Here’s an article, I got the link from NOBODY PASSES, Darling.

The article itself is Rich Man’s War, Poor (Gay) Man’s Fight. An excerpt (a long one because my brain won’t let me figure out shorter ones):

The President of the United States, a former Constitutional law professor lately suffering amnesia about the presumption of innocence, declares publicly that “he broke the law.” The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union express grave concern about the conditions of his imprisonment, and the spokesman for the U.S. State Department is forced to resign after calling it “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” A letter signed by 295 noted legal scholars charges that his imprisonment violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment guarantee against punishment without trial, and that procedures used on Manning “calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality” amount to torture.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Human Rights Campaign, having invested millions lobbying for “gays in the military,” have no comment. Of course not. Bradley Manning is not that butch patriotic homosexual, so central to the gays-in-the-military campaign, who Defends Democracy and Fights Terrorism with a virility indistinguishable from that of his straight buddies. He is not that pillar of social and economic stability, only incidentally homosexual, who returns home from the front to a respectable profession and a faithful spouse and children.

No, Bradley Manning is a poor, physically slight computer geek with an Oklahoma accent. He is, let us use the word, and not in a negative way, a sissy. Having grown up in a dysfunctional family in a small town in the South, he is that lonely, maladjusted outsider many gay people have been, or are, or recognize, whether we wish to admit it or not. He broke the law, the President says. And he did so–the liberal press implies, trying terribly hard to temper severity with compassion–because he wasn’t man enough to deal with the pressure. He did so because he’s a sissy and he couldn’t put up with the manly rough-and-tumble that is so important to unit cohesion, like that time three of his buddies assaulted him and instead of taking it like a good soldier he peed in his pants. And then of course he was so embarrassed he threw a hissy fit and sent Wikileaks our nation’s most closely guarded secrets, like some petulant teenage girl who gets her revenge by spreading gossip. This is, of course, the classic argument about gays and national security–they’ll get beat up or blackmailed and reveal our secrets. And NGLTF, Lambda, and HRC, with their impeccably professional media and lobbying campaign, based on the best branding and polls and focus groups that money could buy, have effectively demolished that insidious stereotype.

They have demolished it by abandoning Bradley Manning.

It took a lot of cognitive effort to cut and paste those links, and then choose, cut, and paste the excerpt, not to mention find the words to put in the title and introduction. Yeah, it’s one of those nights. (So far. You never know when the weather in my brain will change without warning, but right now it’s lousy writing weather.) I had wanted to do a post with several links to different articles I’ve found recently, but I realized I’d be lucky if I got this one post written.

Oh and I didn’t write this post to start a debate over whether what’s happening to this guy is justified, so if you feel the need to justify it, do it on your own blog (or on the blog of someone who doesn’t mind hosting such a debate). I wrote it because these sorts of power dynamics among “activist communities” (and indeed the whole structure of such communities) ruin real people’s lives. And so does the use of widget-based morality — something I’ve planned to write more about why it works that way but haven’t had the opportunity. And of course the power dynamics and the widgets are entangled in ways that more than guarantee this level of sheer tangled bassackwardsness.

It’s always “fun” to wake up to this kind of spider-smile leaning over your bed:

[Image description: From “Coraline”, a stop-motion movie. The main character, a girl named Coraline, is standing there as her “Other Mother” (a spider-like monster pretending to look like her mother, but with buttons for eyes) leans over her with a creepy smile.]

…and then have to let the person, among other things, wash your private parts. And to know you pretty much have to let them, because you don’t want to get a reputation for rejecting people for no reason (or “not good enough” reason).

And no, it’s not a sexual kind of creepiness. It’s more like a weird power dynamic, where the person thinks everyone loves her and that she can do no wrong, while running roughshod over everyone, human or otherwise, even above their vocal objections to her invasiveness. You can explain it to her calmly, or shout “No! Stop! Stop NOW!” and all she’ll do is giggle and keep doing whatever she’s doing, whether it’s barging into your bathroom while you’re on the toilet, trying to touch a pet who doesn’t want to be touched, or otherwise violating people in various ways. After awhile the giggling and smiling gets more and more creepy, and happens with more frequency the more you try to assert yourself. I think the spider-like component — which another client of hers has described as an “I’m gonna eat you” smile — comes from the tendency of people like this to “feed on” imaginary gratitude and the like (see My Contaminated Smile for something similar).

This kind of behavior is especially damaging to anyone who (like me) is so used to these boundaries being crossed that I often don’t think to defend them. As Dave Hingsburger explained in a video I saw once, that leaves us open to serious forms of abuse because abusers look for people who don’t push back the minute we experience invasion. It also erodes the boundaries between your own home and institutions. It’s a lot more damaging — especially after each “little instance” begins to pile up into something enormous — than any one instance would look on the surface to most people.

And I suspect a lot of people think it doesn’t matter when done to people who aren’t going to experience a whole lot of bodily privacy anyway. Wrong. I used to think it didn’t matter so much because I was used to lacking privacy and was very late to develop body modesty anyway, until I heard that explanation about how being “used to it” primes us for later abuse. Ever since then I’ve tried to create privacy in various ways when possible, even though I’m not used to it and don’t automatically “feel” some of those first levels of invasion the same way other people do. (I’m trying to build up to where I do feel them, with some success so far.)

One time she explained to me she was incapable of abusing power, because she was a Christian. I would love it if the world really worked that way (for any religion or lack thereof). It would be a much better place. But meanwhile she goes merrily on her way, dispensing really disturbing (but not technically against any rules) experiences with a big creepy smile and a chirpy sing-song voice.

(Modified from a post to a mailing list.)

I don’t think humans have the means of detecting that nonhumans (or specific forms of humans) lack these kinds of (“secondary”) feelings. It wasn’t just that I thought Temple Grandin lacked the expertise, it was that I think that people lack the ability to determine that someone can’t feel something — except ourselves.

There’s usually an assumption that most people take for granted about animals (and about specific kinds of humans, including very young humans and many kinds of disabled humans), that… they’re basically as close to a blank state as we can possibly get without denying something that’s too obvious to deny.  And so instead of figuring “these feelings are possible”, we feel that each and every feeling they feel (as well as their intellectual abilities and self-awareness) must be proven by rigorous scientific method.

That’s coming at it backwards.  There should be really really good evidence those things are not there before we start assuming that they aren’t.  (And often that should be on a case-by-case basis.)  And really good evidence means really good evidence — not what passes for “evidence” in a culture that already views certain kinds of beings as as blank as we can feasibly paint them as.

(I’m not saying there aren’t humans without certain experiences.  The amount of enormous holes in my understanding/experience of the world (both growing up and later) compared to usual understandings of the world is truly astounding to me even compared to many other autistic people I’ve known.  I’m just saying, that’s not an assumption we should be making about entire categories of people, even categories we happen to belong to, let alone categories so obviously different that assumptions should come harder, not easier.)

Plus… for instance, I look at cats, and I see that they have realms of experience entirely closed off to humans.  That’s rarely acknowledged either — humans are seen as the “full” form and then cats (and other nonhumans) are seen as having like… certain chunks out of the (“full, human”) experience and then blankness everywhere else.  There are undoubtedly animals with feelings humans don’t have, and life forms with experiences of the world so different from humans that we don’t think they have experiences at all.  (Because we start from human as “the full experience of the world” and work “backwards” through animals and various atypical humans.)  That’s just a really warped understanding of the world, yet a lot of humans seem to take it for granted.

(And in so doing, they miss the vast amount of feline communication that it is possible for them to decipher, because they’re too busy thinking over the top of it to notice the subtlety of it.)

I was reading a bunch of historical short stories, just starting to get into them when… whap!  It feels like a whap anyway, or like having someone dump icewater on my head. It’s that sensation when I’m jolted out of having an ordinary reading experience, and thrown into an all-too-detailed look at how the author sees (in this case) developmentally disabled people, or (in other cases) some other group of people I’m part of. 

In this case, we’re shunted to the side, standing out even in a place supposedly devoted to nonconformity and diversity.  That’s not an unusual place to find us in people’s heads, but seeing it made so clear and obvious never gets any easier. We’re either on the sidelines, or we are there as a means to show another characters attitudes or morality, or we are piled high with the baggage the author carries from having a disabled family member. But whatever we are, we’re never just people, which is what we actually are in real life to anyone whose brain isn’t filled with BS about us.

Any comments in the next week or two may not remain on this site, due to assorted upgrades and stuff. Please don’t leave comments that you aren’t also saving to re-comment, or that you don’t care if they disappear. Also, I just deleted over 2,000 spam comments and wasn’t able to search through them individually for legit comments, so other comments may have been lost as well. Take this as a warning.

Yes, I have more substantial posts planned, but for now…

These photos show that I have just found my first white hairs! It was quite startling at first (I didn’t realize that it often happens around the age of thirty, which is exactly my age), but now I am eager to get more of them. I think unpigmented hair is cool-looking and it has an interesting texture too. I always said I was looking forward to getting grey hair. And people told me I’d be really freaked out by it when the time came because they symbolize mortality to people on a gut level. But I’m not freaked out. I just think it’s cool. At first I thought it was only one hair, but then I looked around and found some more. (My hair is so dense that it’s easy for single hairs and even small bald spots to hide just depending on the position of the hair.) Maybe I’ll decide to keep my hair for awhile so I can look for more of them. If anything I find this exciting. Then again I’ve been excited by life lately in general, and any little discovery is even more exciting.

As some people know, I have certain traits that… well… how to explain. I’m trying to explain closer to how things appear to me, rather than using other people’s words and making it look like I agree with them. But it’s damn hard. So anyway. 

There’s certain ways that I function or don’t as the case may be. There’s been for the past decade or two this whole academic discussion about how much of it can be said to be a separate “movement disorder” and how much is part of what currently gets called “autism”. Honestly that whole discussion on whether “autistic catatonia” is “part of autism” or not has started bugging the crap out of me. Because honestly my brain doesn’t ask that question before it causes me to freeze in place, if you know what I mean. 

So anyway to get out of standing on top of the sky abstraction land and waiting to fall, a bit closer to the ground here to describe what the trait is and not what people think about it. So what I’m trying to talk about is that I have this problem with crossing lines.

How intense the line-crossing problem varies depending on the type of line, the time of day, whether I’m in a wheelchair, phase of the moon for all I know. The really classic description is like when my last apartment had a rug in the living room and tile in the kitchen. I almost never made it into the kitchen. I’d hit that line and either freeze or sort of rock back and forth foot to foot. And eventually I’d walk away. 

What they don’t tell you is that this doesn’t apply just to the classics:  doorways, lawn to sidewalk, rug to tile, etc. And it doesn’t just apply to the other physical barriers I have trouble crossing:  Bed to wheelchair, wheelchair to toilet, sitting to standing, etc. It also applies to all sorts of weird internal barriers. 

The reason I’ve chosen this winding path convoluted twisting and turning writing style to write this is a good example though it doesn’t fully seem one at first glance. It’s not my understanding that’s twisting and turning. (The colossal mistake in assuming confused words mean confused thinking.)  It’s the only available path to write on. All others are blocked and I am finding my way through the blockages by all kinds of strange routes. 

Living my life is always a study in taking weird routes to get things done. If I can’t get into my wheelchair I have someone hold a coat hanger over it and say “grab the coat hanger”. I grab the hanger. Which stands me up. The rest of the movement is effortless in comparison. Everything I do requires certain elements. There’s the trigger, which helps me to get started. There’s possibly the path-guiding sort of like railroading or horse-racing that constrains my actions to a certain pathway . Then there’s the immense effort required to hurdle all the barriers I can’t trigger or guide my way around — like jumping to a different pathway or initiating when there’s no trigger. That third point takes exponentially more energy than everything else combined. If I run out of energy no amount of effort will help me. 

I am using those same things right now. The start of this writing was triggered by the problem I’m writing about. The pathway is the only places I can get words out of. That includes needing to be weirdly informal, closer to the conversation mode I just said can’t take the place of writing. It also includes a lot of invisible twists and turns through different topics and places of writing that I have no control over. And the effort… my brain feels almost as bad as my body feels after it tries to walk. It hurts. My eyes won’t stand still. I don’t like this. 

Anyway all that before I could say what I mean to talk about. And that is that there are boundary lines in my head just as surely as there are ones outside of me. 

My brain seems to have divided places I write, and people I write to, into rooms or something. So if I’m, say, writing a lot to my private blog, it impairs my ability to write here. If I write to one friend it’s very hard to write to another, if possible at all. 

It’s also very hard for me to write HTML tags on my iPod because despite the fact that the angle bracket keys are in my muscle memory by now, every time I click to another key layout is a barrier. To write a single HTML tag, I have to click twice for the first angle bracket, once to write the letters inside, then twice more to write the second angle bracket. A closing tag with a slash in it is even more complex. It is easier for me to delete using the backspace key and retype a long string of words than it is to highlight it and only have to hit backspace once. That’s because moving my fingers from the onscreen keyboard to the upper part of the screen where the words to highlight are, is another barrier. Even when the two finger positions are closer to each other than two keys on the keyboard might be. No matter how close the thing is on the other side of the line, it feels like a giant gulf that a person wouldn’t want to try to jump over without a death wish. 

So I am, by writing this, trying to shift myself back to writing here. I am also trying to use whatever tricks I know. And it’s still painfully hard. I’ll have to see if doing it more often will do the trick. The problem is all those guiding path things when it comes to where I write, they’re still guiding me away from here. My smaller scale paths are guiding my sentences but the larger scale paths want me to be somewhere else. 

And resisting is grueling. Before I wrote this I felt as good as I generally do lately. After, I can’t get my eyes to point in the same direction, parts of me are shaking, other parts are just sort of limp. It feels as if it was a physical effort to do this. And whenever I just stop… the momentum stops, my mind first starts trying to replay sensory experiences (always a bad sign), then just goes blank and drops meaning out of everything, and my hand drops my iPod, and everything just stops. Then it takes even more effort to get going again. 

So there went my attempt to write here more. Be aware that any apparent incoherence was not mental confusion but just word problems requiring twisting paths to get around barriers in front of the words. And perhaps at least starting in conversation mode made it possible to write at all, contrary to a couple posts ago. Bottom line, this barrier problem isn’t just physical, it also makes its way into language and other thought related things.