The Atlantic Hires Right-Wing Racist Sexist Columnist

Premise: If you can't find a conservative columnist who doesn't advocate for hanging women who have abortions, then don't hire a conservative columnist. I don't really know what else to say. https://t.co/w3fW5vbQI9

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 23, 2018

I know that it's a complicated moment to hire right-wing writers. The right-wing itself has become so radicalized, regressive, and violent, that no writer emerges to prominence without promoting terrible things. I don't have a solution other than to change our culture, change our politics, change our discourse, change.

But how do we do that without drawing a line of some sorts? Without saying that if you advocate for horrible, violent, bigoted, positions, you're not welcome?

• Williamson called a black child a "primate".
• Williamson called for hanging women who have abortions.

This can't be just glossed over. I don't know what else to say.

Diagnosing Trump

Yesterday, as news about the Wolff book rolled through the net, I had an accidentally well-timed piece on the complexities of talking about Trump's age and his brain. I acknowledge that in fact age-related cognitive change might be an issue in a president (or other forms of cognitive change), but continue to believe that outside of very judicious high-quality reporting, we've got to stop this wild gossiping. I open with Reagan and write:

I've been thinking a lot about Stahl lately, thanks to the latest round of speculation about President Donald Trump's mental health. For 18 months, I've joined many other disability justice activists in decrying such speculation as based in ableist ideas that associate Trump's cruelty, incompetence, and deception with some kind of easily diagnosable pathology. These armchair diagnoses have provoked tense and angry discussions, driving wedges between diverse segments of the progressive community. I’ve taken a hard line against this speculation. I don’t think it will unseat Trump. I do think it will make people with mental-health needs more likely to stay closeted. With the alleged deception and silence surrounding Reagan's Alzheimer's on my mind, though, I’ve had to admit that there might be some occasions where reporting on presidential mental fitness could be appropriate. Still, we can distinguish between ableist gossip and good, reliable, journalism. Let's set the bar high.

I also tweeted:

When Trump is taken down, the GOP will lean on "mental health" as their rationale, never address the racism and bigotry, and then use that as leverage against any openly neurodiverse candidates.

I don't really see a way around it. But feel it's important to keep saying this.

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 5, 2018

So it's not that I don't agree that it's possible that there's an issue, as any of us at any time could experience change that might make being president impossible even with reasonable accommodations, but that our cultural ability to talk about mental health is so limited by deeply embedded cultural ableism that it's not going to hurt Trump and it is going to hurt lots of other people. It will emerge when Trump falls anyway (when/if), but it won't be causal. It'll just be a tool of the GOP pretending it's not their fault.


Yesterday The Atlantic published James Hamblin's long and very thoughtful commentary on Trump's mental state. He write, in the key paragraph:

After more than a year of considering Trump’s behavior through the lens of the cognitive sciences, I don’t think that labeling him with a mental illness from afar is wise. A diagnosis like narcissistic personality disorder is too easily played off as a value judgment by an administration that is pushing the narrative that scientists are enemies of the state. Labeling is also counterproductive to the field in that it presents risks to all the people who deal with the stigma of psychiatric diagnoses. To attribute Trump’s behavior to mental illness risks devaluing mental illness.

This is good. A thoughtful paragraph. Glad to see it in such high stakes writing. He goes from there to suggest:

The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close.

A presidential-fitness committee—of the sort that Carter and others propose, consisting of nonpartisan medical and psychological experts—could exist in a capacity similar to the Congressional Budget Office. It could regularly assess the president’s neurologic status and give a battery of cognitive tests to assess judgment, recall, decision-making, attention—the sorts of tests that might help a school system assess whether a child is suited to a particular grade level or classroom—and make the results available.

I, of course, find the idea of a presidential-fitness committee frightening. I know how intelligence assessments are used to reinforce ableist concepts, institutionalization, segregration, and stigmatization of intellectually disabled folks.

I have no solutions, only reactions. It's a tough moment. The problem is ableism and the way it infuses our society, making non-ableist reactions to situations like Trump's brain that nevertheless assess his ability to do his job impossible.

Bioethics of Cognitive Drugs for Down Syndrome

"Ally’s story, and Penny’s story, don’t negate the significance of these new neurological findings, or the fact that drug interventions for cognition will come as good news for some people with Down syndrome. I am not certain that Penny needs medical interventions to improve her cognition, but I know she needs a social context that welcomes her."

Amy Julia Becker on the ethics of a "pill for Down syndrome," in The Atlantic.

I think about these issues all the time. There's a major trial going on in Chicago, in which we are not participating, but Nico frequently reveals frustration at his communication delays. If a pill could help him through those, I'm pretty sure he'd consent to it.

Women and War (and Public Scholarship) - Medieval Style

I've been caught up in my disability journalism lately, but don't want to neglect some of my other passions  - medieval history and helping academics share their expertise with wider audiences.

Over the past few weeks, a number of outlets have passed around research - just a working paper really - that argues women rulers are more violent than male. It's a classic case of correlation without context. On the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship mailing list, a long thread emerged pointing out all the ways this research was either wrong or misguided in its findings. I offered only this - anyone on that list who wanted to publish an oped could contact me within 24 hours and I'd help them craft a pitch, critique their essay, and try to help them find the right editor.

I mention this only because I extend my offer to you, dear reader. If there's a timely story and you are willing to hustle (and willing to be rejected), contact me and I'll see what I could do.

Here's Katrin E. Sjursen's first piece for The Atlantic on what medieval history really shows about female rulers. It's an outstanding piece of public scholarship, detailed and interesting, teaching me things I didn't know, hopefully shaping our national discourse around women, history, and power.

Hillary Clinton’s victory in Iowa marks the first time a woman has won the presidential caucuses there. Enter the latest round of gender-based speculationsabout female candidates’ inherent pacifism versus their over-compensating hawkishness. With Clinton in the presidential race for the long haul, now is definitely—finally—a good time to throw out the binary competition between passivity and warmongering that always seems to be ascribed to female leaders. There’s no need to cram women—including Clinton—into one-dimensional categories: History demonstrates that women employ multiple and complicated approaches to leadership.

Politically active women thrived in the Middle Ages—as queens, duchesses, countesses, and so on—because the medieval period seated political power within noble families, and women were members of those families. Medieval history may not be the obvious source for an examination of active women rulers—after all, books on the Middle Ages often center on the infighting between kings and their knights, while increasingly misogynistic monks produced diatribes against the wiles of women. Nevertheless, noble wives in the Middle Ages were regarded as co-rulers of territory, alongside their husbands, and were expected to participate in both political and military affairs even when their husbands were present and available. This expectation meant that medieval noblewomen had the opportunity to develop a personal ruling style.

Sjursen  wants us to discard the false binaries of women as hawk/dove, and instead embrace the complexity of gender and rule in both past and present. I look forward to her next piece!