The Problem Isn't "Infighting"

Recently, I posted “Polarization” and “When You're Not Loud and Angry Enough” on here, and on Tumblr. Discussions have sprung up, and I hope they continue, because the way the Autistic community treats other members of the community needs a fair amount of addressing. The discussions that have been started on Tumblr following those posts are not “in-fighting,” as I've seen the discussions called. I'm going to get more specific here and less jargon-filled than those posts and also add on extended commentary to reactions I've seen to the posts.

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There are no such thing as good Autistics and bad Autistics, to be explicit. If good Autistic people are accused of sucking up to NTs and non-autistics and bad Autistic people are the heroes who actually call out people, how on earth do you expect solidarity within a community when people are trying to strike a divide? I know people who, on Facebook, Tumblr, elsewhere, who have been told that they are just goody-goodies and that they have no place in activism. It could have been me.

When you talk about a community, you take into account everyone. The people who feel guilt because they pass as neurotypical, the people who don't take pride in being Autistic, the people who maybe even want a cure, the people who feel guilty because they don't always have the capability of fighting every battle, the people who need accommodations, the people who need support staff, the people who need neither, and the list goes on.

You take into account the people who disagree with you.

The original posts were never about allies, and I did write it as a semi-response to the TPGA debacle – but not from the perspective of ally worthiness. I see people taking it that way anyway. The posts were about that there is often no room for disagreement in this discourse, and more importantly, that the way people are treated (like me, and others) when we disagree, people yell at us.

I should not have to constantly remove myself from Autistic spaces because people are being abusive with their language and treatment of other people, Autistic or neurotypical, to be clear. This is not tone-policing, as someone told me it was. It is not tone-policing to request a stop to the endless barrage of explosions and abusive language. And abusive language doesn't even have to be in all capital letters, to be honest: it comes in the form of “you disagree with me, so here's why you should screw off.”

The problem isn't the “infighting.” The problem is the continued mantra that asking people to stop being flat out mean and abusive is silencing, but yelling and intimidation are not silencing, and if you say they are, you are tone-policing.

When You're Not "Loud and Angry Enough"

We clearly need to figure something out, as a community. When the Autistic community has scared a good amount of Autistic people into not being able to say things, what has it become? I was one of them, for a while. I’m not going into direct confrontations on Facebook (I don’t have spoons to deal with the arguing that would happen), but I’m writing this post.

The goal of a community is to not echo-chamber itself into only allowing certain ideas and viewpoints into it, which, frankly, has been a lot of what I’m seeing. People are attracted to the ideal that explosive, sometimes abusive behavior is okay when you’re part of an oppressed group. We as a community have dealt with a lot of pain. We’ve lost a lot of children, teenagers and adults to caretakers, and we’ve been abused in the name of therapy. I would not deny this community anger at things that have been done and are still being done.

The echo-chambering I’m seeing, though, is that if you’re not loud and angry and constantly scouring the bits of the Internet to confront and call out people, you are too polite and constantly want to make nice. The echo-chambering I’m seeing is permitting the silencing of some Autistic people through fear while saying that you’re being silenced when someone has a different opinion than you or wants you to stop yelling.

The dynamics of a community, the fabric of its being, does not rely on explosive techniques. The explosiveness I can no longer be quiet about drives potential allies and newly diagnosed Autistic people away as an unsafe space, and more importantly, many Autistic people may look at this community and wonder what is getting done, wonder if they even want to be part of it, and credibility is damaged. And what will we tell the people who aren’t privy to our conversations and are not able to join in, who may rely on us to help enact change in the community and society? What then?

Polarization

Polarization

 

I am sometimes afraid of “Autistic spaces.” I get afraid of the fact that hey, if I don’t like the fact that people are yelling about things because I have trauma in my past related to intense anger/yelling/emotional abuse… I’ll be told I’m tone-policing, that I’m a goody-goody with the neurotypicals and non-autistics.

“If you don’t like our anger, just leave, if you don’t like our anger, you’re trying to silence us.”

I am not trying to silence anyone.

There is a difference between explosive anger and righteous anger.

There is a difference between calling someone out and completely lambasting them into the next century with an explosion.

I’m trying to navigate a world of activism where if I disagree with someone, I might get yelled at – by other Autistics, of all people. I’m trying to tread a line between telling someone to stop triggering me and tone policing.

You can’t claim to want a safe space for Autistic people, then summarily explode at other Autistics who disagree with you because yes, we have other opinions, and no, it’s not because we just want to suck up to neurotypicals and non-autistics. Sometimes we have other methods of activism that still include calling people out.

It has a polarizing effect on the community. When people accuse us, the less angry-sounding, of being textbooks for neurotypicals, have you considered: maybe we don’t always have the energy to fight every battle? Maybe we don’t have the energy to yell and scream? Maybe we also don’t feel like triggering other people with explosive language?

I should not feel unsafe in Autistic and autism community spaces both from neurotypicals/non-autistics and other Autistic people.

Maybe, in Poetry... Reflections on My Autistic Pride Poetry

TW: Abuse, murder, electric shock mention, links to things on "quiet hands"

I successfully read my poems, "Writing out Infinity: Autistic Pride" and (tw: ableism, violence, murder mentions) "Power Structures" at the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event on Saturday, September 27.

 I received an email later telling me that my poems had touched their heart. It made the fear of standing up in front of people with that microphone, staring at the papers in my hands, trying to put conviction in my voice because I am the authority standing up there on the stage and I know being Autistic is not shameful and I know all the things that have been done to us, worth it. 

I wasn't sure they would understand what I meant by neurodiversity or by infinity, or or the description of stims. I wasn't sure people would understand what I meant by people being afraid to move their hands, or people being afraid to be Autistic in a world that sympathizes with our abusers and murderers, and the innumerable counts of abuse done to us through electric shock and aversive therapies and forced normalization and telling people they can't move their hands and they cut our vocal cords because we scream too much. 

Maybe, in poetry, the graphic or specific details don't need to always be there. Maybe, in poetry, the conviction with which you say it will tell them it's true, will tell them they should look into it, will tell them to presume competence and believe me and tell them that we are not suffering burdens 

--and that we can love ourselves just as much as any non-disabled person. 

 

A Right to Representation

This buzzfeed article on "Parenthood" and autism (the spark behind this post) uses really problematic language, like 'battling' autism. Most Autistic people I know, including myself, don't battle against it- we accept, embrace, and celebrate our neurotypes. Sometimes it is not a picnic, but no one's life is a picnic, and we don't have to like every aspect of our disability in order to embrace it and be proud.

It quotes no actually Autistic people and uses a quote from Autism Speaks, an organization that most Autistic people stand against for its propagation of myths such as Autistic people are broken, diseased, require normalization through methods such as ABA, and need a cure. It also uses person-first language (“with autism”) rather than identity-first language (“Autistic”).

I may be rehashing what people have said over and over again in numerous posts about representation in popular culture and about including our voices in articles and policies written about us. In no way am I, however, beating a dead horse. If I was beating a dead horse, there would be ideal representation, inclusion, and more listening to us (and even then, it might not be a dead horse because there would still be people trying to drag us back down).

There's the thing where they write articles on us without talking to us. People gladly assume we do not like being disabled, or that we cannot communicate about being disabled. Sometimes, perhaps, they do know, and just decide to talk for us anyway. We deserve to be included; we have thoughts. Traditional manners of communication may not work for us, but we still have opinions. We all have the right to be a self-advocate and be heard.


Then there are films by disabled people about disability, but people seem to jump for the sensationalized, dramatized, and either tragic or magically-cured stories. This is why, for instance, the Kansas City chapter of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network created a petition for Netflix to include films about disability and chronic illness by actually disabled and chronically ill creators. They compiled a list of films by disabled and/or chronically ill creators here.

We shouldn't have to make petitions about better representation, but we do, unfortunately. A lot of showrunners will deny their character is even Autistic because the character either “functions too well,” or they didn't mean to write the character that way, or they don't want the stigma of having an autistic character on the show. It's often a combination of them. Disability in general also doesn't fare so well. Disabled characters are often played by able-bodied actors, which leaves them able to 'stand up' or go off at the end of the show or film. Often we're depicted as either violent or savant. Often we get cured, get killed, or die in some fashion.

These depictions lend themselves to stigma in multiple ways. People can be afraid of us because we're not making eye contact or doing “strange” hand gestures or pacing. People expect us to be savants when most of us are not – giving the idea that we're only worth something if we have some miraculous skill someplace “despite” the disability. Cures imply we need them. Our deaths imply that death is a fate kinder than disability.

This is not just an issue that affects disability; it is intersectional and should be treated as such by all marginalized groups. We are one of a marginalized people and culture. Queer people, trans people, PoC, women, religious minorities and other groups also have a lot to work for in the field of representation. We should just make a collaborative series of films between disabled people, trans people, queer people, women, PoC, and as many religious minority groups as possible, and other groups too... because we all have a right to representation.

(also posted on Tumblr)

Eugenics and Disabled Parents' Rights

I am very concerned by Robyn Powell's words: "there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities."

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

I am going to block quote a post I wrote in July:

Robyn Powell, Attorney Advisor at the National Council on Disability, writes in “Can Parents Lose Custody Simply Because They Are Disabled?” that "removal rates where parents have a psychiatric disability have been found to be as high as 70 percent to 80 percent; where the parent has an intellectual disability, 40 percent to 80 percent." In addition, she writes, “parents who are deaf or blind report extremely high rates of child removal and loss of parental rights.”

We are no longer in the 1920s and 1930s, and the ingrained ableism still persists into the modern day. The statistics listed by Powell, and the countless cases in which children are removed from parents with disabilities, says among other things that:

• The disabled are not fit to bear children, nor raise them.
  
• People with disabilities should not have the same rights as non-disabled parents, because they are inherently less.
  
• Children need to be protected and raised away from people with disabilities.
  

Some people may protest, once the concept of eugenics is explained to them, that they’re not like that. They don’t support things like that. Yet by either failing to act in defense of, or supporting the removal of children from parents with disabilities, they are playing into the very legacy of eugenics.

Eugenics has been around too long. It needs to stop. Eugenic-based legal aspects are one of the policies that violate a human's rights so deeply that I find eugenicists unforgivable. I will fight eugenic policies til the day I die. And hopefully I can write things that people can keep fighting with after I’m gone.

Dear Issy

Dear Issy,

I want to tell you that the world isn't as harsh as it always seems, but I don't know how that would go over, since your mother did something so unbearably cruel and inexcusable to you. You are 14 and already you have suffered an unforgivable amount of abuse.

You are Autistic. In some people's minds, that is justification enough to make you a target. But it is not your fault. You are not the aggressor or abuser.

You are Autistic, and the Autistic community stands with you. By being Autistic, you have been accepted into our community. Remember that being Autistic is something that holds no shame, regardless of what people do to you. Preserve yourself at all costs, because you will never not be Autistic.

On a personal level, I hope you are recovering from what happened. I hope you can go someplace safe and heal and grow up. I hope we can hear you communicate your story. We will listen.

From,

Kit