6:50pm July 31, 2014

I wanted to respond to this separately.

youneedacat:

madeofpatterns wrote:

And there’s a particularly nasty variant of it around some parts of the FC/RPM community. Where people are like, there are two kinds of autism, the kind that makes you nonverbal and the kind that makes you unable to understand that other people are real. Which is horrible. We’re all people.

Yes I have run across this many, many times in many variants.

There’s one variant where the passivity of people who are most likely to end up needing FC/RPM is praised as a virtue. Like, everyone says, “They’re so forgiving of everything that was done to them, they’re never angry, they totally accept whatever has happened to them, they never express anything but gratitude.” And this is basically used to paint them as some kind of angelic saint.

I’ve actually had people say that I can’t be a nonverbal autistic person because I’m too angry. Mind you, I’m not that angry. I think I may even have a less than normal amount of anger. But having any anger at all, showing any human emotion other than beatific bliss and gratitude, is enough to get these sorts of people thinking you’re not nonverbal enough. Where nonverbal is a type of autistic person that they can project all of their saintly images onto because the person either can’t say anything back, or is too afraid of having their means of communication taken away, to say anything that contradicts the people that are facilitating them.

And nobody ever gets that.

Nobody ever gets that this is fear, not virtue.

That when your very means of communication is dependent on another person, you will do anything you can not to piss them off. Which includes playing into any role or stereotype that they want you to play into.

I’ve heard people say things like, “Nonverbal autistics are so happy, because they’re in touch with God. I have a nonverbal daughter and an Asperger son, and I can tell you it’s my Asperger son I worry about him committing suicide, not my daughter.”

Nonverbal people commit suicide all the time. The problem is, nobody ever sees it as suicide. They see it as “accidentally wandering into traffic”, “accidental drowning”, “accidentally wandering onto the train tracks right as the train was coming”, etc. And that last one is an actual example from a man whose communication system was taken away from him forever, and the next day he “wandered” onto the train tracks.

Taking away the idea that nonverbal people can be suicidally depressed is dangerous. Taking away the idea that we can be angry is dangerous. Taking away the idea that we can be assholes is dangerous.

I know a nonverbal woman with an ego the size of a planet, and her family pumps up her ego both in private and in public. She becomes nearly insufferable, she throws tantrums to get her way (I don’t mean meltdowns, I mean through typing). Everyone knows this about her but everyone’s too afraid to say so. Especially since she has this amazing ability to radiate an “angelic” aura. But really she’s got insecurity and gigantic ego written all over her. There’s nothing angelic about her, in fact she’s manipulative and can’t handle anything not going her way. In part because her family’s response to things going badly for her was to build an entire life around her, where the entire world has to revolve around her, and she has no idea what it’s like not to live that way, anymore.

But most people come away from interactions with her as if she’s some kind of saint or something. At least until they actually have to work with her on anything important. At that point the grandstanding and manipulation and ego crap become readily apparent. But still somehow she gets the reputation of an angel, because she’s nonverbal and she’s good at projecting an angelic glow.

And she’s not the only example she’s just the first that comes to mind. Nonverbal people are people. We’re the same as anyone else. That’s true whether we’re nonverbal sometimes or all the time, whether we type independently or use FC or RPM, or can’t type at all. There is nothing fundamentally different about our ego structures than that of anyone else. We are prone to all the same human failings as anyone else.

And it makes me angry when people, autistic or not, spread around that idea that we’re angelic somehow. Or that we’re fundamentally a different breed of autistic person from speaking autistic people. (Particularly weird for people who have gone from nonverbal to speaking or speaking to nonverbal.)

And I really hate the way this portrays verbal autistic people. The way it portrays them as lesser. The way it portrays them as not in touch with God (whether God exists or not doesn’t matter here, it’s a stereotype that’s very real). The way it portrays them as too angry, too human, not angelic enough, not passive enough. The way it portrays passivity as a good thing. The way it portrays them as more prone to emotional problems of all kinds — anger, depression, suicide. The way it portrays them as basically closer to human, but in a bad way. Not good enough, not as good, one foot in both worlds, in a bad way. People who will never understand the deep spiritual mysteries that only nonverbal people can understand. (And the equation of “spiritual” with “passive” makes me want to scream.) Too egotistical (as if I can’t name off the top of my head several FC users who are more egotistical than any verbal autistic person I’ve ever met).

There’s also the variant where people are like “nonverbal people only have motor skills problems, not cognitive communication problems” which causes them to be really nasty towards people whose cognitive problems they can’t write off as motor impairments.

Yes I’ve seen that too. It also lets them deny their own cognitive problems. You get the same thing among some people with cerebral palsy who have associated cognitive disabilities but try to pass as purely physically disabled, and tend to be nasty to people with more obvious cognitive disabilities.

I’ve also seen speaking autistic people who have far more problems functioning in some areas than some FC users do, and the FC user will be like “Well you’re high functioning so you should be able to handle this” even when the person has completely lost the ability to function in any way whatsoever. And same with staff associated with FC users, they tend to pick up the same attitude towards speaking autistic people (and to some extent people like me who don’t need FC usually in order to type). It’s like they see them/us as somehow having abilities across-the-board better than FC users do, even when we have very severe disabilities in areas where an FC user might actually have an area of strength, depending on the person.

Notes: