yet-another-autistic-blog

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when you're autistic and you learn how to smalltalk it literally feels like you started hacking real life

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Sometimes autistic people make social mistakes that aren't harmless and actually hurt people. And it seems like everyone is either 1) quick to defend them and say they can't help it or 2) say it's not because of autism and they're just a bad person.

Autism can be a genuine explanation for why someone did something. That doesn't make it okay, but also we need to stop saying that it never has anything to do with it.

Two things can coexist- autistic people need to take accountability when they hurt someone, and sometimes it is because of autism.

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i dont know who RFK is. i dont care. i know lots of level 3 and severe autism families have different opinions on what he said. i dont know my opinion because i didnt listen to the whole thing and topics like this are really hard for me.

but one thing all these people agree on is that he was talking about level 3 people. he was. and whats making me really upset is instead of standing up for level 3 autistics, people are using level 1 autistics as examples why RFK was wrong

so again they are completely pretending me and people more severe than me dont exist. again again again

people are using the fact that they can work, that theyre smart, that they have all these fancy jobs to argue against him. instead of saying why did he point out taxes first? why is he immediately thinking of how useful level 3 autistics are?

instead they just once again want to prove how good they are and how better they are than people more severe than them. and doing that they ignore us again

do better

I AM INTELLECTUALLY DISABLED. DO NOT REBLOG THIS POST WITH BIG AMOUNTS OF COMPLEX TEXT. THIS POST IS INTENDED TO BE ACCESSIBLE. MAKE YOUR REBLOGS EASY TO READ. DO NOT MAKE MY OWN POST INACCESSIBLE TO ME.

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I LOVE being autistic and trying to communicate because every time it’s

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"Diagnosis is a privilege.”

How often have you heard an Autistic adult who came into that identity later in life use those words? I hope that RFK Jr's plan to create a registry of all diagnosed Autistic individuals settles once and for all how much this is not the case. The choice to access a diagnosis is a privilege. People who are able to mask their Autism and did not have diagnoses forced upon them as children get to decide whether to identify themselves as disabled publicly or in the eyes of the state. They get to choose for themselves whether the possibility of accommodations and greater social acceptance is worth the risk of being viewed as legally incompetent, being deprioritized for ventilators or organ donations, being denied immigrant and refugee status, and losing the right to make decisions about their body or money -- all rights that Autistic people have been very much denied in countries all over the globe, including the United States long before Trump took office. Visibly Autistic people, nonverbal people, intellectually disabled people, and those who cannot mask have never had the option to obscure that they are disabled. They've never been granted the right to choose how they self-identity, and to whom they will disclose their disabled status. Their lives have already been treated as less valuable for a very long time, and when RFK Jr uses this registry of Autistic persons for whatever nefarious purposes that he has in mind, it is those hyper-visible Autistics who will be targeted first and suffer the most. Hans Asperger created a separate psychiatric label for his "little professor" Autistics in part to spare them from the eugenicist Nazi regime. His argument was that Autistics who could speak and function intellectually at a very high level deserved to live because they were useful to society. We can argue that Asperger’s choice to highlight the unique gifts and abilities of certain Autistics may have saved their lives, but he also collaborated with the Nazis to send intellectually disabled and higher-support-needing Autistics to their deaths in clinics where they were starved and poisoned.

Today, Autistics who can speak and function intellectually at a very high level continue to make the same argument that Asperger did -- that some of us can hold down jobs, live independently, and "contribute" to the world, and thus we are deserving of life. These are also the Autistics who got to make a choice about whether or not to ever pursue diagnosis, and whether to share that information with anyone else up until this point. Infuriatingly, many members of this group claim that masked Autistics somehow have it harder, because of the inner turmoil of our difficulties not being seen. There is great peril to giving sensitive information about yourself over to the state. Trans thinkers like bioethicist Florence Ashley have been issuing warnings about this as it relates to the X gender marker for a long time. There is no reason for the government to have records on individuals' gender minority status. It’s not information that is used to treat the person in a more respectful or gender-affirming way, or that meaningfully alters their status within larger systems — almost every legal and medical structure that exists today still places every person into a binary male or female category. All that an X gender marker does, then, is flag to the government that a person is a member of a highly targeted minority group. They truly do not need that information. Passports only began including gender markers in the 1970s, when conservative anxiety about the sexual revolution and androgyny in young people’s style of dress led to lawmakers moving to more strictly categorize people by legal sex. It has never been liberatory for people to begin handing over information about their gender identity to the government. Giving more personal information over to the government only expands the aspects of human life that the it can surveil, and potentially control.

I have been arguing for years that disabled individuals should take pause before deciding to hand over incredibly sensitive information about their own disability status to the government. I have pointed to the fact that Autistic people have been denied the right to move freely between countries, to maintain custody over their children, to handle their own finances, to exercise body autonomy and access medical care, even to flee from war zones because of their disability, and suggested that those of us who have the freedom to choose how we identify not rely upon medical or governmental authorities to do so.

And I have been inspired in this by the pre-existing norms of the Autistic self-advocacy community, which has long recognized that we all sit under a wide umbrella that includes a wide array of overlapping disorders and diversities, both diagnosed and undiagnosable.

But right now, my greatest fear is for those among us who never got to choose whether to seek a diagnosis for some extra test-taking time or personal validation.

The Autistic people that RFK Jr has fearmongered about are the ones without jobs or full legal rights, who have long been denied their voices or their ability to self-identify. Those are the people that mainstream society fears. They are the ones that will be first to be sterilized, incarcerated, or exterminated. If any of the rest of us are castrated or thrown into camps, it will be due to the fear of us producing children who are that visibly disabled and dependent upon others.

Meanwhile the Elon Musks of the world will glory in their Asperger's diagnoses, claiming that their disabilities make them more cold-bloodedly rational and intelligent than anybody else, more worthy of reproducing their genetic material yet also uniquely immune from criticism -- wielding the identity of their choosing only as it suits them. I worry for the people who only ever got told from the outside what their identity was, and never had any say over whether it was a good or bad thing. There is no privilege in being othered, forced into corrective therapies since childhood, and in being the specter that haunts national hate movements. Many of us masked Autistics have lived our lives in fear of ever being seen the way visibly Autistic people are. We have done everything in our power to avoid taking on their second-class status and keep being seen as human. Even in our advocacy we do it. "We feel empathy!" "We can be competent!" "We have jobs!" What about those who can't?

Now that some of us can scurry back into the shadows of internalized stigma to spare our skins, what will we do for those who have no such choice?

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“Of course autistic people can go to the bathroom by themselves and have jobs!!” Some can’t. They’re not burdens or an “epidemic” either. Please don’t get pulled into an argument about usefulness, because that feeds into their baseline eugenic idea that you have to “contribute to society” to justify your existence. Nobody’s worth is tied to what they can do for the state.

[yet-another-autistic-blog]

Hey just a general PSA from someone officially diagnosed and documented:

Now is not the time to seek out an autism diagnosis.

RFK's plans have been made very clear and any diagnosis you do get will get you put on this "national disease registry" they're proposing.

Trust me when I say I completely understand the need for accommodations and a better understanding of yourself, but if you have gone this long without being diagnosed, you will be better off waiting.

Furthermore, listen to and advocate for folks who are diagnosed, especially folks with higher support needs. They'll be the first ones targeted for whatever bullshit "experimental treatments" the government tries to push.

Stay safe and look out for your neighbor.

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Ya know I'm starting to think RFK Jr. does not actually know what autism is

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I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"

Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.

Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :

They make a hateful, fascist statement

Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong

We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process

We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go

They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.

Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.

Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)

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During autism awareness month, it’s important to recognize this type of misinformation propaganda. Please reblog and share to spread the word. This is complete ableism.

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for like a decade I kept getting the advice of "don't ruminate" but also "sit with your emotions" and I was like What The Fuck Does That Even Mean. until someone finally explained it in a way that makes sense:

so there's the emotional part of your brain ("I'm embarrased") and then there's the storytelling part ("all my friends hate me and I'm a piece of shit"). when people say "don't ruminate" what they mean is don't feed the storytelling part

you tend to the emotion ("I'm feeling x. why am I feeling that? how do I move forward given that information? what's something nice I can do for myself right now to cope with this?") but you treat the storytelling part like a little goblin that's trying to be as unhelpful to this whole process as possible. this doesn't shut the storytelling goblin up completely, but it keeps it from causing so much chaos and over time it stops talking so damn much

it's basically like if you were trying to comfort a friend. you'd validate their emotions, but you wouldn't sit there and let them call themself a piece of shit. do that for yourself

sharing this in case someone else is also like Why Didn't Someone Just Say That

[yet-another-autistic-blog]

there are some autistic “traits” that people find really annoying but that are inherently kind

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HOT AUTISTIC ADULTS IN YOUR AREA ARE UNSURE IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO THEM...CLICK HERE TO ESTABLISH CLEAR INTENT

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in my dream world that i live in sometimes we stop saying things like “NOBODY is gross or dirty!!!” And start saying things like “being gross or dirty isn’t a moral flaw or failing”

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I think some of you forgot that autistic people sometimes act strange and say things that are poorly worded and speak with incorrect tone and misunderstand or miss social cues because they are autistic

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You don't wish your disability was worse or more visible, you wish your disability was taken seriously. Please stop confusing the two, I guarantee you would not get the support you need JUST by being more severe or more visible. Please listen to visibly disabled people when we tell you it isn't better on our side