#fancy ableism

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“How dare you say ‘Covid era’ in past tense because we haven’t completely eradicated it!” said by a lot of people on this website who talk about HIV-AIDS like no one has contracted or died from it since the mid 1990s

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Saw this on Facebook when I logged back in after a while, and I can’t be the only autistic person who finds this condescending and infantilizing rather than inspiring, right?

“Their nervous system is saying” who I decide to talk to isn’t some unconscious bodily stimulus, it’s a conscious decision I make. Also framing it as being about “feeling safe around” rather than just that I want or don’t want to talk to you! Who’s to say it has anything to do with “safety” rather than how interesting you are? Or if I’m even in the mood to talk — and if I’m not, infinite reasons other than “safety” for that (maybe I’m busy, maybe I’ve just got other things I’d rather do)! I’m so tired of this uwu baby shit and I’ll never get how this appeals to other autistic people at all.

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I do think one of the things that's sort of under-discussed though in terms of "ableism" online is people who assume that writing lengthy responses to something means "you're very angry at them!" because for them personally, they'd only do that if they're really fired up I guess? But some people are naturally verbose. Some people's brains just make connections and extrapolations easily, or they get hyperfixated, and they end up having a lot more to say about a topic than they might have originally intended. Length of a response is not necessarily indicative of "level of passion" in everyone.

This also probably has something to do with that people who don't like writing/aren't good at it assume that writing a lot is some act of strenuous labor that you'd only undergo if you really really care, as opposed to that for some of us, it's a thing we do so easily it can be unintentional and therefore is more of a "default" response.

It's especially a weird thing to see as indicative of "anger!!!" when it's like, an academic writing about something within their area of expertise. It's a thing we are trained to do, quite literally! (We have comprehensive exams that are exactly that.)

But more to the point, it is weird how many supposedly neurodiverse, "inclusive" areas of the Internet have made me feel like I'm weird and "mean" and "intense" for some of my most classically neurodivergent traits, one of the big ones being that I easily write long paragraphs about things. And this is a minor thing on its own, but I think speaks to a way a lot of "neurodivergent" stuff online is more about accommodating a particular picture of it that can view us as smol and vulnerable and uwu, and that ND stuff that involves Taking Up Space (like writing a lot, talking loudly, being argumentative, etc.) then conversely gets shut out as "problematic" even when it's a far more common symptom of that particular neurodivergence.

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I also think something worth talking about when talking about accommodations for ADHD and other disabilities that often require stuff like extra time, leniency with deadlines, and so on is how quickly it can become a class issue. My mom teaches at a private school that both has a lot of rich students and a lot of poorer students on scholarship, and she says that she regularly sees cases where a rich kid who is probably neurotypical is able to get a doctor's note for an "extra time" accommodation just by psychiatrist-shopping, but where she just as regularly notices genuine issues with focus and time management (and that they fit patterns she's seen in me as someone with ADHD-PI) in middle/lower-income kids who don't have access to expensive testing, and encourages the school to do something about it and is ignored. In general, there's a class issue that I think a lot of the disability rights internet doesn't want to talk about in terms of the inaccessibility of diagnosis - or at least, exclusively talk about it in terms of "why you need to respect self-diagnosis" in terms of Internet discourse (and often in terms of laundering people who are clearly lying, lbh, and removing a way for actual disabled people to call them out for furthering harmful stereotypes about the diagnoses they actually have and this person doesn't. I'm not totally against self-dx but this is a real issue with it!) But I think precisely because a lot of the discoursers themselves are people who benefited from class privilege in this way and related other ways like educational privilege, they're reluctant to discuss it or even just aren't aware of it as a dynamic.

Anyway, I think there's a way we can push back against the RFK Jrs of the world who are themselves extremely privileged people who just want to hurt everyone with ADHD and are using "it's overdiagnosed" as an excuse for that - and also admit that overdiagnosis is a real problem but so is underdiagnosis. It's that we're misidentifying people because of the role that money has in acquiring a diagnosis. It's undeniable that a lot of rich parents see "get your kid tested for an extra time exception" as a thing anyone can and should do to give their kid a leg up (and as a person with ADHD who doesn't need that particular accommodation, I can verify from personal experience that some psychiatrists tend to give it out pretty automatically) and also, that a lot of kids who genuinely need these accomodations are getting double-whammied because they aren't able to afford testing and not enough schools are willing or able to bridge that gap. Double whammied because it's not just that they aren't getting the help they need to succeed - but that kids who don't need it and are already ahead of them as a result, are getting it instead. That's a problem! We've got to figure out what to do about it if we actually care about educational equity.

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Disability rights is, I s2g, one of the issues where people are the Worst about listening to nonsense they've seen on social media as opposed to reading/listening to conventional news sources (and that's saying something because way too many people do that with everything now). It's not because those news sources don't cover it! I personally know people where writing about disability issues for mainstream newspapers like NYT/WaPo and Internet magazines like Vox is Their Job. You might not get automatic phone news alerts for it, but you can find sources on it if you search those sites, which you should be doing if you actually care about this topic (or any topic). Even in the post I just reblogged about how stupid "both parties hate you" is re: LGBTQ+ stuff, someone just tried to do that in the tags with disability issues. But that's just as untrue! At least, if you're defining "disability rights" the way normal people do, and not using some Internet wackadoodle definition like "thinking you can perform eugenics on your own uterus" or "believing that everyone needs to be on lockdown forever until we've completely eradicated COVID from the face of the Earth like smallpox." Okay, sure, if that's what you're working with, the Democrats aren't "pro-disability-rights," but that's a definition you could similarly only come up with by purely listening to Internet goofballs who almost never have the actual disabilities in question they advocate for, and also don't read the news, and you should not be listening to those people. And also, those people are doing the same fucking thing that post is about re: LGBTQ+ issues: doomering and catastrophizing to an especially vulnerable population that they have no one who cares about them, and more often than not, over shit where they've got no personal skin in the game. If you actually care about disability rights, then you should not be listening to and promoting those creeps!

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There are so many posts on here that are really clearly about neurodivergence or just failing to live up to sky-high parental expectations or the stuff you were told about what your adult life would be like if you did X, Y and Z not panning out, that people instead frame as being about “former gifted kid syndrome.” And I know it’s basically a meme at this point and I shouldn’t take it too seriously but FYI, the fact that you were labeled “gifted” has very little to do with any of that and has much more to do with stuff like race and class and parental education level. If you’re white (or in a school district like mine, East or South Asian or MENA, though they still had to out-compete us of course) and upper middle class, that has way more to do with why you were G&T than your autism or ADHD. After all a ton of kids with those are NOT labeled gifted and are often instead labeled what is typically treated as its opposite, “special ed.” And I really think it’s important that we push back against the way this narrative suggests the “gifted” label really is indicative of some inherent special status or ability and not just segregation by another name, anti-busing for Millennials.

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So the idea that the only way to write a marginalized character is "without faults" is problematic no matter which marginalized group it is, but it's particularly fucked-up when people apply this to POC or to disabled/neurodivergent characters, because in fact portraying those two groups in particular as saintly and faultless is its own harmful trope with a long history. It's often used to imply that someone in one of those groups is not capable of being bad, is simpler than white people or non-disabled people. And as we all know that broad patterns in fiction can affect real life, it also puts high expectations on real-life marginalized people when they see the message over and over -- even in their fandom spaces where they go to relax! -- that their stories are only valuable if they're perfect. That they are only valuable, even to supposedly "progressive" people, if they're perfect!

And this misconception seems to be common with people across multiple demographic groups, but in a few different fandoms I'm in, the most outspoken advocates for "writing POC as having faults is racist" are other white "allies." And like, look, I know it's hard when you never had a media studies class and are getting all your info about that from this webbed site, but if you're white you really need to think long and hard about why that idea appeals to you so much

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Disabled people as a group are not "more oppressed" than women as a group. Just because you've heard of a certain type of oppression more recently doesn't mean it's "new" (disability rights is as old as any other rights movement, please read up on its history sometime, it's fascinating!) and doesn't mean those people are "more oppressed" or it's "more intersectional" or unable to be exploited rhetorically to oppress others. Intersectionality means that everyone is a collection of their various privileged and oppressed identities which interact with each other, and no one oppression takes the trump card. The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to discuss how the legal system fails black women by forcing them to choose between the "black" and "women" identities, including by suggesting one is more profound than the other, instead of recognizing that their oppression involved being both those things and included things that affected neither black men nor white women. So yeah, when you try to declare one oppression "more" than another, you're doing the very thing she was criticizing.

And "disabled" is a very wide and very diverse group: there's a lot of diversity within the concept of "disability" and a lot of different degrees of ableism that people experience. There's this assumption that everyone who identifies as "disabled" talking about any kind of ableism has personal experience with it and that's just not true. As an autistic/ADHD person who is otherwise able-bodied I can't speak for someone who uses a wheelchair, and a neurotypical D/deaf person can't speak for me. (This isn't just a physical vs. mental disability thing either: I can't speak for someone with schizophrenia, for instance.) We share the experience of being marginalized for our disabilities but the specific circumstances vary. I definitely don't believe that you have any right to bother someone about what they mean by "disabled," but a lot of people online are letting that word do heavy lifting to let them talk about shit that they have no more personal experience with than a non-disabled person. For example: in all the whining on the Internet on the supposed "evils" of aborting fetuses that test positive as having trisomy 21, I think maybe once (?) have I actually seen something like that come from a person who identified themselves as actually have Down's Syndrome. (Which did not mean that person was correct, as I'm about to get to.) Every other time, the specific disabled person framing this as an attack of them or their community had another unrelated disability — usually autism, which cannot be tested prenatally and is likely too complex in its causes to ever be able to be tested in that way, unlike something that comes from having one specific extra chromosome. For another example: A lot of discourse on “ableist language,” particularly going beyond obvious slurs like the r-word (where the activism on that is largely led by the intellectually disabled community), seems to come primarily from people without the specific disabilities supposedly targeted by those words. And they’re often very resistant to anybody within those communities who doesn’t agree with them — aka, the exact same issue you have with non-disabled allies and organizations/activism led by them. “Nothing about us without us” needs to be intra-community too when a community is a big tent; I think we’ve started to get that with LGBTQ+ stuff but it applies to disability as well.

And likewise, disabled people have all kinds of experiences with other oppressions. Disproportionately it is the most privileged people in the group (whether because of the intensity of their particular disability, or their other identities) who are getting upset at non-issues like “other people exercising their bodily autonomy in ways that discomfort me.” After all, if you were more vulnerable you would probably care about something that actually affected your life!

Lastly, of course I want to reiterate the basic facts that no one gets a say in the "morality" of an abortion other than the person getting one, and an "ableist" person being pregnant against their will is still having their bodily autonomy violated in horrifying ways and deserves to be able to end that. Etc. But I want to address some common delusions that I think get people on this site to be more willing to listen to those kinds of arguments than they should be.