Category Archives: Uncategorized

Autistic community, Autistic People of Color, Autistic Women, Liberation, Passing/Masking, Uncategorized, Violence against us

take the mask off

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cw: twitter, discourse, criticism, assault, violence, murder

i deleted my twitter account a while back, but i lurked the web page for this campaign. twitter gives me hives. too much competition for attention, too many people, too aggressively interactive, too overwhelming. arrgh, arrgh, arrgh, arrgh. say it, Deanna.

A picture of Deanna Troi (Star Trek: The Next Generation) having an empathic meltdown.
A picture of Deanna Troi (Star Trek: The Next Generation) having an empathic meltdown.

so there’s that. here’s a post about the start of the campaign.

i liked #takethemaskoff‘s focus on neurodiversity, and education about the harmful effects of masking.

i’m still figuring this out, so i could be wrong here on this point, but one of the things i was seeing seemed like the flip side of saying “being on the spectrum isn’t a disability”; people who have become so good at masking that they’re experiencing personal trauma because of years or decades of being masked all the time. which is a recipe for social burnout, and eventually, autistic burnout.

in my opinion, one of the more positive aspects of things like “take off the mask” is that people who fit more within the “white aspie” social paradigm are starting to open up more about being – oh the ever lasting shocking horror – disabled. that’s where our real collective power is as a community, because it’s the truth. that part of the campaign was important, it just got framed in a “coming out day” sort of way that doesn’t really work, and is sort of offensive.

having Asperger’s be the framework for inclusion and acceptance (when that was possible, which definitely wasn’t, and isn’t, common, because of discrimination against us, no matter where we are on the spectrum) meant that it emphasized “high functioning” as a social paradigm. which is a very shaky foundation, because it’s not representative of anything, and because it can cover up that people are masking to “fit in”, and at a high personal cost. as an autistic person, i’m disabled, and i don’t fit in. i definitely don’t fit into tech culture (or office culture in general), i fare better in subcultures, but that’s because those spaces have a wider tolerance range for being “weird”, while still being ableist, sexist, racist, frequently classist as well. i have more in common with people who have difficulties fitting into society, who have long-term support needs, than someone like Temple Grandin or John Elder Robinson. (also, they didn’t “fit in”, either. they just become famous and successful. shrugs.)

unmasking as an individually practiced political strategy has its problems though.

i worry that this’ll come off as too critical, but here goes. i’ll all for people taking the risk to stim in public if they feel they can risk it — but as a trend? for everybody? absolutely not. i’m not sure that’s a guaranteed safe zone for any of us — in fact, i’m sure it’s not — but it’s definitely not that if you’re autistic and black. i think if you’ve been conditioned to suppress who you are — which a lot of us have — there’s a reclaiming process that is healthy, but starting an ad-hoc civil disobedience campaign around unmasking that prioritizes white autistics isn’t the same thing. it’s not safe to be encouraging this in this particular way for any of us, frankly, and the more at-risk someone is, the less viable (and more potentially harmful) it becomes. framing things in such a way that people are encouraged to choose between being closeted or risking getting shot, and in turn, stimming publicly or otherwise being visibly Autistic, with no plan, no precautions and no risk assessments, is not a good idea. good intentions don’t matter if someone else winds up dead from stimming in public. it’s the equivalent of street protests where nobody masks up and everybody is white, when it’s known that the cops are likely to go wild on people.

for the record, my brown, trans, autistic ass is terrified at the prospect of being pulled over by the cops, and your autistic ass (no matter what race you are) should be as well. i may – or may not – be at less risk of getting shot, but that’s not much of a consolation, when the second and third place prizes are being beaten or arrested. also, idgaf, but that’s definitely not much of a consolation at all. if anything, i’m not sure i trust that part of myself, depending on the situation. (i *really* do not like cops, for starters.)

that all said, being the fool that i am, when take off the mask started, i came up with a plan, and carefully tried out unmasking (as in, visibly stimming) in public.

speaking only for myself, here are my conclusions:

  • i was constantly afraid of getting stopped or harassed, including on side streets;
  • while it’s a nice feeling to stim in public, it’s also the sort of nice feeling that has a mind of its own, because i’m stimming. it’s not like i can necessarily say “i’ll just spin my hand on the side that’s not facing the street and hope for the best”, it depends on if i can suppress or “tone down” one hand while spinning the other (if i’m stimming with both hands). also, i encountered a few situations where my strong impulse was to start flapping my hands and arms as well, which ups the risk factor;
  • i already look somewhat “weird”, stand out for a number of reasons and already do visible things to be able to survive sensory overload, which is its own risk. i can mask that, but it messes me up. shrugs.
  • in terms of empowerment, i’m gaining a lot more from things that have nothing to do with being in public anyway, like sensory diet. i definitely don’t want to wind up punching a cop because my neurology spikes, i can’t suppress it in time, and a flailing arm results in me being critically injured or dead;
  • not all white people™ on the campaign were like this, but there were white people who said things along the lines of “i’m autistic and i’m in public! selfie time!” posts photo of themselves in public. i thought to myself “this is not gonna end well if this keeps up” because where else is left for that sort of thing to go, other than stimming in public in the most foolish way possible while white and having someone bail them out of jail, at best, or saying “woo hoo, coast is clear, i stemmed in public and everything was great!” on twitter. so then, even more foolish white people do even more foolish things, and it becomes like the time when fidget spinners were a craze, but with unfortunate outcomes, like injury or death.

conclusion: wtf? i’m not sure what the goal was here for this part of the campaign, other than “be visibly autistic”. a huge part of the problem is that we can’t do that, without risking being harassed or worse, and the more at-risk someone is (like if they’re black or brown), the greater the potential for being harmed. it’s like being visibly lesbian, gay or trans, in the most queer way possible. depending on where you live and how you’re read, it can either be a positive way of increasing visibility and acceptance, or a way for things to go completely wrong. knowing the difference is where shared community knowledge comes in, and that appears to not have been considered in this case.

i hope it is clear that my concern here is that more of us don’t wind up injured, imprisoned or dead, rather than being against us ending masking when it’s more harmful than helpful. there’s a difference though between rejecting forms of masking that do nothing but harm, and deciding to mask out of personal safety or sometimes, as a form of compensating in order to meet personal needs or goals. figuring out those differences and what they mean for us is part of community dialogue and growing together, in the hopes of creating spaces where we can safely live and express ourselves, in any number of ways. that’s going to take more work than a single campaign, and needs to be accomplished with safety for all people on the spectrum in mind.

ABA, Autvoid, Functioning Labels, Liberation, Parents, Uncategorized, Violence against us

Erasure

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Trigger warning: long read, anger, suicidality, ABA, trauma, functioning labels

This pattern: adaptive skill -> “intelligent” -> high-functioning. wtf.

Further, this pattern: need for support -> “lack” -> low-functioning. Again: wtf.

First off: it’s ableist. That’s a given. Functioning labels, intelligence and correlating adaptability to both (and its respective presumed opposites) are *all* flawed concepts.

That said, I’d like to talk about how this makes no sense. Not just because functioning labels are ableist, but how the entire pattern doesn’t make any sense.

A *lot* of being viewed as high-functioning is about masking, and possibly having some particular set of skills or talents that are viewed as “humanizing” (and under capitalism, valuable). I can do both (even if it’s sending me careening towards a meltdown while I do it), up to a point — then things fall apart. So, rhetorically speaking: what does that make me? It is virtually impossible to memorize every possible social interaction; even if some hypothetical person did so, new ones emerge regularly, if not constantly. No amount of scanning a database of situations and scripted responses, and affective empathy (if needed) can fix that. It’s as if those of us who get viewed as “high functioning” (or in some mixed state of high and low functioning, if someone is bothering to pay attention) are the opposite of the “puzzle piece” metaphor; instead of being a neurotypical person trapped inside an autistic shell, we’re autistic people trapped in a learned/assimilated neurotypical one, to varying degrees.

A huge part of this is due to viewing typed or spoken communication as a key marker of ability and intelligence, if not proof of intelligence itself. When I’m non-speaking, does my ability shift? When I melt down? When I’m non-compliant? Is an IQ test an indicator of anything at all? (If you answer is “yes”, consider: even the official WAIS site encourages people to study in advance for testing. So then, what is being tested? If your answer is speed of response as an indicator of intelligence, perhaps consider that this concept is also flawed and ableist.) Also, the lived experience of having a skill or talent in society is predicated on a complex set of social skills, and it’s rare for accommodations to be made based entirely on that skill or talent, especially if you’re marginalized or oppressed. <sarcasm> So much for talent being mapped to functionality with the inference of social acceptance and inclusion! </sarcasm>

That said, there’s also the problem of viewing “low functioning” as lack rather than difference, of equating challenges and the need for support through the lens of intelligence, if not correlating lack of speech to lack of intelligence to lack of capability. Everything from the rather condescending ways people approach facilitated communication on an individual basis, without allowing for context, training or the person’s ability to type independently, to the ways that exhibiting high-functioning traits is equated with being high functioning at all times (or for that matter, with “not really being autistic”) are rooted in biased assumptions about functionality, both “high” and “low”.

Here’s a deeper problem that I see, especially for autistic youth: either through adversives or positive reinforcement, ABA presumes making an allistic child out of an autistic one. This alone is abuse, but on top of it, there’s a presumption that you’ll ditch that “fake child” (the autistic one) and become the real one (the made-up allistic one) that was buried under a pile of broken puzzle pieces. It’s very abuser-as-false-savior-like, as a “therapeutic” approach.

The problem with this is that it’s a lie. The real child is the autistic one, (TW: ABA, coercion, violence) the rest is forced and/or bribed compliance. Further, if you remember who you actually are in adolescence and adulthood, this creates a tension between your real self and the fake allistic one — which is masking at its most harmful. It can lead to forgetting who you are altogether, so you know that your mask isn’t real, but you can’t get back to who you are before you masked, either. This was coming up a lot on the #takethemaskoff campaign: autistic people kept saying “I’ve been masking for so long, I don’t even know who am anymore.” I know what it feels like to start to forget. It’s like someone is murdering you, and you get to watch. There’s masking out of necessity and survival, as well as masking to get your wants and needs met — then there’s masking that can be overcome, safely, or that could if someone hadn’t been subjected to years of forced compliance. (These categories aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, either.) In my opinion this is part of why there’s a link between suicidality and masking.

There’s a variety of ways that ABA and directly ABA-like things are foisted upon autistics. I know that ABA as a practice has been around since the mid-1960s, and the first assessment questionnaires have been around since then as well; my parents used behavioralist techniques that map to ABA more than closely enough to parallel ABA itself. Why that is, I don’t know (although I have my guesses), all I know is that it was traumatizing as fuck, and once the “compliance protocol” was established, it *never* went way. Not just in childhood, period. I have had to unlearn “people tell you what to do, you do it”. It’s a life skills anti-pattern.

What helped me find modes of expression and learning in the school system was *NOT* being assessed, and the more negative aspects of what my parents did at home. What did were teachers that encouraged students to find their own ways of learning and communicating, instead of trying to force us into a box. I thrived under these teachers, and didn’t otherwise. (It’s probably important to point out here that I was frequently what now gets labeled as combative, non-compliant or passive otherwise.) By high school, I learned how to coast, until I was forced out for other reasons. This wasn’t just educational, it was inter-personal as well. I was literally rescued from some personal hell, assessment included, twice — only to fall back into hell until I left the school system altogether, and I have no intentions of forgetting that.

Perhaps what is flawed here is both the entire concept of intelligence in the first place, as a presumed indicator of cognition as well as ability, if not sentience — as well as the idea of “functioning” being a fixed state, that can only be deviated from by regression or “cure”. Both of these assumptions are dangerously ableist, if not eugenicist in their world-views. This is the sort of never-ending array of conundrums that Melanie Yergeau talks about — the frequent assumption is that someone is either too autistic or not autistic enough to self-advocate. This basically is a toxic worldview, and deserves to be challenged as a pernicious threat to our well-being and survival. Self-advocacy is communication, and non-compliance is a social skill, regardless of how we have been labeled, how we communicate and express ourselves, and what levels of support we need.

#actuallyautistic, Autistic community, Autistic Women, Functioning Labels, Liberation, Self-advocacy, Uncategorized

Neurodiversity lite, or assimilationist plus?

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CW: use of functioning labels to “call in” exclusions of less visible forms of functioning hierarchies, patronizing mainstream media “autism think pieces”

https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/09/siri-love-problem-neurodiversity-lite/

https://www.tumblr.com/sherlocksflataffect/121295972384/psa-from-the-actual-coiner-of-neurodivergent

http://highlysensitiveperson.net/hsp-autism-aspergers/

Preface: I am *NOT* advocating for anti-neurodiversity here! I am proud to be part of the neurodiversity movement. If you are against us, have a seat.

I’m starting to wonder if the late 1990s was not just a step forward in terms of self-advocacy, but also a partial setback, despite best intentions. There’s a way of looking at neurodiversity that emerged as being “differently abled”, which is not everybody on the spectrum’s experience. Some of us *are* disabled. It’s like people are missing the “crip liberation” component of self-advocacy. It’s also true that the press has been very condescending and dismissive (even when being disparagingly pro-neurodiversity ), some of which has spilled over into our familial relations. In contrast, I had a close friend tell me that I was “sensitive” somewhere back in the 90s, and referenced HSP as “something that’s a thing now”. It was basically the opposite of what Astrid’s dad did – asserting something as being good, while also not factoring in autistic traits and life experiences. It was an honest mistake, and I don’t blame her for trying to help, but it probably delayed me seeking a diagnosis.

It can also mean that only the most “shiny”, “maps to high functioning”, “personality typed” of us get a seat…well, not at the table as much as under it, but still. Saying “neurodiversity means that we just have different kinds of brains than NTs” can erase how some us have other disabilities, how many of us have co-morbidities, and not all of us are autistic to the same level or degree, including within the same day! That’s definitely not always the intent, but it can have that sort of “impact”, so to speak.

“You’re not including the *real* people with autism!” is the one trump card autism parents, curebies and aspie supremacists have, and they twist that into whatever toxic balloon animal suits their needs on a regular basis, because they have nothing else to base their shitty assertions on – other than “I <3 torture, gaslighting, and copping a patronizing attitude”. This is something we need to be critiquing in our own community, rather than leaving to adversaries. People who get labeled as “low-functioning” *do* get ignored or otherwise not included in community-based needs assessments on a regular basis, as Julia Bascom and Amy Sequenzia have pointed out. From what I can gather as a relative newcomer to the Autistic community, it’s not that people are willfully ignorant, indifferent or ill-intentioned (although that happens too), as much as not always working in consort and solidarity across the spectrum, as autistic liberationists.

I remember all too well what it felt like to be a terrified 10 year old, watching adults trying to decide if I was “enough of a problem” to escalate their attempts to assess and “convert” me (both cisnormatively and neurotypically). Thankfully, that passed (although the aggressing against me, including in physically violent ways, did not). I’ve never been fully accepted in society, even in marginalized spaces. I see similar things happening in the more relatively privileged corners of the neurodiversity movement as well, my gratitude and indebtedness to some of those corners notwithstanding.

I’ve been in activist spaces enough to know how this can wind up. It sounds…familiar. It’s assimilationist, harms the most oppressed members of our community directly, and eventually harms all of us as well. It needs to be replaced with liberation-focused approaches that include all of us. Not just “Nothing about us, without us” — although definitely that as well! — but “All of us or none of us!”, too.