as small as a world and as large as alone

4:30am April 3, 2014

dendriforming:

The degree to which the autistic community sweeps dissent under the rug terrifies me.

I use identity first language and have no fondness for Autism Speaks. In a lot of ways, I’m a Good Movement Autistic. However, I do know autistic people who do support AS. I disagree with them.

It scares me that we’re claiming that “just ask any autistic person” is enough, because this means that either really prominent people don’t realize how heterogeneous we are, or we’re silently agreeing that some people just don’t count. Not even enough to admit their existence.

Of course, when you decide that oppressed people can’t be wrong, you have to tangle yourself in knots like this. But it’s just so obvious that when people take this advice, quite a few of them are going to end up running into autistic people who support Autism Speaks. There are so many autistics outside this particular subset of our community. That foundation’s not going to hold. We need something more solid.

We already have it, though. There are so many sound, well-established arguments. If people would just stop asking us to throw them away in favor of “trust unquestioningly anything that any oppressed person says about oppression,’ we could maybe rely on those?

Not just sweeps dissent under the rug, but cuts dissenters off from a community they might really want to be a part of.  I’ve seen many instances where autistic people here on tumblr had one “wrong” opinion and were promptly bullied into silence.  Then everyone promptly forgot they ever existed, at least as evidenced by “There are no autistic people who disagree with us” sorts of things.

I’ve long advocated a very different way of doing things:  Instead of figuring out a large set of values that everyone is expected to agree with (and to hell with anyone who doesn’t), why not work together on things related to one value at a time so that people who share that value can join in, and people who don’t can do something else?

Want to work against cure?  Work against that with people who share your values.  Want to work for FC?  Work for that with people who share your values.  Want to work against Autism Speaks?  Work against that with people who share your values.  But don’t expect every single person you work with to agree with you in every single area at once.  This is not only more realistic, and more inclusive, it’s far more efficient to divide these tasks up and work on them one at a time.  You’ll also find the community you’ll have to work with will be much larger than that relatively small group of all-the-same-people who seem to be doing everything prominent right now (including deciding for the rest of us which views are valid and which aren’t).

But even if someone disagrees with everyone working on any of those issues, it shouldn’t mean they should be treated like they’re, at best, stupid or brainwashed.  That sort of thing really pisses me off.

Note:  There are reasons that people should, sometimes, be excluded from communities.  But most of the reasons people are using, are not that, at all.  (People should be excluded from communities when their presence in the community basically means that other people are going to be excluded.  By which I mean, habitual, repeat bullies and stalkers and that kind of thing.  The autistic community has a few of those who have been turning up for decades, and they manage to worm their way in every time people get too inclusive.  Once they are part of a community, their victims are de facto excluded from that community, and that’s wrong.)

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