9:06am July 6, 2013

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

rayvenloaf:

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.

If you don’t mind and are feeling up to it, could you explain the origins of allistic, or point me to a resource? I’m unaware of it’s negative aspects and interested, as I had quite liked allistic.

Allistic was created by an autistic girl as an opposite to autistic.

Aut- means self.

All- means other.

So it just seemed to me to be reinforcing the idea that autistic = self-oriented and non autistic = other-oriented. Which isn’t in the slightest bit accurate.

And the girl actually liked that connotation because she believed it was real. (She tended, IMO, to believe a lot of stereotypes were real. And would defend them in terms of “it’s okay that (this group of people) are (that stereotype)“ rather than acknowledging that the stereotype wasn’t even based in reality to begin with.)

And… it just left a really bad taste in my mouth at the time and I never got over it.

And that’s besides the fact that it’s a word my brain refuses to accept on a more cognitive vocabulary type of level.

But my objections to the actual meaning were that autistic people aren’t any more self-oriented than nonautistic people, so other-oriented isn’t a good word for the opposite of autistic. Combined with my problems with the way that the originator of the term approached lots of other disability stereotypes in the exact same manner, cheerfully accepting their reality. So it was not that she just came up with a prefix that was the opposite of aut-, she also meant it, and meant so many other things I disagreed with.

YMMV of course.

No references because this happened back when most autistic communities took place on mailing lists, not blogs.

I have no idea what portion of the autistic community took her idea and started using it lots and migrated to tumblr until practically everyone here uses it, because I’m not part of whatever that community was and was surprised to see a little used ten year old term suddenly flare into life.

Notes: