1:12am August 4, 2015

karalianne:

madeofpatterns:

fierceawakening:

newvagabond:

I thought it was good that they encouraged us to be physically active in school but I feel like PE teachers were way too hard on everyone. Once a week we had a whole PE period just for running and my teacher told me that it didn’t matter if I had chronic bronchitis (I was sick like, every few months, I even had walking pneumonia once), I still would be graded on how many laps I could run in one hour, which wasn’t many. If we walked, we got yelled at and would get points taken off our grade. I even failed a semester of aerobics in highschool because I had a nasty ovarian cyst, even though I had doctor’s notes and everything. :T What was up with PE class, man.

I don’t know about anyone else’s, but I’m pretty sure what was up with mine was “pointless ableist nonsense.”

Yours too it sounds like.

i got in trouble for ~not trying~ when I was asked to do demonstrably physically impossible things

I hated Phys.Ed. class. Only class in school I got a D in regularly. You weren’t just marked for trying, you were marked on how well you did. Which absolutely favours people who are coordinated and good at sports and penalizes anyone who’s bad at these things.

Also, I am afraid of things flying through the air at my head thanks to two incidents with basket balls in grade eight. I don’t think the boys responsible even got in trouble, and I needed new glasses after the first one.

My gym teachers were so out of touch with reality that they actually claimed I wasn’t flexible enough.  I’m hypermobile.  However, my arms are not proportional to the rest of my body at all.  So their one flexibility test, I routinely failed.  Not because I was bending less than anyone else, but because my arms were too short to reach as far as anyone else.  Even measuring my arms against my height, which is very simple to do, could have shown them what the problem was, instantly.  But instead they recommended that I do all these stretching exercises to become even more flexible than I already was.

I could put my feet behind my head, flexibility was hardly a problem area for me, or rather it was a problem area but because I was too flexible.  I actually told them that my mother was too flexible, because I knew she’d been diagnosed with hypermobility at one point, or something related to it.  And they told me, “There’s no such thing as too flexible.”  They actually said that.  Hypermobility comes with a huge list of medical problems including potentially a reduced range of motion later in life from joint damage.  But apparently to  most gym teachers, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.

Oh also, I had a few teachers over the years who clearly wanted to be gym coaches, or who actually were gym coaches in addition to the subjects they teached.  Invariably these were the same classes where I was subject to all kinds of ableist bullying beyond the usual, often instigated by the teacher.  In two of those classes, the teachers even listed me as “having a great sense of humor” on my report card – which was a twisted way of saying “Mel is the butt of all my jokes and I like making the class laugh at hir, so I’ll say sie has a great sense of humor even though actually sie breaks down crying sometimes”. 

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same teachers who did that were always the ones who made it very clear that they wanted to be (or, in fact, were, in addition to teaching their regular subject) teaching gym class.  Because there’s a very particular way that the worst of gym teachers look upon disabled students (whether diagnosed with a disability officially, or just everyone knows unofficially that this person is “different”, and treats them accordingly).  And these teachers do that even when they’re not actually teaching gym class at that moment.

129 notes

12:59am August 4, 2015

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

I’m trying to teach Lovette to put things in my hand if he wants me to throw them

So far he’s tried batting at my hand, then batting at the hair band he wants me to throw, and now he just clasps my hand between his paws

Eeeeeee!

Fey does a thing when she wants me to move things, rather than throw them.

For instance, she likes lying on this backpack my dad made, that I got sent after he died.  It mostly lives on my bed.  So does a whole lot of yarn.  Sometimes the yarn ends up on top of the backpack.

So the other day, there was yarn on the backpack.  She stood on the backpack and sniffed each piece of yarn.  But it was not ordinary sniffing.  It was not to gain information about the yarn.  It had a quality to it almost like nudging, except she wasn’t nudging it – it was a movement that was implied rather than actual.

I’d seen her do this before, so I knew what it meant.  I moved the ball of yarn out of her way.

She sniffed the next ball of yarn in the same manner.  I moved it.

This continued until she had the entire backpack uncovered, at which point she turned around in place a few times and then curled up in a contented ball and went to sleep.  But she totally was telling me “Move this, it’s not supposed to be here.”

When she wants me to throw things or play with them (she doesn’t differentiate), she will generally touch the thing with her paw, and then touch me with her paw, both in a playful manner, although sometimes when she touches me there’s a bit of a threat involved, like “Use this to help me play Or Else I will probably bite you.”  But then that’s what her personality is like sometimes.

I’m not sure how I would go about teaching her to bring me things if she wanted me to throw them.  I’m not sure I could, honestly.  Generally, when either of us learns something like that, it’s pretty spontaneous.  I’d have no idea how to make that happen on purpose.

I do find it interesting that she has so many different ways of smelling/nosing things, all of which mean something totally different.

17 notes

12:49am August 4, 2015

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

If I had a solid piece of advice to give anyone it would be just “calm down”

And I don’t mean that in a dismissive sense but like

One of the things being involved in SJ did was give me an immediate panic response every time I saw someone talk about something Forbidden

And slowly learning that talking to people about things is not actually on par with trying to put a fire out before it kills someone has been extremely helpful for me

It’s incredibly important to be able to gain a little perspective. No, someone on the internet being wrong is not the literal equivalent of a bullet on its way to murder someone. Working out right from wrong requires time and patience. It can’t be done with panicked urgency or rage.

I think what’s especially saddening is that you get so many splinter groups within social justice itself because people don’t know how to deal with different perspectives without making it into “you’re wrong, and that’s dangerous, so now we’re enemies.” When some in-group thing becomes controversial, like, “Disabled people all think (thing),” and some disabled people go, “No, we don’t,” I never see that reconciled as a valid difference of perspective. I always just see it turn into enemy factions. It sucks.

I like the tags used by someone before me on this:

#I don’t think stupid is an ableist slur #that doesn’t mean I care less about people with ID than people who think it is

That’s a really good example of something that’s split people into warring factions, when it should just be left as a valid difference of opinion among disabled people.

There’s a website I’ve been reading as I watch Star Trek.  The guy has reviewed every episode and it’s fun to go there and read what everyone has to say in response, and then sometimes even add comments of my own, even though they’re so long after the fact that I doubt anyone actually reads them at this point, or that I’ll ever get replied to.  (If I do, it’ll probably be a year from now or something.)

But.

The author there… he has really good intentions.  And I respect anyone’s right to run their website however they want to, and moderate or ban people on whatever criteria they choose.  But I still wish he had somewhat different criteria.

He’s not, to my knowledge, disabled.  I could be wrong about that, but the way he talks about disability is very different than the way he talks about marginalization that I know he experiences as a gay man of color.

But he’s heard, somewhere, about The Unwritten List Of Ableist Words Never To Say.  And he enforces that.  He warns people if words like ‘mad’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’ or ‘crazy’ are in the books he’s reading or shows he’s watching.  And he does not allow people to use those words on his site, saying they are ableist slurs.

And I know that he probably thinks he’s doing right by disabled people, but as a disabled person whose disability makes it hard for me to do a search-and-replace function on individual words I use, I really don’t like being asked not to say words unless the words are so heinous that there’s really no excuse.  Like, I would not say the n-word.  And the only reason I say retard (as in REE-tard, not as in re-TARD, which is a completely different word) ever at all, is because it’s a word that’s used against me frequently so I feel I have the right to use it as long as I don’t use it for real.  Like, I can say the word, such as for discussions like this one, I just can’t say it as an insult or a way of actually describing real human beings or something.  But those are two words that I would have no problem with someone banning from their website, at least as used by white people and people without cognitive or developmental disabilities. 

On the other hand, banning stupid and dumb just makes it hard for me to write, because although I don’t throw those words around all the time, they’re still words for actual concepts that have nothing to do with disability.  And it makes me unsettled that people have become so factionalized over this issue, that even my talking about this has led to people telling me I just don’t give a crap about [insert groups of people that I either belong to or am routinely thought to belong to], or that I’ve never been hurt sufficiently by being called stupid or dumb, because if I had, I’d agree with them.

And the guy who runs that website?  He probably believes what he’s been told, which is that disabled people all agree about these words, or at least the disabled people who count when it comes to discussions like this.  I’ve seen so many disabled people state outright that all disabled people, or all autistic people, or all people with intellectual disabilities, believe one particular thing.  And it’s never true.  Ever.  But people say it anyway. 

And people like me either don’t exist or are uncaring monsters who don’t get how much words can hurt people, because if we did we’d agree.

And there’s that… thing people can do.  And people become very adept at it.  Where they can link anything at all back to a heinous crime against some marginalized group of people.  And then they can say that anyone who disagrees with them is doing the equivalent of allowing that heinous crime to happen. 

What do I mean?  Well… I forget exactly what was being argued about, because this was back when I was first on tumblr, and people were first forming the #actuallyautistic tag, to give some background on how long ago this was. 

But there was an argument between an autistic adult and a nonautistic parent of an autistic child.  This is not surprising, these arguments happen all the time online.  It was over something about… how parents should behave towards adult autistic self-advocates, or something like that.  Whatever the parent had done, it was a social gaffe at best and disrespecting autistic people at worst.

But then.

The autistic person somehow tied – and it took a lot of twisting to do this – the parent’s behavior, back to the murder of autistic people.

So now, the argument took on new urgency.  The people on the autistic person’s side were suddenly not just correcting a parent’s behavior towards online autistic adults.  They were, in their eyes, preventing murder.  And the parent was, in their eyes, contributing to murder in some manner. 

It took a large stretch to get there, and it took a lot of links in a long chain that would not hold up to close scrutiny without falling into pieces.  But that didn’t matter.  What mattered was that now a difference of opinion was elevated in importance, to the level of murder prevention.  And this meant that the autistic people in the conversation now viewed what was happening with an intense urgency that had not been there before.

And that disturbed me greatly.

Because the ability to tie relatively minor disagreements to things like murder, genocide, sterilization, torture and other crimes against humanity, is a skill.  And some people on here have honed that skill, turned it into a high art form in fact.  And that skill is so very destructive to anyone who is trying to communicate, to cooperate, to learn from each other.  But it’s pulled out and used like a weapon.  And it’s not right, and it’s not fair, to anyone involved.

And it’s late, so even if I had a direction I was going beyond this, I don’t remember it.  I think I’ve said enough for now.

135 notes

12:23am August 4, 2015

History of autism diagnosis and marginalized people.  (Original post removed because the author was uncomfortable with being reblogged.  They didn’t specifically ask me to delete my original reply to them, but I did, because I don’t want to send people back to their inbox inadvertently.)

So I’m removing direct quotes from their original post, and I’m just leaving in the information I gave out because that information is still relevant to understanding a bit more nuance than a lot of people know to the history of autism diagnoses.

So here goes: 

I agree with your main point.  It would be hard not to, I’m autistic, AFAB, and genderless, among other things, so I’ve seen how these things play out.  But at the same time, you make some statements as absolutes that I want to clarify because they’re not actually true as absolutes, only as generalities.  So I just want to add some… detail… I guess you could call it.

[deleted quote about autism only being diagnosed in white men]

I was diagnosed in 1995, at the age of 14, the diagnosis was reiterated several times over the years, and I’m white but AFAB/genderless.  I was re-diagnosed in 1999, at the age of 18.  I was not seeking a diagnosis when I was originally diagnosed.  

However, at the same time, I was certainly diagnosed later than I should have been.  These days, I would have been diagnosed at the age of 15 months, at the latest, as that’s when I stopped speaking.  But that happened in 1981, and the doctor my mom saw about it, told her the standard line for “regressive autism” at the time, which was “it’s probably your fault, you’re letting her be lazy and not making her need to talk”.  Which is ridiculous.  I also should’ve been diagnosed when the preschool called in my mother to tell her I was playing alone and shrieking when other kids came near me, or when I was first referred to a therapist at the age of seven, and multiple other times I was referred to mental health professionals or schools brought up what was “wrong” with me.  

However, the diagnosis didn’t happen, and I can believe some of it was because of the cis white male thing.  Other parts of it were because the definition of autism was different in 1980 than in 1987, and different in 1987 than it was in 1995.  And every time the DSM gets updated, it can take over a decade – with some stragglers, even more than two decades – for everyone to catch up.  So people look at the change in 1987 and say that instantly everyone should’ve been diagnosed, but that’s not how it works.  I encountered a doctor in 1999 who said that autistic people couldn’t interact in any way shape or form – a view of autism that had officially left the DSM in 1987.  And there’s still doctors who think that, which dates back to the 1980 definition(1).  

There was also another factor you didn’t talk about:  An autistic disorder diagnosis, in the nineties, was considered almost like a death sentence.  Insurance would give up and want to institutionalize you rather than pay for “treatments” and “therapies” and stuff.  And many shrinks recognized this, and would take people who clearly and unambiguously fit the criteria for Autistic Disorder, and diagnose us with PDDNOS or Asperger’s.  That’s how I got a PDDNOS diagnosis:  My mom was told I was ‘autistic’ and an ‘idiot savant’ – out loud – but on paper it was PDDNOS/atypical autism, until I was old enough that the insurance thing wasn’t a threat anymore.  Then it was changed – by the same shrink who originally diagnosed PDDNOS/atypical autism on paper – to autistic disorder, when I turned 18 or so.

The book Unstrange Minds gets into the way that diagnostic weirdness happened to the author’s daughter, who was diagnosed in roughly the same time period I was diagnosed, and was also told she fit full criteria for Autistic Disorder but would get diagnosed with PDDNOS instead because they didn’t want a label that would hurt her chances of getting help in school and the like.  Saying Autistic Disorder was seen almost as like writing someone off.  You just didn’t do it if you could help it.  Unfortunately that has made it hard for some people who are products of that time, to get services when the services depend on an Autistic Disorder diagnosis.

Back to the statements you’ve made.  It’s true that it’s harder for marginalized people of all kinds to get diagnosed even still, and that this was even more true in the nineties and before.  Those of us who did get diagnosed back then got lucky.  That’s how I see it.

But I also know what I saw when I went to a special ed high school.  It had people mostly with a combination of DD and psych labels.  I was in a classroom that was fairly mixed diagnosis-wise, but there were two classrooms that were all autistic people, most of whom were considered nonverbal (whether they were or not).  And then a few of us scattered through the other classrooms.

So anyway… of the autistic people that I was aware of, in that school, the majority of them were people of color.  The majority were also male, or presumed male anyway (most would not be able to tell you their actual gender identity regardless of what it was, or wasn’t).  I know that people of color have more trouble getting diagnosed (and more likelihood of getting diagnosed with things like conduct disorder or ADHD or intellectual disability or psychosis) but in our school at least, the majority of autistic people were not white, and that means that there were plenty of people in the eighties and nineties who were getting diagnosed despite being people of color.

But definitely it was overwhelmingly (presumed) boys who had diagnoses at that school.  There were very few autistic girls there.

[deleted quote about how nobody ever looked for autism in PoC or anyone other than white men]

Again, they didn’t look for it enough in people of color, but they did in fact look for it in people other than white cis men.  They just didn’t look enough. I know that sounds like a minor difference, but I don’t want people getting the idea that people like me or others I know were never diagnosed until the 2000s.  Because I was diagnosed in 1995, and I’m AFAB/genderless, which means someone somewhere was looking for autism.   Especially since I wasn’t seeking an autism diagnosis when I got diagnosed, so they had to have seen it in me – they had no reason to be specifically looking for autism, given that I was there for suicide.

I know it probably looks like I’m trying to argue with you. I’m not. I’m actually just trying to make sure that other people know that your statements, while generally accurate, aren’t literally accurate.  (Including the one that starts with “literally”.)  Because a lot of autistic people do take things literally.  So I wanted to let people know that it wasn’t like the only people to get diagnosed until recently were white cis men.  It’s just that they were the majority of people who got diagnosed until recently, and still are a majority.   I’m white, not cis, and not male or AMAB, and I was diagnosed in the nineties, and so were other people I know, so it happened.  Just not often enough.

Other than that I totally agree with your post.   It’s harder to write a lot about “Yes I agree with this” than to point out where I disagree, so that’s why there’s a lot more disagreement in this response than agreement.  But the actual levels of agreement and disagreement, are that I agree with nearly everything you’re saying, but I disagree with some of the sweeping statements you make in one area, and I wanted people to know that reality is more complicated than that.  In case they weren’t around for the nineties or eighties.

Footnotes below cut.

Keep reading

8 notes

8:42pm August 3, 2015

Why is vanilla flavor considered “blank”?

I’m eating vanilla ice cream and it tastes like vanilla, it doesn’t taste bland or blank.  The idea that vanilla flavor is like.. not a flavor, weirds me out.

39 notes

8:39pm August 3, 2015

rebornica:

Shoutout to those who forget easily because of a mental illness they have

Shoutout to those who forget easily because of an accident

Shoutout to those who forget easily but dont have any reason behind it

Shoutout to those who forget easily

Its okay to forget. Yes, the thing you forgot may be important but you’re human and humans forget things. You can’t help it. It’s alright, me and a lot of other people are here to support you.

8,721 notes

8:38pm August 3, 2015

confettucini:

shout out to everyone with visible skin conditions who are tired of constantly hearing “ew what’s that” and “is that contagious”

you’re beautiful and you aren’t your skin conditions and i love you very much <3

105 notes

8:34pm August 3, 2015

iguanamouth:

katblaque:

My aesthetic is 90s forest sprite. 

I’m here to enchant you and also snatch your edges.

this is such a Good Look though i

24,973 notes

8:33pm August 3, 2015

Experiences at the Judge Rotenberg Center - Telling People’s Stories

andreashettle:

I would like to interview people who have been residents of JRC and people who have worked there.  It is incomprehensible to me that JRC still operates and my sense is that putting an end to the cruelty may hinge on people in positions of power hearing from people who have experienced life there. Until the Andre McCollins video became public, people were able to buy JRC’s story that the shock from the GED was like a pinch or a bee sting. Being able to witness the inhumanity of the shock has changed people’s understanding in important ways.

Offering people a way to tell their story in a safe way may make a difference. I am proposing an oral history/story project in which I help people tell their stories of life at JRC by interviewing people, writing their stories and giving people the opportunity to review/revise their story. It would then be up to each person to decide what he/she wants to do with the story. Some people may just want it as a personal record of their time there; others may want to share it more broadly. This could be done anonymously at the person’s discretion.  Each person will own and control his/her story.

Some people know all about JRC but when they hear about it in a person’s own words it can make it so much more real and only then does the horror of the situation hit them. One person’s story can make a difference.

If you are interested in sharing your story, knowing you will have complete control of it and if and how it is eventually shared, please email me at nancy-weiss@comcast.net.  If you know people who have been at JRC either as residents or staff, please forward this email to them. The best way for me to reach people will be people sending this request to others who may be interested.

Thanks for your help and interest,

Nancy Weiss

Signal boosting, because I would love to see this initiative succeed in gathering stories and maybe getting the Judge Rotenberg Center closed down. Nancy Weiss has been fighting against the atrocities at the Judge Rotenberg Center for MANY years, she’s awesome. 

Signal boost.

62 notes

8:33pm August 3, 2015

madeofpatterns:

I don’t feel competent in this environment.

2 notes

8:32pm August 3, 2015

madeofpatterns:

I don’t know any of you people why is there an expectation of trust

7 notes

8:31pm August 3, 2015

andreashettle:

endquestionmark:

every so often i post a few passages from this. it’s by ken liu, whose explanation of silkpunk i just reblogged, and it’s an excerpt from his story paper menagerie (linked here in its entirety; it won the hugo, the nebula, and the world fantasy awards, the first work of fiction to do so). it is not remotely an easy read, particularly if you are a child of a diaspora, particularly if you have ever struggled with assimilation, particularly if you are struggling with cultural and personal identity. it shouldn’t need to pull its punches, and it doesn’t. if you haven’t read it already, i cannot recommend it highly enough. it will not make you feel better, but it is an axe for one’s internal frozen sea, if you will. sometimes a story like this is the only way to stay alive.

Do read the paper menagerie story at the link, it is heartbreaking and beautiful. Unfortunately, some of the comments from readers are not as pretty (I did not read all of them, but the ones I did glance at … )

1,277 notes

8:31pm August 3, 2015

Gender and Disability at the Doctor

andreashettle:

slashmarks:

It’s around twelve-thirty and I am getting dressed up for a doctor’s appointment.

Like most disabled people, I am a little terrified by the prospect of going to the doctor. I have less to risk than some, because I’m not currently on any medication that could be discontinued. But any doctor who comes off with the impression I am malingering, or attention seeking, is free to write it down in my records and perhaps get me killed five or ten years down the line. And of course, any doctor can do a bad job today and miss something vital.

It is very important for disabled people to make a good impression on their doctors.

Unlike many disabled people, I am also transgender.

Keep Reading

Signal boosting because intersectionality matters

54 notes

6:14pm August 3, 2015

Please help.

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

I’m a mentally ill, disabled person living on my own. Right now I’m applying for SSI, and it will be months before I get my evaluation. In the meantime, I can’t afford my basic living expenses without help.

If you can, please donate to desertlily777@hotmail.com on Paypal. This is my friend’s Paypal, so please leave a note saying that this is ‘for Skeleton.’*

Signal boosts would be greatly appreciated, too. Thank you.

*It was formerly ‘for lichgem’ before I changed my URL.

2,629 notes