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Margaret Atwood has said for decades that she didn't invent a single atrocity in The Handmaid's Tale. Every single thing Gilead does to women in that book is a direct historical parallel to something a government has already done to women in real life.​But people still sit on their couches, watch the show, and comfort themselves by calling it a dystopian fantasy. The brutal reality is that society only views it as a terrifying fiction because the women being targeted and separated from their children on screen are white and middle class.​We don't have to look at a fictional timeline to see the state systematically stealing children. We literally have ICE dragging mothers and grandmothers out of their communities and deporting them while the government keeps their children in state custody. The state is actively severing the maternal line, ripping kids away from their families, and processing them like inventory.​When the government uses its executive arm to traumatize families and hoard children, it is enforcing the exact same architectural control we are supposed to be horrified by in the show. If you are only outraged when child separation happens to women in red cloaks on television, but you excuse it as "routine policy" or "border security" when it happens to brown and indigenous women in your own country, your pattern recognition is broken.​The dystopia isn't fiction and it isn't coming in the future. It is already fully operational right now. You just got used to who it targets.​#TheIntrovertFortress #TheHandmaidsTale #PatternRecognition #SystemicTrauma #May04