• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 27th, 2024

help-circle
  • Politely disagree. Saying something (even generalizing, which always tends to be wrong somewhere) about homophobic people doesn’t say anything about non homophobic people. You don’t have to identify with every gay person on earth, and you shouldn’t. There are gay people who just so happen to be assholes, too. Their existence doesn’t say anything about you at all.

    It is victim blaming

    I don’t think so personally. They are still the oppressor in the situation. “Being secretly gay” is an attempt to explain, not to shift blame to you.

    we are not the reason homophobia exists or that people become extremely homophobic

    I think it’s useful to seperate a causal explanation and the idea of responsibility. The fact that people are individuals and not unanimous blobs is - purely causally speaking - the reason why animosities based on our differences exists. Does that mean that the victims of hate are to blame? Definitely not. It’s always, always the responsibility of the one who commits discrimination.

    It is not oppressed people that cause their own oppression

    I agree, but more precisely it is homophobic people, gay or not, who cause the oppression of non homophobic gay people. I think this is true independently if the stereotype is true.

    we don’t in some way “deserve” it.

    Absolutely agree. Nobody deserves that.

    If they do not see themselves as gay, they are not.

    The idea is that they kinda see themselves as gay, or are afraid they might be, or subconsciously know they are; and because of extreme toxic masculinity and sexism they get hateful and aggressive.

    There surely are non gay homophobic people as well though. After all, some hetero people happen to be assholes as well.




  • Youth corrections staff is still a whole other story than doctors though. A physical examination is probably one of the most vulnerable positions one could be in. These cameras would record people getting naked, multiple orifices being examined, and patients talking about symptoms or things they are unsure and often ashamed about.

    The cost would be enormous. I imagine many people would be even more reluctant to go to the doctor than they are now.

    And the benefit, in my opinion, would be very slim. Medical malpractice is far more subtle than the examples from the article. As patients we’re rarely worried that our doctor will physically assault us, we’re worried about errors in judgement, delays in care, and prejudices based on gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and so on. And those aren’t directly observable most of the time. Even if you get the moment on camera where your doctor decides to trivialize your symptoms you mostly wouldn’t be able to prove it happened for discriminatory reasons.



  • Ironically, behind all this is a misconception that we’re actually constantly working on with our patients. The truth is that the clinics would function better and we could offer better therapy if, for example, we weren’t so overworked and enough staff were employed. But in order to achieve this, we would have to make decisions again and again in specific cases, which are less pleasant for patients in the short term. Specifically: saying no to our employers more often, strikes, and in the worst case resignation. Sensible in the long term, unpleasant in the short term. For our patients. And that’s the crux of it.

    Unfortunately it is always easier to discover those mistakes in the thinking of others. I have met dozens of colleagues who avoid fighting for better working conditions for precisely these reasons (while advising their patients to avoid this error in particular). And clinics of course know this and take advantage of it.

    So better negotiation skills are really only party of the solution (although also very important). I think in the long term we need better education and more focus on socialist ideas, specifically on how and why employee rights (and the ability to self-care) are such an integral requirement to a job well done.


  • That’s an interesting one. As a psychotherapist from Germany I can say we’re definitely not low paid, but it is much less than other academic professions, and especially in relation to the time it takes to get qualified (roughly 10 years) and the cost of approbation itself (varies from 30k-160k, and that’s in a country where education usually is free) it’s really not a good fit for someone who is very financially motivated. (Ironically because of the high upfront cost the job tends to attract people from well endowed backgrounds though.)

    I think like in many helping professions we have a majority of very idealistic people who don’t negotiate very well. Employers get away with way too much because refusal at our side at first only ever hurts the patients, so we kinda keep up with it. Maybe something similar is happening in the professions that are in my mind actually the most underpaid for their time, and that’s nursing and care work of all sorts.