One comeback if someone gives you shit for self-diagnosing as autistic, free of charge:
“Yeah, and Harvey Milk wasn’t gay, and Dolores Huerta isn’t brown. Any other questions?”
This is a directly worded, very concise post.
https://kirstenlindsmith.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/autism-and-consent/
The only thing I’d add is that while asserting that autistic people can’t understand non-consent is ableist (ridiculously, patently so), what can be difficult is parsing allistic social cues, which are always all over the place, but they’re *really, really* all over the place when it comes to intimacy.
The solution remains the same, though: ask. Always fucking ask.
If that’s still hard to grasp: *all* of the social norms around that (both good and bad) were most likely invented by allistics, over *centuries*, and were almost entirely invented by cishet men regardless, with typically *NO* input from women.
Even queer social norms have some of that BS as well. At the least.
So unless you relish trusting cishet allistic fuckshit that excludes women, and hoping for the best (which won’t happen): ask.
Also, *DO NOT rely on pick up books!* Here’s why.
https://kirstenlindsmith.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/clueless-autism-and-the-pua-community/
TW: extreme violence, attempted murder, transphobia
I got jumped in high school. I could have died.
Me, once I broke free of the stranglehold: “Why did you do that?”
Him: “Because you’re different.”
Me: “Different? What kind of different?”
His friend, who watched the whole thing and did nothing: “Come on, let’s go. No, let’s *go*.”
They ran off.
Going back through it, “you’re different” wasn’t just over being trans (and starting to wear more femme clothing to school, and growing my hair out, in order to start trying to come out), or being mixed (although i got attacked for that as well, all the time), but because I didn’t pick up on the “…what are you doing” socially layered cues that were a sort of “danger: cease autism” warning against defying the norms, as well.
I now strongly suspect that not reading the warning cues (someone asked me “what’s this about”, and i didn’t get the “concerned, but oh well” tone and expression they had, at all), was what pushed things over the edge into my being attacked. Teenagers talk. What about? They didn’t tell me — I’m sure they assumed I’d figure it out on my own, or if not, that it was on me.
If I had known how to read the body language and facial expression of the person who tried to warn me, I’d have been like “oh shit, this is high school, and I’m…something they don’t like, obviously, they keep assaulting me, got it” and either closeted myself until I could get free, or figured out a means of resistance with my high school “beyond the outcasts” social cluster. ✊🏽 (Note: if I grew up when teaching “life skills” was more common, I doubt it would’ve helped much. My assumption is that doesn’t work for the same reasons that sex ed in the U.S. frequently doesn’t work, either. Labeling a curriculum a particular way doesn’t mean that it’s addressing the needs that the label infers.)
As it was, I was perplexed. I thought to myself, “Are you unhappy about the way i’m presenting? You don’t seem angry, so…well hunh, no idea. I guess you were just curious. Oh well.”
Shortly after that, I got jumped. I took the proficiency exam, split that gd place and never looked back. 💃🏽
wtf, Temple Grandin. *anxiety intensifies*
I don’t buy this assimilationist, anti-worker, anti-poor nonsense. Full stop.
I’ve worked way too many jobs where i was miserable, my coworkers were miserable, the department heads were miserable — and those were the sort of “not just a job, a career” sorts of positions she’s talking about.
It’s not just her, unfortunately. Some corners of the Autistic community, especially among people who tout being high functioning (or being “cured”) as a panacea, have a ways to go in terms of:
– not playing high/low, aspie/autie games, especially “high-functioning” punching down towards “low-functioning”
– active inclusion and acceptance of POC
– active acceptance of people who self-dx
– acceptance of neurodiversity, neurodivergence and neuroqueerness in general
We’re a community, not a horse race. Asserting that we’re not dealing with the same core issues is bunk, even if they manifest to varying levels from person to person, and within a given person.
When people try to draw a hard distinction between auties and aspies, or the employed (and careered, no less) vs. the unemployed, what they are doing is attempting to reify passing, including passing as allistic and/or NT, as well as “I never would’ve guessed that you’re autistic” sorts of mind games. It may work for them to do that, and that’s fine, but insisting that everybody be like them is both cruel and divisive.
Counter-propoganda for your informational needs:
The thing about the intersect of autism and queer/transness for me is that it’s all a blur, and has been since childhood, on a personal level. It’s *all* part of the same fabric of oppression, teasing it out in terms of what happened diagnostically is murky at best.
In childhood and through to my teens, I was weepy, angry, avoidant, aggressive, bookish, stimmy, social (but with the “wrong” gender), reclusive, and basically a queer happy mess, as long as people left me alone, which they most definitely did not. So then, i was a miserable queer mess, and they still didn’t leave me alone.
Both at school and in my sort-of-home, everything was an intervention, constantly, from the moment I showed up the first day of school to the moment I left the school system when i was 15. Autism, queerness, transness, problem behavior, asocial behavior, all the same tapestry of “stop doing that”.
That said, they did all sorts of soft and hard intervention-like things to me, back when ABA was just starting to get off the ground. “Stop being queer/trans” things. “We’re testing your ability to match faces to emotions” things. Rorschach things. EEG things. “The tests are to screen for your mother’s neurological condition, but only you get tested repeatedly” things. “Look me in the eye, no, *look* me in the eye” things. “Staggering from the EEG drugs” things. “Stop toe walking, people will think you’re gay” things. “Stop looking at shiny and stacked things” things.
I tried to self-advocate to get my school records, but my mom bullied me out of it.
It took me over 40 years to talk about this publicly, and the only reason I am now is because I lucked my way into support materials for autistic women, or as seems to still be an ok thing to say, autistic females. (Yes, females in that sort of way, ladies.)
So I hate to break it to folks, but clinical diagnosis or no clinical diagnosis, school records or no school records, you’re never going to get rid of me.
I am well the damn hell right here, I will remain here until we all are free, and you can’t stop me. To paraphrase Rodrigo De Souza, “My paperwork is in the blood”. (Cancelled? Boo.)
TW: allistic violence, conformity, ABA, murder
I don’t know if anybody has written about this in these exact terms, but it’s fairly unmistakable — it happens when you don’t adhere to allistic social norms, in terms of eye contact, speech or social interaction. It’s the “wtf is wrong with you” look.
The worst version of it is someone institutionalizing an autistic person, committing acts of violence (including ABA) against them, or murdering them outright.
The more common versions are looking at you sideways, verbally questioning, correcting, or patronizing you, or jaw-dropping silence followed by deflecting/changing the topic/making a “joke” out of things.
It’s a form of compliance insistence. It’s triggering. It leads to us being rejected from work positions (or fired from them), failed relationships (with allistics), or in some cases, arrested, assaulted or worse.
I wish I could just say “come on, try harder” and have that be enough, but I see the same thing happen from white people towards people of color, men towards women, and against disabled people in general.
As always, we need to create our own media, and act collectively in our own self-interest. It’s up to us, not them. It should be better, but as with so many movement-level shifts in society (let alone liberatory and transformational ones) it’s not going to come through mere awareness. It’s up to us to make it happen.
“Too Nice”: Avoiding the Traps of Exploitation and Manipulation
Whew, this. I have been led astray and manipulated a *LOT* in my now-middle-aged life. It can lead to all sorts of problems, including autistic burnout, it seems.
A thing that I think needs teasing out a bit — where he says “We lose ourselves in repetitive behaviour, we Hyperfocus, we Stim, we become different characters or act as animals, we script conversations, we withdraw, we hide in worlds inside our heads, we close ourselves off, or equally sometimes explode outwards”? That isn’t necessarily negative; if anything, that list of things can be a positive part of an autistic person’s life (stimming, hyperfocus, roleplay), or a form of self-defense or release (hiding, exploding), depending. I think I’m finding myself through an *unmasked* acceptance of these things, not being thrown further afield. I’m not advocating for decking someone or disappearing to the point of forgetting to eat though, just so that’s clear. (What that can mean rhetorically, as a form of communication or being, is another question.)
The High Cost of Self-Censoring (or why stimming is a good thing)
The Angry Aspie Explains It All
I’m not saying this to negate what he’s talking about, which is about coping mechanisms (including masking), though. This is probably why he immediately continues the above quote with “we Mask — all in an effort to endure this world we live in, to survive, to find balance with ourselves internally and externally and also, to hide who we we are — to make Non-Autistic people accept us, because we don’t find acceptance as ourselves. This is why we burn out.”
Having been through this sort of burnout multiple times in my life, I can confirm that it is not a picnic, at all, and whatever we can do to make space to unmask, to lessen the likelihood of not burning out, and for generalized self-care and self-love, is a good thing. (I recovered one time by sleeping for four days; I was barely able to talk, even with people I was close to. It was different than being just selectively mute, it was like “OK, all systems and communication protocols are glitching or failing.”)
That all said, I’m working on putting what he talks about to practice, because I’m getting close to it happening again, and wow, does it suck. Sheer mortal fear, do not want.
A mind-bendingly difficult thing from my past that i’m coming to terms with:
I might have been screened for and possibly diagnosed with autism back in grade school, or some sort of gifted + autistic, although that was before “doubly exceptional aspie” was a thing (early 1970s).
I went through the Very-Concerned-Teacher-to-shrink-to-non-staff-specialist gauntlet for a while. I definitely was being assessed for cross-gender behavior; pattern matching games and a “mind in the eyes” test was part of that.
That’s mostly sorted for me now, or sorted enough that I’m slowly moving from being floored by it to acceptance and integration of what happened.
What’s still too raw to talk about in much detail: realizing that writing and music was the communication vector that might have kept me from getting aggressively ABA’d or institutionalized in some way or another, right at the moment when modern “child autism” was starting to be acted upon (as in, ABAing autistic children). So, it’s a toss-up as to what would’ve happened, had I not lucked into writing and music as “ok, well, you’re ‘creative and sensitive'” as a result. Things went from “You’re a problem. *sounds alarm*” to “You’re innately talented, so of course you’re that way”, quickly, come fifth grade (homeroom teacher) and seventh grade, partially. I never was labeled as “gifted” within the school system, but writing and later, music was how I found my way to forms of support that were actually supportive, rather than more aggressive interventions, both informally and formally.
It also was a way to express myself creatively in a classroom setting, rather than *stacks small stones away from the other kids* or *runs into the closet, overwhelmed*. In other words, I was “learning how to behave”, so the early negative reinforcement machinations of ABA-like things wound themselves down. This unfortunately did *nothing* to stop students themselves from aggressing against me, but it did change the classroom dynamics, including the times where I was flunking out, in a class where I had tested beyond grade level or otherwise was capable of doing the work. The right-wing “take” on this is to attribute this to laziness, but…well, no, actually.
Same goes for my family — if my parents were presented with a diagnosis of autism, or as was starting to get phased out, schizophrenia as a clinical “who even knows” place-holder for autism (this all happened in the early 1970s), it’s very possible that my parents took one look at the school system and attempted to intervene on their own instead, because that was my family, back then. (This was before my father’s drinking, and the subsequent bullying and aggression kicked in.)
So when my active interest in spinning and stacking games shifted to reading the dictionary and their encyclopedia set, then once encouraged, to writing and music, it was tolerated, and accepted, both in my family and at school. “Narrowly escaping a worse fate” is my best guess and operative assumption, for now.
(Caveat: diagnostic tests are an indicator, but not the “final word”, including for self-dx. (Is there a final word? What are words?) I’m working on a list of autism-themed books and blogs, which provide a lot more context.)
I found these posts the other day, thought I’d share.
(Possibly) controversial opinion:
I think taking the AQ test more than once might be necessary in some cases.
The first time I took it, I “passed”, but after I thought about it for a couple of days, I realized that I might’ve taken the test incorrectly.
The test is designed 1-4, not 1-10 (and scored 1-2), from definitely agree to definitely disagree. Which for a “spectrum” test, is an…interesting choice for testing format, but whichever.
I kept thinking “Why does this feel like it should be numbered 1-10? There’s things that feel like I should’ve answered 7/10, in terms of per-question autistic assessment, that were…somewhere else. It’s as if I was denying what the autistic inference is (“Do you like trains?”) for some of the questions, or perhaps the mapping of the options itself threw me.” (This is a common thing for me with multiple choice questions. “Well…maybe? It really depends on this, and this, and this, and this, and. Also, “this question is offensive, so *answers question sarcastically*, or feels an impulse to. Or the “boxes” in the test format contradict each other, or don’t represent an accurate answer — what does “slightly” mean? Slightly relative to what?”) I’m not sure if this is denial, or some other thing, but something’s off.”
So I took it again, and my score went up. o.O
Also, if you’re not aware of the issues surrounding how autistic women have been misdiagnosed or ignored, including on the basis of now-outmoded criteria, it’s good to know about:
This includes questions in the AQ, which is why I’m mentioning it. The classic example is “trainspotting and math” sorts of questions/assertions.
In case anybody is curious, my (self-administered) AQ scores after repeated testing are, in order by date: 33, 41, 42, 48. The last one was done after having two meltdowns in a week, while recovering from one burnout cycle, and working to not wind up in another one. My guess is that my mask fell completely off. “The Mask coming off is exactly what happens during the Autistic Burnout period.”
Also, I’m going through a process of letting go of being closeted (and the masking and denial that comes with that). So it’s possible — and most probably, likely — that I was in partial denial the first time I took the test. I think it’s possible that the first score, the second two, and the last one are clustering relative to my levels of self-acceptance as autistic. That said, it’s just one test. It’s a process.