#rant-tism

[augh-tism]

Making this post its own thing so I don't derail any conversations by high support needs autistics who already get talked over enough (listen to high support needs autistics and people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities. Intersectional solidarity yesterday.)

It's really weird being medium support needs, tbh. Because, like, here's the thing. I know all the therapy and shit I got as a kid was designed to break me and remake me into something that could work a job. And I have a love/hate relationship with the fact that it, on the most pragmatic level, worked.

Because on one hand, yes, I'm employed. And on the other...the actual literal psychological torture that it took to make me this way made me every kind of dysfunctional. I can't work on any task that falls even slightly out of the workflow I've built for myself. I lose hours to meltdowns because of minor procedure changes (meltdowns which look like panic attacks, because that's one of the big things they forced onto me, that things that look like meltdowns are unacceptable). I regularly have coworkers who support me pull me aside to explain that I have once again socially clowned on myself (thank you Hannah and Tiffani you are real ones). I regularly get in trouble for not understanding things that were not explained to me, even when I repeatedly remind people I need things as explicit as possible. I forget things. Dear god, do I forget things. I've spent nearly as much of my life in autistic burnout completely incapable of working as I have actually employed.

And I think about it a lot because there's a low support needs person in my department. (She told me herself she was autistic, shortly after she was hired. It's not my place to disbelieve her, and I believe fakeclaiming is inherently bigoted.) Maybe I should say was, because she got promoted to head of a different department three months after she joined us. She's completely indistinguishable from a neurotypical person, to the point that she reads to me as a threat. I know workplace ableism favoring her is not her fault, just like I know it's not my fault, but it doesn't make it hurt any less.

I don't quite know where I'm going with this, really. Maybe I don't follow enough other medium support needs folks. Maybe I'm not trying enough.

Or maybe I'm just feeling a normal kind of upset and traumatized about being tortured as a child.

[augh-tism]

so like, me and my gf went into Wuthering Heights (2026) expecting it to be bad, regressively pseudo-feminist, and deeply out of touch with the very intersectional politics the original book is about.

I was most certainly not expecting my exact flavor of autism to be slapped onto Isabelle and paraded about as a spectacle. I was not expecting my exact flavor of autism¹ to be treated as a eerie villainous undertone, or to have that shoved into what, to me, reads as a bizarre anti-kink undertone.

Like oh BROTHER I am in this photo and I so do not like it. How did this film manage to simultaneously do undertones of "neurodivergent people can't consent" and "neurodivergent people can consent but we shouldn't let them because their poor widdle brains can't understand" AND "consenting to BDSM is consenting to abuse." Why are you speedrunning the most obnoxious regressive takes in one go.

Like this whole film is just galling. To divide the complex web of tomfoolery and sociopolitical drama into what Emerald clearly intends to be a decently clear grey to black moral dichotomy. To make everyone who's placed on the "worse" end of that dichotomy marginalized (either a PoC or heavily coded to a disability) is just. Oh BROTHER this guy STINKS. And that's not even GETTING into blonde haired blue eyed "I'm just a girl" tradwife flavored Cathy and White Heathcliff. "We have Wuthering Heights at home" ass movie.

(footnote 1: there's nothing canonical there obviously. But when a character is literally introduced by infodumping a thematic parallel to the audience, is regularly portrayed as foolish, overbearing and unaware of boundaries....I struggle to assume that was written in good faith lol)

[augh-tism]

If anyone wants to play a fun tag cleanup game:

Search ABA, filter by newest post. See all those obvious botted advertisements for ABA therapy? Report them as spam. Extremely gratifying, and if we work hard enough the main tag can be for actual autistic voices (and someone in Guilty Gear apparently named Aba).

Go, be free!

[And before anyone gets the wrong idea: obviously don't harass any of the blogs doing this on the one in a million chance that there's a human person reading the message. This is about leaving the tag free for autistic people to use as a discussion forum, rather than people trying to make a profit off of us.]