Hi,just a quick message here about #IDPWD2020 .It's been a tough year for Disabled people, and i wanted to take this thread to reflect on this from my personal https://t.co/M6RAkbs9uh you will see certain organisations providing lip service for exposure...

While #Tulane school of medicine is rightfully being exposed for its contemporary racism towards faculty, staff, students (and patients) due to the racist firing of Dr. Princess Dennar, it’s important to call out the deeply anti-Black history of this school, specifically... 1/

The way #Tulane became a private institution (originally was a public university) at the end of Reconstruction to avoid having to desegregate. The school charter says it was founded for “white men” only... but there’s more (much more) to this story... 2/

cw: medical racism

Tulane’s school of medicine rose to national prominence for its collection of human “specimens” in their anatomy museum “rivaled only by Harvard”. How did it acquire these “specimens” you might ask?

The collection was “curated” by a Dr. Edward Souchon... 3/

Dr. Souchon was mentored by the late James Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology”, who himself had started collecting body parts, organs, and skeletal remains from enslaved Black people during slavery. Souchon continued “curating” his own collection in horrific ways. 4/

The Souchon Collection grew over several decades, eventually touring the state as a traveling “public health” exhibit- nearly all of the body parts stolen, harvested and illicitly acquired from formerly enslaved and poor Black people via Charity Hospital. 5/

Okay, let's start this hypersomnia thread!

[note - I am not looking for unsolicited advice.]

Idiopathic hypersomnia or narcolepsy (not the same, but similar) is very hard to describe to people.

When I say "I slept 10 hours last night and I'm still tired" I'm not bragging. 1/16

For me, the accommodations I need are about time. My body doesn't care what I want to do - when I want to wake up or be asleep. My body wants to wake up at 10-11am, and go to sleep at 3am, always.

Just a one hour shift in my sleep schedule can screw me up for days. 2/16

When I tell people that I'd really "prefer it" if we could meet at 10am or later, it's because getting up before that has consequences for me. Big consequences. Most people won't see them. Sometimes I still give in and say it's fine. It ruins 2-3 of my days, sometimes more. 3/16

Let me explain. When I am required to wake up at 9am, esp. in covid times working from home, my body pays me back for it later.

I'm going to show you ways this happens. I can usually withstand 1 day of waking up early, with some consequences, but 2 days in a row kills me. 4/16

Let's say this graph represents Day 1, the first time I am required to get up early. The y-axis is my level of Sleepiness. Any symptom listed higher up includes that symptom + every other symptom below it. Getting up that early means I can't listen or concentrate all day. 5/16

Our conscious experience exists. In fact, it's the only thing you can directly observe, as everything about reality and how we perceive it is filtered through how our brains process stimuli and information. You are the only one who can define who and what you are.

Don't get me wrong, I am a materialist who believes the universe exists in the absence of beings who can observe it from an intelligence standpoint, but we are all collections of atoms, our function governed by chemical processes, not perfectly replicated by the process of birth.

Our means of DNA replication is imprecise because of billions of years of random evolution. We are on one branch of many, and there is countless variation in how all living beings are formed, and how we classify traits of those creatures, including sex and reproduction methods.

It would be an error to say that people who are intersex and/or transgender are the results of mistakes or errors in reproduction, because it implies DNA is "trying" to create a binary model of people and sometimes gets it wrong. It doesn't "try" to do anything; DNA != conscious.

Rather, our biological blueprints are not precise, and this is true for all living things. We can crossbreed plants and animals because of that imprecise nature, it's responsible for what we perceive as the "races" of people, etc. We can observe variation everywhere.