THREAD 1/21
I am a 57 year old, tall, thin, cishet, white, #adopted man. For years I have been horrified and appalled at the violence and oppression women suffer and the hands of people of my demographic - men just like me.
I am a 57 year old, tall, thin, cishet, white, #adopted man. For years I have been horrified and appalled at the violence and oppression women suffer and the hands of people of my demographic - men just like me.
A few years ago, I started to volunteer at my local women's shelter and to follow feminist pages on facebook where I learned a lot about myself and my role in the patriarchy and the oppression of my sisters.
From those facebook pages I found links to feminist Twitter where my education and enlightenment accelerated and grew dramatically.
Here I am honoured to follow remarkable women as they share their struggles against a system deliberately stacked against them and hateful, violent men who rape and abuse them. I am privileged to follow their threads and conversations and to, sometimes, participate in them.
And I am thrilled that many, even some of my heroes, follow me too and make me feel like a welcome friend. But, while I stand with them against trolls and misogyists and am a friend and ally, I can never be one of them. I am of their oppressors and I know that.
Through my interactions here I stumbled onto #adoptee Twitter and for the first time in my life have started to feel like I really belong.
Here I am not a friend nor ally, I am adopted and I am among comrades who understand and share the existential loneliness and trauma that comes with abandonment and familial separation. I love you all.
This a space where #adoptees can gather to encourage and support one another as we navigate our way out of the fog of lies and gaslighting and try to find ways to heal our primal wound.
I never imagined that this space for trauma victims would regularly be bombarded with vitriol and hate by people who were kept by their own families but feel the need to tell us, the people who actually live it, what #adoption is really all about.
Adoptive parents (AP) and hopefuls (HAP), and people whose 3rd cousin is adopted, all feel like they have licence to dismiss our trauma and scoff at our pleas for understanding and reform.
Both prochoice and forced-birth camps claim us and use us and props to support the righteousness of their cause.
Neither pays the slightest attention to our voices - we're just the football on the field, the object they're fighting over. I'm pro-choice - unequivocally,
and so are the adoptees I know, which is why finding pro-choice people, some of whom I followed and admired, raising their voices against us, such a bitter pill.
I've seen some insist the right of women to choose their own destiny also means that if they make a baby - a new human being -
they have the right to cut all ties, legal and otherwise, with that child and to take steps to ensure that that person is never able to have any connection to their genetic kin and heritage, that families remain lost to us forever.
We are seen us as living abortions that can be abandoned to the past. Many have no consideration for us and what this means for our mental and emotional well-being.
One person even posted "they didn't want you, get over it." Another called an adoptee privileged for talking about her trauma and challenging the idea that adoption is good.
To adoptees, the kept are the privileged ones. These attitudes feel like betrayal from people I thought would be our allies and supporters. The disappointment has left me gutted.
I am only now seeing just how marginalized, silenced and ignored we really are and I feel shaken by it.
We try to help each other and to stop other children from suffering the same abandonment and we get scolded and silenced by so many of the kept who are devoid of empathy and compassion for the damaged adults that have grown out of lost, abandoned children.
