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6:23pm April 18, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: people trying to become autism stereotypes is also a thing

devilsmoon:

youneedacat:

josiahd:

deducecanoe:

josiahd:

I wish it wasn’t.

WHAT? Please explain this to me?

It’s like…

Autistic folks thinking that being a legitimate autistic person means you have to have specific stereotypical attributes, or even ALL the stereotypical autistic attributes, for instance:

  • find…

Weird. The non-words mental space is something I’ve experienced and described often, but rarely seen people trying to emulate. Aside from that, all these things and more, I’ve seen people trying hard to become, then some of them also treating like shit any autistic people who weren’t like that (“you aren’t really autistic because you’re not a stereotype, I’m really autistic because I’m pretending to be a stereotype!”). Thus putting pressure on others, to hide and pretend, self perpetuating cycle.

On the other hand, are people who do have those ‘stereotypes’ legitimately and are not ‘mimicking’ them to fit into social criteria. Then it becomes a giant pissing context between auties and aspies and frankly it’s a load of shit. I don’t want some aspie to roll their eyes at me thinking I am merely emulating a stereotype when I tell them I love animals I have deep connect to rats and horses. On the other hand I am pretty sure I am pansexual, and sexually active, and suck at math and good at language and is very social and interested in new things and new experiences and getting out of routines.

So yay for me not being a trope?

Josiah does have point and so does Amanda because I see this bullshit policing shit all over the community and it’s one of the reasons I wrote an essay on why I don’t get the “all aspies like cats’ meme. I am just worry that your essay is going to throw more shit on the fire causing aspies and auties to continue to schism and divide and infight and we reeaaaaalllly don’t need anymore cockfighting.

Can we just avoid trying to judge auties on how their symptoms and behaviors present and start beating the crap out of allistics that enforce these stereotypes?

pls, I am sick of fucking pissing contests.

PS. How the fuck is being against an unethical organization now ‘stereotype.’ that should be common goddamn sense.

People can be like a stereotype, for real, and that’s totally not the same as people who are trying to force-fit themselves into that stereotype. It’s okay to talk about people force fitting themselves into various stereotypes (and I resemble plenty of stereotypes myself, just not the ones listed in that post, and it bothers me just as much to see people pressured into becoming the ones I resemble). There really is pressure in different autistic communities to be certain ways. I once tried to say that plenty of autistic people need human contact, and was literally told, by an autistic person who was vastly misinterpreting an essay of Jim Sinclair’s, “It’s okay for autistic people to want human contact, it’s just not okay for us to need it, that’s an NT thing.” As in, in that segment of the autistic community, there was great pressure to resemble Donna Williams and/or Jim Sinclair and whatever they wrote about themselves became dogma for some. Not the fault of either of those people, mind you. Just that there were a bunch of people who literally thought those two people defined what it is to be autistic and that if you were any different that, literally they said this, wasn’t okay for an autistic person to be like that. Different parts of the autistic community have different bullshit pressures put on them and its okay to talk about that without people thinking that you’re saying people who are like the stereotypes are wrong.

(I have a lot in common with Donna Williams in terms of specific autistic traits, so in some portions of the autistic community, I am like the stereotypes too, and that gives me some undeserved status. And that doesn’t mean I think it’s wrong for people to denounce the using these traits as stereotypes, rather than as one possible way to be autistic. It really bothers me when people are pressured to be like one type of autistic person, whether that type of autistic person matches who I am or not. Any set of traits or beliefs can be turned into a stereotype, whether there are real people who match it or not. And I really, really hate watching people being pressured to be something they’re not. It’s stifling and it becomes really nasty and ugly and divisive. And it’s not a “pissing contest” to point out when this is happening. Good grief. I point it out just as much when it’s traits that match me, as when it’s traits that don’t. It just happens that the portions of the autistic community I’ve been in the most recently, it’s traits I mostly don’t match. If I were talking about specific small portions of ANI in the late 1990s/early 2000s, it would have been a lot of traits I do match.

Weirdly enough, in that community, when it was traits that did match me, I felt just as pressured as I do in communities where it’s traits I don’t match. It’s hard to explain. I felt like I was pressured to adopt my own traits, but in a false manner that didn’t reflect who I really am. And that’s so very incredibly destructive that I will point it out no matter when I see it. I wish I could describe better what its like to experience pressure to adopt traits that actually match you. Because it’s actually sometimes more messed up than being pressured to adopt traits that don’t match you. Because it’s you, but it’s not you. And that is much more messed up than a situation where you can see the contrast.

So please don’t assume that people who are pointing this pressure out, are against people who actually match those traits. We are against a pressure to conform to certain traits, and that’s all you can say without knowing more about the persons specific beliefs. I am pretty sure the original poster is bothered by this in close to the same way I am. And it’s a real problem, it messes with people’s heads, it’s a pressure to be something you’re not, and people who aren’t like that get treated like dirt by some people. Whatever “like that” happens to be in whatever community it is. And I’ve seen so many variations on autistic community, all of which have done something like this, about a different set of traits each time, that I can’t possibly like it any better when I happen to match the traits being described, than when I don’t. And I’m pretty sure the OP would feel the same if they had seen as many variants on this as I have seen since 1998 or so. (Which is a lot. Because there are so many different subgroups of the autistic community that have existed by then. More than I can even remember at once. And it’s fucked up, seriously fucked up, no matter what set of traits people adopt as the stereotype of the day. And it shouldn’t be wrong to talk about this. It just shouldn’t. I’ve seen so much of it, too much, in 15 years of seeing different parts of autistic communities doing this to people. I can’t sit by and let it go unremarked upon.)

And yes. There was a time and place when everyone was trying to be Donna Williams, whether they were really like her or not, and it was very ugly, even for people who closely resembled her. It may still be going on in some places for all I know, but it was very intense. Now it seems more common for everyone to be trying to be Temple Grandin. That was going on back then in some places too. And it’s gotten to where people think there’s a “Donna Williams type of autistic person and a Temple Grandin type of autistic person”, when there’s dozens if not hundreds of types of autistic people, and in some times and places people have been pressured to be one or the other of those two types of people but not like themselves, not like any of the many other sorts of autistic people out there. Ugh I’m rambling a lot I just can’t stand this kind of insistence on conformity, it really harms people in serious ways. And I will always talk about it. I can’t not. Not after seeing the damage done to people who would not or could not be those things, to people who were those things but still experienced the pressure, to people who were not those things but felt forced to emulate them.