as small as a world and as large as alone, soilrockslove: Could anyone point me to any...

5:39pm July 19, 2015

Could anyone point me to any blogs/articles/essays on the problems of institutionalizing and forced drugging people for Monday?
(Besides all the articles on Ballastexistenz - I already know about those :D )
On Monday I might actually Do The Thing and it would be nice to have sources…
Feel free to re-blog this with links, or use my ask or submit.
Or use the ask box below?

Signal boosting and also thank you for remembering Ballastexistenz. It seems like sometimes lately I feel like I and most other “old school” bloggers from the autistic community are being slowly forgotten by people looking for this kind of information. (Ranting about this topic under cut, especially because it’s autistic community specific – skip if you don’t want to read that part.)

I can’t count the number of times I see the same few articles by the same dozen or so autistic people being cited over and over again. When there are way more in-depth articles by bloggers and writers that everyone has all but forgotten these days. Which is horrible because it forces people to reinvent the wheel among other things, like our community’s history is for nothing, even as people use phrases and concepts originated by people nobody remembers anymore.

Not to mention people who have become anathema in some way because we can’t, ironically, follow the complex social rules of the modern autistic community. I’ve seen people telling other people not to use my material for that exact reason, which makes me really queasy. Like I got in one accidental argument with one person once (who deliberately made it into something it wasn’t and stirred up shit to get back at me, such that one argument that I apologized for became a supposed habit of mine, it’s amazing how “some Important Person said this happened once, even though it’s not exactly what really happened” turns into “this happens all the time” in the blink of an eye), said one thing that got vastly misunderstood, and suddenly I’m a horrible person beyond redemption who should never be cited or linked to ever again (or if done so, only with great reluctance and a disclaimer about how “problematic” I am).

It’s an even worse feeling than the awful gossip that people spread. And it’s a pretty disgusting thing to do to anyone, and I’m far from the only autistic person who routinely falls afoul of complex ever-changing rules of conduct that are utterly impossible for many autistic people to follow. There are obviously autistic people who are good at following such rules, and those are the autistic people who have the most power in the autistic community right now, and that’s a big part of the problem.

There’s also a thing that happens where two popular or well-known people have a falling out and everyone has to choose sides and if you cite the wrong person that’s seen as taking their side in an argument you don’t even know about and/or want to be part of. Also disgusting to me. Also a social minefield most autistic people can’t navigate but the ones in power lately are again the ones who navigate (and, at times, instigate) such things best.

Did I mention it disturbs the fuck out of me that the autistic people with the most power lately are the autistic people who navigate particular forms of social minefields particularly well? It’s not that they’re any less autistic than people who can’t do it. It’s that most autistic people can’t do it. And those of us who can’t do it will inevitably run afoul of them one day. And when we do, we become ostracized in the one place we and our ideas might be welcomed. And who you are (not on any deep level, but just basically what your social identity is, name recognition, things like that) becomes more important than what you have to say. This is not to say there aren’t people who should be shut out of communities on principle – every community has people who try to hurt other people badly on purpose and that sort of thing should not be tolerated. But most of the people being shut out for social reasons are not doing anything of the sort. Most of us are just socially inept in some ways that are common for autistic people to be socially inept in. (But not universal, obviously, because the modern-day leaders of the community are mostly very good at this stuff and no less autistic than the rest of us. I’m being explicit about this because I really hate any and all “you’re less autistic than me and/or not really autistic at all so shut the fuck up and/or go away” arguments/attacks.)

The other part of the problem is just the short memory of the particular communities involved – a five-year memory at best. Such that anyone who isn’t keeping up with the community lately gets rapidly forgotten, even if that person literally coined the phrases and invented and/or clarified in particular ways, the concepts that are being used in all the modern-day articles that get cited all the time.

And no this isn’t about personal ego, it’s about not forgetting your history and about not shutting autistic people out for being socially inept.

And I know the above isn’t about autism only, which is why all this is under a cut. It’s just that so many times lately when people give articles to cite about particular topics I see the same dozen or so people’s same dozen or so articles each getting cited over and over again when I now there’s amazing articles by amazing people who are being left out because they’re either forgotten, considered too “problematic” (including in areas that have nothing at all to do with disability rights or the topic at hand), or both. And both have happened to me. Some of the “problematic” thing gets worse the more well-known you are or once were, because well-known autistic people get held to impossible standards the more well-known we are (which means Temple Grandin gets held to the highest standards of all, and it’s not that I like everything she does, in fact I’ve put a lot of energy into explaining where she goes horribly wrong at times, but I would never, ever refuse to link to an article of hers just because there’s things she says in other articles that I think are utterly horrible… because she’s human and every human being does and says and thinks things that are utterly horrible, I’ve never met someone who doesn’t, and the more you dig for that kind of thing the more you find of course).

I wish I had the energy to compile a real master list of autistic people’s disability rights articles, instead of what I’ve seen passing for master lists these days. Because I have entire collections, including a huge collection of hardcopies from the days when it was still feasible to print out everything written on the web by autistic people (anyone remember when there was still an up-to-date website that listed every woman’s webpage anywhere? it was like that, and it was a pre-blogging era thing obviously). But I don’t have the time or energy. I don’t even have the time and energy to do disability rights work that I absolutely have to do.