I’m (as far as I can tell) neurotypical, but I’m also a trans woman. I’ve had a period where I couldn’t take hormones for mostly economic reasons, where my appearance was too masculine. My job hunting during that time was almost identical to J’s above – I’d get interest in my resume or applications until I had to go in for an interview…and then, no job. Ever.

I told straight friends about it, and their response was “there’s got to be more to it than that.” Like what? I was too qualified? I don’t know – I also felt like J did, that I could only get a job by getting hired before they saw me.

Observer’s post made me think of this – I recently had a frustrating exchange with a friend of mine – I’d pointed out an excruciatingly offensive stereotyped character from a roleplaying game that actually hits gay men and trans women to her (she worked on the book, but didn’t write that character), and she tried to convince me I had no business being offended, that the writer didn’t intend offense (because that’s an acceptable reason to be offensive) and so on. She tried to convince me that my reactions were wrong and refused to admit that “results matter.” It was really weird coming from her, since she’s encountered harmful stereotypes of both the poly and BDSM communities (and is involved with both).

There’s just a certain degree of obliviousness and denial from privilege. If you have that privilege, you can deny and erase bigotry because you have no responsibility to understand it. After all, your survival isn’t on the line.

“Playing the [blank] card” comments are directly playing the privilege card, too. People say that to shut other people up. It’s a way to say “You’re just trying to get sympathy/pity because you’re not white/straight/male/cisgendered/able-bodied.”

… Probably because privilege cards are usually invisble to their owners. Most people who use privilege cards aren’t even conscious of HAVING “privilege cards” and hence assume they can’t possibly be using them because how can you use something you (supposedly) don’t have?

I get the whole thing about how women have been accused of “causing” disabilities and differences in their children throughout history, and I realize that was the point the post was trying to make. But along with that, it ended up making a statement that autism is something that needs blame placed somewhere, and at the same time, that contributing your genetic material to the creation of a child is a blameworthy act, somehow.

(And predictably, the commenters start arguing about vaccinations.)

I think I would be “visibly gay” if it weren’t for the fact that, since I’m “visibly autistic”, people assume I’m asexual. (And as a result of some mind-twist around that, tend to assume I’m male, at least since I cut my hair short, despite the fact that you don’t have to look too hard to find evidence of femaleness.)

The main reason, unfortunately, that I haven’t been able to connect to the GLBT community, has been because… I get the same kind of eye-rolling around “ableism”, from GLBT folks, that a lot of gay people get around “homophobia”, from straight folks. As well as a long string of disturbing comments.

One day I should post the song I wrote about my “coming out story”. It’s all about going to a community center where just in casual conversation people managed to be about as offensive and at times downright frightening around disability, as they possibly could, seemingly out of nowhere.

This includes the guy who told me he used to work in institutions with people like me, and stand over some of their beds asking in an anguished voice “Why are you alive?” — and wanted my sympathy for this.

And the guy who saw what I was reading about the murder of a disabled person (in Mouth Magazine or something like that) and commented that it was “very hard” to “take care of” disabled people and that I should not be bothered that people were killing us right and left and getting away with it.

And the woman who asked where I’d been, I honestly mentioned institutions, she freaked out thinking it was because I was a lesbian, and when she found out I was autistic it was “Oh, that’s okay then.”

The one good thing there was I did meet an autistic transguy who I still keep in touch with.

1. react in the way described in your entry, or
2. acknowledge that I was treated a certain way because of my gayness, and don’t see a problem with this at all.

I find that using the word “homophobia” backfires, as it causes people to dismiss me completely.

…and, oddly, the other place we’ve encountered this, is in talking about how doctors and drugs didn’t really help us with solving any of the problems we’ve had on a long-term basis. There seem to be those who insist that if your experience of a certain ‘disorder’ doesn’t fit the stereotype of that ‘disorder’ and how it’s treated, if your experience with various ‘treatments’ and drugs was less than helpful, then there must be some sort of ‘additional factors’ that you’re not revealing, things that would give our experience a place in the mental model of the essentially benevolent system they were trying to hold on to. Like that “you must really have been a danger to yourself or others and just didn’t know it” business you mentioned. Or “you must have been misdiagnosed; if you’d really had XYZ disorder then all those things would have helped, they only didn’t help because they were trying to treat the wrong thing.” Or “You must never have been that badly off and therefore you just can’t understand the situation of those for whom these things are absolutely life-saving.” Anything that lets them shove you out to maintain an All’s Right With The System, or At Least Right Enough That It Doesn’t Need Changing pov, apparently.

Or, of course, they can always write you off as someone who did and still does desperately need all these treatments and drugs and any insistence to the contrary is just more proof of your illness. “Trust me, you can’t see it now because your disorder makes you think you’re all right, but you’ll be so much better off.”

For the record, if I ask someone a question like “what were you doing when the cop came over to you,” it tends to be more along the lines of “well, what stupid reason did they come up with to harass people this time.” I’m not… very good at subtext-izing my words, however.

yeah especially if you were one of those (probably fairly many) with both high strangeness factor and high executive dysfunction.