as small as a world and as large as alone

11:21pm June 23, 2014

chavisory:

youneedacat:

zanagb:

youneedacat:

zanagb:

madeofpatterns:

another reason “allistic” bothers me

it doesn’t leave a lot of room for the concept “cousin”

THATS THE POINT. THE WORD WAS MADE UP AS SATIRE FOR THOSE “NON AUTISTIC” OF COURSE IT WONT ALLOW THE CONCEPT OF COUSINHOOD

It wasn’t made up as satire.

It was made up by an autistic girl who, at the time, seriously believed that it would be good to have a word for nonautistic that reflected a difference between autistic (self-istic) and all-istic (other-istic), as in, that autistic people were focused on ourselves while nonautistic people were focused on others.

There was nothing satirical about it.

She meant it.  She was serious.  I was there.

Right now i can’t seem to find the quote dating a copule years back that was contained inside a whole bunch of text being satirical about how neurotypical people treated autistic people. but since i can’t find the quote and thus i lack the proof to validate my argument. We will leave it like that.

Ohh you know that might explain some things.

Because the word was made up circa like… 2003.

But it didn’t get popularized at all until a couple years ago.

If there was a widely read satirical piece that included the word ‘allistic’ in it, that came out a few years ago, then that would explain why it suddenly exploded and everyone was using it but nobody could remember where it came from.

Yes, that sequence of events makes sense.

Because I had been under the impression—apparently wrongly—that the word was coined, if not satirically, then at least with a sense of being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Like “Oh, they made up a word whose roots convey a hugely inaccurate idea about who we are and proceed to define everything about us through that lens?  Okay then, IF we were gonna play that game, here’s what the word for the other kind of people would be, using an equally faulty line of reasoning.”

Because I had seen it starting about 3 years ago, in very limited, mostly not entirely serious contexts.  I googled it, actually, and think I came up with, like, 5 whole references.

There was a really good blog for a little while called “Not Quite Allistic,” by a teenage girl trying to figure out whether she was autistic, but it disappeared.  I still wonder about her and hope she’s doing well.

Then I saw it getting picked up, under the same line of reasoning that gives rise to “cis” as the complimentary term to “trans.”  Because just like it’s not fair to define trans people in opposition to “normal” people, so with autistic.  People argued for a value-neutral descriptor that didn’t imply that non-autistic people were the “normal” default.

Only, then it wasn’t a neutral descriptive term at all.  It was something to spit.  The way people used it really defeated what its supposed purpose and value was.  I never had a conversation which it didn’t muddy instead of clarify communication  Or in which I didn’t have to start the conversation explaining why it wasn’t supposed to be an insult, everyone was just using it that way.

No it was coined pretty serious, by Ettina Shee.  She has a unique approach to words.  Her basic idea is…

Like if she sees people saying high and low functioning, her approach is “The problem isn’t that people use functioning labels, the problem is that people see low-functioning as bad.  I use functioning labels but it’s okay because I don’t assign them value judgements.”

Recently, I had an argument with her in which I was trying to say that I hadn’t “found hope” (in a specific way that has to do with disability melodramas) by taking dexamethasone.  And she argued that no in fact I had found hope because now I wasn’t going to be dying soon, so I had a hope of living a normal life so, technically, I had found hope.  I found this really irritating, because by “found hope” I was trying to convey a very specific sense those words are used by nondisabled people when telling stories about disabled people.  She, on the other hand, kept asking me why I wanted the words “found hope” to be controlled by nondisabled people.  The conversation went in circles until it went nowhere.

So she is very much the sort of person who would say “There’s nothing wrong with being self-centered, that’s what autistic means, is self-centered.  So I just came up with allistic, which means other-centered.  The only way you can find anything wrong with this is if you see there’s something wrong with being self-centered.”

I’ve had, and witnessed, at least ten different conversations with her that went along those lines, with various terminology.  So she’s quite serious about thinking that way, and she seems to have real trouble with people who say “It’s not that being self-centered is bad, it’s that it’s an inaccurate way to describe autistic people” or “It’s not that being low-functioning is bad, it’s that functioning labels literally don’t make sense as a way of classifying autistic people.”

So it’s like… a very longstanding pattern for the person who actually coined the term.  Generally, when confronted with terminology that other people find really offensive, her response will be “But there’s nothing wrong with being _______, so what’s the problem?”  Or something along those lines.

She has a blog at abnormaldiversity.blogspot.com that’s still going as far as I know.

(And yes, she knows how annoyed I was at our last conversation.  I’m not trying to talk about her behind her back, I just want to explain how she approaches these things, so nobody’s surprised by it.  Because it’s definitely a habitual way she approaches this stuff.)

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