as small as a world and as large as alone

8:56am May 21, 2014

1. raposadanoite said: I followed some of the reactions to your post and I can’t understand what happened to get those responses.

I’m pretty sure it’s like this…

In certain circles (especially those known around here as “SJ”), some words are fair game, and it’s good to criticize those words, and talk ad nauseam about their origins and how bad they are, and how bad it is that people use them.  You can even talk about origins that aren’t real and don’t exist.  You should encourage people to avoid using those words as much as possible, tell them how easy it is to use different words, and in general try and force things so that nobody uses those words and everyone is offended by them, no matter what.

In those same circles, there are other words that are considered necessary words, and those words become sacred.  Those words are words that you not only are not supposed to criticize their origins, you’re not supposed to criticize them at all.  Criticizing them is seen as an oppressive act in and of itself.

In this case, what I’ve noticed so far is that a minority of people have decided that ‘allistic’ has the same pattern of meaning, history, purpose,  and origin as 'cisgender’.  It doesn’t, but people are assuming it does.  They assume I am trying to take away their community’s equivalent of 'cisgender’.  They also assume that I am objecting to 'allistic’ for the same underlying (often bigoted) reasons some cis people object to 'cisgender’.  And they get very, very offended by this.

Of course, in my book, it’s sort of like “Why is it that it’s okay for people to falsely claim that 'stupid’ has an origin that involves intellectual disability (or  a bunch of other things it doesn’t have an origin as), but not okay for me to accurately point out that 'allistic’ has an origin that calls autistic people self-centered and nonautistic people other-centered and enshrines that false dichotomy into language?”

But the 'why’ is because this community believes that it’s necessary to have a specific word that means nonautistic, because that way it 'normalizes’ autism in a way that 'nonautistic’ doesn’t.  Since 'nonautistic’ doesn’t 'normalize’ autism, some even find it so offensive that they are asking everyone to stop using it, which is, to me, way beyond the pale.  Because you don’t just casually ask autistic people and other people with language disabilities to stop using a word without a really damn good reason beyond something.  And this is not a good enough reason, it’s not even a reason, period, and that offends me more than any word could.

But to me this whole thing of “Let’s examine language that SJ people don’t like, and fail to examine language that SJ people do like, and flame anyone who doesn’t like us examining the first set of language or does like us examining the second set of language” is just really, really irritating.  (And I’m only using SJ as a shorthand for something I have no other term for, sorry to anyone and everyone who uses the term 'social justice’ and means it.)

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