• gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Might be obvious, but just to underscore it - if a conservative ever starts spouting nonsense about how ā€œthere wasnā€™t no transgenders when we was kidsā€ - yes there were, they just didnā€™t know, and things like this are why

      Also, just to put this research in some historical perspective - when this institute first opened its doors, we hadnā€™t figured out insulin yet and the best treatment doctors had for diabetics was restrictive diets that ended up starving patients to death as often as not. Like, if those research institutes has gotten firebombed repeatedly over the years, a lot more of society would probably find the notion of people who canā€™t eat sugar strange.

      • sharkwellington@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Might be obvious, but just to underscore it - if a conservative ever starts spouting nonsense about how ā€œthere wasnā€™t no transgenders when we was kidsā€ - yes there were, they just didnā€™t know, and things like this are why

        • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Exactly,

          Many early 20th-century British and North American educators and physicians, albeit with a ā€œscientificā€ rationale, insisted children should be made to write using their right hands. The methods used to obtain this result were often tortuous, including tying a resistant childā€™s left hand to immobilise it. Typical of the reasoning to justify such practices is a 1924 letter to the British Medical Journal endorsing ā€œretrainingā€ of left-handers to write with their right hands, because otherwise the left-handed child would risk ā€œ[old word we donā€™t use anymore] in mental development; in some casesā€¦actual [old word]ā€. As late as 1946 the former chief psychiatrist of the New York City Board of Education, Abram Blau, warned that, unless retrained, left-handed children risked severe developmental and learning disabilities and insisted that ā€œchildren should be encouraged in their early years to adopt dextralityā€¦in order to become better equipped to live in our right-sided worldā€.

          • sharkwellington@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            ā€œchildren should be encouraged in their early years to adopt dextralityā€¦in order to become better equipped to live in our right-sided worldā€.

            I hate the obvious parallels here.