Thread by @AlexandraErin

Did a lot of people forget after an earthquake in Haiti, a Nice White Church Lady from the US was stopped at the border into the Dominican Republic with a bus full of kids and claimed she'd been given permission to just take X many children to put up for international adoption?

Not specific kids. Not even specifically orphans. She made up a license that let her go pick up displaced/evacuated kids (I think she had close to three dozen of them) from Haiti and take them to found an "orphanage" in the DR for international adoption (trafficking).

Here's an article about it.

Quote: "Silsby and her supporters say they just wanted to save youngsters from the chaos, disease and uncertainty of quake-ravaged Haiti."

White Saviorism isn't bad just because it's arrogant or rude. It's actively evil.

cleveland.com/world/2010/02/…

In my twenties, I knew absolutely nothing about adoption that you can't learn from TV shows and movies like Annie or various adaptations of Oliver Twist, where it's basically a fairy tale plot device without any magic wand required.

And I knew that stuff was Hollywood stuff.

But whenever I encountered someone online of an anti-adoption bent, I fell back on what I now recognize are easy and thoughtless cliches: but isn't it better for a kid to have a home and family than not? Who could be against giving a child a home?

In retrospect, there's a very clear and obvious pattern where everybody I so magnanimously dispensed these platitudes upon had themselves been adoptees, where I couldn't think if I knew anybody, at that time, who had been adopted.

Now, I know multiple people who are grown-up adoptees. They think and feel different things about their experiences and about the practice itself, which makes sense as they are all different people.

A lot of people are up in arms today because Ana Mardoll, whom some segments of the twitternet seem to never tire of trying to make into a Main Character, merely said that adoption is not an option for him and wished that people would stop recommending it.

And there's more than one thing at play here, some of it being preexisting animosity towards one person and some of it being white saviorism and some of it being that same mixture of arrogance and ignorance I had on the subject when I wore a younger me's clothes.

But it's leading a lot of people to make big, bold, huge, sweeping statements in support of adoption as a simple, straightforward, universal, unvarnished, unadulterated, and absolute good... just because the wrong person seemed to say something against it... and it's really not.

Were you mad when you heard that the DHS under Trump had up and "lost" a bunch of other people's kids?

The same white supremacist Christian dominionist circles that the Haitian child-snatcher I linked to above had similar plans for those kids.

And those plans fuel a huge, huge, huuuuuuuge amount of international child trafficking, under the guise of adoption services. Of kids who aren't orphans, whose parents are often lied to, coerced, or simply not given a choice.

And kids who are orphans, for that matter. There's not an asterisk in the list of universal human rights that says You Must Have This Many Parents To Not Be For Sale.

Anyway. For more on this topic, I suggest you listen to #AdopteeVoices, some of whom have conveniently tagged their hashes thusly.

And if you're stuck on "But surely giving a child a home must be a good thing. Only a monster would imply otherwise!"... you should learn more.

Oh, and before this thread finds So Now They're Canceling... Twitter, let me make it clear: random trans people don't have the power to "cancel" the adoption industry and I'm not arguing for its abolition.

I'm telling you nuance-averse pickle chips that it's complicated.