Marie Gardom Lam

🥚These trends are the result of national bans enacted around the world after exposés in international media revealed systemic deception, corruption, coercion, fraud, and baby-stealing by adoption agencies.

And those exposés were the result of relentless, ongoing #adoptee rights activism. BRAVO🧵

Trans women to be strip-searched by male police officers after UK court ruling Trans women held in custody by police in the UK will now be strip-searched by male officers, following the UK Supreme Court ruling.

Trans women to be strip-searched by male police officers after UK court ruling

She grew up believing she was a U.S. citizen. Then she applied for a passport Among those fearful of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown are adoptees who grew up thinking they were U.S. citizens — only to find out years later, in adulthood, they're not.

Among those fearful of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown are adoptees who grew up thinking they were U.S. citizens — only to find out years later, in adulthood, they're not.

Thanks so much for trying to understand and for recognising our humanity and rights

It’s actually a lot like the language and enforcement of border controls and immigrants. We are made enemies in the storytelling. And made immigrants by adoption itself - for some of us literally and others symbolically

I get it but it’s more complex than that - many of us want to build back our identities and relationships and heal the sense of exile and loss. But the legal messaging can add to the complexity in that and sense of what’s normal. Hard to explain in short msgs

There’s a constellation of ways society perpetuates an idea that we are the danger to others, and our rights barely register. In fact it’s society that endangers us with secrecy and cruelty and it’s well studied impact on our wellbeing

The legal involvement perpetuates an idea that it’s ok to keep such secrecy and that they need protecting from us as do other bio family 2/2

I’m saying why should there be any sort of order formalising such an extreme sanction, they’re adults and can tell us themselves if they want contact or not and even if they do say that, there are others to contact too. To me 1/2

The whole witness protection scheme we’re entered without consent goes far beyond one parent

And what about siblings, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents?

some of you need to think a whole lot harder about the differences between privacy, secrecy, and anonymity.

no one has a privacy right to keep my own identity a secret from me. My identity belongs to me.

people seem to care a whole lot about personal autonomy EXCEPT when #adoptees demand theirs.

They don’t shift their opinion at all and will make themselves or situations the exception, in a way that causes mental and emotional labour and disruption of advocacy work for their target.

Shows up in DMs and private texts as asking for advice but is instead asking for permission to or just blatantly claiming sovereignty to do it anyway.

Buys books on lived experiences and showcases them but doesn’t read them bc “they’re too depressing”.

Shows up in the comments wanting gold stars by listing all the things they’re doing differently to the posters’ examples of harmful, therefore centring themselves in a post. It will be presented as empathetic and judging of the bad behaviour but will highlight their own “goodness”.

This behaviour looks like:
Performance of caring by seeking out advice or resources from a marginalised person but sees themselves as an exception from all the observations made.

An observable violence I wanted to name - a thread

Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need - scoop.me In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Why? The country applies the "Housing First" concept agains homelessness.

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.”

Mother reunites with American daughter taken as baby during Chile's dictatorship "I knew she'd find me," Edita Bizama, 64, said from her home in the Chilean port city of San Antonio after finally reuniting with the daughter who was taken from her over 40 years ago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Garcia was removed from her mother a few days after birth and sent abroad for adoption, one of as many as 20,000 children authorities estimate were forcibly taken from their parents by a military government that saw int'l adoptions as a way to reduce child poverty.

www.reuters.com/world/americ...

Just the number from one country - I’m sure we don’t even know the number that includes me and infinite others around the world.

Small things like these…

Petition asking PM to revoke Elon Musk's Canadian citizenship garners support Thousands of people have electronically signed a parliamentary petition calling for revocation of Elon Musk’s Canadian citizenship over his role in the Trump administration, which is pointedly threate...

Petition asking PM to revoke Elon Musk's Canadian citizenship garners support #GoCanadaGo #LetsDoThis #Canada #cdnpoli

Link here: sign the parliamentary petition www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...

www.ctvnews.ca/canada/artic...

Maddow: I think it is a bad mistake to let Joy Reid walk out the door. It is also unnerving to see that on a network where we've got two nonwhite hosts in primetime, both of our nonwhite hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend. I do not defend it.

Exactly right. And in this era, they woo us to get our babies, then kick us to the curb. Before, we’re selfless saints and heroes. After, we’re heartless sluts. They’d love us to just go away and die.

Sadly so true, in adoptive families there are a range of ways we learn not to talk about our first family and culture or how it can be talked about if at all. Even in my well meaning family my mother was never mentioned ever - not even on my birthday - imagine the dissonance

Indeed. The reason this guy can keep chatting away happily about baseball is his pal's opinions are unlikely to leave him homeless, deported, violated or dead.

As adoptees we’re both groomed to abandon her too while also excitedly pushed to find her (without help) for entertainment

The Sin of Love | InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV) Chinese father who lost his daughter via intercountry adoption shares his story of loss and hope; now in reunion, sharing the memories and pain it brings up.

Fathers, siblings and grandparents are collateral damage along with adoptee descendants intercountryadopteevoices.com/2021/08/05/t...

By abandoning mothers we also abandon adoptees, sacrificing our emotional development to be balms to others wounds. We are forever the carer and mask of the wound.