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2:42am September 3, 2014

madeofpatterns:

intelligentairhead replied to your post “grumpy stick”

I worry a lot that I might do this unknowingly. I try to evaluate the things I say and post, but I can’t help but worry that I might have messed up a couple of times

I probably wasn’t talking about you.

I’m being grumpy about this kind of thing:

  • someone posts about inability to do a particular thing
  • someone else is like “But I’m autistic and I can do that thing! You’re just making excuses!”

This happens a lot. Particularly if the thing is something SJ ideology says that all good people can do without trouble, but not just then.

This.  This.  This.

One example that I run into over and over, in disability rights contexts, frustrates me a good deal because it’s something that I need.  It’s something that I need.  But it’s not something I can do for others.

That is:

In order to understand something someone has written, I need it to be written in fairly plain language, with uncomplicated sentence structures.  And I need it to be shorter than a certain length.  With no long walls of text.  I grew up with severe receptive language disabilities due to autism and hyperlexia.  I still have those receptive language difficulties.

Funny thing about hyperlexia, though?  In classic hyperlexia, a person’s expressive abilities – at least superficially – far outstrip our receptive abilities.  That means we can write things with a larger vocabulary than we can read them.  It means we can write using sentence structures that we can’t comprehend if we read them.  It means we can write things that are really long, too long for us to be able to comprehend when we try to read them.

But there are other people.

People who have only the receptive language issues, and not that imbalance between receptive and expressive.

Who believe that anyone capable of writing “eloquently” is capable of doing things like writing summaries of long posts.  Mind you, I do try to write summaries when I can, just like I try to write image descriptions when I can.  But “when I can” is not anywhere near even 50% of the time.  Most of the time, I cannot write a summary of a long post, and I cannot make a long post shorter and more accessible.

And people blow up at me about this, they accuse me of deliberately making things inaccessible to them, they get extremely bent out of shape.  I have cried myself to sleep more times than I can count due to interactions with people like that.  And they don’t care.  To them, if they need something, then everyone else is capable of giving them what they need.  And if they can do something and they share a label with someone, then that other person must be able to do it too.

Never mind that there are many types of autism, and many types of hyperlexia.  There are types of hyperlexia that don’t come with any language impairment at all.  There are types of autism that barely come with language impairment.  There are types of both that don’t result in long-winded writing styles.

And yes – for me, my long-winded writing style is not a choice.  It, too, is a function of a fucking language disability.  

But nobody cares.  Because to them, what it works like is…

Someone needs something.

Everyone else should do what they need.

If anyone is not doing what that person needs, then it’s by choice.

Even if it’s not by choice, they’re still a horrible person for not finding a way around it or not apologizing every time they write anything at all or just for fucking existing in the way they are and making conflicting access needs a thing in a world that doesn’t want to acknowledge that kind of complexity.

Also, did you notice how it’s a terrible sin for someone with a condition where pronoun problems are part of the diagnostic criteria, to have pronoun problems that sometimes result in misgendering, but it’s not a terrible sin for those same people to turn around and misgender anyone who disagrees with them?

Because assuming I’m cis is misgendering me.  Giving me a gender is misgendering me, because I’m genderless.  Cis people all have genders.  Therefore calling me cis is misgendering me.  

And it’s far more hurtful to me, far more triggering, far more awful, far closer to making me want to cry myself to sleep, for trans people to assume I’m cis when I disagree with them on something, than it is for either cis or trans autistic people to accidentally call me “he” or “she” (or “you” or “me”, because autistic pronoun problems do not stop at gender) instead of “sie”.  This is my own community turning their back on me because my friends and I are disabled in a way they can’t handle (and they think their needs should always take priority, instead of looking for a solution that would allow everyone to be happy, so they just try the bulldozer approach instead of just having a conversation about “How can we solve this problem to everyone’s satisfaction?”), and that cuts like a fucking knife.

I read a post that said that the people who defended autistic people with pronoun problems were (a) cis and (b) disregarding the existence of autistic trans people.  Hello, autistic genderless person right here and you just misgendered me for having different political views than yourself, how the fuck is that okay when someone’s brain glitches are not okay?  Oh and the good friend I wrote about, the autistic one who can’t use neologism pronouns so has to call me “she”?  She’s not cis either.

FFS.

It is far more hostile, far more offensive, far more cutting, far more damaging, to assume genderless people are cis because you disagree with them, than it is to stick your hand into the pronoun hat and pull out the wrong one by mistake.  It just is.  But apparently grabbing the wrong word out of the hat is ‘misgendering’ and actual misgendering isn’t misgendering at all.  And mind you, I’ve seen this happening since I first arrived here in 2010 – autistic people who hadn’t even heard of preferred pronouns, getting blasted from all sides for accidentally using the wrong pronoun on someone they didn’t even know.  And it made me think tumblr was a place I would always have to watch my step, that was my introduction to tumblr.

I am the fucking grumpy stick too.  (And I will leave this conversation if it turns hostile enough to create stress, because severe adrenal insufficiency + the kind of stress my body and emotions are already under right now + even more stress that amounts to “you don’t have the community you need to have, they’re turning your back on you because you’re disabled in an inconvenient way” = possible death by adrenal crisis, and I don’t want that.)