Catch 22 isn’t about illegal orders. The contradiction is more about your own sanity/safety.

Troubled teen facilities have parents sign agreements which give them permission to physically restrain their child, and release them from liability if the child gets hurt. These “holds” can often kill.

I was only put in a hold once. I was on the van, I was being kicked by two other children, the staff refused to intervene, so I opened the van door and attempted to escape. I was groped in this hold.

I do not know how to convey how traumatizing physical restraint is. It happened to me again, in December, when I went voluntarily inpatient and was physically forced into the woman’s ward. I am a trans man, have had surgery and I’m legally recognized as male for more than a decade - I had asked if I could just sleep in the common area as a concession/to not be outed - nope! I got shoved around by four grown men and called “fucking retarded.” I’ll never reach out for help again.

Yeah - I wish more folks understood what the experience is like. It’s like my brain lights on fire. I get angry, extremely angry and can be verbally really aggressive. If I’m alone, I can usually self regulate, but when I’m around others it’s much harder.

It’s been a struggle as I work to get this facility shut down. When I’m calling state agencies to get my torturer’s facility investigated, the second that I can pick up that they don’t believe, or if they minimize my experience - it ratchets me into a world of pure anger and panic.

I knocked over a container earlier and it made a loud sound as it landed on the ground - it made me angry. Embarrassingly ridiculously angry. It’s stupid, but I had the urge to throw the thing at the wall! I wanted to cuss it out! It’s an inanimate object, it didn’t break, I just needed to pick it up and put the pencils back in. It wasn’t a big deal. But in that split second where I went to that lizard brain, I was furious!

That number of articles is still pretty impressive. I’d rather have fewer, high quality articles, than millions of terrible quality AI articles.

The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can add articles! It also wouldn’t be too difficult to “translate” regular Wikipedia articles to simple ones. You could even use AI tools to help - there are text leveler tools that will help you recognize which words lower level readers would struggle with and can help you make those changes. But this cannot be an automated process.

I’ve done graduate level course work on modifying text for “EMLs” - “emerging multilingual learners.” (“ELL” is still okay, but lots of folks in the field prefer EML because it is prioritizing the students “assets.”) I’ve made several assignments for students with reading difficulties. When I did experiment a bit with AI tools to help me with this process, I had to do a lot of fine tuning to get an acceptable product.

Tbh, you just convinced me right now that I should start adding more articles myself.

I’ve successfully deradicalized at least a few. Not on FB but a couple of other social media sites.

My mental health will never be good. I’m a gender minority in a state that wouldn’t even allow gay teachers until the Supreme Court forced them in the late 90s. I’m desperately broke because somehow a divorce can result in one person being a millionaire and one person being bankrupt. Most of the time seeking out mental health care makes my problem worse - past two nights have been nightmares about being physically assaulted at an inpatient facility in December.

Arguing gives me my sense of power back. I read insanely fast, I can dunk chuds in the five minutes I have between clients sometimes. I learned enough about biology by arguing with creationists in middle school that I tested out of high school bio and clepped college bio. Arguments give me the opportunity to learn more and research. I know that chuds are stupid and will not change their mind or admit defeat, but the audience might.

As satisfying as fantasizing about arson is, I imagine these facilities are usually insured. It’s also easy to spin into a sob story - these places often take advantage of the fact that they work with underprivileged/foster youth to get community donations. “Oh no, we can’t help children anymore! Gib us money!”

I got my facility taken off DonorsChoose - absolutely enraging that they were able to use that site as a for profit institution.

It’s a problem that needs to be attacked at the root ultimately. Children should have their rights protected. Remember how the US refused to sign the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? We also need more parenting classes - I’ve never been given the opportunity to be a parent, but I’ve talked with lots of parents about things like Love and Logic. Or just even accepting the fact that kids can just be weird or different sometimes - I should not have been punished for being uncomfortable with eye contact.

In the short term, educating people about these individual facilities. Making sure that the children who die in these places have their names remembered. I make signs with the name of the child my abusers killed, and just blanket surrounding neighborhoods with it.

Discworld explores gender a few times in a way that I like.

Monstrous Regiment is about a bunch of women who pretend to be men to join their military. For the most part - these aren’t trans characters, they identify as female. The funny is the characters slowly discovering that everyone else in their group is doing the same thing. One character though, explicitly identifies as male after the “reveal” and has male pronouns used for them.

Discworld as a series tends to be irreverent without punching down. Comedy is a weapon in Pratchett’s hands, but his targets are capitalism and oppressive systems.

LeGuin has a lot of interesting takes on gender. The Hainnish cycle is about a race of humans who had previously colonized a bunch of planets and did lots of experimentation on those populations - kinda Vault Tec vibes. The civilization collapses/gets better, and the POV character is usually some type of researcher/anthropologist looking at how those planets develop The Left Hand of Darkness is a sci fi classic: a planet where people stay sexless until they go into “heat” and will develop the opposite genitals of the person who they are attracted to. There’s lots of switching back and forth. It’s a big deal when the king gets pregnant, because only children the king carries can inherit the throne.

Any LeGuin is good. Earthsea is a far superior children’s series compared to Harry Potter. Nothing that really makes it explicitly trans but the process of finding your true name and accepting yourself is something that resonated very much with me. (Also props to LeGuin for being very forceful with insisting that the characters not be depicted as white. None of this pussyfooting retroactive “I never said Hermione was white!”)

Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy is also more gender bending sci fi. Everyone is “she.” The first book was part of the Sad Puppies drama, because it won Hugo’s and absolutely pissed a bunch of a bunch of chuds.

Yeah - tbh the name sucks. I hate recommending it to students, because it feels like I’m calling them dumb.

But yes 100%. Instead of doing dumb AI shit, they should be advertising what they already have.

Thats why I mentioned Simple Wikipedia.

This is far more readable that what an AI generated version of the article would make.

Those Americans with a 6th grade reading level or less are precisely the people who shouldn’t be reading AI summaries. They’ll lack the critical thinking and reading skills to catch on to garbage.

Simple Wikipedia already exists and is great.

Pro tip - directly insulting a Trump supporter with that kind of irrelevant remark doesn’t really help.

You want to look for pain points and hypocrisy. Do they have kids? Talk about what happened at Miss Teen America. Are they flipping their lid about Trump protecting ‘merkins from sharia law? Ask them why he supports Al-Sharaa.

Greta, you know, kinda got international news to cover Gaza here? Also got international news to cover our impending climate disaster?

Talk is a form of activism. Just because you don’t get instant results doesn’t mean that it’s pointless.

The same could be said of to-do lists, right? But I still like having an app with a checklist, because my phone is always with me and a piece of paper is not.

When I did have periods (thank god for testosterone), I had a really difficult time keeping track of them and they were often very irregular. The app I used helped me pick up patterns and would warn me when I needed to be prepped. My dysphoria cope was pretending that they didn’t happen ever, so it was helpful to have that occasional “hey, pack some pads today” as a notification without constantly checking a calendar.

Eric Adams is so tough on crime!

In September 2024, a series of investigations into Adams’s administration emerged. Adams was indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams pleaded not guilty to the charges. He alleged that the charges were retaliation for opposing the Biden administration’s handling of the migrant crisis. In February 2025, the Department of Justice in the Donald Trump administration instructed federal prosecutors to drop charges against Adams. In April 2025 Judge Dale Ho dismissed the case against Adams with prejudice, meaning that charges cannot be refiled.

DARVO

I don’t use it so much to stay in touch with my friends as a platform to argue with fascists, Nazis, and child abusers.

The kinds of parents who are going to be looking at these programs are probably on Facebook, and that’s the best place to reach them.

I just found out that my facility claimed another life, within the months I’ve been trying to get the state to investigate it. Not reported anywhere, just personally have been loud enough to have former employees reach out to me.

Fuck anyone involved who doesn’t become a whistleblower.

I’ve never been physically violent as a person, but that didn’t stop her from telling these types of fuckers I was. I don’t think I’ve ever punched anyone. I’ve told her exactly what I think about her a few times, and maybe the punishment is that she has to live with the knowledge that her child hates her.

I cut off contact in my early twenties, briefly tried “maybe she’s better, maybe I was actually a crazy kid” (it is very hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that their parent deliberately hurt them) then discovered that she had lied about my biological father all of my life. That was the final straw.

She is an insane monster. When I wake up and hear she’s gone someday, it will be like the clear skies after a rough storm.

You know, I am fighting pretty fucking hard, but I’m not inclined to brag about it online. I’m sorry as a little tranny in Oklahoma that I can’t end fascism.

Elan was thankfully finally shut down in 2011, so it’s no longer destroying children. Just took four decades!

The big issue, as I campaign to get my own torturers facility closed down, is that they weaponize privacy laws. Both the facilities and the state. They pretend they are protecting children by refusing to investigate. The double speak is fucking insane.

Alright then - put your money where your mouth is. If getting on a boat to draw international coverage of a genocide isn’t enough - what did you do to fight evil today?