Quote: Being Told You’re Innately Defective Is A Form Of Abuse

“People who are told repeatedly that they are innately defective are being abused and traumatized. The cost of conversion therapy to gay men and lesbians may be nothing less than emotional devastation. They may spend years recovering from the trauma inflicted upon them.”

-Laura Booker, LCSW

The context is a lawsuit against a Jewish agency that claims to cure gayness, but I think the quote is applicable widely, to all sorts of marginalized people. For example, I don’t think it’s possible to understand the scope of the harm anti-fat ideology does to fat people without considering the issues brought up by this quote.

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7 Responses to Quote: Being Told You’re Innately Defective Is A Form Of Abuse

  1. Pingback: Being told you’re inescapably defective is a form of abuse (NoH) | Feminist Critics

  2. 2
    nobody.really says:

    Thanks for sharing this, Amp. I want to say that before launching into analytic-talk.

    And here we go:

    I’m reminded of the concept of “micro-aggressions” – patterns of experiences that members of subordinated groups encounter that may not arise to actionable assaults, but nevertheless have the aggregate effect of keeping members of subordinated groups worn down and defensive. For example, even people who are skeptical of racial explanations for social trends have to acknowledge that blacks in the US experience hypertension at rates higher than whites – and also at rates higher than blacks outside the US. What is the cause? It seems likely that “cultural factors” (a/k/a unremedied racism) play a role.

    That said, there’s a term for people who are told repeatedly that they are innately defective: “Catholic.” The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin states that we are all defective, right out of the box.

    Now, can we really say that all Catholics grow up abused and traumatized? Perhaps so. A lot of them seem to be, anyway. Psychoanalysis might go a long way to explaining the Supreme Court.

    But religious institutions have a habit of institutionalizing and normalizing threatening ideas. The radical ideas of Jesus get converted into one more bulwark for the status quo, and threatening words about personal failings become mere ritual. I recall in my youth feeling threatened by religious teachings stating that I’m innately defective. (Admittedly, I found these ideas less scarring than all the references to Jesus’s blood. Yeesh.) But I’ve come to take comfort in the idea that EVERYONE is defective, so my defectiveness does not threaten my status relative to my neighbors.

    In sum, I suspect it is not defectiveness per se, but the threat to status – the idea that some people are defective in a way that “normal” people aren’t, rendering them subordinate to “normal” people – that proves to be uniquely traumatizing.

  3. 3
    Tess Eract says:

    Well put, nobody.really–if everyone is defective, at least you’ve got company. And you can relieve any distress you feel about being defective by attacking people who don’t happen to feel that way about themselves.
    But when someone comes and singles you out, for whatever, that really hurts.
    I recall certain relatives getting on my case for being introverted and more interested in things/ideas/places than in people. It didn’t happen real often, but a few times was more than enough. Some of said relatives have learned to shut the hell up–but I still don’t trust them. The latest tactic is to claim to diagnose me as belonging on some autistic spectrum–which isn’t fair to the autistics either, and stretches the whole concept too thin, as well as abrogating my right to tell my own story.
    I sometimes feel like some people just aren’t happy unless there is someone they can look down on, with”pity” as well as with more obvious forms of disrespect–sometimes for anomalies much more fictitious than mine. Microaggressions is a good word for much of it. Sympathy or empathy for whatever one has endured is benign, but pity is a form of contempt.
    The true modern champions at making us feel defective, though, are the industries that sell cosmetic surgery, diets, etc., etc., etc.

  4. 4
    closetpuritan says:

    Shameless self-promotion: that was the subject of my very first blog post on my little fat acceptance blog.

  5. 5
    Ronak M Soni says:

    “Now, can we really say that all Catholics grow up abused and traumatized? Perhaps so. A lot of them seem to be, anyway. Psychoanalysis might go a long way to explaining the Supreme Court. ”

    “In sum, I suspect it is not defectiveness per se, but the threat to status – the idea that some people are defective in a way that “normal” people aren’t, rendering them subordinate to “normal” people – that proves to be uniquely traumatizing.”

    Catholics aren’t singled out. Generalisations like the first quote are just absurd.

  6. 6
    JustAnna says:

    I really, really liked this quote. And thanks, closetpuritan for the link to your first blog post. You hit the nail on the head about fat stigma. Thank you both very much for posting these things. They made me feel a little better.

    I have been feeling pretty inadequate in my life lately. I’m quite fat. I’m getting old. The combination frightens me: the physical pain and disabilities are increasing. And if that weren’t enough… (takes a deep breath) I’ve been a tomboy type most of my life, but despite my age and weight, I now feel the desire to to become a little more ladylike before its too late. It may be ridiculous, but I’m starting to care, finally, about my own attractiveness! But I feel damned sometimes in my search, in my desire for this. In trying to find ways to learn how to be different than I have been all of my life, and I wind up feeling even more inadequate than ever.

    The beauty blogs and magazines make me feel horribly inadequate. I will never look like one of those drop-dead gorgeous young ladies. But the worst are some of the articles I real about fat people or unfeminine women: the hate and the stigmas against us are horrific. One of the worst articles on being fat and one of the worst on being ladylike appeared on a single horrific misogynist site that I recently ran across in my searches. In this sick little world, women lose weight or become ladylike for only one purpose: to please men. That link, by the way, goes to a sadly brainwashed woman’s article on how women owe it to their men to loose weight, to be pleasing to the male eye. It’s a bit hard to stomach, to put it mildly!

    The one on being a lady, written by a man who is a blatant misogynist, is only a little less sickening and critical. Again, it’s all about pleasing men, being something or someone that a man will approve of. My search for femininity, quite frankly, has nothing to do with men or their opinions of me, it’s for myself. But it’s hard, in this stigma-mad beauty-and-youth-obsessed world, to find anything positive or reaffirming out there if you’re a fat, old, mannish woman. This world doesn’t care what you are like inside: it hates you simply for your appearance. :-(

  7. 7
    LCforevah says:

    I gave up women’s magazines when my younger brother started reading GQ and I realized that none of the young men I knew resembled anyone in the pages of that magazine. Women’s mags are unreal, fake, phony, with phony stories and advice. I say drop em. I subscribe to Wired.

    Being a recovering catholic, I find that the above sweeping generalization to be generally true.(Ha) Don’t care if others don’t wish to believe it. Look to the behavior of the rcc bishops and their desire to make women’s lives a punitive landscape. Yes, sure, I know many adult catholics who have been able to shed some really stupid ideas put forward by the rcc and remain part of the church, but they still have to contend with the nearly constant rhetoric about original sin and woman’s place. At some point, it diminishes you.