8:46pm December 22, 2011

Oh and…

…there’s other stuff that bothers me about some specific things. Including things I used to do (which are how I first ran into that community, it wasn’t about the cat stuff, it was about other stuff). Like I understand why modern autistic people often find out about ourselves first through certain legends rather than, say, medically, and some of us incorporate that into our identity. I did that too when I was growing up. But those were legends that existed solely to make it possible to kill us. And we’re still hearing variants of those legends and they’re still being used as reasons to kill us – both autistic people and other disabled people, although these days it (using those legends I mean) seems the most common with autistic people. And to identify as literally what happened in those legends because we’re autistic or otherwise disabled in some way, it just reinforces the connection between “autistic” (or disabled in some other way) and “nonhuman that is okay to kill or violently abuse in order to bring the ‘real human’ back or at least get the disabled human out of the way”. And since it doesn’t take much to tip people over that line, and I refuse to continue identifying as something that to this day causes people to kill people like me on a regular basis. I just can’t – once the connection was made in my head, I couldn’t romanticize it anymore. (Or justify doing it or anything else that could make it easier for people to kill any of us.)

I did, however, write a poem about it once, but that one left no room whatsoever to take a “killing people is okay” message out of it. (In fact, rather the opposite. And it never actually called the person nonhuman… that’s something they were called by others in the poem. It’s about generations worth of disability-eugenocidal bullshit and finally laying it bare for other people to see it instead of sweeping it under the rug or saying “it doesn’t matter, they aren’t human”.)