But on the other hand, I doubt I would really freak out that much if I woke up tomorrow morning and found myself with male genitalia. It would probably feel strange, at least at first. I’m not sure whether I would be okay with it over the long term–maybe yes, maybe no, it’s hard to say without being able to experience it. I know it’s not something I would seek out on my own. But it wouldn’t be nearly as upsetting or disconcerting for me as it would be for, I suspect, the majority of the general human population to wake up with genitalia that mismatches my (somewhat nominal) gender identity.

Most regular readers here know this, but for the record I’m not autistic. But I am bisexual. Not asexual, but relatively low sex drive. Don’t know if either of those are related.

Disclaimer: Yes, I realize that even conceiving of certain types of identity as being on a continuum is itself limiting and may be only a partial improvement at best over the more rigid, traditional binary approach to gender identity. But since I have trouble conceptualizing, much less articulating, a more complex or nuanced model, I make do with this.

So I see the locations in discussions of privilege And oppression of any kind in a much more detailed form than I can normally articulate. At all.

And when such things are combined, my ability to apply language flies out the window that much more readily. I really admire people who can rattle off huge amounts of information about intersectionality. I read such things with keen interest both to learn more about others and about myself. And I am hardly ignorant on the matter. Just inarticulate. With exceptions.

The problem in articulating this stuff is it can be too many things. I can recognize a situation where intersectionality is at play, but I can’t easily go the reverse direction of going from the word intersectionality to a detailed description of all those ways it comes into play.

And in addition to all that I do think I have a mode of perceiving it that isn’t as academic (is that the right word?) as what I usually see, and a gut sense that there is something important about the way I perceive it that’s worth hanging on to despite the difficulty. (Which in turn is NOT saying the more academic way of looking at it is wrong or bad, each has it’s uses I am sure.)

I also definitely see it as going far beyond levels of belonging in various communities, that’s just the easiest to articulate without a reference point beyond the word itself. Not the most important (I would say the ones that directly impact survival are the most important), just the fastest to come to mind.

I am definately working class, my accent betrays it and I have ended up in that environment, my brother too, for all our parents aspirations that we would become “professionals” it hasn’t happened yet, the nearest I came I suppose was being self employed.

I note that the majority of AC’s who I know are also from the same class origins as me, and I do think that our experience is significantly different from the middle class experience of autism.

I can’t speak about race and gender, but that certainly does also colour ones experience of the autistic phenomenon.

I consider myself sensitive to gender perceptions of autism, and indeed I get very angry about the male stereotype of autism as you ask Simon Baron Cohen and Mike Rutter, they make me very angry indeed.

Thing is I tend whatever I do to inhabit a sort of liminal land where I am neither one thing nor the other, my circumstances have brought me into contact with people from a very different class background but I remain in spite of all the fancy dinners a “beer and sandwiches” man myself. Indeed not long ago I refused all the fancy food at a formal meal in a posh hotel and demanded sandwiches.

Regards, Ivar TJ

(Also re the “kyriarchy” concept, that’s… a good verbal way of describing the way we’ve always seen this stuff, different layers of privilege and power, interacting, although it maps mentally for us in spatial and synaesthetic ways.)

And… besides our whole general wtf about that and the tendency of intersectionality discussions to get abstract beyond what all but a very few of us can handle, the other big problem we have in them is that people tend to come into such discussions having pre-decided what constitutes a valid difference or minority group. I mean, usually everyone will have race, class, (physical) sex, and sexuality (gay vs straight) on their list. If you’re lucky, you get gender identity and disability. Very rarely you get weight/size, or discussions of sexual/relational differences beyond gay vs. straight. And then there’s this whole list of other things for us, that most people, if they have even heard of them and/or believe they exist at all, tend to subsume into the category of disability but in a very condescending way that assumes we are all suffering victims, and/or into a sub-category of disability they’ve designated “mental illness.” And are carrying around a whole list, in their head, of what they think that entails, and what we experience, want, need, think, and feel. (And don’t ever notice when they are condescending to, dismissing, appropriating the voices of, or using their privilege against members of those groups, in ways they would be justifiably angry about if it happened to a group they were a member of.)

I mean this is not an attempt to “play oppression bingo” or anything, definitely not. We’re well aware that we’ve escaped some potentially bad situations that we couldn’t have escaped if we and our birth family had been less privileged in various ways, front-wise. Just, it gets dispiriting, to say the very least, to repeatedly have the experience of going into groups where you can openly discuss this one difference that most other places don’t accept, and then find that you have to hide three or four others because even within that group, people think those ones aren’t acceptable, or that everyone who experiences them must immediately be taken care of or treated in a certain way, or whatever. And then hop over to another group that accepts another difference but dismisses all the rest and carries many of the same prejudices and stereotypes about “them” as mainstream society.

The worst part about it– for us, at least– isn’t just the hiding. It’s the feeling that no matter where we go, all of our “allies” who would defend us against all oppression in one regard would be just as willing to turn and throw us to the oppressors if they knew about another certain difference or experience of ours, so it can feel like there is almost no one we can really trust, not anywhere, not ever. And that almost no one will ever really know the totality of what our life is, because there will always be some part of it censored out of our telling of it, for fear of that. That what people think they like or admire or whatever is the censored, deliberately oversimplified version of our life, not the real one.

And all of that is a pessimistic view, I know, but sometimes it’s hard not to be pessimistic after seeing so many cases of people changing their opinion of someone, in a negative way, after that person revealed certain things about themselves.

But… yeah, on the issue of people not recognizing certain things or differences because they’re not on their list of All The Officially Approved Human Differences Ever, The End, it’s why we stay back from 98% of not just most intersectionality discussions, but most discussions about prejudice et al period. Because those non-recognized differences are just as significant to us as the recognized ones. And while we can, for instance, join in discussions about how, for instance, as a female-bodied person, we were taught to shape much of our life and activities around fear of rape and assault, or about how as a disabled person, we’ve experienced “nice” disability services workers turning on us and treating us like a naughty child when we started openly showing anger or frustration, and everyone will go “yes, that’s a perfect example of this stuff”– well, we could do that. But if we tried to talk about, say, fear of psychiatrists, a lot of people are likely to either not understand (not in the way they would if we tried to talk about fear of men or of disability services staff), or try to convince us that there was nothing to fear, with bullcrap like “they can’t do anything to you if you aren’t clearly a danger to yourself or others.” And there are many more things that are even harder to describe.

And trying to convince people that a non-recognized difference is significant, it can get you a lot of hostility. Again, often of the same sort that people would rightfully condemn if someone responded to a member of one of their communities in that way. I mean, it’s been weighing on our mind for the past couple of weeks, for instance, that there is definitely a type of privilege associated with being a singlet (i.e. non-plural– we know in some countries a singlet is a word for a type of clothing; it’s an example of how the existing popular terminology in one particular emerging community really sucks, but we have no idea what to do about it). Yet, we’ve also been fearing that if we tried to point this out, or start a discussion about it, or make a list of the privileges associated with it, it would be interpreted as an attempt to mock or parody other oppressed groups and their attempts to start discussions about such issues. So we just keep thinking “no, not yet, maybe some day” again and again.

So… ugh, yeah, not knowing what to say, and frustration. (And I’m not actually sure if this was the reply we intended to write, either; it had to go through some translation to render it from the terms in which we think of this stuff, to what seems to be the generally accepted common language set in most of the communities we’re in.)

Have a link:
http://unapologeticallyfat.blogspot.com/2009/10/kyriarchy-101.html