9:57am June 10, 2014

➸ Cousins, ACs, autistics and cousins, autistic cousins, etc.

youneedacat:

We used to have a term in the autistic community, we called it ‘cousins’.

It started when Xenia Grant was talking to a guy who had hydrocephalus and had a lot in common with autistic people, but was not autistic. She took a look at him and happily exclaimed, “Cousin!”

(I like to keep track of…

Yeah, we definitely know those “cousins.” It’s why the one study group we ever had that actually worked out, was entirely composed of disabled people. This included everything from people with more “typical” learning disorder diagnoses, to autistic people, to people with brain damage. (We were talking to the guy in the group who had brain damage, at one point, and it turned out that a lot of the things he had trouble with, and a lot of the strategies he used for remembering things, were surprisingly similar to ours. And I don’t think anyone will conclude this, but just in case anyone tries to, we’re *not* saying autism is a form of brain damage or anything— just that from what we’ve seen, and things we’ve heard from friends who are both autistic and have brain damage, both of them can affect your sensory processing in ways that are often made worse and alleviated by similar things.)

One other thing we’ve noticed over the years, moderating various communities, but don’t usually talk about unless someone asks about it explicitly, is that there are *a lot* of autistic people who experience some form of plurality. This isn’t to say all autistic people, definitely— we know some autistic people, and cousins, who thought they might be plural but eventually decided it didn’t fit them after all, and we respected their decisions about it— but there seemed to be a much higher proportion than random chance would suggest; a correlative relationship, at the very least. (It’s been almost twenty years since we took stats, so I can’t vouch that we’re using that word correctly.)

What we always took from that was “People should pay attention to this. This is a meaningful statistical overlap. This might suggest something very interesting about neurodiversity in general and why there are anecdotal reports of multiplicity seeming to run in some families.” But apparently, there were a lot of people who simply interpreted it as “Everyone wants to self-diagnose with trendy mental illnesses! Let’s laugh at them! LULZ!” To the point where, in some communities, we saw people making comments like “I think terms like autism, Asperger’s and multiplicity are just code words for evasion of responsibility,” like everyone was toting them around as some sort of trendy matched set. (Everyone loved the term “evasion of responsibility,” in some places. They loved it so much you’d wonder why they didn’t marry it. They were never specific about what exact responsibilities were being evaded, oddly. The closest they seemed to get was throwing around vague insinuations that “people use it as an excuse to be rude to others and claim they can’t help it.”)

Oh, and these weren’t always mainstream communities or snark communities either. Some of these comments were made in places like otherkin communities, made up of people who were at least as shunned by the mainstream as AC people are. We saw people in otherkin communities who reacted angrily when plurals came into their communities and told them they did not allow people with mental illnesses in here and to go away and “get help,” and people in pagan communities where various posters regularly said they were doing things like casting spells or communicating with gods, who reacted this same way to both otherkin and plurals. (Talking of throwing people under the bus, again. There are some people in here who would tell you they do those things inworld, as they subjectively experience it, anyway, but they’re also aware that even a lot of “mainstream” religious people regard such things as delusional.)

The thing about Tumblr social justice… we’ve also seen it destroy a lot of concepts like the ‘cousin’ idea that have been massively helpful to us and some of our friends, create an atmosphere in which such things couldn’t even be proposed, lest you be accused of appropriating another group’s particular experience of disability. Because apparently people believe that separatism is the only way to protect communities from “accidental appropriation,” ignoring the messiness of how much a lot of disability or difference categories can overlap in real life. More cynically, some of us think that the reason for the existence of the “walls” is that when you have a disagreement or are angry at someone else, it lets you stand behind them flinging canned accusations of how of course you’d say that because you have fill-in-the-blank privilege, hiding behind ideologies and prefabricated insults and arguments instead of just talking things out like two human beings having a disagreement, in a situation that can’t be dealt with by simply plugging in names and types of privilege and sticking them into a prefabricated argument.

We’re not immune to the mentality, either— the practically phobic attitude of “omg, am I appropriating this other person’s experience?” That “cousin!” phenomenon isn’t always just about neurological stuff. One of our close friends is a system whose physical body is blind, and even though they’re not autistic, to their knowledge, we get that “cousin” feeling when talking to them, too. Actually, there are times when we’ve ended up mutually going “Wow, that sounds so much like what we experience, but I’m kind of afraid to say it, I really hope it doesn’t sound like I’m trying to appropriate your experience of blindness/autism by saying this sounds a lot like how I perceive some things” at each other. Even though this paranoia of standing around going “omg omg omg am I appropriating your experience if I say this” shuts down so much productive discourse. From talking with them, we found out that we often understand dialogue in movies better if we watch them with our eyes closed, and can often get a better idea of what’s going on from listening to the sound effects than from trying to make visual sense out of special-effect-laden movies where lots of things and shapes are flying around very quickly.

Anyway… it’s a concept we wish more people would think in terms of nowadays, too (and we remember when it was used more regularly), and that fewer people were standing around constantly at arm’s length from each other, afraid to discuss the similarities in their experiences frankly, out of fear that “my disability isn’t the same as yours and I don’t experience exactly what you do, so I might overstep my boundaries/appropriate your experience/etc if we talked too much about the similar ways we’ve experienced various things.”

-caffeine makes us crazy switchy