Your opinions on tone indicators can be a sign you have some internalised ableism to process. /srs
If you follow me you might have seen I was part of a reblog chain where I was calling out what I believe to be internalised ableism against autistic people, from someone who's also autistic, who's blog I used to follow. I'm going to delete it I think, because the conversation didn't go anywhere. I'm going to include screenshots here, as a jumping off point for an issue I've noticed ever since the popularisation of tone indicators.
If you don't know, these are tone indicators:
They're a system for conveying tone through text, you add them to the end of your sentence to show how you meant it to come across.
They're 99% used online, and mostly by neurodivergent people. This has made them gain a reputation for being "chronically online cringe." This is cringe culture. This is "this is bad because it's weird." Unfortunately, things can often become "cringe" due to their association with marginalised people, and I don't think this is an exception. I fully believe tone indicators are only as hated as they are because of their association with neurodivergence. And as autistic people we are often primed to play into this! An autistic person is almost more likely to fall into this mindset because of not wanting to be "one of THOSE autistic people." Marginalised people often fall into the trap of finding a "lesser" kind of person to feel superior to, the same way their oppressors feel about them, as a source of validation.
So if you're reading this post as a neurodivergent person, I want you to question what any negative feelings you have about tone indicators might say about how you view other autistic people, most likely people with higher support needs to you or with different needs to you.
Before we get into the screenshots I want to talk about, I want to go through a small list of valid criticisms of tone indicators:
"They're overly complicated!" Yes, they kind of are. You can probably find an infinite amount of them. You can make up your own. Keeping track of what all of them mean can be difficult.
"I don't want to memorise what they all mean!" Completely fair. Especially when you have memory issues or a learning disability. But if you're just not bothered, that's fine too. What I will say, is that you've likely already learned so much internet slang and abbreviations and acronyms that this really isn't any different. I'd watch out for ableism in the fact that you might've learned what things like "TTYL," "BTW" or "LMAO" mean, and likely know hundreds more similar examples, but you aren't willing to learn what these abbreviations mean. I'd just question why if I were you.
"They're ineffective!" Yes. Many people are not familiar with this system. It's relatively niche. What good is it to a neurodivergent person if someone's using a tone indication system they're completely unfamiliar with? Miscommunication will happen regardless if that's the case.
"The abbreviations already mean something else!" True. This can be confusing. But it's usually clear from context what they mean. Sometimes context is hard for people, so I completely get this as a reason for you not to like or use them. But it's still very much possible to grasp that "nm I found it!" means "never mind I found it" and "could you please pick up your laundry from the floor? /nm" is the "not mad" tone indicator.
"There are better systems!" There are! Some people just don't abbreviate the tags. Some people like the parentheses system (tumblr meme). Some people just elaborate with more context. I personally favour tone indicators because they're just faster to type.
Now for some screenshots. I am censoring URLs for a reason. Do not seek out anyone involved to harass them. Sending a random internet user hate mail for disagreeing with you will never be productive. I do not condone harassment. This is not a personal attack on anyone involved.
this is the original post. I responded to. Here's my response.
I definitely think I could have worded this better. This was very in the heat of the moment. I assumed this person was not autistic themselves since I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume ignorance over malice. I couldn't quite believe "you really need to work on yourself" could be a response from an autistic person to a common symptom of our condition: not understanding sarcasm or tone in general.
I didn't think I had to explain why this is ableist. But as the reblog chain played out they refused to acknowledge this at all, and that was very disappointing to me. I think it highlights a wider trend of lower support needs autistic people often minimising the struggles of higher support needs autistic people because they don't experience those struggles themselves. Autism is such a broad spectrum. There are autistic experiences you will never understand. You have to accept that there are people like you who's lives you will never be able to relate to, even when they have the same diagnosis (including self diagnosis) as you. In a way, it's understandable, because neurotypicals often use the caricature of a higher support needs autistic person to bully us. But you have to realise, those people actually exist. People who are non verbal exist. People with extreme sensory issues exist. People overwhelmingly hyperfixated on weird or disturbing things exist. People who cannot socially interact normally exist. People who's stims are "embarrassing" exist. For every stereotypical autistic person you can think of, however malicious the caricature is, there is a real person out there who has similar traits and faces struggles you have never known because of it. So to you, "not understanding sarcasm" is a harmful autistic stereotype, which it can be, but many many autistic people face this real struggle. I get it, you've spent your whole life running from this stereotype, but you can't throw the people who actually have that struggle under the bus for your own validation.
The next reply and my response. I will repeat, being autistic yourself does not make you immune to being ableist.
now this is where this conversation stopped having any hope of being productive. You can personally find this system infantilising. Those are valid feelings, and a valid reason to not like or use this system for yourself. But nowhere did I ever demand people to use this system. Especially not in this reblog chain. You would have to really dig and cherry pick to find examples of people demanding everyone to adopt this system, I won't say they don't exist because they do, but they're by far not the majority of tone indicator users, and they're not an excuse to talk about them with ableist language.
What I find really insensitive here, is the comparison of people who like tone indicators to dogs... blatant dehumanisation of autistic people, BY AN AUTISTIC PERSON. I refuse to accept that this is OK, that this is not ableist. If that's how they personally make you feel, that's valid, but this is being said in a discussion about how calling them useless and unnecessary as a whole is not OK! How do you expect other autistic people who use tone indicators to feel upon reading that?!
And lastly... I believe this last point is comparable to victim blaming. As I said in my response, we all have a story about how we asked a genuine question with no malice and had a neurotypical blow up at us for being rude. Why do you think we wouldn't want to start asking questions to clarify?! Like no, I'm not saying you shouldn't advocate for yourself, I'm saying starting fights over miscommunications constantly in your everyday life is exhausting and not worth it! This can be traumatising, or retrigger old trauma. I don't like this implication that if an autistic person doesn't understand something and doesn't ask for a clarification, whatever happens after is their fault and they don't deserve grace for it, when we literally all have a story of asking the wrong question at the wrong time and getting treated horribly for it. Is it really so bad for us to just want systems to avoid the misunderstanding in the first place rather than having to constantly go through this anxiety inducing experience of asking for clarification and not knowing if this is going to spark some kind of huge conflict?
I want to go through an ask this person received after this interaction.
I'm not a helpless permanent victim. I'm using tools that make my life easier. What about anything I've said suggests that? And sometimes, believe it or not, people are victims of ableism. Yeah, it hurts to be reduced to that. I hate it too. But denial isn't going to help. Especially not for higher support needs autistic people who have it way worse than we do. You growing up autistic in the 90s is not an excuse for holding on to the ableism for higher support needs autistic people that was so prevelent at that time.
I think these replies from someone else really get to the heart of it.
Acknowledging that you are disabled and that you have different needs to most people is not infantilising. Me finding tone indicators helpful is not infantilising myself. I think this just reveals that you view higher supports needs autistic people through an infantalised lens.
I really really just want to encourage everyone to find understanding for the disabled people who aren't like you. To not use your own issues as an excuse to turn your self hatred onto us. I am not an animal or a self imposed helpless victim because I choose to acknowledge my disability and find tools to manage it, even when those aren't the right tools for you. ESPECIALLY if you're lower support needs, I want you to genuinely have a think about whether or not your feelings around tone indicators show you have deeper issues to address about how you view other autistic people. For some reason this is what snags most people's internalised ableism and gets them to make unhinged comments like these when normally they are decent people who view other autistic people with compassion.
