Your politics have a problem when they contradict the real-life experiences of the people they’re supposed to be about.

Your politics have an even bigger problem when the people they’re supposed to be about, become afraid to describe our real-life experiences, for fear of angering the echo chamber.  And when we become afraid to describe our real-life experiences, that reinforces your idea that or real-life experiences don’t actually exist.  Which reinforces the idea that you’re right.  Which makes you feel even more justified in attacking anyone who happens to contradict you for any reason at all.

I hate this.

I hate it because I am afraid to say certain things about my life.

Because I don’t know if I have the strength to handle the consequences if I do.

Because I understand, I more than understand, why the echo chambers believe as they believe.  I understand what’s at stake.  I understand why it’s so easy to believe that contradiction is a threat to your life, because in some areas, it almost, sort of, can be.

And yet I also understand what’s at stake when all of us little people on the ground aren’t allowed to talk about our lives.

And there’s more at stake there than you think.

When we can’t have a conversation.

When we can’t bring our little packages of our truth from our lives to the table, and unwrap them together, and look at them, and learn from each other, without judgement.

Then something is dying, and something has died, and something is dead.  And your entire echo chamber smells of rotting flesh.

But we are still alive.

And we still pass around our little packages to each other.

But instead of doing it in the full light of day, where everyone can see and benefit from it.

We do it furtively, at night.  We look around, make sure nobody is looking, tiptoe to the neighbor’s house, sneak in through the back door so nobody sees us coming.

We send each other packages in the mail with no return address.

We write our stories in invisible ink.  We write them in code.

You should know all about this.  This is what it was like for all marginalized people, before your movements got started.

But now, instead of just hiding from the oppressors, we are hiding from your movements.

You might want to take a really good, long look at why that is.

I once took part in a disability studies group we called Disability Studies Prometheus.  Because we were people traditionally left out of disability studies.  We were cognitively disabled, or too sick to make it to class, or other things.  We called ourselves Prometheus because he stole fire from the gods for the benefit of humanity.  We were stealing the fire of knowledge from the mainstream disability studies programs that wouldn’t let us in — our IQs too low, our behavior too wild, our bodies too unreliable for the university setting.  So we stole what we could from them, and we made the fire our own.

Don’t for a moment believe that this isn’t happening everywhere.

There are disabled people stealing fire from the mainstream disability communities.  Trans and genderless people stealing fire from the mainstream trans communities.  People of color stealing fire from the mainstream PoC communities.  Poor and working-class people stealing fire from Marxist and other anti-classism echo chambers.  LGB people stealing fire from the ivory towers that theorize about queerness all day.  Women stealing fire from mainstream feminism in all its incarnations.

More than that, there are marginalized people stealing fire from the marginalized people who have gained power.  And the ones stealing the fire don’t always stick to the communities we’ve been taught to stick to.  So you have nondisabled trans women of color stealing fire and bringing it back to cis men with profound multiple developmental disabilities, and both of them learning to tell their stories together.  And you have elderly gay white rich healthy men stealing fire and bringing it back to children of color living on cancer wards.

All around you, in the night, where you can’t see us.

We are all around you.  We are carrying little packages around.  Packages wrapped in plain, nondescript, brown paper.

Those little parcels will overturn the world.  They will overturn everything you’ve ever worked for.  And they will make it better.

Because each little package contains the story of one of us.  And it is a story untainted by ideology.  It is a story untainted by who you say we should be.  It is a story that says who we are.

And our stories.  Our stories as ourselves.  Our stories without someone to look over our shoulder and tell us that it can’t be the way it actually was.  That the way it actually was, will automatically hurt someone else.

And we put our stories together.  Even if we have to do it in the dead of night.  Even if we have to do it in code, whether low-tech ciphers or high-tech encryption.  Even if we have to send it to each other anonymously, one by one.

We are cautiously, furtively, forming real communities.  Communities that are about helping each other, not about tearing each other apart, or about finding new people to tear apart.

You can even join us… if you learn to resist your impulse to jump down people’s throats the moment we don’t comply with expectations.

But the bottom line is: We are out here.  Nothing you can say or do will stop us from carrying around our little packages, handing them out to each other, reading them, discussing them.  We are being.  We are being joyously and cautiously, furtively and with abandon, but we are being.  We are handing out manuscripts and poems, index cards with recipes on them.  We hide them, we bury them, we slip them into our bras, into the back pockets of our briefcases and false drawers in our luggage.

And then we pull them out.  And we show them to each other.  And we read them.  We read them understanding each person as an individual, without judgement except where absolutely necessary.  And we find ways of making connections.  We find ways of making communities.  Not based on shared individual traits, so much as on a shared desire to understand and protect one another.  Shared understanding, based on learning about each other.  Even the parts of each other that would seem inconvenient at first glance.  Even the parts of each other, perhaps especially those parts, where our stories seem to contradict.   Because it’s those parts that show us where we most need to grow, and understand, and learn to see each other in new ways.

But we form communities because that is what people do, when we begin to understand each other in depth.  To understand each other enough to care what happens to each other.  And when we form those communities, we do so because we’ve learned so much about each other, on a deep enough level, that we can’t avoid caring about each other.

The most important part about communities formed in this way?  They’re not about ideas.  They’re about people.  Every single community member counts, and every single community member is the reason that we have come together in the first place.  Those packages we have exchanged are our stories as people, our experiences in the world, our lives.  And everything that happens in these communities are based around that.  Not around ideologies, not around constructing the perfect set of ideas.  Not around making sure that everyone’s thoughts are pure and free from dissent.  But around making sure that each human being is valued to the fullest extent possible.  Even if our stories seem to contradict each other.  Even if our stories seem to contradict the ideologies we remember from before.

This is another way to do things.  This is already happening, right in front of you.  I am doing this.  My friends are doing this.  We are doing these things because we are being harmed so much by ideologies, that there has to be another way, there has to be a way that we can change the world and survive doing it without selling our souls.  So if this seems like a far-off utopian dream, know that it is happening all around you.  It’s happening offline, it’s happening online, it’s happening right under your feet.  I’m doing it right here, right now.

A bunch of stuff that needed saying

The following stuff is important stuff I wrote elsewhere on the net. If some of what I'm saying doesn't make sense, ignore it, it's just context that I'm not able to describe right now. The main thrust of what I'm saying should make sense without understanding the full context of what I wrote. And I can't rewrite it all right now for this blog. So the following is pretty much as I wrote it. Also sorry for all caps in places, it was because where I was writing it I couldn't use other forms of emphasis. And please don't assume that this is all about autism. Everyone always assumes that everything I say is all about autism. It isn't. Most of it isn't. Not even the stuff that talks about autism is all about autism. I am fed up with just about every such assumption because my world isn't made up of only or mainly autistic people and when I talk about things I always get replies saying “This applies to people without autism too” and I want to say “no shit Sherlock, that's what I meant in the firs

This turned into a long post, and it may not apply to the people I’m replying too, but this conversation just brought up a lot of things I’ve been thinking but having trouble saying.

Thank you for writing that. It’s really important.

Also another point I want to make. There are many autistic people whose best method of communication is nonverbal. By which I mean, not speech, not writing. Some of us this is true of, can communicate well by speech or typing also. Some of us can’t. But we usually have trouble with receptive language — either some of the time, all of the time, or especially, during the early formative years of our lives. I’m one such person.

Most people don’t know this because the current theories of autism all involve us being terrible at nonverbal communication. By which people mean, terrible at one specific kind of nonverbal communication that most nonautistic people are good at. Also, most autistic people who can talk about their experiences in words, are (or believe themselves to be) bad at nonverbal communication, and their experiences get seen as applying to all of us, when this is not true.

So for many of us — nonverbal communication, and the world of things outside of words, are our best way of communicating. Whether we can also use words or not. I wrote about one such group of autistic people in my contribution (“Untitled”) to the Loud Hands anthology. Because I want people to know we exist. Because I want other people like me to know they aren’t alone, in an autistic community made up mostly of people who experience themselves as terrible at nonverbal communication. Where people even say that autistic communities are communities where people can use text or other forms of language, rather than having to deal with nonverbal communication. Even though there’s plenty of us who do better in person, BECAUSE we communicate best nonverbally, because words, whether we can do them or not, whether we are or seem good at them or not, are so hard and so difficult and so painful to keep using.

There are entire groups of autistic people out there who communicate with each other using our own unique forms of body language that are different from nonautistic body language, different from other autistic people’s body language, specific to ourselves, specific to each other. Who communicate best reading each others writing, looking for the patterns that exist between the words, rather than inside the words themselves. Who communicate best by exchanging objects, by arranging objects and other things around ourselves in ways that each other can read easier than we can read any form of words. Who share the most intimate forms of communication, outside of words, outside of anything that can be described easily, in between everything, seeing each other to the core of our awareness. Who see layers upon layers of meaning outside of any form of words.

In “Untitled” I was writing about my favorite communication ever, my video chats with AnneC (and her cats, when they show up, which Shadow absolutely loves communicating with me over video and reminds her every Friday at the right time because he loves it so much). I don’t necessarily do the best at visual stuff the way most people think of it. But I can see the patterns of movement in other people, including cats, whether or not I see them well in the usual forms of visual perception. And those patterns of movement tell me more than any word ever could.

I can even read nonautistic people fairly well at times — just not in the ways nonautistic people read each other well. That’s one of the problems with nonautistic research into autistic people’s abilities to understand nonverbal communication. Most of it relies on the understanding and use of words at the same time as understanding the nonverbal communication. And most of it relies on the kinds of nonverbal communication that nonautistic people are most aware of. This frustrates me to no end — how can people research forms of understanding that they don’t themselves have and therefore they don’t themselves understand even exists? I’ve actually told researchers ways they can research autistic people’s understanding of nonverbal communication without having to resort to the faulty methods they usually use.

And one researcher told me, when I asked, that every parent of an autistic child she ever met said that their child picked up easily on things like stress in the household, but that SHE ACTUALLY DISREGARDED IT UNTIL I ASKED HER, BECAUSE SHE’D BEEN TAUGHT THAT AUTISTIC PEOPLE COULDN’T READ BODY LANGUAGE. I’m totally serious. If researchers are that biased themselves, how can they possibly hope to even notice that we can understand things they assume we don’t understand?! I taught that researcher a bunch of very simple ways to test that without relying on the painfully stupid research methods that guarantee researchers will find only what they expect to find — relying on us to use and understand words, relying on our understanding of actors and stage conventions rather than real people’s real nonverbal communication, relying on nonautistic people’s limited ability to read autistic body language, all sorts of other flaws that seem obvious but that researchers themselves seem never to notice. So hopefully she will set up some real experiments that show our real abilities.

Anyway. Back to what I was saying. There’s entire subgroups of autistic people out there _ not just my own — who rely on nonverbal means of understanding the world, and nonverbal means of communication. That’s one reason I usually put myself in my videos — because I know that certain other autistic people will be able to read me like a book, even if nonautistic people usually can’t. And that nonverbal communication is a crucial part of my videos. (See why the entire first half of “In My Language” has no words in it. I was trying to make a point about the best way I communicate, the best way many people communicate, autistic or not, verbal or not. Mostly lost on people, who think it’s a video about autism. It’s not. It’s a video about communication and understanding and personhood, that happens to be made by an autistic person. Big difference. I told CNN why I really made the video, and they left out that part of the interview in favor of putting their words in my mouth. I think my real intent was too political for them.)

Anyway. I may be a writer, but my real best form of communication has nothing to do with words. I use words because I have to. Because most people won’t understand me if I don’t. I don’t use them because I like them, or because I “can’t do nonverbal communication so text is best for me”, or any of the usual reasons most people assume. If I could never use language again, spoken or written, I would be really happy. But the world won’t let me do that, so I carry on using a means of communication that is outright painful for me.

I don’t know the people in the video, but I know that the way their bodies move makes intuitive sense to me and communicates things whether they intend it to be so or not. (The forms of nonverbal communication I understand best are unintentional, in fact. That’s one reason tests using actors don’t work on me. I know an autistic woman who failed a test of nonverbal communication because it used actors and she kept describing their real feelings instead of their acted ones. What this says about nonautistic people’s understanding of nonverbal communication is… interesting.) Whether they are able to use spoken language or not, the video would lose a lot if it only relied on showing them speaking or typing the words.

And I really dislike a lot of the self-advocacy movement for relying mostly on the self-advocacy that happens through words, written or spoken. This leaves out people who can’t do either but who are nonetheless quite capable of advocating for themselves through their actions and movements. If I hadn’t spent a lot of my life forcing myself to do words, I might be such a person, so I am always aware of this. Words are not natural to me the way they are to some autistic people. They’re difficult and my development could have gone either way. There are also people who, no matter how much effort they put in, could never have used or understood words, and they are also extremely important, and they are also capable of self-advocacy, and they are still capable of communication that is more full of meaning than the communication of many people who use words.

I wish there were videos using their communication — which by definition wouldn’t involve words. Both people who would have been able to use words had they put in a crapload of effort at critical times in their development, and people who would never be able to use them no matter what. Such people exist. I sometimes wonder if they are too inconvenient for some autistic people to remember. I hate when people tell parents, “If you just gave your child a communication device they would be able to type words (or use picture symbols) and everything would be solved.” You don’t know that. You just can’t possibly know that. I hear that a lot, this idea that autistic people would all be able to communicate in words if only they were given a means to type them instead of speak them. And it’s so not true that its utterly ridiculous. I hear it both from people whose main way of communicating is speech, and also from people who use typing, and people who use both. It’s wishful thinking and it’s not true. There are people whose understanding of the world is just like a typical “aspie” except they couldn’t speak for motor reasons, and they are the most likely of those who use typing, to believe this myth.

Reality is that there are lots of people who will either never be able to use words, never be able to understand words, or both. Or whose use or understanding is so limited that they will never be able to use words as their primary means of communication. But they do communicate, whether the communication is intentional or not. And they do matter. And they are capable of self-advocacy. And they should be included in self-advocacy movements if those movements ever expect to represent autistic people, developmentally disabled people, cognitively disabled people, disabled people in general, whatever group is trying to represent itself in that movement. And in order to include them, you have to show their movements and their sounds and all the things they do that aren’t words.

It’s true that many people who are thought not to be able to use or understand language, actually are. And it’s terrible that they are overlooked. But in their desire not to overlook such people, many people claim that all disabled people who can’t communicate through speech fall under this umbrella. And that’s simply not true. In order to communicate with people who will never use words, you have to learn their language. (And surprise, that’s one thing that “In My Language” was actually about. And it would be about that whether I used typing or speech to communicate — either one would be my “second language”, and as such I can easily, easily envision a situation where I never learned and never would learn to use speech or typing, both of which I used at different points in my life.) And each person has one. Sometimes several people have a language that is in common but is not words. Sometimes each one has a separate way of communicating that is not words. But either way, you have to learn how they communicate, not force them to either communicate how you best communicate, or else be considered “non-communicative” for the rest of their life. And yes it’s possible to get consent to use their communication, it’s just sometimes harder work than asking a yes or no question in words.

And a community that doesn’t include such people isn’t my community. The developmental disability community is far better at including such people than the autistic community is, even though not all of the DD community manages it either. One reason I’ve spent a lot of time communicating with people who can’t use words in any form is because I’ve been in the developmental disability system for pretty much my entire adult life and have spent a lot of time with a wide variety of people. And I’ve spent a lot of time communicating with people who can’t and may never use speech or typing or even picture boards. And that’s something that certain segments of the autistic community are sorely missing. Even parts of the autistic community that involve people who don’t use speech, are often made up of only those people who were able to learn typing, and often put forth the (false) idea that everyone could learn typing if only they tried hard enough or were exposed to the proper teaching methods.

The response someone made is true: Some of the people in the video use typing, so they could never be shown speaking the words in the video. But I’d like to go further than people who use speech and people who use typing, because unlike a lot of people, my social world is made up of a lot of people who can’t do either one. And also made up of a lot of people who, even if they can use speech, typing, or both, those are not their best means of communication, and it would be better to show us using our best means of communication rather than merely the form of using words. Not everyone has words but everyone has a voice and a means of communicating. And not everyone who uses words sees words as their primary voice or their primary means of understanding things, and that needs to be respected. And I’m sick to death of spending time in communities where most people seem to miss these facts, and automatically see having a voice as the same as using speech or at least using language.

Posted with Blogsy

“I don’t know that person’s program.”

That's a sentence I've heard a lot. And when they don't say exactly that, they say things that mean the same thing. Usually in the developmental disability system, for some reason, although I can easily imagine it in other contexts.

What it really means:

“DD people aren't like regular people. When people do things to them that would be horrible if they happened to other people, there's always a logical reason that justifies whatever is happening. Staff and case managers rarely if ever abuse power. All of their decisions have the best interests of clients at heart. So if something looks terrible, chances are that there's a reasonable explanation behind it. I just don't know what that explanation is. And I likely never will, so I'm not going to judge.”

They say this when staff scream at an old woman with an unsteady gait every time she falls, and refuse to help her get back up or allow her to hold onto things for balance.

They say this when staff publicly humiliate a man who clearly has trouble moving to avoid obstacles, when he accidentally bumps into someone.

They say this when staff do their best to keep a boyfriend and girlfriend apart. Or when staff are okay with boyfriend and girlfriend, but balk at the idea that two women with intellectual disabilities have fallen in love. As if it's even their job to decide who can love who.

They say this when parents simultaneously put on a big public show of wishing their son could move out on his own like he wants to, but sabotage his every attempt to do so. Because they had planned out a whole life for him in the group home they run, and can't handle the idea that he doesn't want to live under their control the rest of his life.

They say this when a staff person kisses a grown man's leg and says “I kiss you boo boo aww betta!” in baby talk.

They say this when, in the name of integration, staff prohibit disabled people from speaking or socializing with each other. I just saw an instance of that last one, which is why I finally remembered to write a post on the matter.

They say this when we get outright tortured. Tied down. Skin shocked. Slapped. Pinched. Made to smell ammonia.

I wish I could upload the scenes from real life that play out vividly in my head. But like as not, people likely to say these things wouldn't consider me a reliable observer. They never do, when you start pointing out the truth. When you see yourselves as people. With all that this means.

Suddenly you are either too severely disabled to understand what's happening, or you're not disabled enough to grasp why treating people like dirt is necessary. Or both at once. And they'd much rather you were highly submissive, maybe even the really cool type of client who helps staff out by giving them information about other clients.

All of this requires seeing DD people as less than. It just has to. There is no other way to justify these actions towards us.

And I know how people see us. As in, I know what we look like inside their minds. Sometimes we're human — almost, anyway. Not quite. There's something vitally important inside every real human. And to them, we either don't have it, or are missing large chunks of it. So we go around in human bodies but there's pieces missing in our minds and our souls. Even people who don't believe in souls in any religious sense, still perceive something inside us as only partial.

I know this because this is one of those viewpoints that isn't content to stay in the minds of others. It tries to force its way as deeply into us as it can manage. Until many of us look in the mirror and see only part of a person.

I can't describe the violence that involves. It's horrible. And a whole system of relating to us, forces its way into our lives. It tells us that we are taken care of, that we can relax, go to sleep, almost. And then it suffocates from inside. There's no words for it.

I suspect the drive to say this about people comes from several places at once.

If you work in the system, there's not wanting to see yourself or your coworkers or people who could be you, doing something horribly wrong. Much less on a regular basis.

I also suspect a strong desire to trust the society they live in, not to do horrible things to people. Or at least, not to do horrible things to certain kinds of people.

A member of my family once told me that it took him a long time to believe what happened to me in mental institutions. He said that in order to come to terms with the reality of the abuse, he had to destroy a strong desire to believe that the society he lived in was safe and just. Him telling me that was far more honest than a lot of people are.

That desire to trust society gets in the way of understanding every kind of injustice. I am amazed that people trust a society that does its best to shut out and destroy all but a handful of people. But they do.

And not seeing us as quite exactly people, is the one thing that you can't avoid if you think like this. Because if you see us as people, you have to see what happens to us as dreadful. And you don't immediately, upon being told of the latest awful thing, say any variant on “I don't know that person's program.”

Posted with Blogsy

Making everything clear.

[Well not everything. I hope to write more posts going into detail on this topic. But this is the most general one I mean to make.]

I am not part of the Internet “social justice” community.

I am not part of the Internet “anti-SJ” community.

Both communities have, at different times, tried to claim me. At different times, I have joined in with both, knowingly and unknowingly.

But I can't be in either. Because they are both part of a larger pattern that does great harm.

Each one contains people who are there for sincere reasons. And also people who use these communities to play with power in devastating ways. But the way these communities work, even people's best intentions get turned around until they range from ineffective to destructive. I'm only going to be talking about people who join in for good reasons, because it's already obvious that manipulative power trippers and trolls are bad news, whether they're cloaking themselves in fake good intentions or not.

I can't be there. Not because I think I'm better than the very good people I know who are involved in both. Not because I don't care what is happening. I can't be there because I see what is happening, and if I join in, I will only be joining in with destruction.

I see what is trying to pull me in. I will not be pulled in. I will stand next to and apart from these communities. I will not fight against them, or, like Devil's Snare, they will only pull me in tighter.

The pattern works kind of like this: There is a monster. That monster runs around trying to devour everything in sight. When it can find nothing else to devour, it devours itself.

The whole thing is set up in a way where the only way to move forward is to find something to oppose and devour. There is never a point where the way you do things is good enough. You have to find more and more words and ideas to oppose. Words and ideas that mark who is in the know, and who is bad. These things constantly change. The monster never stops looking for more.

People are judged by how well they can keep up and remember these things. Even when people say it's a bad idea to just memorize everything by rote, that's what most people are actually doing, because that's what this culture encourages. Pretty soon, most people fall into a pattern of dodging and weaving, trying to say the right things, not say the wrong things. And above all not admitting it, because this culture simultaneously encourages this kind of behavior, and says you're wrong if you behave this way.

Within this culture, you stop noticing your surroundings. Instead, you see a network of lines representing various power dynamics, bad words and ideas, good words and ideas, and the way this community responds to them. You stop being able to see that this is not the only way to respond to injustice.

When people start noticing what is wrong, and wanting out, things twist around until they are absorbed into a different part of the same pattern. They fill the part of the monster that, in the absence of anything else to eat, turns around and begins devouring itself. And so people become part of the same thing they wanted to stop. And the fight between these two communities goes around and around forever, providing infinite food for the monster.

In this way, the pattern tries to pull in those of us who try and talk about it. It sucks people in until before they know what is happening, they are part of it. Few people intend to be sucked into either part of the pattern. People mean well, and are not stupid. But this is a whole pattern of connections between people, set up to perpetuate itself. And that pattern ends up hurting both the people caught up in it, and people outside of it, through the actions it encourages people to take.

It feeds on opposition of all kinds. It even makes things work so in the end, the only conversations that take place are arguments against this or that person, this or that action, this or that thing.

Which is why I will stand outside the pattern. I will describe the pattern. I will encourage more people to step outside of it.

But I will not set myself up in opposition to it, or else I will just be pulled in and become part of it. So I am outside of both pieces of the pattern, but I will not fight them.

And I will remind people, there is a huge world out here. There are other ways to do things. Not just my way, either. Lots of ways. You will always be welcome to step outside, to join me and many other people who live out here.

And, together or apart, we can find other ways to make a difference in the world.

[With credit to a friend of mine, who first characterized the pattern we were watching in terms of the self-devouring monster.]

Posted with Blogsy

To be finally free from entanglement.

It has been a long time, longer than probably anyone but my closest friends could guess, since I have felt comfortable being on the Autism Hub.

It was okay at first. It seemed to be similar to a blogring (anyone remember webrings?), a place where links to various blogs were collected by someone I barely knew who happened to like those blogs a lot. But then it became a community.

Online communities can be good things, but they’re complicated. They seem to sprout cliques (which start out innocently as groups of friends then harden their walls when conflict occurs), feuds, and drama faster than my head sprouts hair. Often faster than I even notice their existence. And then things get even more complicated. People have arguments that mysteriously seem to line up with the same sets of people on each side most times no matter the topic. Other people start insisting that since we’re all in the same community, we’re all really on the same side — since we supposedly all want the best for autistic people (even if it’s clear we don’t all, and even when people have totally opposite ideas of what “the best” is). Communities of this sort often come with massive strings attached.

I do want to make a few things clear though: I have friends in this community. I have people I agree with in this community. (Those two groups are [gasp] not identical! Would that more people understood that.) I have people I respect greatly in this community. I don’t respect them any less for remaining there when I leave, that’s a personal choice everyone has to make for themselves.

I am leaving the Hub (whenever Dave gets my email or reads this) but not leaving for want of those things.

I am also not leaving because I have changed my views on autism or disability. I am leaving in part because of those long-held views. Not leaving because of any recent events, in fact I have remained oblivious to most events recently due to lack of time and energy (if had more energy would left sooner). Certainly not leaving because of any one event or person.

Why am I leaving then? Half of it has to do with the complications of this kind of community and a desire not to become entangled in the strings attached. And half of it has to do with the long nagging of my conscience and ethics.

Review of something often point out: I am not primarily an autism blogger or a neurodiversity blogger, not in my mind anyway. I am a person who operates from various (not widgeted so there is no good name for them, this not being a putdown for widget-users but my inability to do more than rudimentary widget-work) ethical principles and applies those throughout my life, some of which involves blogging about events in my life and the world around me, from that particular point of view.

I usually deal with disability rights topics. I have noticed that people with cerebral palsy who blog from disability rights standpoint about events affecting them and other people with CP are not called “CP bloggers” at anywhere near the rate that autistic people doing the same get called “autism bloggers” (in fact when I google “CP bloggers” I find mostly stuff about Club Penguin, whatever that is). On the other hand, I can make an entire video dedicated to a girl with CP trying to say the way she and I (and many sorts of disabled people, and nondisabled people who happen to come from nondominant cultures, etc.) have been dehumanized on the basis of our way of communicating and interacting with the world, is incredibly wrong. And end up on television represented as if the film is about letting people into “my world” of autism (which is something Sue Rubin said about her film but I never said about mine, in fact voiced strong objections to that whole idea). [headdesk]

So to me, I am primarily an ethical blogger, or a political blogger, depending on your definition of political. Possibly even a disability rights blogger even though that’s still not the entirety of my point. Not primarily an autism blogger. So while I do happen to want the best for autistic people that is too narrow to be considered central to my reason for blogging or my de facto membership in a community that used to just be a blogring at the time I joined it. And I guarantee that my idea of what’s best for us is totally different than a lot of what I have seen on the Hub.

I have seen ableism running rampant all over this community. I have seen those who try to counter this ableism, be they blunt or diplomatic, treated as if just making trouble or being mean. Although the blunt ones are treated worse, in yet another stunning display of ableism (gee, autistics, blunt? Who would figure?).

I have seen vile hate speech be more readily allowed on parts of the Hub than the non-hateful speech of autistics (and even some allies) who simply disagree with people in those parts.

I have seen all manner of pseudo-allies as well as fair weather allies who retreat into their privilege and leave autistics hanging when the going gets tough.

I have seen people who are on the Hub for primarily scientific reasons whose ideas about actual autistic people range from inaccurate to degrading and patronizing. I have seen parents do the same. I have seen autistics get treated terribly for pointing this out. The old power structures — professional over parent, parent over autistic (recognizing that this is simplified because any one can also be any of the others) — still hold strong on parts of the Hub.

I have seen a lot of medical model ideas floating around. I have seen people treating the education of autistic people as if it is therapy. Even people promoting so-called treatments of autistic people, that are identical to ones some of the autistic Hub bloggers were harmed by as kids, but if we say something we are either ignored or patronized and treated like we just don’t understand.

I have seen “biomed” become the latest in a long series of different “bad guys” who are supposedly the opposite of “the neurodiverse”. Even though there are “biomed” parents who do a better job of understanding and fighting the societal forces that make the world such a nasty place to be autistic, than some Hub parents who seem to all but embrace those forces.

(I know some biomed stuff is terribly dangerous and needs opposing. But on the Hub it’s turned into good guys and bad guys and I don’t believe in good guys and bad guys. The world is more complicated than it looks in this community sometimes. I don’t like being in close proximity to these distortions.)

And for that matter the whole cure topic gets oversimplified the same way. While I strongly disagree with the notion of cure and all it represents, not all decent people have even heard of my point of view and not all decent people would agree with me once they did. I have worked right alongside people who want cures (some of whom even did “biomed”), in order to fight for good adult services, against restraints and seclusion, against institutions in all their forms from huge to tiny and stereotypical to stealth, and a lot of other issues that we can agree on. And I have met anti-cure people who are aspie supremacists, who do great harm to autistic people (especially those they perceive as inferior), and who I would rarely if ever find anything to agree with them on, not even the reasons for opposing cure.

And I have seen a lot of personal fighting that may once have had a point but now seems to just go endlessly in circles. If I am going to fight for something, I want it to be something that at least makes progress in a useful direction. Comes from not having much energy to spare.

I am not interested in going into who did what. I don’t even care who does these things, I just care that they are being done. I won’t answer or print any comments going “Is it me?” or “It is me and you are attacking me.” Or anything similar. That is just point-distraction.

I still have limited time can spend on the Internet and limited time can read and write on blogs. Have found that I no longer even wish to allow the pretence that I am part of this community. General-sense disabled and autistic communities, maybe, this particular little community, no.

Again, my viewpoints haven’t changed, my friendships haven’t changed, my people respect (including some I have criticized) hasn’t changed, and I don’t even think would necessarily be a good thing if the Hub didn’t exist. I just had to get out, for reasons that are entirely my own.

I know this decision is the right one because it feels like freedom rather than entanglement. It feels like being able to think again. It feels like breathing after long suffocation.

Or as Anne put it in her blog post about cutting her ties with the transhumanist subculture:

And I don’t have any problem being friends with someone who still calls xyrself a transhumanist, or engaging in respectful discussion with such a person. With very few exceptions (e.g., Nazis, Raelians, Amway salespeople), I don’t care a lick what someone’s associations are — I am very much about taking people on their own terms, probably to a fault.

[…]

I’ve just realized that I don’t owe anyone anything for having the interests I have, nor do I need to be a “member” of any transhumanist organization in order to have the kinds of interesting discussions that I’ve always been interested in having.

If that’s somehow not okay with you — well personally I don’t care, but you might want to seriously examine your thinking. I can’t survive cognitively in environments that force everything into false dichotomies, and nobody should feel hurt, slighted, or bitter because of my doing what I need to do for the sake of being able to actually use my brain.

And that says it all.

Breathtaking to behold: talking back to dismissal

One of my biggest interests is the study of how oppression plays out, and how it is resisted, among communities that most people would consider minorities. (Note: Minority in amount of power, not in amount of numbers. So yes, women count.) Not some sort of study of victimhood the way some people would paint it, but rather how people resist becoming victims.

It is breathtaking to behold communities where enough people have worked out the way things work, that when they are hit with the usual forms of sexism, racism, ableism, heterosexism, etc., they are ready for it. They have answers to the usual bothersome questions and comments designed to disempower them. Even if the people attacking them don’t understand those answers, they at least are told a lot of the same things by a lot of people.

It’s breathtaking because we haven’t reached that point in some of the communities that I work within, including the autistic community. It’s like we’re almost there, but not quite. So a small number of us end up sticking our necks out and a large number seem to either understand but not be able to articulate it, or else not understanding yet what’s going on.

This isn’t because we’re too autistic to understand (which is in fact one of those obnoxious power plays, rather than a reality), it’s because as a community we’re just not quite there yet knowledge-wise. It’s been like this for other communities in the past, it doesn’t have to be like this for us forever. I don’t always even have coherent answers to a lot of what goes on, because this is not easy work by a longshot, but I think it’s work worth doing.

What would be cool is if eventually we all just automatically understand what is going on when people say certain things to us, and from that understanding (plus some time for thoughts to congeal into words), know what to say and how to react. My problem half the time is understanding but not knowing the words.

But imagine that, if anyone ever told us…

…”You’re not really autistic.” or “You’re not really autistic enough.”

(“You just have Asperger’s,” “You’re too high-functioning,” “You understand your situation too well,” “You’re too articulate,” etc.)

…”You’re too autistic.”

(“You lack the empathy necessary,” “You couldn’t possibly understand,” “You lack theory of mind,” etc.)

…”You’re too much like children and confusing us with your parents, somehow.”

(“You’re just like adolescents rebelling against their parents without understanding why the parents know best,” “You’re just like small children who can’t possibly understand the adult world,” “You’re just like little children who want to do whatever you want and can’t understand why your parents don’t want you to do that,” etc.)

Etc.

…then there would be an immediate, coherent response to each one, explaining why this is not an okay way of treating us or viewing us, explaining how the misdirecting of other people when it comes to us works, explaining why this is not okay… voiced by enough of us at once that it would be harder to ignore than the current sporadic response to it.

We’re getting there. See Bev’s Are you autistic? and I repeat myself. But we’re not there yet. And it would be wonderful for a lot of us to work towards this until we are, until we can throw answers back at that stuff easily. Because I’ve been watching these comments thrown at self-advocates for ten years and they never truly change in substance.

[Note also that I’m not going to be taking comments that actually try to explain why those particular ways of dismissing us are actually real or good or right. So don’t bother. Because this blog is about how to work towards this kind of change, not about getting the conversation derailed by people who think we shouldn’t even be trying to.]

“Intentional” communities… not.

I wrote part of this in response to a post on the change.org autism blog called Down on the Farm, about “intentional communities” (which aren’t really) built for autistic people (but not by us or with our meaningful input) along with some non-autistic people (who have much more choice and power than we do) in ways where the power structure screams institution even if the shape of the walls doesn’t (some people believe institutions are defined by their shape and number of residents, which is neither the sociological definition nor my definition — the definition I use includes a specific power structure that can occur anywhere).

The blogger’s response was not to actually critique all this in any meaningful way, but just to say:

I like the idea of [my son] Charlie working on a farm. He likes being outdoors and the kind of work one does when gardening strikes me as combining many of the things he’s drawn to do. Judging from his indifference to computers, he’s not likely to be a candidate for doing data-entry. And various sources have been saying to me, they’re aren’t going to be any of those sorts of jobs left when he’s an adult—-??!??!!?

Driving back from the post office earlier today, we saw a father and his young son digging in a huge pile of dirt in front of their house. The boy was younger than Charlie; I could see how eager he was to be helping his dad and I think the fact that he was getting to work with (play in) the dirt had a lot to do with it. Working at a desk isn’t for everyone, that’s for sure (even in the industrial-suburban Garden State—there are farms here).

Which completely misses the point of what these places really are.

I’m reposting my response here because I think it’s an important issue and I am disappointed in the blogger there for her treatment of it. Change.org is supposed to have a strong commitment to social justice and I see no such commitment in this kind of complacency about such a destructive place.

Here is my original post:

———–

I can’t explain why I think these places are a terrible idea. But I do.

Last year, an autistic woman (Danechi of And Stimming with Rainbows of Every Design) blogged about these places in a much more responsible way than they are being discussed here.

Her first post was called, The point of intentional communities is that they are *intentional*.

To quote the relevant parts (which are in response to the exact same community that is being discussed on change.org):

Bittersweet Farms is not an intentional community.

The point of intentional communities is that a person *intends* to live there. If they decide they no longer want to, they can leave. They make decisions about their own lives.

If a person is placed into a community by someone with greater power, forced to stay there unless the person with greater power moves them out, and has important decisions about their life made by those people in power, then they’re not in an intentional community. They’re in an institution.

Yes, even if it is on a farm. Yes, even if they are doing work on said farm.

And no, I will never willingly consider such a living arrangement for myself, even if I think intentional communities have the potential to be really cool, because Bittersweet Farms, and the Sacramento-area farm-institution in the very early planning stages are not intentional communities.

[…]

At most I can only realistically imagine an autistic getting a token role in this planning process. There’s no way we can get a majority. Even if we did get a sizeable minority, the power structures will still be the same, and they’re the most dangerous part of the whole thing.

Googling the name of the person in charge [of SAGE] shows that they’re a Rescue Angel and that they were somehow involved with the Green Our Vaccines Rally. I know what that means from an autism-science perspective, and I’m not happy with it, but I don’t know if it would have any significance from an institution-masquerading-as-pseudo-utopian-community-planning perspective.

Her second post on the subject is here:

I just spent time at another residential-farm/institution’s website reading the rationale for why agricultural life is good for autistics.

[…]

SAGE Crossing’s rationale/justification for concept has no similarity to my experiences, and clashes horribly with my worldview in general (that we should create a culture of inclusion). Theoretically a rural setting might be “safer” for autistic-me. (But is it for someone with my chronic illness? I think me-with-cystic-fibrosis is far better off in a city with nearby medical facilities.)

And there is no way that I’m going to live in a farm just because I flap my hands. People who flap their hands are allowed in cities too, for the record. And if all people who annoyed other people were sent out to the countryside, there would soon be so few people in cities that they would no longer qualify as cities.

Also, what the hell does needing to be anesthetized for routine medical procedures have to do with needing to live on an institution-farm? It seems like SAGE Crossing is just throwing out random stuff about autistics and assuming that people will infer we can’t be included in society based on these disconnected, irrelevant things.

I would like to ask why you don’t deal with these issues in the same manner that Danechi does. It seems to me that she thinks more critically, as well as more accurately and responsibly, about these places than you do. She has put into words things that I could only describe as a vague nausea and feeling of these things being wrong at the core, as well as being my worst nightmare. institution-wise (far worse than nightmares that call up images of totally rough and obviously degrading treatment).

When I say wrong at the core, I mean that the problem is not a superficial issue. It’s not whether some autistic people might like to live on a farm while others may not. (My autistic father grew up on a farm and his farm was nothing like these ones deliberately created for autistic people.) It’s about the power structure. And I am not equipped to explain what, precisely, is wrong with it. I don’t have that kind of language. I just know it’s terribly wrong, and become quite alarmed when I see writing by people who cannot appear to sense that at all. Especially on a site that is supposed to be about working for real change and social justice — which would require far more critical thinking about these matters.

If you want to talk about intentional communities, though, LeisureLand (another page, with photos, here) is a good example of an intentional community created by and for autistic people. And it is nothing at all like these more institutional versions of the same things. The institutional ones have an alluring form (at least alluring to some people) but a terrible substance.

At any rate, on a place like change.org I am highly concerned about posts that seem positive or neutral towards places as destructive as this one, and that appear to take places like this (and possibly group homes, etc., too) as inevitable, or inevitable for people with a certain level of difficulty doing certain things.

———–

…and that is where my original reply ends.

I think Danechi’s phrase institution-masquerading-as-pseudo-utopian-community-planning sums up the situation better than anything else I can think of. That’s what makes all the hair on my body stand up when I read about these places.

I’ve lived in a pseudo-utopian institutional farm community before, and my experiences there have done more lasting harm than straightforward beatings and attempted murder have (well, there were beatings there too, but they were not the worst part, merely the easiest to describe). I am sure such a remark would be really puzzling to a lot of people, but I don’t know how else to explain it. Certainly I was totally cut out for the kind of work there (simple, concrete, and repetitive), and I enjoyed the work-training program very much. Certainly it was less physically brutal than most. But of all the things I have had to untrain myself from in order to survive in the real world, that place has been the most strenuous, and the most resistant to my attempts to overwrite it.

At any rate, it concerns me that someone affiliated with Change.org can write about an institution-masquerading-as-utopia, and have their only response be a set of musings about whether their son might like it there. And it highlights a difference I have noticed between people who look to the core of such a place and find it highly alarming, and people who readily believe the propaganda and proceed to fantasize about how much they or their children might like living there.

Please remember it is propaganda, and does not speak to the reality of having your life controlled that thoroughly. Please remember that people who have had their lives controlled that thoroughly often cannot see the damage it has done until a long time later. You come to expect that kind of control and you forget what freedom was like, if you have ever even experienced it in the first place. And please remember that places created by one kind of people, and for another kind of people (where “another kind” can be understood to be different societal categories even when it’s not an actual difference in essence), are rife with power imbalances and the potential for great harm. And that carefully crafted utopias on the surface are often among the most insidious dystopias under the surface where you can’t get your hands on them in any concrete way.