11:03pm August 15, 2014

otterlymagic asked: You've talked a lot about sensory / language-less communication, and what you describe sounds a lot like how I communicate with various animals in my life. And it's something I haven't been able to do with any humans yet. I'm not sure if I can talk about this way of communicating, though, without people taking it as permission to dehumanize me and other autistic people by saying we're more like animals than humans. Is this a valid concern? And if so, how do I protect against those people?

It’s probably a valid concern.

And yet I care less and less about it some of the time, just because… people are animals, animals are people.  And people have always had ways we communicate with animals.  And some of us communicate with some animals better than other people do with other animals.  For instance my mother is a dog person and growing up she couldn’t fathom the relationship I had with my cats as as deep as they were, she kept telling me once I got a dog I’d learn that dogs are special and can form special connections with humans that cats can’t.  But when I got a dog, I had to painstakingly learn how to communicate with her it, was not easy, it was totally worth it, I loved her so much, but I’m fundamentally a person who communicates better with cats than dogs and always will be.  Not all cats – nobody can communicate with an entire species perfectly – but cats are easier for me than dogs or humans overall.

Lots of autistic people report things like this.  Dawn Prince-Hughes learned her social skills from gorillas.  Temple Grandin is famous for her work with cows, and however you may see her work in slaughterhouses,  she sees it as owing them a certain respect given that we’re going to eat them later.  I have often thought of myself as more cat than human.

Yes, there’s a stereotype that we’re more animalistic, and that has to be tread cautiously around.  But I can’t let that stereotype erase the feeling that I get sitting in a room full of cats, none of us looking straight at any other others, but each of us acutely aware of the smallest movement of any other cat in the room, and the meaning of those movements, the nuances of emotion that are conveyed.  That’s something I can only get, otherwise, with neurodivergent humans.  Otherwise it’s cats, cats, and cats.

I get fed up with not being able to talk about real life experiences because someone thinks they fit a stereotype somewhere.  It’s like… there was this horrible well-meaning trend among social workers in the DD system.  It went something like this:

• DD adults are stereotyped as eternal children.
• Some DD adults continue to do, as adults, things that we mostly associate with children.  (So do some non-DD adults but we’ll ignore that, completely.)
• If we were to take away all the trappings of childhood from DD adults, then DD adults would be less stereotyped as eternal children.
• This would mean that DD adults would be happier (we are always complaining that people see us as children).
• This would also mean that DD adults would be less vulnerable to assaults on our human rights, such as the right to bear and raise children (with whatever assistance we need to do so), to have sex, and to do other “adult” things.

The end result was a nightmare.  Staff would go through people’s rooms and remove all toys, children’s books, and stuffed animals.  They would destroy them, store them, or have them donated.  People who objected would get punished.  There were physical fights over these items, many of which were highly meaningful to the disabled people in question.  They were not even allowed to hang their own art in their rooms if it looked too “childish” in its execution.  Stuff got thrown out, or locked away, or donated, never to be seen again.  People’s private personal stuff that they had no right to throw away, legally, morally, or ethically, yet they managed it.

Look up Normalization and also Social Role Valorization if you want to see more about this.  It is still going on, and it’s horrific.  And a lot of it is based on the idea that we don’t know what’s good for ourselves, and must have it forced upon us.  (Wolf Wolfensberger is a particularly nasty example of someone who takes that line of reasoning to its logical conclusions.  Ugh.  I’ve read him.  I want those parts of my life back.)

Anyway… what I was going to say, is that some DD people, just like some non-DD people, do things that the rest of the world sees as childlike.  But where a non-DD person can cover their entire car in Tweety bird decals, or attend Barbie collectors’ conventions, DD people are likely to have our stuff taken away and be punished for having it.  I live in fear of my agency having a Normalization craze and taking away all my children’s books and videos and toys and stuff.

So they were reacting to a real stereotype that has real effects on people but they were reacting wrong.  They were reacting from an ideology, going top down rather than bottom up.  The reality is that DD people liking dolls or children’s toys won’t change whether we’re allowed to have sex or not.  Our rights to have sex and be adults have to be fought separately from this bullshit Normalization stuff.  Normalization doesn’t bring us adulthood, it brings us another childlike situation where the “grownups” (read: agency staff) get to decide what’s best for us.

So when I hear about the stereotype about autistic people being animalistic, I am not going to give up talking about my connections to animals.  There’s also a stereotype about autistic people being “shamanistic” and “closer to nature”.  I have what could loosely be called a nature religion, and I am autistic.  I’ve been told before that I’m oh so “shamanistic” and “spiritual” and I try to explain to people why those are really bad interpretations of my spiritual experience, and how they in fact cheapen my spiritual struggle by making it sound like something I just got as a bonus for being autistic.  (As well as having racist overtones as well, with “shamanism” and all that.)

People will see what you say and make the connection to the stereotype.  But you can also spend time refuting the stereotype.  And if anyone tells you “oh you’re so close to the animals you must be an autistic savant horse whisperer or something,” you can set the record straight.  But as for me, I’m never going to stop talking about my connection to animals, or to “nature”, and how those things interact with being autistic, just because some people have some really fucked up ideas about autistic people, animals, spirituality, and “nature”.  I’ve learned they’ll have those ideas no matter what, and that I need to just be who I am, do what I do, and hope everything will turn out okay.

That may not be for you, but that’s what I’ve decided to do.

#actuallyautistic  #actuallyDD  #eternal child stereotype  #holy fool stereotype  #animalistic stereotype  #stereotypes  #normalization  #social role valorization  #SLV  #tw: normalization  #tw: social role valorization  #tw: SLV  #otterlymagic 

16 notes

8:33pm July 2, 2014

#ableism  #cognitive ableism  #intellectual disability  #actuallyautistic  #actuallyDD  #developmental disability  #internalized ableism  #tw: eternal child  #eternal child  #eternal child stereotype  #stereotypes 

29 notes