3:46am June 7, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: Stop saying "neurotypical"

youneedacat:

goldenheartedrose:

eyehaightewe:

What the hell is “typical”, anyway? When you call certain people “typical”, you are holding people up to a standard and implying that those who do not meet that standard are “atypical” or “abnormal”.

Say “allistics” instead of “neurotypicals”, please.

And I’m never, ever going to say allistic in my life. Ever. And that’s besides the fact it doesn’t even mean the same thing as neurotypical. Besides the fact that my brain just won’t use allistic in ordinary sentences, there is the fact that I remember who coined it and why (way back before most people even heard of it, it was just one person trying hard to popularize it) and I hate the implications of allistic, they’re even more insulting to autistic people than the word neurotypical is to anyone. Not that I care, you can use words without caring about their origins, and I’m not saying other ppl shouldn’t use allistic, but I remember that one and I reject the word as totally as my brain rejects me using it.

My brain rejects it too. Not saying I condemn people for using it either. It’s just that my brain can’t handle it.

Also, the problems with making rigid changes in what words are okay and not okay every so often aren’t just philosophical ones. It’s that I actually don’t feel safe being friends with people who don’t understand that my brain can’t always keep up with what’s now considered the best language, or sometimes rejects the “new best” words entirely and can’t use them at all. That sometimes the “wrong,” old words will slip out of me. That my brain is more comfortable saying I was born female than that I’m FAAB or AFAB (again, not condemning anyone for using those, just saying what’s true for my brain). And when I try to find ways around using words or acronyms my brain is uncomfortable with, often it leads to me coming up with ones that hurt my brain just as much if not more so because I have to “cover every base” in term of “showing I have the correct understanding.” So it ends up being stuff like “endocrinologically typical person with XX karyotype”… no, can’t do it, just can’t.

I want and need my friends to be people who understand that if I say “biologically female” it’s shorthand for a whole bunch of stuff that Western culture is just starting to get its collective head around, not that I’m suggesting trans people are made of silicon or something so similarly inane I can’t believe anyone would really take that home as the message.

And the problem is that some places seem to be filled with people who think you’re some kind of… evil, or at least a voice to be destroyed and silenced, an enemy they must fight against if you can’t control how your brain works in this manner. Because they only take the words and not the things that are working under the words, which is where the majority of my understanding is taking place.

Words don’t create respect. Identity understanding does. But if someone thinks all identities and all thinking and everything is in words, there’s never going to be any understanding between me and them.

(And it also bothers me for reasons I can’t describe in words right now that so many people say “you should use this word not this one” because it’s what everyone else is saying, without actually even knowing where the word came from. I know where the word allistic came from originally but I really wonder how many people who think it should always be used know.)