12:25pm July 1, 2014

OMFG this is weird as weird can be.

youneedacat:

So in 1999, I coined the terms ‘autistic supremacism’ and ‘aspie supremacism’.

And now I’m reading this guy using the words ‘autistic supremacists’ in this Kindle book he’s written that appears to be a lengthy diatribe against the idea of ever listening to anything any autistic person says about autism ever.

And it’s just weird.

(Also he seems to hate ASAN. I’m not 100% fond of ASAN myself, but he claims that the board members secretly admit to not being autistic, and all sorts of other stuff I suspect to be either bullshit or gross misinterpretation. He never mentions ASAN by name, but it took two minutes of web searching to figure out who he meant because of a blog post he’d written about ASAN’s stance on an autism registry. Which by the way surprised me — I’d have hoped ASAN would be against an autism registry, but apparently they worked to get one in place? Unless he’s as wrong about that as he is about a lot of things.)

Basically his stance is that you don’t know if an autistic person is actually autistic, or “self-diagnosed”, or a “wannabe”. But that even if an autistic person is actually autistic (by which he means accurately diagnosed… he thinks lots of autistic people are misdiagnosed as autistic, too, and he seems to think that anyone who’s had more than one type of autism diagnosis is misdiagnosed, which is plain weird), that’s no reason to actually listen to us either.

And he has this weird fixation on whether autistic people have synesthesia or not. Like, as an actual question people should ask themselves about every autistic writer they come across.

This is really weird shit. Fortunately it cost me less than a dollar, or I wouldn’t be reading it.

Any of my ASAN readers should be aware that he admits to interacting with ASAN both as himself and as a sockpuppet, and finding it funny that ASAN was warning his sockpuppet about him. Or something weird about that.

http://www.amazon.com/Autistic-Authors-Autistics-Autism-Literature/dp/1482660040/

He seems to think he knows more about autistic communities than he does. Like he acts like he’s been around forever, but he’s only been around since Aspergia. This gives him very little insight into the roots of autistic self-advocacy, but he claims to have a lot of insight in that regard. And he keeps claiming to have all this inside knowledge of autistic people behind the scenes gleefully describing how they’re not really autistic but they just get along with autistic people really well and pass themselves off as autistic. Which does not ring remotely true. Although it could be that he’s grossly distorting things people have actually said, or exaggerating from a small handful of people.

I do have some concern about his apparent sockpuppeting and attempts to get into ‘high places’ in advocacy organizations in order to get dirt on people, though. That sort of behavior irritates the crap out of me.

I guess I’m not as offended as I could be, because honestly it’s hard to take his viewpoint all that seriously. I’m more regarding it as a curiosity. But then on his list of things to ask yourself about whether an autistic person has this or that trait or not, is “Are they an autistic supremacist?” and I just have to laugh because I made up that term (back before Aspergia, that’s for sure), it’s mine, and his use of it just… it’s a WTF moment.

But I am concerned for my friends who are involved in ASAN, that they should know about this guy, and should not take him into confidence on anything. Because he may not name ASAN outright, but it took me two minutes to work out which self-advocacy organization he was referencing and it would be just as easy for anyone else. And he might be going by other names, online at least.

It doesn’t sound as if he takes any of y’all’s privacy seriously — he doesn’t mention names, but he says a lot of details about people. Like someone who kept going back to get diagnosed with autism and kept getting diagnosed with bipolar instead, that kind of thing.

It’s also weird how he keeps talking about how some purported autistics “may have a criminal record”. Okay… some people have a criminal record. How I think of them depends on what kind of criminal record they have and why. And it has nothing to do, at all, with how I see their connection to autism. Because autistic people can be criminals just like nonautistic people can. Having a criminal record isn’t proof someone’s fake or something, and it doesn’t even mean they can’t be trusted.

It’s just very weird to me, how much this guy cares, about this little world of autistic people, and autistic authors in particular. I mean I stumbled on his book looking for autistic authors because I collect books by autistic authors, and he’d written this thing about autistic authors. I also got his Kindle book about autistic factions. It should be entertaining if nothing else.

But seriously be aware this guy is out there, don’t give him personal information about your diagnostic history, sure as hell don’t tell him anything that he can twist into “you’re not autistic you just like hanging out with autistic people because you’re socially awkward too haha”. And this is a warning specifically to ASAN people, because he seems to have something against you.

(I’m heavily ambivalent about ASAN, but I would never do something like this to them, ever. And I would distrust anyone who did. There’s being cautious about an organization you don’t 100% trust, and there’s… whatever the fuck he’s doing. If you’re interested, his Kindle books don’t cost a lot of money. But they’re mostly rambling on the same theme over and over, at least the first one is. Like he keeps saying the same thing, in different ways, without giving much information of actual substance. But I don’t trust him.)

But his actual theme, throughout this entire book, is “Don’t listen to autistic people, even when they really are autistic, because they’re not qualified to know anything about autism.” He also seems to think that real autistic people don’t have meltdowns often or…. IDK WTF.

Wow… I’m kind of gobsmacked on two different levels.

One of them is that people even do this. It’s not so much “shocked” as “I never seem to hit a point at which I stop being disgusted at seeing human beings act like this, even when other people get jaded to it.”

The other is how much the autistic community has in common with the plural community in some ways.

Like outsider concern trolls who get into our communities, who act like they’ve been around forever but in actuality saw, at best, the tail end of things that had been established years before they came in on it, and thought that what they got in on was “the beginning.” (Or pretend they think that even if they know better, for malicious/libelous reasons.) And anyone who was really around in earlier days could tell they knew nothing about the earlier history of the community.

Like harping on and on about “self-diagnosis” and “the unreliability of self-diagnosers.” (And BTW, complaints about people self-diagnosing themselves as having multiple personalities go at least back to the publication of “The Three Faces of Eve,” and that’s *just* in the psych community. Corbett Thigpen, who co-wrote the book, wrote this huffy rant about it.) Like admitting to sockpuppeting to get close to people and then actin like there’s all this “dirty laundry” the community is trying to hide, and saying that it’s dangerous. Like use of little invalidating descriptions like “regarding it as a minority lifestyle.” Like not naming specific communities but when you study their language closely enough, you realize who they’re referring to.

(Which I regard as being very dirty pool, btw. If you think a community or organization is dangerous, NAME IT DIRECTLY. That way, readers can go and check it out for themselves and see if they agree with the author’s conclusions; and if on the off-chance it’s truly dangerous, they can avoid it. My conclusion is that they don’t want people to be able to do this, because of the chance that people might see something that led them to disagree with the author. Even if they don’t do a good job of hiding who the group really is.)

And like acting as though things which have been standard in many places for decades, like referring to people as autistics, are a NEW WEIRD SELF-DIAGNOSIS THING. (Or, for that matter, referring to people as multiples— that one dates *at least* back to the early 80s, some professional journalists used it then, and to the best of my knowledge, the people who originally started using it were *doctors,* as shorthand for “multiple personalities”— the wording they used was “s/he is a multiple personality,” and that got contracted to “s/he is (a) multiple,” before the diagnoses of MPD or DID officially existed. Also, plural as an umbrella term existed at least as far back as Sanctuary, but I’ve seen some people think Pavilion invented it. I wish we *could* take credit for having invented a word that useful when the group did so little, but it was around quite some years before us.)

And coming up, at the end of all that historically inaccurate mess, with “Don’t listen to these people; even if they really do have DID, that just means they’re too mentally ill to be reliable sources.”

-S./Tamsin (holy shit we got some co-fronting now)

(…also, morbid curiosity: does the author pull stuff about saying he won’t name specific groups or people directly because They are organized and powerful and They will come after you if you tell the truth, blah blah blah?)

Regarding the morbid curiosity, I don’t remember seeing that. I think he might actually be worried about being sued for libel or something if he’s too specific, because a lot of the things he’s saying really could be legally actionable if he wasn’t so damn vague about it.

And yes everything you’re saying about the stuff in the plural community… where the fuck do these concern trolls COME from? Like why was this guy even on Aspergia to begin with, he doesn’t claim to be autistic himself so why was he even there? There weren’t a lot of nonautistic people on Aspergia.

He also has this really annoying habit of saying, every time he says that autistic people might think something, he’ll say “autistics, and posers, and wannabes” or something like that, like every single time, he never just says “autistics”.

He claims to have lots of autistic friends and that they’re all super functional in real life and that he’s skeptical of the autistic people online who have meltdowns and stuff because he thinks we’re just copying meltdowns from stuff we’ve seen on TV. (Heh, I wonder if he thinks people are copying my meltdowns, given that I had a massive one on national TV. :-P)

He also claims that some of the “wannabes” have stalked autistic people in ways that sound like how my stalker stalked me, except my stalker is to my knowledge autistic (honestly I don’t care if she’s autistic or not, even though I do know she’s lied about disability-related stuff pretty blatantly at times).

And it’s just…

The thing is everything he says in any of these books I’m reading (of which I’ve only got two and that’s all I plan to read) is basically along the lines of, “Don’t trust anything unless you got it from a peer-reviewed journal or a board-certified autism expert. Nobody else knows anything worth saying about autism, and you shouldn’t listen to autistic people, even real autistic people, because they don’t know anything real about autism either.” Which seems like he’s wasting a lot of words and time and energy just to say that a million times over.

Notes: