That to me, seems very close to how I would define ‘identity politics’, whereby the identity of the person, as gay, or female, or autistic, or whatever, then defines that person’s politics. Their politics then get reduced to just demanding that everyone else respect their identity, and also to banding together in ‘communities’ that seek only to celebrate their identity because they see that as ’empowering’ in itself. Of course, that kind of actvity is valid and I would see it as a good thing, but I don’t think anyone is going to successfully fight discrimination that way.

I could warm up to an environment to where, by the time it was time to leave, it felt like I was leaving a home, but it never felt like “coming home” when I first walked in the door. Even on return trips it would take some warm-up time, except in college in the dorm, where I managed to have the same room for 4 years. (The third and fourth years, I felt the “coming home” feeling as soon as I walked in. But not the second. Make of that what you will.)

I do best if I’ve made connections on-line with people beforehand. I go to camping events with my husband where he has met more people there, but I knew more people on-line before I got there and it’s more putting a face to a name (as best I can, anyway) than meeting someone totally new. Meeting someone totally new can be a bit much, depending on who they are, or at least who they are presenting themselves as at that time. And there are people I just don’t like, and I’m never sure how to handle that. I can ignore them online, or flame them if I think it’s worth it (and I’ve written up 2 flames in the past 2 months, I think), but I have no idea how to handle it in person.

Yesterday, I went to a conference hosted locally on the other side of town. http://www.aspieinfo.com I was invited and went because they mentioned an autistic adults only thing and I had never gone. I felt amongst friends and saw the diversity I come to expect. It’s kinda fun to observe others and wow, it was the same kinds of body language everywhere that I understood. I got to meet three people from the journals. We hung out afterwards and fortunately, I was able to think like a lot of them. Strangely, our discussion went into the metaphysical but I enjoyed every minute of it. I sometimes want to talk more about experiences and compare “autistic life” out of interest. Not a big deal. I sometimes worry about being the kind of person I detest most and that is the manipulative type. There were times when I might do something nerveracking to someone. I know I did but I was able to read the response and stop. Well, it was exercise but not as exhausting as NT classroom per se. I feel like everyone there was real.

Occasionally, one worries about the faker who infiltrates and becomes a pain. It hasn’t happened yet. I sometimes worry about how others think of me but I hope they think like I do that functioning or appearances should have nothing to do with acceptance or belief of autism. So many of us have gone through life undiagnosed and neurotically normal. It’s apparent sometimes which are which when those who are neurotically normal sometimes allow themselves to be a bit more autistic. Hehe. Sometimes, I’m thinking of trying a stim another autistic is doing ie: looking at a particular object. I wonder if people will think I’m more autistic this way. It was a silly thought that many of us have….esp those of us who grow up being told we are normal but just need to try harder. Some of us are tempted to get in the mode of acting autistic. (even though we already are, we may act moreso). I try to be myself FTMP but I’ve done a few things for fun. Being deceitful isn’t my cup of tea but testing perceptions is. ;) I do however understand that some people will behave a lot different and look different. I was surprised, pleasantly at the diversity which made me feel comfortable that me, as unusual as I was in that group was allowed to fit but I worry that some autistics don’t think I am because I do some neurotypical thing. I don’t worry again and try to hope they don’t and accept me anyway and I find most do. It’s a baseless worry.

I think you are probably right about that. It is very sad and sometimes it seems like there is no way to fix it. I have been lucky to have friends and especially to have a partner that I am very close to, but aside from my partner, it is very hard to have the kind of social energy necessary to make and keep friendships, and nearly impossible to have any kind of close friendships.

It leads to a kind of loneliness that is sometimes unbearable, yet also self-imposed. It is very hard to find people to be with where you don’t always have to be “on”. I used to live with a lot of people, and that kind of thing happened naturally. It doesn’t anymore. Now having friends takes work and a kind of energy that i don’t have or even understand.

I think that it is likely that many autistic people who appear to not want, or not be interested in having friends may be lonely and might like to have friends if they were allowed to be themselves and not have the usual expectations of what it means to be a friend. I don’t mean that they would be “bad” friends, just that friendships would operate under a different set of rules.

I have noticed that trying to make friends within the autistic community is in some ways so much easier because of some things that many of us seem to have in common (less bs, no games, less random lying, etc.), but in other ways, the things that make it hard to have friends in general can be multiplied and make it even harder!

“There’s something about the social conventions, even of other autistic people, that wipes me out and gives me very little in return, allows also me to give very little to anyone else.”

Um… yeah, i think that is what i was trying to say ;)

I don’t believe any of us have ever tried pointing it out in communities, but we have occasionally taken a crack at trying to point out to individual people that they were displaying the same sort of elitism and us/them thinking that they claimed were characteristic of everyone who wasn’t autistic. It always ended in an ugly way, or, at best, in our pointing it out to them being met with complete silence.

A few of the things you said in your original post remind me of our experience in the “gifted” school we attended for four years. There, it was made clear to us in a variety of ways that people who behaved as our friends were actually doing so only out of pity. (That, or we would end up befriending the people who had even lower social standing than ourselves, which would lead to our status basically being dropped to the same level as theirs.) It was exactly what you spoke of in a post you made some time back– most of the “gifted” kids thought of themselves as outcasts, low in the pecking order, etc, and this was their chance to set up their own hierarchy in which they could be “cool,” and because they had been bullied themselves, they believed they somehow couldn’t bully others. Some of the teachers tried in various ways to break up what friendships we did managed to form, usually by doing things to provoke us or latching on to some fact, like our not having done our homework, to “show” the whole class what an awful person we were, and by doing things that were essentially set up to make us look bad.

And I have definitely seen bullies in the autistic community, bullying other auties, launching flamewars against those in the community who dared to disagree with them, using what are generally agreed to be below-the-belt debate tactics, etc.

It’s funny how often I’ve seen people in various communities insist vehemently that absolutely no comparison can be drawn between their behavior and school bullies or their hierarchies, when it’s plainly obvious to outside observers that they’re doing exactly the same thing.

As far as LGBT groups go, they lost their appeal for me long ago after about the fifth person who spontaneously brought up how they’d either wished people like me dead in the past, worked in institutions with people who looked like me in the past (and just brought this up to bring it up in order to say how horrible or grotesque people like me were or something), or thought that people like me were in some way worthless, drains on society, or better off dead in the present (or some combination of all these things). I couldn’t stomach the rampant barrage of flagrant ableism.

That was 25 years ago.

I liked meeting people in various LGBT groups, but there were always a few dogmatic central agendas and it would be so personality-based that I never felt unquestioningly “home.” It was just neat to know I’d be easily understood when I talked about A, B or C. Tedious to know that talking about M, N or O would open a rancorous debate with lots of background politics that I didn’t understand. And distressing to know that talking about X, Y or Z would get me immediately kicked out and shunned.

The university experience was not about meeting a group of people like me in politics or experience or sexuality or brain-cooties or anything; it was about meeting people who I was free to talk with about anything because they were curious and they cared about knowing things. Not about who was right, or about proving that certain things were right, but about finding out.

Autreat is usually held in the same place and roughly the same time every year, although there have been a few moves. The exact location isn’t given out much because there’s a guy who has stalked members of the autism community before. Unfortunately there’s predatory people even here, and I know some of them read this blog, so be careful — I’m not in much position to be hurt by them anymore, but there are people who do that (emotional manipulation, physical threats, sexual exploitation, etc) specifically to autistic people they view as lonely, vulnerable, whatever (to the person who emailed me about this statement:  if you have to ask, I don’t mean you). But yeah, Philly area lately, haven’t heard complaints about that site yet (and it’s way better than the only other one I was at, I can attest to that).