1:42am May 26, 2015

Class and Education

It’s not that this isn’t a complicated topic.  It’s not that there aren’t working-class and poor people who are anti-intellectual and shun education of any kind other than “practical”, not only for themselves but for family members.  I know people who grew up in families like that, and they suffered horribly just for liking to read, or wanting to go to college to learn something other than a trade.

But that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

I want to talk about my family.

My family, until my generation (which I’d call mixed-class — it’s complicated and I don’t want to get into it or I’ll never write the rest of this post), were poor and working-class as far as we can find record of them.

My mother’s father, who mostly worked in a mill (although he had other working-class jobs along the way, and long stretches of joblessness too), had an eighth grade education, formally.  However he was a proud autodidact, read a lot, and certainly believed in self-education.  This is a common thing in some working-class families who don’t have formal education.

My father’s grandfather never graduated from junior high.  My father talked about graduating from junior high, and realizing that at the age of 13 he was doing something that this man he looked up to so much, had never gotten the chance to do.  He was awed by this.  My great-grandfather was a huge believer in formal education, partly because he never got a chance to get one himself.  When my father graduated junior high, his grandfather told him that he had enough money saved up to put any grandchild of his through college who wanted to attend college.

My father did not actually want to attend college.  He wanted to be a farmer, like his parents and grandparents before him.  But his father was adamant that this was not okay.  He saw that in the area of the country they lived in, the family farm would be destroyed by the time my father got a chance to try to have one.  I never understood this growing up, and constantly wished that my father had chosen to stay on the farm.  It wasn’t until I was an adult and my father took me to the sites of his family farms growing up, and they were eaten up by huge tracts of corporate farmland staffed by migrant workers, that I realized there was no way we could have had a farm when I was a kid, not in California.

Especially since my grandfather was already in serious debt at that point, trying to run a sheep farm in Oregon (my family were part of the Okie migration to the San Joaquin Valley in California, but then spent some time in Oregon as well).  He basically asked my father — very angrily — “Do you think you’re smarter than I am?  Do you think you can pull this off without putting yourself, your livelihood, and your family, into serious debt?  Because you can’t, you have to go to college.”

So my father grudgingly went to college.  The first day, they got a lecture about how being in college would make them better than people who didn’t get into college.  The classism he encountered in college was so demoralizing that he flunked all his subjects.  Back then, though, report cards were written by hand, and before he showed his to his parents, he had changed all the F’s to A’s by adding a line.

He’d taken electronics in high school, and he had also spent most of his childhood up in the attic taking apart electronics and putting them together again to see how they worked, building radios, that kind of thing.  So he was self-taught in the area that he ultimately turned to for an education and a career.  When he and his friends saw that they weren’t getting a quality electronics education at the school they were at (their teacher knew less than they did), they decided to go check out this place they’d heard of, Oregon Technical Institute (OTI — these days it’s OIT, Oregon Institute of Technology).  They found that it met, and possibly exceeded, their expectations for a good electronics education, and transferred there.

My father ended up with a two-year degree that qualified him as an electronics technician, which was his job title throughout most of his life.  At the place he finally settled down to work, a government research facility with a linear accelerator, though, the technicians did a lot more than building and repairing electronics.  Some of them, including my father, designed electronics.  And they also had to do things like dig ditches and set up experiments.  It was a perfect job for my father’s skills, and as he spent a lot of time there, he not only learned a lot, but taught things to graduate students in electronics engineering who supposedly had more education than him (but were often sorely lacking in anything that wasn’t theory — so he taught them the practical side of things, and from everything I heard he was a good teacher).

When he retired from that job and began to take jobs with corporations (rather than publicly funded research facilities), he had educated himself so well that he earned the job title of engineer without ever having a degree in engineering, or even any degree beyond the two-year degree.  But they had to recognize his talents and he finally became an engineer in name and not just in skills.  That was just the last few years of his working life, however.  Before that, he said his employer had felt obligated to call him a technician because of the lack of formal engineering education.

At any rate, I hope that these stories have told you a little bit about how education can be valued in working-class and poor families just as much as it can be valued among middle and upper class families.

It’s not always the same kind of education — there’s often a huge element of being self-taught, whether or not the person actually attended college or university; and there’s often but not always an emphasis on practical skills, even if there’s theory required to understand them — but it’s education.  And sometimes it is the same kind of education.  My great-grandfather on my dad’s side firmly believed that any of his grandkids should have the right to the formal education that he himself was denied.

Anyway, I’d been meaning to write something about this for awhile.  Poor and working-class people often face barriers to education, and there is sometimes a cultural attitude that’s anti-intellectual that throws up even more barriers for anyone in the family who wants to break out of that mold.  But there are tons and tons of poor and working-class people who either want a college education, get a college education, or educate themselves without need of a college education (or in addition to, or instead of, the college education they’re getting).  And that’s actually extremely common.  People stereotype working-class and poor people as anti-intellectual, brutish, stupid, all brawn and no brains, but that’s no more true of poor and working-class people than the opposite of true of middle and upper-class people.

I’m glad I wrote this.  I’m having a hard time writing lately.  I think it may be due to my brain reshuffling itself again — I’m gaining other skills and that usually gets taken out of somewhere.  And right now I’m having trouble writing posts above one paragraph.  It may not show, because I’m not posting all my failed attempts, but it’s true.

42 notes

7:33am January 27, 2015

Anyone read these books?

The Rosie Project
The Rosie Effect

Both by Graeme Simsion.

Are they as aspie stereotype as they sound?

Are they any good?

(Separate questions. Something can be stereotypical AND good.)

Also would they be potentially triggering to someone who was molested by an aspie as a kid in part because try as he might he could not get any woman to marry him according to the life schedule he set for himself (nor did he at the time understand how degrading it is to women to be considered just a piece of a routine someone set themselves of “marry someone anyone by this age)? (I was his means of retaliating at a world he saw as wronging him by depriving him of a wife and kids.)

And yes I’m autistic. Autistic FAAB or assumed female people (I’m genderless and FAAB) tend to have more sexual experience, but less voluntary, than autistic MAAB or assumed male people. I’ve actually had autistic guys tell me I was lucky to be molested because at least it was sexual, never mind I was 11. Also that I was lucky to have been in a relationship even though it was emotionally and physically abusive and I’m not attracted to men. (Now that he’s grown up though we are on surprisingly good terms. I think neither of us was ready for a relationship and we both did fucked up stuff.)

I will say I feel incredibly lucky for my one relationship with a woman, so many magical memories that if I never meet another woman, nonbinary, or genderless person who wants a relationship, I won’t feel I’ve missed anything.

There’s no sign there’s any child abuse anywhere in these books. The tw tags are for the post not the books. Also I am well aware my situation was rare and not caused by autism (just carried out in an autistic way) I’m not suggesting aspie guys are child molesters. Just trying to figure out whether I should bother reading this, especially given my history. Since even watching aspie guys behave certain ways in their search for love and lust can bring back bad memories

7 notes

5:29pm July 31, 2014

I wanted to respond to this separately.

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).

41 notes

4:55am July 31, 2014

This post is for…

• Aspies who sometimes can’t speak, despite having no speech delay in early childhood.
• Aspies who have permanently lost the ability to speak, despite having no speech delay in early childhood.
• Aspies who are quiet and sensitive, not loud and blundering.
• Aspies who sit out entire conversations because they can’t figure out where and how to join in, or how to initiate communication.
• Aspies who stim, a lot, visibly, to the point people assume they’re “low functioning” and are surprised to hear them talk.
• Aspies who can’t take care of themselves at all, despite what the DSM says about no significant delays in self-help skills.
• Aspies who have the stereotypical high-tech computer job… and secretly wear diapers because they’re incontinent and always have been.
• Aspies who are very echolalic, very ‘sensing’, other things more commonly associated with 'auties’ than 'aspies’.
• Aspies with autistic catatonia who have gone from being considered very high functioning to very low functioning in a fairly rapid time span.
• Aspies who are 'passive’ or 'aloof’ rather than 'active but odd’ or 'formal’.
• Aspies who look exactly like many of Kanner’s original patients.
• Aspies with extremely severe visual processing issues and other sensory issues, well beyond finding certain stimuli painful.
• Aspies with something resembling visual agnosia.
• Aspies with an IQ in the 70-90 range.
• Aspies with an IQ slightly below 70, who got diagnosed with AS anyway (despite this being against the criteria) because some doctors will diagnose AS in people with, say, a 65 IQ, if every single other thing about them fits the Asperger criteria and not the autism one.
• Aspies who did badly in school, and never made it to college, or did horribly in college or university and never got a degree.
• Aspies who grew up partly or entirely in self-contained special ed classrooms or schools.
• Aspies who find it easier to gesture than to speak.
• Aspies who find body language easier to understand than understanding language.
• Aspies who are extremely polite and careful about respecting people’s boundaries.
• Aspies who are quiet and gentle and shy.
• Aspies whose speech sounds like that of a very young child – they had no early delay in speech, technically, so they got an AS diagnosis, but their speech stalled at the age of five or so, and never got any better than that.  And somehow that doesn’t count as a speech delay because it happened too late.
• Aspies who grew up being considered severely intellectually disabled, didn’t speak until they were 15 (after first learning to type at age 13), but didn’t have an autism diagnosis at the time.  And now they’re adults and are being diagnosed with Asperger’s because they can speak now and there’s nobody to corroborate their speech or diagnostic history so the doctor just doesn’t care about getting it right.  So now they’re officially an aspie.  (I’ve seen this happen more times than you’d be surprised by.)
• Aspies who more than meet the criteria for autistic disorder, but aren’t being diagnosed with it because their doctors are ignoring the DSM entirely in favor of their 'clinical judgement’ that someone has Asperger’s rather than autism based on seeing them as an adult.

Basically, this post is for 'aspies’ who fit stereotypes normally reserved for 'auties’, but had (or were presumed to have) no speech delay and (often) don’t meet the criteria for autistic disorder, so got diagnosed with Asperger’s.  Because such people are all over the place, yet when people say 'aspie’ they never mean them, of course.  Even though they’re frigging everywhere.

187 notes

3:17am July 7, 2014

trans-folx-fighting-eds:

T-FFED Team members encourage you to join our Visibility Project for trans and gender non-conforming/non-binary folx struggling with ED issues!

The ED treatment funding org Project Heal recently sponsored a photo exhibit entitled ‘The Many Faces of Eating Disorders,’ featuring the same archetype of mostly white, young, female, cis, able-bodied folx: http://www.refinery29.com/2014/06/70126/eating-disorder-recovery-photos#slide  We want to situate EDs firmly in a social justice context; demonstrating what eating disorders REALLY look like and who suffers (often in silence) when we look at the folx most likely to struggle and least likely to be able to afford/access culturally competent and relevant treatment.

Let’s interrupt the total lack of marginalized community representation in ED media portrayal and draw attention to the epidemic of EDs in our trans and gender-variant communities, esp. low-income communities of color who cannot afford boutique recovery programs. Lack of representative research and access to affordable, gender-literate treatment does NOT eclipse the fact that we struggle disproportionately! Come join us in increasing visibility of EDs in our communities and in mainstream ED spheres! Find out more information and learn about how we’re working to transform the face of eating disorder recovery at www.transfolxfightingeds.org!

3,318 notes

8:33pm July 2, 2014

““That’s a computer game? Firing and guns and screaming your name… is a game? Wow. Really? That’s not like the games at College!” “No! I bet it’s not. What do you do at College?” “It’s just kids stuff.” He hung his head as he said this. He was her older brother, and he did not like it that as she was growing up he could see her doing things he had never done. She was so much younger than him, nearly 12 years. How come she was playing a proper game on a proper computer in her own bedroom, while he had to go to College and play Find The Mouse?”

Collins, Helen (2012-10-30). Like A Fish Understands A Tree (Kindle Locations 532-533).  . Kindle Edition. 

Oh geez.  I know that feeling wayyy too well.  Not within my family, but in other contexts.  I used to feel like I was a two-year-old watching all the adults do adult things and having no comprehension of it.  Not because I really was two, not because I bought into mental age, but because I really, really felt like I was being put into the position of a child while all the adults got to do adult things.  This was when I tried university, only to find that without the help I’d gotten in community college, my life skills were nonexistent.

It felt like everyone was passing me by, and I was just standing there, a two year old in a dark room, watching all these young adults dancing and singing and studying in the light.

One of them even told me, “college is supposed to be when I’m having fun and finding myself and learning who I am as a person and how I fit into the world, it’s supposed to be carefree… it’s not supposed to involve taking care of you.”  And I didn’t blame her for feeling like that, especially since neither of us anticipated her in the caregiver role, but it still hurt knowing that my existence created a giant hole in the life that she thought she was entitled to.

But at the time, I felt like everyone in my life was outgrowing me, and I was if anything growing backwards, back to age five, four, three, two.  And if I was not treated like an adult, then it was because I was not behaving like an adult.  That’s what everyone with learning disabilities was told in orientation:  You’re adults now, you won’t get help with organizational skills or things like that, you’re on your own.  So as my abilities dwindled I felt I grew smaller and smaller and smaller, and it was not a good feeling.  It’s never a good feeling, in a highly age-segregated society, to see that all these people younger than you are better than you at “easy” things that “everyone should know”.  And you hear you must be spoiled, that if you’d been taught right it never would’ve happened… bullshit.  That’s what developmental disabilities are like, something all the teaching in the world doesn’t take.

29 notes

11:08am June 7, 2014

“

I learned, too, that when people look at me as so different that they want to feel pity, I can probably get anything I want out of them. I can manipulate the hell out of them.

While they see me as weak and unable - well, I’m not. I can come on strong and capable when they’re staring at my wheelchair and my respirator and feeling entirely sorry for me. I can use that, tactically. It’s a very powerful tool and it’s something we should teach people to use in practical ways.

I learned this, interestingly enough, from the women’s movement. I watched women in the self-support groups [consciousness-raising groups] in Berkeley teaching each other how to manipulate the stereotypes of weakness in women. And I thought, ‘Wow! That could work real well for disability.’ I began to use it tactically.

You see a lot of people who take that role as part of their whole life. That’s a whole different thing. When you use that sick role all the time, it’s toxic.

Parents may see their disabled kids try to manipulate them. The kids may not be aware of doing it, but there’s always a very natural tendency. Hopefully, we can recognize it, and encourage people to use that for a tactic, but also be clear with them about what’s going on there.

”

23 notes

2:41am June 5, 2014

“Destroy stereotypes not the people who fit them”

412 notes

3:29am May 25, 2014

andotherpoems:

mengsuchang:

every book on Africa has the same cover. 

From the article:

But change comes slowly. One day, Mendelsund predicts, there will be a best-selling novel by an African writer that happens to use a different visual aesthetic, and its success will introduce a new set of arbitrary images to represent Africa in Western eyes. “But right now, we’re in the age of the tree,” he says. “For that vast continent, in all its diversity, you get that one fucking tree.” 

508 notes

9:14pm May 17, 2014

There’s a difference in philosophy, sometimes.

I apologize in advance for how long this is.  I wouldn’t be able to read it, myself.  I often can’t read what I can write.  But I can’t make things concise, it’s part of my language problems.  So anyway…

I’m going to use mental age as an example.

DD people, regardless of diagnosis or IQ, are generally subjected to this idea that we are eternal children.  We are not ever truly adults, we have ‘the mind of a child’, or 'the emotional development of a toddler’, or 'the cognitive functioning of an infant’, or something like this.

This originated in IQ tests, where mental age was an abstract concept, and that’s all it was ever supposed to be.  You had your chronological age, which is how old you are physically.  And then you had your mental age, which was the age an average person would be who got the same score as you did on the IQ test.  And you divided one by the other and multiplied by 100 to get your IQ.

But the idea spread beyond IQ tests, and spread to actually mean that a person was a child for all kinds of purposes.  Including legal purposes.  And it spread to things like emotional age, and all these other ages that basically make DD people of all sorts supposedly children or even infants regardless of our actual lifespan and life experiences.  All because of this outdated abstract idea about test scores.

These days the idea that we have the 'mind of a child’, things like that, is firmly embedded in Western culture.  And most DD people – the overwhelming majority – are mad as hell about this.  We do not like being considered children in adult bodies, and we do not like the social, legal, and physical consequences of not being considered adults.

But some people don’t see it that way.

Some people see the problem not as the idea of mental age itself, but what mental age means.

Some people think it’s totally okay to say someone has the mind of a child, and that the only problem is how we view people with the minds of children.  That basically we aren’t real adults but the fact that we aren’t real adults shouldn’t matter.  We aren’t real adults but we shouldn’t be discriminated against for not being real adults.

Some people also think that those of us who insist we are really adults, are somehow 'throwing under the bus’ all the people who really aren’t real adults.  That by distancing ourselves from the stereotype, we are making the stereotype real.

And sometimes that happens.

I can’t count the number of times, when dealing with disability stereotypes or something, that I’ve heard people distance themselves from a stereotype by saying that nobody who fits the stereotype exists, or that those who fit the stereotype shouldn’t matter.  And I’m someone in that case who absolutely does fit the stereotype and I get quite offended by people who want to basically erase my existence.

In the world of mental age stereotypes, this takes a weird form.  It’s not so much that I believe any adult DD person is really a child inside.  But there’s a thing that happens that’s horrible.

There was a very popular movement called Normalization, in the world of DD staff.  And what would happen, was that the staff would come into the home of a DD person.  And they would say, “You’re an adult now.  Nobody will treat you like an adult unless you act like I believe an adult should act.”

They would take away people’s toys, games, and books, if they were deemed “not age appropriate”.  They would destroy people’s doll collections, remove their comic books, remove any art that didn’t look “adult” enough due to motor coordination issues, basically steal and destroy people’s shit and call it progress because it was “making people more normalized in an adult role” and all kinds of other bullshit.

And the thing is, if you’re not DD, you can get away with doing “child” things.  My collection of children’s books and young adult novels would not be out of place in the home of a nondisabled nerd of a certain sort.  But because I have a developmental disability, I am vulnerable to service agencies deciding that my reading material isn’t adult enough and taking it away from me.  It hasn’t happened, but not because of anything special about me.

Because of this, a lot of DD people have become very sensitive to the idea of 'age appropriateness’ and really hate it.  But to most of us, there’s no contradiction between hating the tyranny of 'age appropriate’ while at the same time hating the tyranny of 'you’re really a child inside’.  These things aren’t in opposition to each other.  They’re both messed up things that miss the mark entirely.

But the response of some advocates has been to say, “So actually, DD people really are children inside.  And that’s okay!  We should just be okay with the fact that they’re children in adult bodies.  We should give them all the respect that children in adult bodies need.  We should not deny them rights because they are children in adult bodies.  But they are children in adult bodies, or at least some of them are.  And if you object to the idea of mental age, then you’re just ignoring reality and you’re hurting people who really need people to understand that they’re really their mental age, not their chronological age.”

And I can’t say I don’t understand where that comes from.

But I also have to say, that’s some serious freeze-dried bullshit.

There are not just two ways to respond to a stereotype.

And sometimes nobody fits a stereotype.  Sometimes a stereotype is just something that someone came up with as an abstract idea, that has become intensified to the point where people believe it as literal concrete fact.  And while I’ve known plenty of DD people (myself firmly, firmly included in this area) who do things as adults that normally only children do, this does not make us in any way children and there is absolutely no need to se us as in any way children, in order to respect our rights.

Some people respond to that by saying “But what’s wrong with being a child?”

Nothing’s wrong with being a child.  But I’m not a child.  And adults differ from children in important ways.  And DD people are seriously harmed by being considered children.  We are harmed in two big ways by being considered children.  One way really is that we treat children badly in this society so DD adults attract the same bad treatment children get, and that’s something that can be addressed by addressing how we treat children.  But the other thing, which is huge, is that we are not children, we are different from children, and adults need to be treated differently from children, and this problem will not go awayjust by treating children better and pretending that DD adults are actually children inside.  Infantilizing adults is never okay, no matter what you think about the treatment of children in general.

Oh I should also note it’s not just DD adults who get this treatment.  Adults with dementia are also often treated as if they have the mental age of a child.  And also adults with other adult-onset cognitive disabilities.  But also DD people whether our disabilities are cognitive or physical we get it all the time.

So there are not just two ways to deal with this.

You don’t have to pick and choose between:

1.  Total denial of any and all childlike characteristics in DD adults.

2.  Total acceptance of the idea that DD adults are actually, mentally or emotionally, children, and that this is okay, and that the problem is how we treat children, not how we infantilize adults.

These are not the only two options.

There are, in fact, lots of options that are not these.

I picked this topic because it’s extremely cut and dried – mental age is false.  No matter how you slice it, no matter who you look at, no matter what “childlike” things we may do, DD adults are adults.  (And it’s a serious double standard to say that because some of us do childlike things then we’re mentally children, when nondisabled people get to do childlike things all the time without that threat hanging over their heads.)

But there are situations that can be much more confusing, because there will be people who seem to fit a stereotype, and denying the stereotype really can in some cases be more like denying the existence of certain people.

And that’s what someone thought I was doing recently.

I wasn’t.

But that’s what they thought I was doing.

They thought I was saying that there are no autistic people who, by virtue of autism, are extremely oriented towards themselves.  Or that such people didn’t count, or didn’t matter, in my world.

What I actually said was that the difference between autistic and nonautistic people is not that autistic people are oriented towards ourselves and nonautistic people are oriented towards others.

I still like the way Donna Williams describes things as far as succinctness goes.  Autism can create a state of no self, no other.  It can create a state of all self, no other.  It can create a state of all other, no self.  And it can create any combination of those things.  Plus some autistic people can experience both self and other simultaneously.

But that right there tells you that you can't define nonautistic people as oriented more towards others than autistic people are.  Like that can’t be the defining characteristic.  Lots of nonautistic people are highly self-centered, lots of autistic people are so other-centered that they can’t even perceive their selves at all.  So I was saying, you can’t say autistic vs nonautistic = self vs other oriented.  Because it’s just not true.

The fact that you can’t do that, says nothing bad about autistic people who really are stuck in a mode where all they can perceive is themselves, and they can’t perceive other people, or can only unconsciously perceive other people.  It just says that this isn’t the definition of what makes autistic people autistic and nonautistic people nonautistic.

But also there’s another thing that happens extremely frequently, that makes me furious.

Which is that many, many autistic people are simply assumed to be wholly focused on themselves, living in their own worlds, totally cut off from awareness of other people.

And time and time again, it’s been shown that this is a wrong and damaging assumption a huge percentage of the time.

Autistic people who have had that assumed of us are justifiably angry about it.  I’ve experienced it and it’s horrible.  But I haven’t had the experience, common to many people, where they grew up being considered that, day in and day, out, for their entire lives.  Where they had to spend their entire childhood fighting for a voice to say “I understand other people exist, I am not trapped in my own world.”

And it’s extremely offensive to me that people would take that anger, that anger that comes from direct experience of a horrible misunderstanding, and tell people who’ve experienced this, “You’re just trying to throw under the bus the people who really are self-oriented and trapped in their own world.”

Because for the most part?  That is not what is happening.  At all.  Not when it comes from people who’ve had any sort of experience of actually, in the real world, being considered unaware of everything.  Most of the time, that’s genuine righteous anger and it should not be stifled in the name of being inclusive to those who just happen to fit the exact stereotypes that we’ve been trying for some chunk of our lives to get away from.

I used to get very mad at this one autistic woman because she had not ever had the experience of being stereotyped in that manner.  But she embraced every autism stereotype out there.  She told anyone that would listen that she was actually mentally only a toddler, that she was sick of being treated as an adult, and her dream was to live in the kind of institution that most of us have spent our entire lives trying to stay out of.  Any negative stereotype was something she embraced wholeheartedly as applying to herself, and the worst part was that none of those stereotypes actually applied to her, she just said they did because it felt good to her to be treated as a child who had no responsibilities in the world other than to be taken care of.  She lied constantly about her IQ scores in order to get a lower 'mental age’.  It really pissed me off because she’d walk into a room full of self-advocates who had been struggling their whole lives to get away from that stuff, and then disparage them for not embracing these stereotypes that she’d never had to live with herself.  

It’s easy to say you want to live as if you’re a child the rest of your life, when you’ve never been treated like one for real.  It’s easy to say you want the loving care and supervision that only an institution can provide, when you’ve never seen the inside of one.  And she’d run around telling people that other DD people were simply “in denial” about the fact that they were really children.  And people who didn’t know better, believed her.

When it comes to autism and relationship to self, I think that autism makes your relationship to yourself and others complicated.  It can reduce awareness of yourself, or it can reduce awareness of others, it can reduce awareness of both at once.  That’s not the same as “autistic people are self-oriented and allistic people are other-oriented”.  I find the generalization offensive in the extreme, and not because “there’s something wrong with being self-oriented”.  It’s a matter of an assumption being so completely out of left field that it’s not even wrong, it’s just something that doesn’t map to reality at all, and that causes a lot of grief for autistic people when these assumptions are applied to us.

So it is offensive to me to say that autism means being self-centered.

But not because there’s something wrong with autistic people whose autism makes them lose track of others.

Because the connotations are simply radically different, and only words make them even remotely the same.

And because it’s a false generalization.

And because it is like a giant eraser rubbing out all the autistic and nonautistic people that the generalization doesn’t apply to. Which is actually all of us, in the end.  Even the ones who, if you go by words alone, the generalization seems to apply to.

I understand, though.

I understand what it’s like to hear people saying “But autistic people aren’t like that” when they really mean “But your kind of autistic person doesn’t really exist and/or shouldn’t matter and/or should be swept under the rug.”

But that’s not what I’m doing.

I hope I’ve explained well enough what I am doing, because I feel like at this point I’m stuck in words and talking around the topic rather than describing the meaning itself. 

So I’m going to stop here.

One of the best things I have ever heard was the phrase, “the freedom to say neither/nor”.

Because that’s where all the truth in the world lies.  All of it.

Outside of the two sides.  Not in between, not “the truth is always somewhere in the middle” (which is just a thinly veiled way of saying there’s two sides).  Outside entirely of the system that the two sides create.

I may not have the truth, nobody always has the truth, but I know that the truth is almost never in either of the two sides, or anywhere on the path between them.

64 notes

1:35pm May 6, 2014

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

neurodiversitysci:

Mosaic of Minds: What the gifted education field needs to learn about learning disabilities

Here’s why almost everything you’ll ever hear people in the gifted community say about learning disabilities, twice exceptionality, and misdiagnosis is wrong.

“Researchers in gifted education writing about twice exceptionality continually complain that clinicians who evaluate children lack experience with giftedness; unfortunately, they seem less concerned about their own knowledge of learning disabilities.”

Myths targeted include:

1) Gifted kids experience problems only in certain settings, such as a boring classroom, while learning disabled kids have problems everywhere.

2) When the same behavior occurs in gifted people and people with disabilities, it must occur for different reasons.

“researchers who think we can draw a clean distinction between learning disabilities and giftedness based on motivation often misunderstand the motivations of disabled people due to an external perspective.  I think we would be better off pointing to differences in observable behavior.”

3) One can and should identify twice exceptional students based on “scatter,” or huge gaps between IQ subtests.

Know anyone in the gifted community who just doesn’t “get it” about disabilities? Please share.

What myths irritate you the most?

The myth that IQ is meaningful.

The myth that “giftedness” is a thing, that you will always have, if you ever had a high IQ.

The myth that my “real IQ” isn’t 85, that there’s something called a “real IQ”, that is mysteriously inside you, just waiting to be discovered, separate and distinct from your actual test scores.  And that because I’m “smart”, then I can’t have an 85 IQ.  Or that because my IQ used to be high, then I can’t now have an 85 IQ.  (Or whatever it is now, which may or may not be higher or lower than 85, because honestly you don’t know what it is until you test it and I haven’t been tested in 11 years.)

The myth that IQ is a stable thing throughout your life, or should be.

Lots of the myths around IQ are really the things that bug me.

Also the myth that your cognitive disability (learning disability, autism, whatever else) can’t be that severe if your IQ was ever high.

The myth that high-IQ autistic people have no significant problems functioning in areas unrelated to test scores.  And for that matter that we have no significant problems functioning in areas that seem superficially related to test scores.

The myth that if you’re placed into a gifted program, then you’ll be with people “like you” and you’ll belong finally and everything will fall into place and you’ll be happy and included.

The myth that students in gifted programs need more educational enrichment than other students, and that gifted kids are the only ones who get bored in school.

The myth that if you’re struggling in school and you’re labeled gifted, it must be boredom.  (This one bit me in the ass so hard I’m still angry about it to this day.  I actually learned to say “I’m bored” because it’s the only thing anyone taught me to say.  I needed to say “I’m drowning, I can’t handle school anymore, it’s too hard for me,” but nobody ever ever ever let me say school was hard, because I was “gifted” and school can’t be hard when you’re “gifted”.)

The idea that you can even identify this population called gifted people and separate it out and that this is a good thing.

The idea that people with intellectual disabilities aren’t intelligent.

The idea — held by many gifted people — that it’s impossible for a gifted person to have an intelligent conversation with a person of average or low IQ.  (And that therefore if they’re having an intelligent conversation with you, then your “real IQ” can’t be as low as it actually is.)

That thing people do where they attribute any skills to giftedness rather than hard work.

I could go on for ages, I think there are fundamental assumptions built into the entire concept of giftedness that are broken at the core and can’t be repaired.  This is not to say that some people don’t have talents other people don’t have, but the idea of giftedness is not how to approach them.

All of this.

And:

The idea that there’s a Real Person and Real Abilities that have nothing to do with any attributes you actually have in any observable way. Like, you’re *really* a Gifted Student, despite never having been good at school or interested in the things school wants you to be interested in.

The thing where everyone tells you that you’re having feelings you’re not having, to the extent that you don’t even know what the words mean.

The thing where you aren’t allowed to suck at anything and still like that thing and spend time doing it and still not become super genius at it.

The thing where they say bullies are just jealous and that you’ll be more powerful than them in the future because “the economic system will make revenge”. Even when you’re being bullied primarily by rich Gifted kids who will always, always have more power than you.

The thing where people make you feel like it’s a moral crime to ever be bad at anything.

Being constantly scrutinized and still completely invislble.

Feeling like any weakness will get you kicked out of the interesting classes, because only perfectly smart Gifted kids are considered worthy of interesting enrichment, and so if you’re not good enough, you won’t matter enough to be included anymore.

Being told “Are you sure you’re really in gifted classes?  You know gifted classes is what they tell retarded kids so they don’t realize they’re in special ed.”

(That’s pretty much the exact words I heard it in, and I’m leaving the words as-is.)

Also, people assuming that you’re either in gifted or in special ed, but you can’t be both.  (Someone said on tumblr recently, “I was never considered gifted, in fact I was in special ed,” as if the two are opposites.  I was considered gifted and I was in special ed.)

150 notes

4:30pm November 26, 2013

Anyone noticed…

How your religious or spiritual beliefs are seen very differently when you’re disabled?

Like it’s either…

…you’re stupid or naive so you’re religious.

…you’re crazy so you’re overly religious and you’re probably delusional.

…you’ve got epilepsy (especially temporal lobe epilepsy) so your spiritual experiences are probably seizures, even when they bear no resemblance to ecstatic seizures.

(And then there’s the way that the existence of ecstatic seizures are used to prove that religion is bunk because spiritual experiences are all seizures.  Except that this makes no sense.  Seizures can also cause you to hallucinate an object that you’ve seen before, it doesn’t mean the original object wasn’t real.  Just because you can induce fake spiritual experiences by seizures, drugs, or magnetic stimulation, doesn’t mean that the real thing isn’t real.)

…you’re an atheist because you’re cognitively disabled and don’t understand enough abstraction to understand religious concepts.

…you’re very devout because disabled people are closer to God(s).

…you’re very devout because disabled people are innately and mysteriously spiritual in a way that nondisabled people aren’t.

etc.

You’re never just allowed to be religious (or not-religious), in whatever form, the same way other people are.  They always link it back to your disability and make it seem like you’re stupid, naive, or out of touch with reality in some way.  And quite often you’ll be used by people who are either for, or against, your religion, as an example in some way.

And even when there is some connection between your disability and your beliefs, people will grossly exaggerate or distort it for their own ends.

And even some disabled people will play into this.  Sometimes because we come to believe what we’ve been told (just like happens with all stereotypes).  Sometimes for much more disturbing reasons (something to exploit ourselves, or because someone else is exploiting us – not that we’re all poor pitiful things to be exploited, but it does happen).

This is why even though I do think some of my spirituality (and the forms it takes) is tied to some of my disabilities, I get very angry when people exaggerate or distort that connection for their own reasons.  I was exploited for things like that when I was younger and I take it really seriously.

Oh another thing that pisses me off is the way that people who exploit us can never tell the difference between spiritual and psychic – typically in a newage context.  I dealt with a lot of that when I was younger, especially because I have really intense pattern-sensing abilities connected to my variant of autism, that get misconstrued as psychic sometimes.  And it really screwed me up in a lot of ways and I hate seeing it happen to other people.  It’s why for a very long time I was unwilling to talk about any of these topics at all, I was so afraid someone would misconstrue it and misuse it, deliberately or otherwise.

And it is seriously damaging to elevate people for things like this, because one important component of just about every spiritual practice I’ve ever heard of is humility.  That doesn’t go with putting people on a pedestal, whether yourself or anyone else.  And disabled people get put on spiritual  and religious pedestals all the time.  Or else get considered incapable of understanding it.  Or else get considered to only be religious because we’re incapable of understanding why not to be.  All of which is horrible, patronizing, and horrible.

138 notes

11:41am October 30, 2013

“

I have told Noreen’s story in the form of a lecture a number of times. Invariably, someone comes up to me and says, “She can’t be retarded.” A flat statement. Usually, they then turn and walk away, discounting everything. As if what happened to her is then not relevant.

Let me say that this attitude is bigotry, pure and simple. What is being said is that disabled people can’t be wise. What is being said is that wisdom is the domain of the privileged. White. Educated. Male. BUNK! Wisdom touches whomever it chooses. And it chooses all. If one takes a careful look at what Noreen knows, one will find a wisdom not contained in books, not taught in classrooms and not obscured by linguistic elegance. Yes, Noreen is wise. Yes, she is disabled. I fail to see the contradiction.

”

Dave Hingsburger, I Witness:  History and a Person with Developmental Disabilities

Autistic people aren’t the only ones who get undiagnosed from a distance the moment we show the slightest sign of understanding anything whatsoever.  This was published in a 1992.

205 notes

7:20am July 31, 2012

Different — No Different

This is a reply to this post that got so carried away that I am making it a post of its own. Don’t worry, I do eventually address your post directly.

There’s something that happens. And I don’t know if it applies to how other people talk about us. But it definitely applies to how we talk about ourselves, and it’s responsible for some conflicts between different disabled people. Which is there are different ways disabled people can get treated by others.

Note that I’m talking about disability. But this can apply to any group of oppressed people, or even just plain unusual people. So keep that in mind, and you’ll see a lot of conflicts suddenly making more sense.

Some of us are treated as if we are essentially the same as everyone else. People assume we are mostly just like them. They think we should just try a little harder. We are usually expected to live with, work with, go to school with, and compete with nondisabled people, and blamed if we can’t keep up.

And some of us are treated as if we are fundamentally different from everyone else. As if we have no common humanity at all. Often we get stuck in fully segregated environments. Or are told we ought to be. People view us as completely incapable. Maybe not even people.

And a lot of us get both, in different situations.

Although… I also see this thing going on. Where an organization (like Aut$peaks) will talk about disabled people in a certain category (like autism). And it will make descriptions of autistic people that sound at first glance like they’re putting all of us in the second category. But if you look a little closer at their statements over time, they’re not. They’re actually saying “The only autistic people we are talking about right now are in the second category. Those autistic people in the first category? We are using them for our 1 in 88 statistics. But other than that? They might as well not exist. They’re out there, but we don’t really give a shit as long as they shut up.”

To also be clear: I am not saying these are two genuine categories of autistic or otherwise disabled people. I’m saying these are two ways we can be treated. Aut$peaks thinks they’re real categories based on inner traits. But I don’t.

But sometimes people assume that Aut$peaks is putting all of us, and therefore them included, in the second category. But really many of them are people Aut$peaks is putting firmly in the first category – and ignoring the hell out of their existence. Which is subtle but sometimes important.

Anyway people who are currently being put into the first category tend to want to tell the world that no – they’re not the same as everyone else. They’re different in all kinds of important ways.

And people who are currently being put into the second category tend to want to tell the world that no – they’re not different than everyone else. They’re the same in all kinds of important ways.

Most people experience a mix of these things. Among most people unfamiliar with me, and some people familiar with me, I currently get treated like I’m in the second group. Among many people familiar with me, and some people unfamiliar with me, I currently get treated like I’m in the first group. Emphasis on currently for all of this. Only a very few people in my life see who I am underneath all that.

Examples of being treated like I’m in the second group:

I attended a science museum with a staff person and a friend. We watched an exhibit on roller coasters. A man saw me talking on my communication device. He approached and asked how the device worked.

I explained that I type things into it and it speaks them out loud.

The man looked profoundly skeptical. He thought for a moment and said, “Can you tell me what we just saw then?”

I was too enraged to even put my fingers to the keyboard.

The man got all self-satisfied. He said “I didn’t think so!” and walked off while the staff person yelled at him that actually I could, and my friend, who was a part-time aug comm user, tried his best to disappear.

I later realized the guy thought the whole thing was a computer trick. That I was just hitting random buttons and somehow answers were coming out. But that if he forced me to come up with a novel answer, I couldn’t.

Another time, I was hospitalized for a physical illness. I was often too sick to use my communication device. At one point, I watched a medical professional explain to another, that I had the cognitive functioning of an infant, regardless of the age on my chart.

Neither of these men regarded me as a person on the same level that they saw themselves as people. I’ve observed that people like that tend to regard me as a weird combination of a person and an object. Shaped like a person. Alive like a person. But not-real in the same way most people see objects. Not worth considering, ethically, on the same level that you’d consider another human being. The same sort of idea the r-word conjures up.

And my first impulse on being treated that way is to tell them that I’m just as much a person as they are. That I have deep similarities to all other people. That, whether I’m exactly alike or not, I’m fundamentally equal. As in, I have the same value as everyone else. (Which is what equality means. Anyone who tells you it means sameness in various other characteristics doesn’t fully understand it. But someone can easily use the language of sameness to mean exactly what I mean by it.)

I’m different from other people in very important ways. But I’m not going to be emphasizing those differences at that exact moment in time.

Some examples where I’ve been considered the first type of person:

There’s people out there who assume that the only kind of communication problem that really exists in the world, is the inability to use your mouth to talk. That is actually the least of my communication problems, it just happens to be the most obvious. So I will be sitting there unable to work out how to say something. Maybe sitting still, maybe trying futilely to use home signs. My home signs are notorious for being confusing or ambiguous.

So I’m getting frustrated and the other person is getting frustrated. And most times their first impulse is going to be to blurt out “JUST USE YOUR KEYBOARD!”

But that of course doesn’t work, because if I could “just” use my keyboard, then I probably would. The problem may be trouble initiating or switching, or trouble using words, or trouble finding a particular word. But it’s sure as hell not that I forgot I have a keyboard, or just didn’t feel like using it.

Another problem I encounter is mostly Internet-based. People see that I can write well – at least most of the time, and during times that they can see me. And so they view it as impossible that I could have any significant cognitive impairments. And they also view it as impossible, except in the case of purely physical impairments, that I could have trouble with daily living skills, let alone the degree of trouble that I have.

In both of these examples, people consider me just like everyone else, but with one or two minor differences. They have trouble seeing that the differences run much deeper, and much stranger, than they’re accustomed to.

So in both of those situations I would be telling people that I am different in all kinds of ways they are not aware of or acknowledging. I would be explaining those differences in detail. I would be wanting the other person to acknowledge how different I was. Because in assuming that I’m similar to them in these ways, they’re not grasping who I am on a deep level at all.

The conflicts between disabled people (among others) about these things, usually happen in specific contexts. Note that all of these things may apply to the people in general, or they may only apply in the specific situation the conflict is happening in:

One person has mostly been considered in the first way, and the other person has mostly been considered in the second way. The first person is talking about how different they are. The second person is talking about how similar they are. One or both people, doesn’t understand why the other is reacting how they are.

And that right there is enough for a serious conflict.

“Assimilationist.”

“Whiner. You’re probably just pretending to be different for the hell of it. Some of us have real problems.”

“You want to deny our differences.”

“You want to deny our common humanity.”

“Conformist.”

“Special snowflake.”

“You want to be the same as everyone else.”

“You’re obsessed with difference for its own sake.”

“Why can’t you just admit that we aren’t all the same?”

“Yeesh. We’re all people. Get over yourself.”

To make it worse, both sides are generally fighting for our lives.

Disabled people die all the time because we’re considered so outside the realm of what it means to be human, that our lives aren’t worth living and therefore not worth saving. Or because we are denied jobs because we couldn’t possibly be competent at anything.

Disabled people die all the time because nondisabled gatekeepers see only our similarities to them. So they deny us disability benefits. They deny us services. They deny us every bit of assistance we need to survive. And they do it because they see – or only think they see – one or two things we are good at, and think we must be good at everything. Or we get services, but we don’t get enough, or don’t get the right ones.

So people who have mostly been considered only different, or only the same, know they are fighting for their lives. And so when they fight against each other, they fight hard.

Of course plenty of disabled people have been treated both ways. And we are probably the most equipped to notice the problems of seeing it only one way, or only the other. That is unless we experience one as so much worse than the other that we ignore the other one. (Or for that matter if we romanticize one or the other.)

So that is one way that we can be both the same and different, and want to emphasize both, without being contradictory at all.

Not that that’s guaranteed to be what’s going on here. But it’s a possibility. It’s a possibility even when it’s a nondisabled person saying these things about us.

And it’s a possibility that someone means something similar but not quite the same. Because ‘different’ can mean more than one thing. Or refer to more than one area of a person’s life.

So my guess is that when they say we are no different, they mean that our value is no different than that of other people. And when they refer to us as people who are different, they mean we have differences besides differences in value. Then “different - not less” means we have some differences from other people, but are no less valuable. (Same as “they are no different”.)

Nonautistic people don’t usually use language as precisely as some autistic people do. The person in question also probably didn’t think it through as clearly as I just did above. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re using doublethink. I mean they could be. But I don’t see any signs they absolutely are.

An article on some of the topics I discuss above is Critic of the Dawn.

40 notes