10:24pm May 15, 2014

Allistic

youneedacat:

When you say allistic to mean nonautistic…

What you’re actually saying, is that autistic means self-oriented and that its opposite means other-oriented. So you’re saying that autistic people are essentially self-centered, and that nonautistic people are other-centered.

You may not actually know that, because you may not know that aut means self and all means other. But that’s precisely how they came up with the word. I was there. As in, I was actually there, arguing against it, from the beginning of the time that the word was first thought up and propagated.

I understand, more than most people who talk about language on tumblr, that language moves on and that most people who use language aren’t thinking about its origins, or even aware of its origins.

But before you ever use the word allistic, remember how it was created. Remember that if the person had wanted to coin a word with less offensive connotations, then they could have. Then make your own decisions.

I will never, ever use it. Ever. Because I am extremely offended by the idea that autistic people are more self-oriented, self-centered, or selfish than nonautistic people, and that nonautistic people are therefore more other-oriented, other-centered, or aware of others. These are not generalizations that stand up to anything.

I’ll use autistic because it’s the only word we’ve got, and because practically nobody who uses it these days thinks too hard about where the word came from. But allistic is a neologism, it was coined for a purpose, and its connotations are entirely deliberate. You won’t ever catch me using that word, because I couldn’t agree less with what it means.

Fortunately nonautistic has been around longer than allistic has, means the same thing, and isn’t offensive, not to mention more people can tell what you’re actually trying to say.

Understand I’m not telling you what words you have to use. If you’re going to continue using allistic, that’s fine with me. I’m just explaining, in detail, why I not just don’t use the word allistic, but find the entire premise behind the word offensive.

Allistic people are liking and reblogging this uncritically of course I am not surprised :/

Like seriously, this whole tirade seems like thinly veiled bigotry and no one is picking up on it and that’s kinda fucked up. OP is literally using the the origins of words to discredit the meaning and usefulness of the term allistic. This is very similar to those assholes who try to excuse their bigotry by saying homophobia is okay because it’s an “irrational fear that can’t be helped.”

Oh please.

Allistic is a term that was created by and for the autistic community. Literal definitions should not be used to discredit terminology as such unless you’re the type of pedantic fuck who thinks oil is literally afraid of water. The term allistic is used to denormalise allism, which makes autism such an “abnormality”.

And on the whole self-oriented thing: why is that bad? Exactly why is it bad to spend time to yourself inside your own head? This line of thinking is often used by more….”socially normal” autistic folks to throw “self-oriented” autistics under the bus in order to get ahead.

This entire post is screwed up and fuck anyone who reblogs it especially if they’re allistic.

Most of this is only going to get an “okay whatever (eye roll)” response because that’s really all I can muster right now.

I’m autistic.

I was around when the word allistic was invented (by an autistic teen who approached and continues to approach words very differently than I do). I was there for the original conversations people had about it. It was very, very deliberately invented to contrast “self-oriented” (autistic people) vs. “other-oriented” (non autistic people). That’s why I’ve never used the word, never liked the word, and have argued against the word since the moment I first heard of it. Because this isn’t some sort of accidental thing that it just happened to mean. This meaning was incredibly deliberate and built into the word from the first day that it existed.

So I’m not someone who just came across people using this word recently, dug down until I figured out what all- stood for, and then engaged in a pedantic argument about why this doesn’t work. I’m someone who was there when the word was created, remembers why and how it was created, and has never liked it. I put this information out there so that other autistic people can make their own decisions about how to use it. I don’t tell anyone what words to use, with very rare exceptions, ever. Because I know what it’s like to only have certain words available, and the difficulty of changing your vocabulary. I do try to tell people the origins, so that they know, and so that they understand why I will never use this word. That I have actual reasons.

All this stuff about “denormalizing allism” came much, much later, when the word actually caught on. There were many years when practically nobody used the word allistic because nobody seemed to see much reason to, and many people disagreed with the meaning of the word. Then, suddenly, a couple years ago, everyone started using it at once, out of nowhere, and that’s when all these weird “denormalizing” things started being given as the reason for it. The original reason was just to have a word that meant the opposite of autistic, by inverting the meaning of ‘self’ and 'other’ – that was all, there was no big political or sociological meaning to it.

As for this:

“And on the whole self-oriented thing: why is that bad? Exactly why is it bad to spend time to yourself inside your own head? This line of thinking is often used by more….”socially normal” autistic folks to throw “self-oriented” autistics under the bus in order to get ahead. ”

Why it’s bad is because it’s not true, and it’s bad to spread untrue information around as if it is the truth. Autistic people are not more self-centered on the whole than non-autistic people. We do not, on the whole, spend more time inside our own heads than non-autistic people. In many ways, in fact, the opposite is true – non-autistic people are often trapped in a representation of the world that comes from within themselves (while they call that the outside world), while autistic people are often more capable of perceiving the outside world in a more direct way that is not mediated by our own ideas about it. Not universally, in either case, but it happens, and it’s important to notice that.

Autistic people tend, if anything, towards extremes. Some of us are far more self-oriented than normal, and some of us are far more other-oriented than normal, many of us flip between the two. Donna Williams describes these two states of mind as “all self, no other” and “all other, no self” and says that mono-track autistic people have a hard time getting out of either of those states. But even in that case, there’s a significant number of autistic people who are more other-oriented than nonautistic people are. Not less. And lots and lots of nonautistic people live their entire lives inside their own heads without stepping out… and lots and lots of autistic people (including, often, the ones most likely to be considered self-oriented) are some of the only people in the world capable of cognitively and perceptually stepping outside of our heads and seeing what’s out there beyond ourselves.

So it’s not that being self-oriented would be wrong, it’s just that it’s completely inaccurate, and that completely inaccurate stereotypes do a lot to make life hell for autistic people.

As for “socially normal”, I’m probably less “socially normal” by most outsiders’ standards than just about anyone having this conversation right now (no seriously, it’s common for people to look at me and assume there’s nobody in here), so the idea that I’m somehow this NT-passing person throwing people … just like myself … under the bus, by not wanting to be inaccurately stereotyped, is laughable.

I do happen to spend a good deal of time doing what other people would call being “in my own head” (although I’d call it in my own senses, which tell me things about outside my head far more directly than the senses of a nonautistic person, which tell them mostly what they expect to see), just to be able to function as much as I do. I have to have that time to do purely sensory activities and drop out of thinking altogether and things like that. This doesn’t make me more self-oriented than the average nonautistic person though. If it did, it wouldn’t be bad, it just… doesn’t.

But honestly it seems to me like you’ve come into this conversation with a rigid set of assumptions about the world, and none of this is likely to make much of a difference to you, because you’ve already decided who I am, what my motives are, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it. I might as well not exist.

I don’t like words that mostly exist to prop up stereotypes about how the world works. I think we can do better than words like that. But even so, even though I have a very strong opinion about this word, I would never tell another person not to use it. And I would never say that someone is wrong to use it just because I don’t like it. I operate way beyond the fringes of those kinds of social games (which does seem to have to do with my type of autism, although autism is obviously no barrier to playing many of these social games, for a lot of people). It’s nice out here, if you ever want to join me.

But put simply:

What’s bad about self-oriented vs. other-oriented as the definition of autistic vs. nonautistic, is that it is not true. It is not even slightly true. And the idea that it is true has damaged relations between autistic and nonautistic people since the beginning of the definitions of autism. It has damaged the ability to understand what autism really is. It has damaged the ability for autistic and nonautistic people to understand ourselves and each other. It’s not that being self-oriented would be bad, if that’s what autism was. But it’s not what autism is. The fact that some autistic people do some self-oriented things some of the time hardly makes it fact that autism = self-oriented while non-autism = other-oriented. You can come up with just as many examples, some of them far more compelling, that show the opposite trend. Autism is far more complicated to reduce to such a stereotype.

Imagine that the word “autistic” meant “can’t speak” and the word “allistic” meant “can speak”. Autistic people would object to that. Not because there aren’t autistic people who can’t speak, but because it’s a shitty definition of autism that promotes the stereotype that, among other things, autistic people who can speak aren’t autistic, or at best aren't as autistic as those who can’t. That would be a ridiculous way to define autism, and yet it might be a better one than self- vs. other-oriented. Especially since autism can cause at least as extreme other-orientedness as it can cause self-orientedness, when it causes either, at all.

At any rate, my objections to the word are because I was there when it started and I know what it was meant to do. And these high-minded academic-sounding descriptions of what it was meant to do, are not what it was meant to do. It was just meant to have a word for nonautistic, and the person who made the word liked the idea of using “other” vs “self” because that’s the way she likes to deal with language in general. There was no social change movement behind this, there was no academic-style rationalizing, it was just someone coming up with a word. All the academic jargon-laden descriptions of why such a word was necessary came almost a decade later.

Now I’m going to go off and live my life outside of your head because I don’t like the inside of your head very much. I will go do things alone with my senses the way I always do in order to deal with the discomfort of being pulled out of my world and verbally slapped around for having opinions I don’t actually have and being a person I’m actually not. And I’m going to go be extremely socially abnormal to the point people wonder if I even have a mind, because that’s me, too. All while “throwing under the bus” people who are probably more socially normal-looking than I am, all by having an opinion you don’t agree with. This is a very strange world you live in. I prefer the one I live in. Luckily the world I live in, while many people believe it to be “inside my head”, is actually all around me and very much not inside my head, much less inside my head than that of the average nonautistic person’s world.

See you. Or not. I think on balance I might rather not see you at all, given you’ve told everyone who reblogs me to fuck off, and managed to stand everything I say on my head (filled with baseless assumptions) until it makes no sense, which is the mark of someone it’s impossible to communicate with. Goodbye then. Use whatever words you want, I’ve never told you otherwise and could never control you even if I wanted that kind of control.

Notes: