that I now recognize as really messed-up.

3. Bill Gothard and the Dynamics of Abuse (posted May 11) "In fact, abusers typically choose their victims carefully while acting in an upstanding way toward those they are not victimizing. This helps hide their abuse by ensuring that no one will believe their victim if they speak out."

4. Did God Give Me Cancer? (posted May 18) "And yet, this is the very dogma folks like John Piper seem to relish in. In fact, he’s written an entire book entitled – and I’m sad to say I’m not making this up – Don’t Waste Your Cancer."

5. “Do I look like a boy, or a girl?” (posted May 16) "Ensuring that people always read my children’s gender correctly would require ensuring that each conforms to very specific societal norms of dress for both hair and clothing. In other words, it would require a sort of forced uniformity."

6. How North Carolina’s HB2 Affects Parents (posted May 17) "Every parent or other caregiver who has ever had to retrieve an escaped toddler from the opposite-gender changing room at the gym understands these feelings."

(Lots of good posts from Libby Anne this week!)

7. Love > tolerance; but (love – tolerance – subsidiarity) < love (posted May 16) "That means you don’t have to help a homeless person unless it’s your own sister. And it means that no one else has to help your sister, or to help you help your sister. So you’re all on your own, and we’re all screwed."

8. sinful hearts: the consequences of Inherited Sin (posted May 13) [content note: abusive theology] "So if our partner spends a lot of time telling us how untrustworthy we are, how terrible we are, how we deserve having our possessions destroyed, our body beaten, our souls violated, where is the space to call this abuse in the context of Inherited Sin?"

9. I saw "Captain America: Civil War" and I think it was pretty good. I really liked the beginning, when there was discussion on whether the Avengers should be under some kind of regulation and be held accountable for the destruction they cause and innocent people who die because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Totally agree with Ironman on this. Actually, this is why I don't like action movies in general- people are always fighting, destroying buildings, destroying cars- like, don't they care? Who's going to pay for that? And what about the innocent people in those cars or buildings, who probably just died off-screen? Yes, definitely a big issue for superhero movies, this definitely needs to be addressed.

Unfortunately, a bunch of other emergencies came up and the Avengers all got involved in various fights, including fighting each other, and never really returned to that discussion. Ahh man. (I'm aware that this is probably when everyone else thought the movie finally got exciting.)

Anyway, I hope Ant Man has to pay for that airplane.

10. 7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships (posted February 17) This is really important- but this article is just a start. There is a lot more that has to be said about this topic, and I'm not even sure of my opinion on it.

As an example: I'm not totally on board with the whole "tone-policing is bad" thing. (I'm defining "tone-policing" as "criticizing a person's 'tone' [perhaps by saying they sound angry or impolite] as an excuse to avoid considering the actual point they're trying to make," which is more or less how it seems to be defined in feminist stuff I've read.) Yes, definitely it's a problem when someone is like "well you should try to say it in a nicer way, then people might listen to you" when the person they are criticizing has every right to be angry, and they are suffering injustice that MUST be addressed, without first having to be burdened with explaining it in a way that privileged people deem as acceptable.

BUT. Does "tone-policing is not okay" mean "any time anybody says anything racist, sexist, anti-LGB, anti-trans, etc etc etc [and all of these terms are VERY broadly defined to include all tiny microaggressions, like asking a woman "and how does your boyfriend feel about you cutting your hair that short?" which implies that if a woman is in a relationship, then her body is not her own, she has to get permission from her male partner before she cuts her hair] then you can totally yell at them. You don't have to think about how they feel, you don't have to try to be nice, you don't have to care about if they're even able to understand why you're yelling at them"? Because, I'm not really comfortable with that. I think there is something to be said for being nice to people who unintentionally perpetuate the harmful ideas that are native to our society.

I don't believe this concern about fighting against tone-policing is a question of "taking it to the extreme"- instead, I think if we define "tone-policing" more clearly, then such situations will be automatically excluded. There must be some better and more clear definition, which does not lead to "tone-policing is bad, and therefore you can be as yelly and mean as you want when someone says or does something that feminism disapproves of."

11. Leaked Documents Reveal Studio Executives Knew About ‘Gods Of Egypt’ Before It Released Onto Public (posted May 25) From The Onion (fake news).

12. Beware the Jelly Creationists (posted May 25) "Hardcore young-Earth creationism is rigid and inflexible, and easy to disprove. It’s not easy to get its adherents to admit you’ve disproved it, because they engage in all kinds of ad hoc rationalisations, but eventually many young-Earth creationists run out of these rationalisations and are forced to change their minds. Jelly Creationism, by contrast, is compatible with almost anything short of evolution by natural processes, and so almost nothing you say will change its adherents’ minds."