MundaneBlog

January 31, 2025

Finding Family or Finding Victims?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — DrMundane @ 2:11 am

Family estrangement (in the sense of children or parents choosing to be disconnected from each other) is not a new topic for me. I remember reading issendai’s site on the topic in 2018 or so and finding the whole thing quite captivating. I generally subscribe to the view that we all have an absolute right to choose who we interact with and spend our time on, and that one does not owe anyone connection solely based on genetics.

Imagine my passion, then, when I read a piece by Lexi Pandell in WIRED this morning: “Are You Lonely? Adopt a New Family on Facebook Today“. Any look at estrangement will be complex, and without both sides I must admit I will be unable to make any definite statements one way or the other. But as Issendai pointed out those many years ago:

“The keywords to find abusers’ support communities are “estranged parents” and “grandparents’ rights.” – Down the Rabbit Hole

My worry with any such group is that it encourages people looking for support and emotional connection, which are certainly needed as much as any glass of water or meal, into a situation where they are matched with potentially abusive people. I know that is a bold claim that does not leave much room for good intent here. But I worry in such a way owing to the genesis of the group and it’s leader, whose actions with her own estranged family include the following:

Donna created another Facebook group, which is part open letter to her grandson, part chronicle of her experience as an estranged grandparent. She has written to her grandson about how he was a third cousin of Bob Dylan, sent him wishes for a happy Easter. She wrote letters about how his parents were keeping the family apart and attached an image of a $25 check written out to her son, which he had ripped up and returned. The content is incredibly personal, like encountering someone’s diary, but the group is public—how else would her grandson find it someday?

Her behavior is typical boundary pushing (writing checks and letters and sending them to the estranged child, thereby continuing to contact them against their wishes) and feels indicative of the kind of estranged parent that is toward the more narcissistic or abusive side. I do always err on the side of assuming children have good reasons for cutting contact, as the weight of society and perhaps your entire childhood press you to not sever your relationship with your parents.

Trying to contact people who do not wish to talk to you is abuse.

I think this article does not sufficiently deal with the family abuse dynamics that may be present, and thereby acts to rehabilitate it’s subjects (the estranged parents/grandparents). After all, they did not choose to follow parents who cut off their children, but those who were cut off.

The article cites one professional source:

Today, around 27 percent of American adults have cut off contact with a family member—one of the highest estrangement rates in the world. And it seems to be on the rise, according to Joshua Coleman, the psychologist and author of the buzzy 2021 book Rules of Estrangement. “Online support groups, Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers,” Coleman says, “all are huge contributors to this phenomenon.” While estrangement has always existed—abuse and divorce are common causes, as are disagreements over money, religion, sexual orientation, and politics—“never before was it characterized as a pathway to personal growth and identity the way it is today,” he says. But just as social media can lead to alienation, it can also bring people together. After all, Coleman runs his own private Facebook group for estranged parents and grandparents.

To my ears, this sounds like confusing a “left handedness” (or divorce rates post no-fault divorce) situation with “the kids are being influenced by social media to be trans, sorry, force of habit, to estrange their parents. I think the more logical explanation, and the one that preserves the children’s personhood and autonomy, would be as follows:

Given the nature of the parent child relationship up to the present day, in which the culture is and was so skewed towards owing your parents connection and respect solely for birthing you, is it any wonder that once presented with the view that, no, you actually are allowed to cut off your parents, that you are not inherently immoral or bad for doing so, and that there are good reasons for doing so, that more people would avail themselves of that remedy? It is no simple or easy task to decide on cutting family off. It is not a step these people take as a first resort. And yet, Coleman wants you to think of them as pursuing an identity. That they want internet clout and some apparently false ‘self-actualization’ all at the expense of the parents, who certainly didn’t do anything worth such drastic action….

You will find I do not believe in that line of thought. I feel as though they disregard the true feelings of these ‘children’ (many of who are, of course, full adults) as impulsive or somehow unconsidered. I think it is a construction that places them back into the role of children, who really ought to listen to their older and wiser betters. This incurious eye extends to the subjects of this piece. Turning back to our subject, we learn that the main subject of this piece, Karen, has two children, both of which have decided to cut off contact with her. As far as the information we have on the estrangement goes, it appears to be at the behest of the children and appears to be very limited to no contact. Given this, I find a couple of points of information very interesting.

Point the first:

Karen still expresses frustration and sadness about her daughters and keeps up with their whereabouts through mutual friends. When Angel the dog died, Karen texted her youngest daughter the news—but used a new number and posed as a family friend.

That sure sounds like circumventing a the younger daughter’s request to not be contacted. Why else use a new number and pose as a family friend? Thats a big strike and indica of abusive behavior to me, ignoring a clear boundary and circumventing perhaps the daughter’s blocking of her own number.

Point the second:

SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER my trip to Minnesota, Karen calls to say that she’s in touch with her youngest daughter again. Her daughter’s brain cancer has returned. Karen’s voice shakes; patients with this diagnosis tend to live five years, maybe less. She wants to help her daughter through treatment, but her daughter has only agreed to communicate by phone….

When Karen got the news of the diagnosis, she hired more workers for the farm so she could drop everything for her daughter. She waited for a call that never came; her daughter stopped responding. As months passed without her daughter asking for help, Karen was left with an open calendar.

This is a stark scenario. I can not imagine facing down my mortality and then faced with that also have to manage my relationship with my estranged parent. And then she clearly decided that she did not want to communicate with Karen. To me this is such a powerful message that I would find it so hard to believe anyone but the children. I take some small comfort in thinking the daughters have each other still, as the piece alludes to the daughters being involved with each other.

One final blow:

For years, Karen’s daughter made soap, helped with the goats, and manned farmers’ market tables. Then she turned 18 and got a boyfriend. She quit her job with Rapha Farms a few days after her 19th birthday and, not long after that, moved out of Karen’s house. She got married in 2023. Karen was not invited. “I honestly don’t understand what happened between us,” Karen wrote in a Rapha Farms Instagram post congratulating the couple

“I don’t understand what happened between us”

The missing missing reasons. I hate to lean so strongly on issendai, but I believe they have put together such a comprehensive account and analysis of family estrangement it will stick with me the rest of my days. I find it terribly prescient and convincing, and will always admit that my view is terribly shaped by it.

But yet it still tracks. She doesn’t know why her youngest daughter cut her off, it came out of the blue. We only hear one reason from her on why her youngest might have estranged, and it is this:

Four years later, in 2023, Karen’s younger daughter, with her older sister’s help, left too.

Is it the older sisters fault? This feels like the closest thing we get to a reason, and it either (in the kind view) reports only that the older daughter assisted the younger, or it implies the older daughter ‘convinced’ or otherwise pushed the younger to cut off their mother. I don’t find the 2nd view to be supported by just that text alone, but it still rattles in my mind. It feels like the sort of thing you get in these situations. Leaving in my drafting-note-to-self for this section as one last indicator of my incredible bias.

— last section before close reiterating my biased-as-hell I only believe the children view —

Abuse is a complicated thing. One does not spend all their time being abused, but may spend much of it in generally acceptable, or at least non-abusive, periods. One will even be happy on occasion. None of this changes the abusive parts of the relationship, though. I worry that people searching for connection may end up being matched with some folks who may end up victimizing them.

The found family dynamic, too, is complicated. I hope that the parent/child dynamic that can be so abused to control or manipulate children is not so strong in such a relationship made of free choice, therefore lowering the amount of effort required to sever ties if any such party wishes to.

I hope all these newfound families work out. I hope they are prosperous and help each other and everyone gets a chance to build and find families for themselves. We are all owed such a chance. We are all owed second chances too. I am, perhaps, overly negative and ascribing too much weight to the red flags.

But I worry this article obscures some warning signs that, to me, would preclude my involvement if I were so inclined to build a family. There are signs that are troubling, and things that to me signal some degree of caution. I think if one knows these things and has fair warning then you can take that risk, but this article does not provide any context or explanation of such issues.

November 17, 2024

Links you should read 2024-11-16

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — DrMundane @ 12:02 am

Staring at 404media.co, with Becky Ferreira writing this weeks edition of ‘the Abstract’. The portion that really stirs my mind is the story on AI poetry, and how in one test readers preferred the AI generated poems. Why? To quote the article quoting the research

“Non-expert poetry readers expect to like human-authored poems more than they like AI-generated poems,” said authors Brian Porter and Edouard Machery of the University of Pittsburgh. “But in fact, they find the AI-generated poems easier to interpret; they can more easily understand images, themes, and emotions in the AI-generated poetry than they can in the more complex poetry of human poets. They therefore prefer these poems, and misinterpret their own preference as evidence of human authorship.”  

I must say I am disheartened by this result. Not particularly surprised. As far as I am concerned much of the joy of poetry is in chewing on it. I have had great conversations on the poems I send out on my Christmas cards, and I feel this only because both of us had really thought on the poem (A burdock clawed my gown, not burdocks blame, but mine…) and then weeks later had a chance to discuss what it means to us. Luckily poetry will live on, I have no fear of that. We may just have to sing its praises louder.

On the politics front, Orac at Respectful Insolence describes why exactly RFK Jr. is bad news as HHS secretary. I can’t help but agree with him that the media has done a fine job of making RFK Jr. seem far more palatable than he is, and I expect that trend to continue. They will cover this administration ‘as usual’, so they can maintain their access.

In a surprising turn of events, I agree with Bill Clinton. Per the NYT:

President-elect Donald J. Trump made Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights a core part of his argument that she was outside the political mainstream. His campaign used video of Ms. Harris expressing support for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for transgender inmates in a torrent of ads that declared: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The Harris campaign largely did not answer those ads, but, internally, the Democratic Party was roiled by them. Former President Bill Clinton was said to have urged the Harris campaign to respond to them, and to have been told that they were not making an obvious dent in the race.

I had certainly felt (and have not written it… argh) that the Democratic Party had really failed in any messaging defending trans people, and this to me sounds exactly like how I expected them to talk about it. Running right down the middle and not standing for anything. Take it for granted that you will get their votes. Such an approach is not up to the seriousness of this moment. Token resistance will not be enough. Words will not be enough. Definite action will be needed. Will they be willing to pay the political cost? I doubt it.

I’m sorry. Perhaps I am too negative.

To end on a positive note, more from my archive.

November 4, 2024

Gender Normativity and Facial Recognition

Filed under: Gender,Uncategorized — Tags: , , — DrMundane @ 11:48 am

Reading the always wonderful “Pivot to AI” by Amy Castor and David Gerard, and they link to a great 2019 piece by Os Keyes, “The Body Instrumental” which was new to me and enjoyable. Well, enjoyable in that particular way that any sufficiently prescient and worrying thing can be enjoyable. I have been thinking briefly as of late on heteronormativity, so both articles were a great coincidence.

I can’t restate any point not already sufficiently covered by the two articles above, but it really does strike me that any such “gender determining” (perhaps really “sex determining” in the end is their goal, reflecting the binary and exclusive nature of sex and gender for them, not that either is so binary as they think) AI will be inescapably heteronormative (perhaps “gender normative”, as I am speaking mostly in the gender, expression, and such things realm, not in the relational sense, although I take the term to apply to both. I can not claim to be an experienced scholar of gender, so forgive me if my terminology is incorrect. I was just reading Sex in Public, so, like, 1998?. Still very much a relevant work in my mind, but my cognition is biased towards that which I can remember in the moment).

The training data is classified first by humans, who will have to fit each photo into a binary category, man or woman. Most of the data will likely be of people who “pass” or perform gender in the correct way, simply owing to the dominance of such images in the training data. Movies, photos, public domain images, et cetera. Simply by volume alone the normative wins out, and therefore any such AI will be biased in its favor. It will be biased to fit people into these categories.

Turning to prognostication, who will be allowed to opt out? To gate access to a room or facility behind such an AI means that the non-normative, the queer, will be penalized. Even if one is notionally allowed to opt out, the process of doing so may very well lead to further stigmatization simply by virtue of being the different one.

As Keyes states: “We should focus on delegitimizing the technology altogether, ensuring it never gets integrated into society, and that facial recognition as a whole (with its many, many inherent problems) goes the same way.”

I could not have said it better or any earlier. You simply must read the whole article, as the portion on how the AI will reshape gender in its image is brilliant and gets to the very heart of not just the AI problem, but of problems of gender in society more broadly.

October 19, 2024

This is how it begins

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — DrMundane @ 12:16 am

Those were my thoughts upon reading the NYT this morning.

I want to leave it at that, but it feels as though I owe the thought a few more words.

I think if one was going for trans genocide, this is certainly a good way to keep the ball rolling (The closure of the clinic happened in 2021, but now I am reminded again of the cruelty). This is because we, as a nation, have certain thoughts (generally) about children and their personhood. Mainly they aren’t full people and for many they are more akin to property. Therefore, a child can have no sense of their gender (2024-11-16 edit – and/or sex) outside of their parents’ sense of what the child’s gender (2024-11-16 edit – and/or sex) ought to be.

Furthermore, as the whole thing has turned into a ‘culture war’ and a political talking point, far separated from the actual issue of: doing the right thing, quantifying what’s the best way to help these children, or creating a humane society that won’t discriminate against them or use them as a target of violence for political gain and personal gratification (I must imagine.).

I could keep writing but it belabors my final point.

I do believe that presently the Republican Party and others are engaged in a campaign of eventual trans genocide and queer genocide more generally. The point is to try and destroy all those who are trans and prevent certainly anyone else from coming out. I think a murder is a murder, no matter if you pulled the trigger or just loaded the gun. If you create a society where trans kids can’t get care, you are creating a society that is ok with some of those kids killing themselves. It is murder by the lawmakers’ hands all the same.

You start with children since they are vulnerable and the parents are more easily convinced to doubt. Once that’s done you prevent adults from living as they are and as they please. The cruelty happens to be a happy bonus, from giving the mob their enemy.

From there, if it doesn’t happen simultaneously, I expect same sex marriage and queerness in general to be the target.

I have some hope that such a thing will be unacceptable to the wider American public. But I worry that the American public is still sufficiently transphobic in a large enough quantity that people will be hurt. I know it, in fact, as they are already hurting people.

I find it terribly hard to get to an ending. I wonder if I’m not overselling the point.

But it’s hard to listen to these people and not believe them when they tell the world what they want.

Let it never be said DrMundane isn’t passionate about anything…. Right? Who knows.

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