8:11pm May 6, 2014

➸ There is not one autistic community.

some-of-the-patterns:

youneedacat:

I’m just talking about the English speaking world here. Outside it there is even more variety.

Online alone, there are tons of different mailing lists, web forums, blogging circles, and social networking groups by and for autistic people. Some of…

“This autistic community, at this point in time, self selects for autistic people with certain traits. Not everyone in this autistic community has those traits, but more so than in some other autistic communities, and sometimes it’s a vast majority.

* Able to use words

* Able to, at this point in their lives, speak, much of the time

* Well educated

* White

* Does not want a cure

* Prefers autistic person over person with autism

* Normal to high IQ

* (often) good with abstract intellectual stuff

* what Donna Williams would call more “interpretive” than “sensing”, and if not, at least able to shift into interpretive mode to interact

* Better at words (text at least) than body language

* Better at reading and writing then understanding speech and speaking

* Lots more stuff, including both specific autistic traits, specific life experiences, and specific beliefs about the world.”

I am all these things (well, with the possible exception of the “specific life experiences” and “specific beliefs about the world”, since I don’t know exactly which beliefs and life experiences youneedacat means here)… and yet, somehow, I’m not really part of (or don’t think of myself as part of) “the autistic community”. I mean, I do have links to it - I’ve been to Autscape 3 times (although I’m not sure if I’d go again), and just recently I went to an autism research event that was organised by people who are well-known “autistic community” people. But there are norms in that community that I don’t relate to (the expectation of everyone being a certain sort of “nerd”/”geek”, who understands the inner workings of computers, and who only wants to socialise in certain “geeky” ways, for example), and also I actually don’t find it any easier to get on with other autistic people than with non-autistic people (in some cases it’s actually harder, because certain types of difficulties get doubled rather than eliminated).

(In fact, the category of people I probably get on best with, if it’s at all possible to generalise, is people who are not autistic but not quite NT either… and/or people who are perhaps “neurotypical” but who are disabled in other ways that gives them experience of being outside the social “mainstream” - I think this goes for some non-disabled queer and/or trans people as well.)

I dunno, I thought I had more of a point about “autistic community” there. But yeah… I am autistic and that’s something I am very out about and an important part of my identity, but I still don’t really feel like “autistic community” really “works” for me. It’s too narrow, or something like that. I strive for community based around radical acceptance (as opposed to “tolerance”) of difference, but I don’t just want it to be around any *one* category of difference.

Interesting…

I’m not good at finding communities that ‘feel like home’ – some people seem to be 'coming home’ all the time, and that’s an experience I often actively distrust in myself.

But if there’s any community that’s ever felt like home to me, it’s the developmental disability community – or rather the best parts of that community, since there isn’t just one community there, either.

And part of the reason for that is that the community isn’t based around your traits. Like, yes, it’s for people who have been or could be categorized as having any of a range of different diagnosis. But there’s a community norm that says your diagnosis isn’t important, that who you are is important, that being a person is important, that diversity is important.

Which also tends (where I’ve been anyway) to translate into a lot more diversity. There’s disability diversity, racial and ethnic diversity, class diversity… and none of this because of some kind of abstract commitment to diversity and bean-counting and tabulating, but rather because of a commitment to people being people, on a deep level, on a way that doesn’t tend to result in certain ways of shutting people out that are common in a lot of communities.

And while it is a community based around disability, and while disability is an issue that is taken quite seriously within the community, there’s this idea that disability doesn’t quite… matter… in the way that it does in the rest of the world. It’s a community with a large number of people who’ve experienced having our humanity completely submerged under a disability label, and that’s where the idea that we’re people first becomes so important. And when done well, this doesn’t mean ignoring what makes us different from each other in terms of disability, but it does mean putting our common humanity first and letting the diversity come from that shared central theme. I’m not doing a good job describing it, especially since it doesn’t fit well with most people’s preconceptions of… anything.

What disability experience is shared, isn’t so much a diagnostic experience as an experience of being put into a more general social category and treated certain ways based on that category membership.

And when it comes to diagnostic categories, we pretty much span every type of disability, so we’re already "cross-disability” without even trying to be. (The most commonly described developmental disabilities are cerebral palsy, autism, intellectual disability, epilepsy, childhood brain injury/stroke/etc., fetal alcohol syndrome, spina bifida, and some other things. Sometimes also blindness or deafness or chronic illness, especially if it comes attached to any of the other disabilities by way of a syndrome or common point of origin. That already spans physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities, chronic illnesses, chronic pain, and some things that have some elements of psychiatric disabilities. Not that everyone in those broader categories is developmentally disabled, but that developmental disabilities encompass some things that fall under, or incorporate elements of, every one of the major disability categories. So, instant cross-disability situation.)

So if I had to pick a disability community, would be the DD community every time. It’s been more welcoming to me than any community I’ve been in. It has more diversity of every kind, and that diversity comes about in a natural, organic sort of way that feels real and not put-on for show. We tend to share certain common experiences in how we are treated by the world, even when we don’t share common body-based experiences of disability. And the lack of common body-based experiences of disability, and the lack of emphasis on that as the important part, is a plus for me, not a bad thing. It’s a place I can go to and while I may experience some bad things (every community has its faults), I’ve always felt like my disability status and life experiences make me seamlessly blend in, in a way that I don’t blend in anywhere else in the world, and that alone makes it, some rare times, the most beautiful group social/political experiences I’ve ever had.

And the mainstream autistic community is pretty much not any of those things that make the best parts of the DD community amazing.