Tag Archives: Disability

May1

If only, oh if only

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[This is for Blogging Against Disablism Day.]

I knew Adam.

I didn’t know Adam’s mother.

That’s important.

I knew Adam in terms of who he was after he’d already been created. I knew this funny, smart kid who liked to grab my hand and walk in circles with me, who fearfully tried to hide in my room every night when staff came around to tie him to his bed, who looked and sounded very non-standard, and all of these things were just part of Adam. The non-standardness no more and no less than any other part of him.

The only time I heard about Adam’s mother was through those sorts of overheard staff conversations that let you know exactly what you are to them. Through them I heard that no mother should be blamed for “giving up” a child like him, that the unusual but not unpleasant sounds he made were animalistic and unbearable to listen to, and that people like him were, in general, impossible, and should be locked up for the rest of their lives. I heard a lot of pity for his mother. I never once saw her visit — and even the most screwed-up parents usually visited their kids. She had to have at least some money because this was a private institution. But she was never there, and staff made it sound understandable that she would never want to see her child again.

I didn’t know Adam through staff eyes, and I did not know him through parental eyes either. I think this was for the best, all things considered.

And the same has been true of any disabled person I’ve known. Not all of us have been friends. Not all of us have even liked each other. There can be all sorts of negative things in between us like status and power hierarchies, stereotyping, pity, and so forth. But at the same time there’s almost always something missing that I’m glad is missing, and something there that I’m glad is there.

I have never mourned the existence of someone the first time I met them. (Or after that for that matter.)

I have never grieved that someone was not the normal person I expected and hoped for. Not even for a little bit. Not ever.

I have never “had to come to terms with” the fact that someone I knew was born different.

I have never had any urge to commiserate with anyone else over these sorts of things.

I do not look at a person and divide them artificially into the “normal” parts of them that I find tolerable and the “abnormal” parts that I find unbearable and tragic.

I do not look at my friends, compare them to other people their own age, and think how horrible it is that I don’t have the good fortune of experiencing my friends hitting all the ‘typical’ milestones for their age group, there is no sense of loss here.

These ways of thinking are just utterly and beautifully absent.

It’s right that they’re absent. It’s wrong when they’re present. I keep hearing we have to allow for the fact that it’s only natural for people (you know, real people, which I’m not) to grieve this part of our existence. How it’s just wrong, downright insensitive, to want more from people.

Want to know why I and many others I know get nervous about reading blogs by nondisabled parents of disabled people? Even many of the “positive” ones? Stuff like this (paraphrases of stuff I’ve really heard in dozens of variations for each one):

“I go into his room every night while he is sleeping. And he looks so normal. And my heart breaks wondering who he could have been if it weren’t for [insert condition here].”

“It hurts so much every time I see normal children her age. I realize how many milestones she hasn’t hit. How far behind she is. And she may never catch up…”

“Other people will grow and change, but my son will be left behind. Other people become adults, but my son will always be a child.”

“My daughter has to live in a group home because she lacks the skills necessary to live on her own.”

“They said my son would never walk, talk, or take care of himself. And now he’s done all those and more. I am so proud of him.”1

“I overflow with love and pride every time my daughter looks me in the eye, gives me a hug, or uses her words. I would not know how valuable such things are if she didn’t struggle so hard to accomplish them.”

“Life with my son is bittersweet. I love him more than life itself but I know the things he will never do and it makes me sad.”

“I am constantly having to fight to pull my daughter out of her own world and into the real world. If it weren’t for me, she would be lost.”

I could go on, but I won’t. All of these sort of comments seem to be commonplace among nondisabled parent bloggers. When I question them people tell me they can’t help their feelings. But the fact is that without certain disability prejudices, they wouldn’t feel that way. And there are right and wrong ways to write about prejudice-based feelings. The right way puts them in the context of ableism. The wrong way simply serves to reinforce ableism in readers. And for disabled readers who could actually be harmed by the prejudices behind the feelings, the wrong way can feel like the twisting of the knife.

The post I just wrote is actually from an old draft on my computer. It seems that I tried to write this in two different ways. Instead of trying to synthesize them into one post, it seems better to just post them both at once. It’s a little repetitive but I’d rather do this than lose the slightly different meanings that each one has.

Despite appearances not response to any recent discussion. Just coincidence brewing in my head for some time. Also despite appearances not poetry. Just way of handling language at the moment.

I knew you
I didn’t know your mother

I only heard about her
In gossip made by staff
The sort of words they always said
That told us who we were:
They pitied her for having a child like you
And said it was good she put you away
And anyone would do so in her place

I knew you after you were already created
And I knew you roughly the way you were

I did not wonder why you were the way you were
I did not mourn that you were not someone else
I did not have a grieving period when I got to know you
I did not compare you to other children your age and cry that you did not do the same things they did
I did not see you as a special angel or a holy innocent
I did not see you as a normal boy who was stolen and replaced by an empty shell

And that is as it should be
And that is as it should be
And that is as it should be
And that is as it should be

Nobody should experience these things when they meet someone else
Yet people stand around commiserating with each other over all of those things
I walk around on the outside
Knowing I can never be part of that
Hoping they don’t notice the knife-pain that they cause

I know I am supposed to understand
I am supposed to grant that this is all natural
I suppose I can see when the world teaches you to think a certain way
That good people will come up with horrible ideas sometimes
I know I have thought and done horrible things before

But how long do we have to be patient
While the groups of people meet with handkerchiefs in hand
And blow their noses about the existence of people like us?

How long before they too will see
Beneath their shawls of tears and pain
Lies naked bigotry?

How long before the world stops glorifying the parents’ pain
And sees it as a tragedy of prejudice
Instead of a tragedy of disability?
(If there must be tragedy

How long before we don’t have to tiptoe around
How long before we can say
This public exhibitionism of pain and suffering at our existence
Denies our full humanity

How many more disclaimers
How many more do I need to make
To show I am not evil
For pulling back the curtain on evil
Will there ever be enough
Or will this always be
That they’re victimized
By having to face the truth
Of how the way they see us
Affects the ones like you and like me

It interests me that the way you and I related to each other
Is not exceptional when it comes to us
We are those below and those below are seen as
Sticking with our own kind

It is exceptional for one of those above to like us
To not mourn for our existence
This is praised as if it’s an achievement
It is just the way things should be

When you and I liked each other
Nobody praised us
If they took the time to notice at all
They either seemed indifferent
Or tried to split us apart

Not all of us liked each other
We had our own hierarchies
And prejudices
We were not some utopia
We are just as much a part of the world
As anyone else
And some of what happened was ugly

But we still saw each other
In a way the others didn’t see us:
We saw each other as we were
Not as we could have been
The sense of tragedy was entirely absent

One day I want to walk up to a nondisabled person
Wipe the tears from my eyes and say
“How tragic — you could have been disabled
And yet” (sniffle) “you had to turn out normal” (wail)
“Oh well. There’s always hope of a cure.”

What? You don’t see each other that way?
You don’t wonder (constantly) what might have been
If only, oh if only you were disabled?

It’s very simple:
Through our own minds
We are not lost and diminished
We are not those who would otherwise have been complete
We are real and whole
Because we are

1 If the inclusion of this line seems offensive, please read the third comment on this post. I included it because the constant recitation of this line can be part of an overall pattern, that came up in a discussion between me, a nonspeaking boy, and his mother. If you use it outside of that overall pattern, I’m not talking about you. But the fact that the line is repeated to the point of cliche does mean something, and it’s not always something innocent. I also don’t mean in any context that it’s wrong to teach or learn those skills. But it can sometimes be part of a distancing, fear, and even hostility towards people who for whatever reason don’t have those skills, a sense of “If she had turned out like you, it would have been awful.” Again, if you truly don’t have that fear, I don’t mean you.

Apr11

On growing up with strange sensory reactions, and the difference between passing and being passed off.

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In discussions with other autistic people about how other people have reacted to us our whole lives, I recently realized another thing that makes me different from some other autistic people (I honestly have no clue whether it’s most or only some). Which is in my reactions to my surroundings.

A lot of autistic people who, like me, were assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be anywhere from somewhat to highly capable by many people during our childhoods, seem to have something in common that I don’t have: They were most of the time a combination of several of… stiff, unusually formal, considered “dweeby”, reserved as far as interaction with their physical surroundings yet obviously “engaged” to a certain degree, and in general… lots of similar things I don’t quite have words for.

I was considered some of those things some of the time. But I’ve noticed some people assume that’s how all autistic kids who were regarded as highly competent tended to act. And they leave out of their calculations a lot of things that were true of me.

Yes, I was socially awkward, had meltdowns and shutdowns, and lots of other stuff. But I was most of the time very, very involved in my physical environment in all kinds of ways that made me stick out in totally different ways than many other autistic kids did. Note that it wasn’t all of these things all of the time. It was at least a few of them most of the time at minimum, and when I wasn’t hiding as well it was more than a few nearly all of the time.

I would sniff things. Books, pencils, wood of all types. If I saw a cat I would get down on all fours and politely (in the cat world) sniff their noses. I would sniff rocks, tanbark, metal, rubber, computer and TV screens, and many other things I came into contact with. Not to mention picking my nose and sniffing the contents (no I have never been able to stop no matter how much teasing or reprimands happened or even injury to the inside of my nose by peeling the lining off, it’s like trichotillomania, it’s not that easy).

I would also grab things and stick them really close to my eyes, or wave them around in the vague vicinity of my eyes (I have good peripheral vision so this means anything from just in front to on the sides). I would wave my hand in front of computer monitors. I would do things with my fingers just to watch them. I would spend hours watching ants or water (which I might also get my hands involved with) or lots and lots of other things involving getting things really close to my eyes. And chasing dust particles. Not to mention doing a very intense purr-like noise that jiggled my eyesight up and down.

I also did elaborate things with clothing, hair, and jewelry. Not for the purpose of decorating myself for the sake of others, but for the sake of being able to carry around things I could either grab and look at, or see anytime I had a mirror, or (in the case of braids) run my fingers over. This stuff wasn’t an enactment of a social ritual (which is good because sticking earrings and pins throughout your hair doesn’t get you anything but laughed at) or for any reason external, it was entirely so I could have lots of portable stimtoys. I could grab the necklaces and stare at them or suck on them, ring my bell necklaces in my ear, stare at, smell, or suck on my paisley shirts or busy-patterned skirts, run my fingers over coiled braids or other jewelry, or stare at the whole mess in the mirror.

meandbrothers

(The photo shows me sitting in between my two brothers, in my brother’s room, with lots of jewelry on, staring at one necklace or similar object.)

I also had some visual phenomena I would get really absorbed in. I see various patterns that probably range from retinal lights and afterimages to migraine auras (both my parents get migraine auras without the headache) to the occasional seizure. But I would get totally lost in that stuff, and find patterns in it the way people do with clouds. I got sent to at least two separate counselors (one in an academic summer camp and one in my brief attempt at high school) for staring at walls in my free time in order to watch that stuff. Other kids just used that as an excuse to do things like wave their genitals in my face to try to get me to stop (it’s amazing what people will do to you for the crime of not appearing to pay attention to them, even when they make it clear you’re weird enough they don’t want your attention).

I was constantly sticking things into my mouth long after that phase is over for most people. Not just pens or pencils either. I chewed sets of rubber jacks balls to the point of really embarrassing my mother once when someone caught me sticking several in my mouth on video. I did this the most often before puberty but I did it after too. I was really happy when someone gave me different lengths of aquarium tubing when I was nineteen for the express purpose of chewing. I chewed and sucked on my own skin, too, hard enough to leave marks. And my hair. And ran the outsides of my tongue over my molars over and over to create a sour taste. And had a metal necklace I sucked on and spat out over and over until the outer gold-colored metal wore off.

I also liked textures like velvet, cat fur, varnished wood, anything large and cold and flat, etc. and pressed anything from hands to cheeks to large amounts of my body onto them, or rubbed them.

I had a weird thing I did in chaotic environments like school dances where I would frequently stand right by the speaker because even though it was earsplittingly loud the music was more orderly than the crowd noises. (At first I’d dance if asked to, or outright find someone to dance with if the song was “Stairway to Heaven”, but later I found it easier to just spin in circles.) I also hummed, whistled, and sang, sometimes all in rapid succession, and had a single toned hum I would do by keeping my ears clicked so internal sounds were loudest and then humming to drown out other chaotic noise. Got pulled out of school assemblies for clapping my hands over my ears over and over to create a rhythmic pattern to people’s voices or music. Played single songs until I wore out several tapes and tape players.

And this is not to mention the spinning, which I did at every dance starting just after seventh grade instead of running up to the speakers or trying to dance with people. And which I also did plenty of without dances as an excuse. And the pulling out all the paper towels, and all the soap, from dispensers, then smearing the soap all over mirrors. And climbing things. And assorted other things that were more actions than any one sense being explored.

And doing something kind of hard to describe. In new situations my sensory input seemed more and more chaotic. (Been planning a post on something related to that too.) And after awhile instead of panicking, I’d started embracing a sense of total randomness. This is the same sort of thing that could make a person really lose it in new situations, but it’s sometimes possible to sort of ride it out like some kind of funhouse ride instead of becoming tense or fearful. (Or as an autistic friend of mine puts it, “As long as there are shopping malls, I will never need LSD.”) This is yet another thing you never hear about because it’s assumed “resistance to change” is just The Way Things Are for all autistic people instead of being one of many possible responses to a more central experience of having things become really confusing the more change or new or unexpected input there is.

And when I did talk about my special interests they were about things like fractals, chaos theory, alternate realities, and psychedelic rock bands. Or any and all kinds of surreal or nonsensical things (including going around saying weird things in several languages that I couldn’t actually speak except to say weird things in). (The embracing of nonsense being one more way to deal with the speed of things changing around that time.) This… did not help.

Then there was… the other stuff. The ways I seemed cut off from the world instead of overinvolved in the wrong parts of it.

Part of that was due to my being heavily tuned into internal sensations. Like when I would sit down cross-legged, pull my skirt across my lap, stare at it, and proceed to vividly replay in my head scenes from Red Dwarf or Star Trek (other times it was listening to white noise and picking out single frequencies to replay songs I had memorized). Other times it was just something like pulling my hair over my face like Cousin It (wonderful to stop seeing lots of overloading stuff), or sitting around with my eyes shut. Or what my parents just called “Staring” with a capital S, where I’d basically sit there and appear to be staring at nothing at all (which could range from overload to replaying things in my head to just some coincidence of my eyes and facial expression, or could even be getting lost in various visual oddities I discussed before).

The point of all this? When many people picture an autistic kid who went undiagnosed until early adolescence, they seem to picture the formal stiff thing going on. They don’t picture the kid who involved herself in all kinds of supposedly inappropriate sensory activities, and seems physically pulled towards these things as if by gravity. But that was me.

I didn’t do these things every second of every day. But I did them enough to attract all the wrong kind of notice. While some people called me a nerd or a computer or those usual insults, much of the teasing I got revolved around being very, very attracted to physical sensations of all kinds, or else looking very, very tuned out. There’s a reason my mother insists on comparing me to Luna Lovegood rather than a more stereotypical nerd (or to, say, Ernie Macmillan, who was so formal he sounded pompous).

Yeah I did get called a nerd But mostly I got other things. When you’re younger and you behave this way, you become a weirdo, alien, psycho, crazy, tard, space case, elf (yes that whole fantasy started because someone called me one — if I could pick a Tolkien creature to compare myself to I’d be an Ent) etc. When you get a bit older you get called even crazier. And then eventually everyone and their dog thinks you’re on drugs.

This is one reason that I question the entire concept of passing. I rarely spent five minutes around other children before they figured out I was different. Often it was more like five seconds. Kids weren’t generally picking up my intellect or nerdiness (they might pick that up later but not immediately), they were picking up my strangeness. Much of the time they said so quite openly and as we got older they were trying really hard to explain why I was strange. But I was always strange, there was never a point even when I did my best attempt to “behave” that this was ever in question. Even when neuroleptics drastically tamped down on my ability to explore my environment in those ways I could expect to wait seconds before I was pointedly and often out loud judged as some kind of Other. Even among kids in mental institutions where the rate of neuro-atypicality was higher, I only very occasionally connected with anyone and it was always their doing, others just either shunned me or found ways to do harm to me.

Weird thing is even though I heard all about being strange my whole life I always underestimated my strangeness. I rarely connected all the dots in others’ reactions to me. I knew I was different but since I couldn’t imagine how all the things I did looked to others, I assumed I was “normal enough” largely because of that and because I was always around myself and therefore found myself… not boring exactly, but like I was used to me. The same way I never knew my autistic brother stood out that much even though he did (although more in the stiff/nerdy way than the sensory/strange way, we are very different people).

But once I put the dots together? Passing doesn’t make sense. What happened was people saw every single thing I did and then since they didn’t know about autism they formed other explanations. So I was crazy, or on drugs, or wanted attention (why do so many people accuse others of wanting attention when the actions prompting it are entirely not focused on other people at all, while they don’t tell people that starting conversations is attention seeking even though it is???) or any explanation at all they could come up with. Sometimes several at once.

As I’ve discussed before, the drug assumption meant I have been both asked for (???) and offered pot, acid, shrooms, DMT, ketamine, speed, mescaline, harmaline, and assorted really obscure “natural” hallucinogens (I did not take more than three on that list, and only after being accused of it got me curious). This took no effort on my part, especially when attending a school so well known for drug use that it made a top five list of drug schools. All people saw was a strange girl dressed like a hippie who did lots of odd things, looked spaced out, and reacted to all kinds of sensory input in a very raw sort of way that often made me respond more to texture and pattern and color than to the socially agreed upon nature of the object. Plus I was fun to get stoned because it made me have even more sensory processing trouble and ratcheted up my anxiety so much that it was easy to manipulate me into doing amusing things like jumping out windows so people could laugh. (One of my support staff has another client who has a very severe cognitive
impairment. I was telling him about this and he told me she gets the exact same crap from her neighbors.)

Another thing that happens when people form these explanations is they begin picking up on irrelevant details that confirm their explanations while blocking out information that conflicts with their explanations. Because of my reputation for drug use, people would claim to smell marijuana coming out of my room whenever I burned incense (I never did that in my room). Have allergies that make your eyes red? Must be stoned. Have naturally large pupils? Must be on acid. Have trouble bathing or washing clothes? Drugs make people not care about that. Have fluctuations in your abilities? Must be based on when you’re high and when you’re not. You can’t win around this kind of fallacious thinking.

Kids who pass don’t get accused of being on drugs by everyone from children to teachers from the age of twelve or thirteen onward. Kids who pass as nerdy or “just gifted” don’t get ostracized and accused of being both on drugs and crazy, or sent to the counselor, when they go to a summer camp filled with nerds who are mostly classified as gifted. Most “just gifted and nerdy” kids thrive in those environments and tease the kids like me who are clearly odd for other reasons. My best friend met me in such a place when we were twelve after seeing me spinning by myself, asking someone who I was, and getting “That’s Amanda. She’s crazy.”

Nor do kids who are passing really well have it assured that they will be only given single rooms from a certain point on so as not to alarm their roommates with their strangeness (yes my roommates complained about rooming with a “crazy person” or “weirdo”). Even in mental institutions. (And kids who pass really well certainly don’t get singled out as strange in those places.) This is not passing. This is being flagrantly strange and having it bother people enough that they try to think up all kinds of reasons to explain it to themselves.

When most people explain things to themselves, odd things happen. They don’t see what you’re doing. They see their explanation. They see “crazy”, “high”, “stupid stunt”, or whatever they have explained things as in their minds. And if they have to have their expectations disturbed enough to explain things to themselves, then you are not passing.

I know a lot of people that things like this have happened to. Even people with purely physical impairments. A woman I know has muscular dystrophy and when she began hanging onto the walls for balance, people explained it away as attention seeking or anxiety induced. That’s the exact same sorts of explanations (with the addition of the ever present drug thing) that I got with a much lesser known autism-connected progressive motor impairment that caused me to freeze in place, be unable to cross certain barriers easily, or lose the ability to speak.

I once froze for a solid ten minutes, with (as I heard those around me noting) fixed dilated pupils pointed straight at a bright light, on a high school field trip. Nobody told my parents. People figured it was drugs or anxiety, and everyone was sort of pointedly avoiding the subject (and avoiding me) the rest of the trip, treating me like I had done something unspeakable. I frequently had the same thing happen in college and was said to be on drugs (never happened when I was actually on them). Happened in the psych system and was called psychotic or dissociative or just left unexplained. Happened around new agers and they insisted I was either astral projecting or somehow being very spiritual. The same thing happened to me at an autism conference, and someone with the same movement disorder told me the journal articles to send to my doctor. I did and he recognized it immediately and diagnosed me with that condition.

Is that “passing”? No. It’s “being passed off as”. It’s people seeing a thing, being uncomfortable, deciding on an explanation, and coming to remember the explanation more than the thing itself.

Similarly, now that that and other conditions have me using a powerchair full time, all the traits that had people who just saw me walking around thinking I was either autistic (if they knew anything about it) or intellectually disabled, the powerchair has become their explanation for all those traits. So now I’m back to being considered purely physically disabled by some people, which has led to overestimation rather than underestimation of my cognitive abilities.

I can do one particular thing throughout most of my life and have it explained in different ways depending on age, clothing (hippie clothes, school uniform, “regular” clothes, sloppy clothes), location (regular school, college, special ed, institution, apartment, at home with my parents), haircut (messy, combed, long, short, parted in different ways, nonexistent), range of deliberate facial expression (less or more limited due to the motor impairments), and a zillion other factors. But I’m the same person and my reasons for doing whatever it is have remained constant my whole life. I have seen kids doing things like eating paper or lying on the floor, and if they’re considered “gifted” then it’s eccentric or attention seeking, if they are considered druggies people figure it’s the drugs, and in institutions or special ed it’s because they don’t know better. But I bet the reasons for doing it are the same regardless.

But as someone who was a strange kid, and paid the price for being a strange kid, I am really uncomfortable with the concept of passing. Passing would be if I never did the things I listed in the first part of this except in private. Something I only ever managed in part. Having people constantly bugging you and making things up about you because you do these strange things is not passing. It’s having people pass things off as something else. It’s having teachers accuse you of drug abuse until everyone believes it and you become curious. It’s freezing up and having other kids laughing and jumping up and down on top of you and going “see she doesn’t feel it”. It’s being singled out for bullying even among other “gifted” kids and “crazy” kids. It’s having “crazy” or “druggie” or “does weird things for attention” be the first words people use about you when strangers ask who you are. It’s having even people you thought were your friends comment gleefully and frequently on these topics as if you are more a source of entertainment than a friend. It’s having people shake you, kick you, wave their hands in your face, and make loud guesses about what’s going on, every time you lose speech. It’s that one guy who likes to come up to you and tell you what “everyone’s saying” about you. But it’s definitely not, ever, even when doing your best acting, being treated like everyone else. Which is what passing would be. Passing has its own set of problems. But “passed off as” is not passing.

The other point of this post is that I’ve talked to even a lot of autistic people who assume that there’s only two general appearances that autistic kids can take: Sort of awkward and stiff and nerdy or dweeby, or else completely cut off from people and constantly rocking and doing other stuff like that. And while I sometimes did both of those sorts of things, I think I was usually something different from either stereotype. Much of what made me stand out and get both teased and “passed off as” various things, especially both before and after the few years I reined it in a bit, was the way I related to objects around me, and sometimes appeared zoned out. Most of which has to do with how I process information in the first place. And while I know many others who were and are like this, it seems like even many autistic people can’t resist having their imaginations constrained by the main couple stereotypes. And I almost never hear this particular appearance discussed. Lest this become a third stereotype, I should point out that there are lots and lots of different ways we can appear, and that a single person can appear different ways at different times. It’s just important to avoid stereotypes. They don’t help.

Mar24

If we were real people.

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This post is for the disability blog carnival.

If I could eliminate any single disability stereotype, I would sit there and try to figure out which one underlies the most others, and pick that one. If you are going to be given a tool that selective and narrow, it’s good to choose carefully by picking the one whose destruction would destroy the most others. And after observing for a time, I have concluded that the stereotype that I would most want to eliminate is the one that says disabled people are not real or whole people.

If we were real people, killing us would be bad, and killing ourselves would be unfortunate rather than something people build special laws to enable.

If we were real people, the world would be designed in a way that allowed us to move through it without extra obstacles thrown in our way.

If we were real people, people would see us as individuals, rather than heroes, tragedies, inspirations, or representatives of our entire impairment group.

If we were real people, then giving us proper medical care would never be seen as pointless.

If we were real people, the whole myriad range of disability stereotypes would look flimsy and silly because people would see us as we are.

Of course we’re already real people. But the problem is that so few people have noticed.

Feb28

Another (misinformed medical opinion) bites the dust.

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Ten years ago, I went to the doctor. One of the things I mentioned, figuring it was just a really annoying manifestation of the movement disorder that’d recently been identified, was “I keep forgetting how to urinate.”

The doctor snapped back at me, in a tone that took me and my mother aback, “Don’t be silly. Urination isn’t voluntary.”

Unsurprisingly, I kept getting urinary tract infections. At one point my doctor actually yelled at me for not being able to give a big enough sample, even though it was bad enough at that point for there to be blood in my urine, among other signs of a nasty infection.

I get things like that a lot. Both developmentally disabled people and people who’ve been in the psych system get things like that a lot. It’s assumed that we don’t know what we are talking about, or are imagining things. So I spent a long time trying to force, cajole, etc., urine to leave my body. The good part was I had less (but, since it was intermittent, not no) trouble with incontinence. The bad part was that this was worse.

But even though I get a lot of discrimination, I also get things like the following a lot:

Nearly ten years (and a zillion UTIs) later, a nurse watched me struggle for half an hour to give a urine sample despite a full bladder and no infections. She asked me if that was common. I replied (with a huge bunch of nervousness) that it had been going on ten years and only getting worse, but that the only time I told a doctor he’d told me it was impossible. The nurse insisted on getting a doctor to refer me to a urologist.

After a bunch of really nasty tests, the urologist told me that he had located the problem. There was a lot of spasticity in my urethra, the place that urine leaves the bladder. So it was hard to get urine through it when a spasm was going on. This was fairly unsurprising because in the course of other testing people had been finding spasticity in a lot of other muscles.

So I did several months worth of a weird electronic training routine to learn how to isolate and relax that muscle. With only partial success. So the next step is trying an implant that will send signals to the muscle in question telling it to relax. It’s only minor surgery, and much as I loathe surgery I look forward to this one every time I sit on the toilet until my feet go numb.

It seems like every single time a doctor dismisses what I have to say, a later doctor will find the real cause of the problem with the right testing or exam. In fact, given my fear of doctors, I seem to have a far better track record this way than usual. They don’t always find the first thing that comes to mind, and sometimes they find something while looking for something else. One time they had to do a long methodical series of tests before finally finding something totally unexpected (a rare form of COPD (caused by, hmm, medical neglect) when their best guess had been aspirated reflux). But they always seem to find something, given enough time. Because, despite what the prejudices of some doctors might say, I never bother a doctor over nothing.

You would think this kind of track record would increase the confidence of the ones who blow me off, but there is always someone ready to believe that people who look like me can’t possibly be right if we say something’s wrong. Because apparently there aren’t enough disabled people who die or become seriously ill because of people either dismissing our observations or just dismissing our worth as human beings.

Feb13

Aspificating snobbery over the DSM all over again

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I have seen a lot of “aspies” whining lately about the proposed changes in the DSM. Not productive critique of the new criteria, the medicalization of autistic lives, or the fact that the things most autistic people have truly in common have been left out of the criteria while peripheral things nonautistic people want to fix are spotlighted. No, nothing that useful. Just out and out whining.

“I don’t want to be associated with that other kind of autistic people,” goes the standard whine line. “You know… Those Ones.” The crazy drooling retarded low functioning diaper wearing nonverbal ones who can’t take care of themselves and need to be on welfare. Which one of those or many other pejorative categories depends on the individual variation in the snobbery. (What is it? Snob not otherwise specified? Not like those other snobs.)

I’ve written a lot of posts on this blog about aspification and snobbery of this very sort. It’s been sitting around in the autistic community for a long time. And now it’s coming out of the woodwork. I might link some of those posts once I get to my main computer, just for a refresher. But this is some of the most blatantly hateful and snobbish stuff I’ve seen in a while.

What I wrote to someone earlier:

And some of us might rightly find it insulting to be referred to as the ones that others had to be oh-so-tragically “lumped in with” (you know, “crazy”, “low functioning”, “retarded”, “autistic”, or other categories that people seem to do their darndest to distance themselves from).  Like we have disability cooties or something from the way some people behave, and like having the medical people put us in the same category as our “betters” is such a terrible threat (and like it changes anything about who any of us really are).

And it’s true. It’s insulting. It’s insulting to me. It’s insulting to anyone who bears the characteristics that any individual aspified snob might throw at us. And it ought to be insulting to all of those who don’t have disability cooties At the moment either. Anyone with any decency should be appalled that people are upset, not over anything that is really going to harm autistic people as a whole, but at the idea of being thrown in with the rest of us.

It’s especially interesting to see that one of the people most widely quoted as divorcing himself from people who wear adult diapers (like me) is someone who has never seemed to hesitate to use my writing (both with and without permission) but apparently can’t stand the thought of sharing a label with people whose underwear differs from his in certain key aspects, or with people who self-injure. I guess nobody had better tell Carley that lots of people diagnosed with Asperger’s are incontinent and/or have severe self-injury. He might want to create a divide within Asperger’s to wall himself off from such people in.

Funny but I have never minded as a person who has had both such characteristics, sharing an autism label with people without those characteristics. Anyone who delves deep enough into either science or personal experience of autistic people will find that the characteristics related to perception and cognition are the ties that bind us together, regardless of the more superficial characteristics that people divide us up by. Of the autistic people who seem to have the most similar experiences on those deep deep levels to mine, include people diagnosed as high or low functioning, Asperger and autism and PDD-NOS, with IQ scores from 20 to 160. The same can be said of those who most differ from me. The reason is the diagnostic categories are neither deep nor penetrating nor accurate. They divide those with the most in common and connect those with barely anything in common in such haphazard ways it should be obvious that they are falsity of the worst kind. And the same goes when people pick these singular outward traits and hold them up as the ultimate dividing line. Like many autistics I have been saying this since I first got a good hard look at what the categories meant. And surely the deep down bones-level traits are those that matter.

People often get the idea from the media that I prefer to be called low functioning. I don’t. I don’t think that such labels can ever capture the intricate and beautiful complexity that exists within all of us. Nobody should be reduced to such a term even when they do the harm to themself by self-applying such terms. But as a person who has received that label from several doctors without even knowing it, I will stand up and resist the way it is used, and will tell people that when they speak of what they want to do to people with that label then they mean me since I have worn that label. (It is not for them to say they make an exception for me, because when people with that label are mistreated I am mistreated because the label is forced upon me whether some random guy likes it or not. It is forced on me by doctors and by people who yell out of car windows alike and is not so easily repelled.). Such things do not fit into soundbites.

Anyway just let it be known that I totally and completely divorce myself from any person or community who shuns people like me or like any other random autistic person who doesn’t meet the standards of aspified perfection. This is not the way to celebrate human diversity and it is not the way to gain status for yourselves by throwing the rest of us to the wolves. We may share an official diagnostic category (in places where the DSM is recognized), people may finally be forced to acknowledge the sameness that many of us have believed in all along, but (thank God) we don’t all share such a terribly harmful set of ethics. And thankfully it’s okay to reject crappy ethics even if it’s not okay to reject people for having unsuitably proper characteristics.   

(“Better? Fuck better. We don’t exist for the beautiful people of the world, Ted. We’re there for the oddball. The rebel. The outcast. The geek.” A line from the movie “The Specials” that just came to mind. As it always does when I am confronted with outrageous elitism.)

Anyway as much as this is a rant against snobbery it is also a call to remember what is important. Look to that beautiful shifting central set of attributes that make us alike and different. Stop using the periphery to divide us. And just as we remember the central attributes that matter, we need to look to the central values that bring us together to assert that we are of equal value no matter how we seem to differ, that we all matter and are valuable, in a deep down way not a surface feelgood way. Because we need those roots to sustain us while other people are fleeing and pointing fingers at those they don’t want to be lumped in with. And because it’s too easy to get blown away by the ethical storms that surround situations like these.

There is so much beauty in those deep levels of who we are, and it’s so easy to forget it when people are going on at great length about how inappropriate it is to see our connections when we could be dividing on the basis of things as surface level as the fabric of our underwear or our IQ points. Yes those things can make a huge difference in how we are treated and what lives we lead, but isn’t that fact something we are trying to change, rather than intensify the oppression?

Nov17

This is not the post I started out writing.

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The next disability blog carnival’s topic is intersectionality. Intersectionality is one of those words that does not slide completely off my brain, the way ‘monotropism’ does, but slides partially off my brain and is not a word I would ever use except in paragraphs like this one.

It is a word normally used by people within a very particular way of looking at oppression. And among people who may not be exactly within that category, but who take the word from those who are. I don’t even know the word for that category, although I can usually recognize it by the sorts of words it uses. As long as it is not too abstract, I greatly appreciate reading from things in this category. But I am not myself someone who can work within it (may have something to do with this post, which is in no way an insult to those who can work within it). Intersectionality refers to the way that being oppressed in more than one way at a time (such as being disabled and black and female) combines to make an experience more than just the sum of its parts.

I have spent all of the time since the blog carnival was announced, trying to write on this topic. The results in no way compared to some of the brilliant writing I have read from others. In fact, all they compared to were past efforts to write homework assignments I barely understood by plugging in words to a formula and straining my brain to the point of pain (rhyme not intended) trying to come up with more words to fill in the blanks.

I started out by listing the current categories I fall under when it comes to being subject to various forms of oppression: female, disabled, lesbian, mixed-class/poor, nongendered, and fat. Then I added a few notes under some of them.

1. (Disabled.) Specifically, I’m physically disabled, cognitively disabled, psych survivor/ex-patient/mad/etc. take your pick, and have chronic illness and chronic pain. All of which are sometimes lumped together and sometimes play out very differently from each other. And while these categories stem from the medical model, they also often reflect ways that even the political aspects of the disability communities have divided themselves, and thus become relevant as more than just medical categories.

2. (Mixed-class/poor.) Born middle-class, been poor by my country’s standards since adulthood. Because this has to do with disability, I am not the sort of fashionably downwardly mobile person I often read about who can always go back to the middle class or even the working class but chooses not to because it clashes with their values or wishes. I know enough from having talked to people who grew up poor and working-class that I’m quite aware I have plenty of middle-class privilege that can’t evaporate no matter what happens. My self-description as poor is not an attempt to erase that, but rather an attempt to convey the reality that I am subject to major classist oppression that will last the rest of my life no matter what choices I make. Permanent, involuntary downward mobility exists in the world, even if I’ve virtually never heard it discussed when people talk about classism. Which itself probably has something to do with the fact that disabled people are invisible, and that most discussions of classism seem to revolve around the struggles of the working class. And the fact that people expect class to be simpler than it is, either you are or you aren’t a particular class, when things are more complicated than that.

3. (Nongendered.) Neither cisgendered nor transgendered. Gender is a concept that, while I understand intellectually that it is greatly important for other people, is entirely absent and incomprehensible to me. I imagine that it must be some collection of aspects of a person’s identity that all cluster together in most people’s minds, whereas I’ve spent my life oblivious to how they are connected or why I would want to connect them, and innocently trampling all over people’s ideas of what it means to be masculine, feminine, or even any particular point in the middle. For more information, read Urocyon’s Gender, Sexuality, Identity, and Binaries or, if you can get it, the article “Growing Up Genderless” by Jane Meyerding in the anthology Women from Another Planet?

Then, I set about writing about how those things mixed around make life much more complicated. Most of the things I could come up with were the obvious: my status as what a friend called a “perpetual outsider” in single-issue, single-identity communities. Even in the autistic community, where I have found (unasked for and unlooked for) status, I have found no belonging. How could I, in a community where it’s impossible to go anywhere without hearing some other aspect of my life (even some to do with autism itself, since I am far from the right kind of autie) degraded, denied, and disparaged? Even the “status” has been given to a distortion of my life, not to who I am. And the same is true of the LGBT community, disability community, feminism, and all the others. I have only to walk into an LGBT community center to find a gay man who is inspired by my presence to tell me how he used to work in an institution where there were people who looked like me, where he would stand over the cribs of some of the inmates and ask (insert pained voice) “Why are you alive?” And who wants my sympathy for the agony he feels at the existence of disabled people. Seriously. This happened.

(For more on that kind of topic, see The Difference Slot, by elmindreda, who eventually left the autistic community over such experiences.)

The original thing I wrote was full of stories like that despite them just being the tip of the iceberg on this subject matter. And I grew more and more frustrated as I fit my writing into a formula that did not at all convey my thoughts. Then I decided I would rather write nothing at all than write what I didn’t mean. So here is what I do mean:

I can’t write a lot about intersectionality as a topic because I don’t ever not write about intersectionality as a topic. Every single piece of my life that I describe, is the life of someone who falls under multiple categories. I write about these things by becoming very specific and writing about things I do and experience. I write as one single instance of life and expect people to fill in the broader context on their own. And from that broader context, they can use it to think about situations that at first glance are nothing like mine.

The way I experience these things has no equivalent in words, that I know of. It is like being acted upon by a large number of separate gravitational forces that push and pull in a physical-seeming way. It’s possible to name specific forms of oppression that are recognizable to everyone, but the way I experience these things isn’t as simple as listing off sexism, ableism, etc. As with most of life, I experience a much higher degree of detail in these gravitational forces that push and pull on me, than there is in the words. So why divide them in the exact way that they are normally divided? Why say that there are six things, when you could say twenty, and why say twenty when you could say a hundred? These are just shorthand for the more complex forces at work in the societies we live in, and it is important not to forget that in these often hyper-abstract discussions. I understand very much why a common language is important, but sometimes it obscures as much as it communicates.

So I will continue to move through the world (and the bits of the world that are around me will affect me, and I will affect them) and write (when I can) about specific aspects of my life, all of which have something to do with this thing they call intersectionality, whether that’s the topic of the day or not. Because I don’t stop being all these different sorts of person, when I stop specifically naming them.

Sep21

On adjustment, dogs, and not “smiling through the pain”.

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I’ve recently seen a lot of people comment on disabled people’s opinions, in the context of “adjusting” to whatever condition we’re said to have.

Basically, if a disabled person is fine with being disabled, then it’s clearly some kind of defense against having to “hope” for a cure. The idea of just being okay with the way your body functions (at least to the extent most people are) seems to be unthinkable to some people. And the idea that disabled people’s opinions come from deep emotional conflicts over the fact that our bodies work the way they do… just no.

I used to talk online with someone who had cerebral palsy. She said that every time she had a negative emotion, it was considered to be “not adjusting to her disability”. Even though she was born that way. She didn’t need to adjust, she’d always had a body that operated the way hers does.

The fact is that a lot of disabled people either actively don’t want to have bodies that function in typical ways (at least not in all respects), or else basically don’t want to be bothered.

About not wanting to be bothered:

Lots of children dream of becoming sports stars. This may lead to them getting into that sport on a child’s level, but very few take it to the point of making it their life’s goal. Often, they do not have the kind of body, or reaction time, or cognition, suited for whatever that sport is. And generally they find other things to do with their lives, enough other things that not being a baseball star doesn’t ruin their lives, and most of the time they don’t even think “Gee, I’m not built to be a baseball star.” It’s just not part of how they work, and so it’s not even an idea that crosses their mind often.

Not everyone is built to be a sports star. Most people don’t lament not being one, or they might do so a little but not a huge amount. This is because it’s considered normal not to have a body optimized for that particular thing.

The same is true for disabled people. We don’t have standard bodies (I’m including brain in body for simplicity of language here, and also because it is a body part), any more than most people have standard sports-star bodies. Most of us don’t lament that fact. Those that do (especially those who suddenly became disabled), generally get over it.

Or as one person said, whose name I wish I remembered so I could cite wherever she wrote this, “I don’t wake up in the morning and think ‘Yep, still disabled.'” (That’s either a quote or a close paraphrase, I’m not sure.)

Most people see disability as this huge, life-altering, scary, tragic, horrible, unremittingly unpleasant, thing. And so they imagine that’s how most disabled people see it.

Some of us do. But most of us — even many people with shortened lifespans — see it as an inconvenience at worst. We may or may not do things to make our bodies function in more typical manners, but most of us do not spend all our time engaging in pointless exercises in self-pity. The fact that some people expect that we do (and that all our other thoughts on disability are just a defense against feeling sorry for ourselves) says more about the people who say that (and their conception about what it’s like) than it does about us.

Dave Hingsburger once compared me to a three-legged dog. I had clearly found ways of doing what I needed to do, with the body I’ve got, rather than emulating someone with a more typical body. I was also not particularly wallowing in a huge sea of negative emotions for having the body I’ve got (why would I?). He’d seen a three-legged dog that was the same way.

In fact, three-legged dogs and cats generally do just find ways of doing what they’ve got to do with the bodies they’ve got. Not because they’re “too simple” to know better or something, nor because they’re any stronger or braver than humans are, they just for whatever reason don’t tend to automatically go in the direction of “Woe is me, I am disabled.” They seem to just figure out what needs to be changed and change it (if they weren’t born that way, in which case they just figure out what to do the same way anyone does).

I think that human beings could take a lesson from dogs and cats this way. Not like “Wow it’s so inspirational that that cat still walks around even though she’s got to use a cat-wheelchair for her back legs.” (What do they expect her to do?) Not like, “Wow that dog really overcame his disability, and we should do the same!” More like, why throw all these pointless and meddlesome ideas on top of an experience that’s close to universal when taken across an entire lifespan?

It seems though that many people view disability as necessarily something that you have to be in a constant adversarial role with. In which case you have to “adjust” to it or something. But… really, views about disability are not all tied back to some imaginary experience people would think we are having as disabled people. People seem to think they have to make a relatively simple thing more complicated than it is, adding all kinds of layers of emotion and misconceived thoughts to it.

So, no. My views about my body, such as they are, are not all “adjustments” to having it, any more than most people’s feelings about their bodies are “adjustments” to having their bodies. But it seems like in some circles you have to have a more-or-less standard body in order to be allowed the privilege of not having their thoughts and feelings (especially positive ones) about their body be considered an “adjustment” to the awful state of affairs that their bodies are presumed to be. Or as the book Pride Against Prejudice by Jenny Morris said, just because we are happy does not mean we’re “just smiling through the pain” or “just putting a good face on it”.

Aug13

About this “can’t defend themselves” stuff.

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I’ve seen some other people, such as Dave Hingsburger, begin to get really irritated with responses to a certain situation. Basically a movie that says ‘retard’ a lot and stereotypes people with developmental disabilities. Many people have been responding saying that it’s awful because disabled people are defenseless, incapable of defending ourselves.

I commented in one spot about that, and nobody responded to me. But Dave Hingsburger commented on it, and lots of people responded to him. They said that they had very young children, and that no child can defend themselves, and therefore it’s okay.

But can’t anyone see that doing this on the (strongly implied) basis that we’re all children is the problem?

If a movie were putting out horrible stereotypes of women, enough that women felt the need to protest, and of course those who cared about women also felt that need, would anyone say, “Poor things, they can’t defend themselves”?

Well yes, some people might. It’d be recognized as a damaging and inaccurate stereotype though.

And I don’t think anyone would dream of saying, “But… but… I have a little girl. She’s only four months old. No four-month-olds can defend themselves against this stuff. So it makes total sense that people say women in general can’t defend themselves.”

It’s no different if you say it about babies or young children with developmental disabilities. This is stuff that affects us all — everyone it’s applied to. Most of us are adults. To defend a stereotype of us based on the fact that it’s true of children, is just one more added stereotype.

I hope this makes sense, I’m having trouble getting the words for it. But I am finding myself more irritated at the assumption that it’s okay to talk about an entire group of people as if we all have the same defenselessness as a young baby (and that a young baby in a certain category being defenseless, means it’s okay to call everyone in that category defenseless — hey, I guess everyone can’t defend themselves then, yes?), than I am at the original thing people are objecting to.

Jun6

R.I.P. Harriet McBryde Johnson

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I only knew her from her writing, but I cried when I heard.

And I’m still having trouble believing she’s dead. She was so fundamentally there, and now she’s not there. I’ve edited this to include a lot of the links that were missing last night, plus a quote.

Unspeakable Conversations is her most famous article.

The Disability Gulag is another.

Not Dead At All is another.

She wrote a book called Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life. One excerpt is here.

She wrote another book, this one fictional, called Accidents of Nature.

She did a talk at the Holocaust Memorial Museum called Medical Ethics: Legitimizing the Unthinkable, and she answered questions like What is a disability? and Can we talk about cure?, Why as a kid did we protest telethons, and So let me ask you, when you think about this question of cure and what you saw in Deadly Medicine….

New Mobility named her Person of the Year in 2004.

I’ll end this with a quote by her from Too Late to Die Young. I wish all autistic people who think that they’re non-disabled just because they find pleasure in being autistic, would read it and rethink what they think they know about the experience of disability. I think it exemplifies the core of what she was trying to do, what a lot of us are trying to do. And in the end it speaks for itself:

My path is constrained but endlessly varied. I watch the sun move up in the morning sky and in and out of clouds, take in the changing light that constantly reinvents the cities classic, composed beauty. I feel the moist air roll over my just-washed skin, breathe in the odors of sea and flowering trees and restaurant grease. Some of the best mornings are the mornings when nothing happens, when there is no story but the continuing relationship of this old city with the ocean that roars just out of sight and with the living jungle that tentatively tolerates our existence here.

How is it possible that nondisabled people tend to feel sorry for me? It still takes me by surprise. Peter Singer couldn’t imagine a disabled child enjoying a day at the beach and he’s hardly alone. The widespread assumption that disability means suffering feeds a fear of difference and a social order that doesn’t know what to do with us if it can’t make us fit its idea of normal. When we seek what we need to live good lives as we are, we come against that wall. Why bother? the thinking runs; all they can do is suffer. When nondisabled people start learning about disability, what seems most startling, most difficult to accept, is the possibility of pleasure.

For decades, little noticed by the larger world, the disability rights movement has been mobilizing people from the back rooms and back wards, along with more privileged people like me, to speak plainly about our needs. We make demands. We litigate. Run for office. Seize the streets. Sit through the meetings. Mark up the drafts. That kind of work has changed the world and we need to continue to do it.

But we need to do something else besides, something that may be difficult but is, I think, vital. We need to confront the life-killing stereotype that says we’re all about suffering. We need to bear witness to our pleasures.

I’m talking in part about the pleasures we share with nondisabled people. For me, those include social engagement of all kinds: swapping stories, arguing hard, getting and giving a listening ear. A challenging professional life. Going to movies, concerts, and exhibits. Wearing a new pair of earrings. Savoring the afternoon hit of Dove dark chocolate. I enjoy those pleasures the same way nondisabled people do. There’s no impairment; disability makes no difference.

But I’m also talking about those pleasures that are peculiarly our own, that are so bound up with our disabilities that we wouldn’t experience them, or wouldn’t experience them the same way, without our disabilities. I’m talking about pleasures that might seem a bit odd.

Let me give some examples.

John Hockenberry rolls across the Brooklyn Bridge self-propelled in a manual wheelchair. As he describes it, it’s a high no one but a hotshot para can really know.

A nation within a nation, of Deaf people, capitalizes its name to demand recognition as a language group, equal to any other in dignity and ferocious beauty.

Barry Corbet, a hotshot para now falling apart, is stuck in bed for several weeks with a pressure sore. As he lives with one marvelous view, he says life doesn’t go away; where would it go? he says life has never been richer or more juicy.

In an essay on smell, Helen Keller wrote that she could never warm up to another person who did not have a distinct and recognizable body odor.

After decades of torment, Professor John Nash recognizes his delusions for what they are and lets voices and visions and mathematical creativity cohabit in a mind unlike any the world has ever known.

My friend Kermit, a quad on a budget, goes out to lobby the legislature and finds a coffee under way. He can’t grasp with his hands so he makes a legislator feed him a donut. The last lobbyist out removes his clip-on tie.

At a summer camp, a mentally retarded boy badgers a girl in a wheelchair to teach him to play checkers. He knows he’s slow and she’s bored, but he won’t give up. Then something clicks and her explanations make sense at last and he sees the patterns and wins the game. For the smart girl in the chair — for me — it’s a humorous, humbling lesson. For the slow boy, there’s joy in pushing his intellectual limits. The peculiar pleasure is unique to each of us, but it’s also shared; the sharing makes a bridge across our differences.

Throughout my life, the nondisabled world has told me my pleasures must be only mental, never physical. Thinking to help me, it has said my body is unimportant. I respectfully disagree. For me, the body — imperfect, impermanent, falling apart — is all there is. Through this body that needs the help of hands and machines to move, that is wired to sense and perceive, comes all pleasure, all life. My brain is only one among many body parts, all of which work through one another and cooperate as best they can.

Some people, disabled and otherwise, conceptualize a self distinct and apart from the body. I may at one time have done so. I’m not sure. I know it is somehow possible for me to talk about me and my body as though separate, even though my mind and heart say we are one. At this stage in my life, my body constantly makes its presence known as needed, telling me with an urgent pain to deal with a wrinkle under my seat belt, or reminding me with a tremble or ache or flutter of its desire for food or rest or some other pleasure. Now the body I live in doesn’t only affect me. It is me.

The nondisabled world tells disabled people generally that our lot is unavoidably tragic, and if we’re smiling, we’re smiling through tears and despite suffering. In the face of these powerful social forces, I believe that living our strange and different lives, however we choose and manage to live them, is a contribution to the struggle. Living our lives openly and without shame is a revolutionary act.

May24

Students vote boy out of class

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Edited to add: Please go to Bev’s blog if you want more information on how to try to get them to put a stop to this crap.

PORT ST. LUCIE — Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.

After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher said they were going to take a vote, Barton said.

By a 14 to 2 margin, the class voted him out of the class.

Barton said her son is in the process of being diagnosed with Aspberger’s, a type of high-functioning autism. Alex began the testing process in February for an official diagnosis under the suggestion of Morningside Principal Marsha Cully.

Read the entire story here.

This reminds me forcefully of a warning that Laura Hershey gave a long time ago in her “Crip Commentary” web column, after viewing the series “Survivor” on television.

She went on to write “Survivor” Promotes Ideology of Exclusion:

In the midst of these escalating social conflicts, there now appears a game show — mere harmless entertainment. It’s fun, gossipy — so we don’t question its underlying principles. But the rules of this “game” seem designed not just to reward the winners — that’s an expected part of any game — but especially to punish the losers.

Somehow, I realized, this game seemed eerily familiar to me. I remember exercises I participated in during adolescence — several times at church youth camp, once in a high school class — called “values clarification.” This involved a group discussion about making difficult choices in some hypothetical adverse situation. As I recall, these exercises were supposedly intended to help us understand our own beliefs. That sounds benign, even enlightened. But in reality, I remember I often felt deeply troubled not only by the outcomes of these discussions, but also by their instigation.

A typical example: My peers and I were told to imagine being stranded on a lifeboat, along with an assortment of strangers and a dwindling supply of food and water. Our companions on the boat included a young pregnant woman, a surgeon, an unemployed drifter, an elderly man, a Boy Scout, a woman with cancer, and so on. The setting and the cast of characters varied, but the basic idea was that some people would make it, and some people wouldn’t — and that it was up to us to decide, based on what we thought of the relative value of each fictitious person.

I never had much to say during these discussions. When they were over, I often had a queasy feeling that stayed with me for several days. I never fully understood why, until much later, as an adult. I gradually came to understand that these so-called “values clarification” exercises were based on a preordained set of values, which I could not accept. The games assumed that there weren’t enough resources to go around; and that some people have more value, more right to live and to consume resources, than others do.

I remember the same queasy feeling when watching the show “The Weakest Link” — which functions like an ultra-crisp, ultra-efficient version of “Survivor”. People are voted off each round, and when they are they are told, “You are the weakest link — goodbye.” It’s like a distilled essence of social darwinism. And people seem to love it.

And people seem to learn it practically from the cradle, unless it’s just some kind of awful misguided instinct. The following will be familiar to nearly any autistic person who wasn’t extremely lucky. I’m only picking from my life because it’s easier to remember my own observations than someone else’s.

I can remember being near the age this kid was, and walking onto a playground at school. There seemed to be a lot of fascinating things to climb, so I tried. And was promptly grabbed from all sides and shoved off the structure, to repeated cries of “Amanda’s on the ship!” If I by chance (because I don’t know how else it would’ve happened at the time) drifted into one of the lines that the other girls were always forming — “Anyone who wants to play My Little Ponies, line up!” and so forth — I heard an emphatic and smug “You can’t play”. And I also remember the first kid among this same group of kids who seemed to be nice to me — who was then marched in front of me by another kid and told to repeat, “I don’t like you” to me. She did. That was the end of that. If the words to any of these things were a mystery to me (and all but a tiny number were), the tone of nastiness and exclusion was unmistakable and it happened without fail when I ended up in the path of groups of kids.

And I remember as well that when I was bullied so mercilessly — at an age where I understood far better what was happening — that I was afraid to go to school and lashed out defensively at nearly anyone who tried to interact with me at all, I was the one who got counseling, and I was the one who was talked about by teachers as if there was something wrong with me. And I was the one who had to repeat a grade and change schools. The bullies were left to go on doing their thing, because it was only natural to be nasty and cruel, but wholly unnatural to be terrified of people who acted in this manner. I’m not saying I never did anything wrong, nor that I treated everyone with absolute kindness. Not even close, and I imagine at times I was a nightmare to deal with in my own right. But good grief.

I also remember thinking that I’d finally escaped all that, in my ill-fated attempt at high school. Even years later, I thought that while people had certainly said nasty things to me, I’d gotten off light. Then as an adult I got in touch with James, who’d been one of the kids who was more likely to hang around with me at the time, and who apparently got his own share of grief for even doing that. He told me that he’d been bullied pretty badly in junior high, but that he hadn’t seen much like what I got in high school, including the fact that even some of the teachers were in on it.

(And yes, teachers were in on some of this stuff throughout school. In one memorable instance a teacher who frequently found new and creative ways to humiliate me so the other kids would laugh, actually wrote home to my parents about my great “sense of humor” — which seemed to actually mean, that he enjoyed laughing and getting others to laugh at my expense. Others, like a particular gym teacher, were more into physical rather than emotional violence. Some teachers were okay, but some of them seemed outright sadistic. A shocking number of autistic people I know, me included, have had teachers or other authority figures ask everyone in the room to tell us everything they hate about us.)

I wrote in a previous post about some of the long-term effects of things like this, and I noted the following:

I’m not telling this story to make you feel bad for me as a person. I’m telling it because assorted variants on these experiences are so close to universal among the autistic people I’ve known. How can you get a good idea of the social abilities or emotional range of a set of people who are treated like this from the moment we encounter other children, sometimes from the moment we encounter other people at all?

I still want to know this.

I also want to know what on earth it means that it’s considered “good social skills” to learn to be one of the people that excludes. And autistic and non-autistic people alike can eventually learn to be that, even if we weren’t much like that to begin with. I’m not trying to say we can’t, I’m not going to pretend not to notice what happens to autistic people who gain the power to become exclusive. But it’s sheer ugliness that these horrible things are treated as normal, and being the target of them makes you seen as somehow worse than the people doing the targeting. And the people doing the targeting are seen as the ones to emulate, it seems like.

It was also an ugly truth to realize that while some people grow out of it, many people who begin as bullies grow up to remain bullies. I fully realized that when a parent of an autistic kid called my friend a “retard” when he was mad at her, then later went on to say that he always tells his son to quit acting like a “retard”. I imagine that if he’d gone to school with me or my friend he’d have done worse than name-calling. (This is also reason #4285 why I don’t believe that “special children are given to special parents” nonsense.) It wasn’t the first time I’d seen an adult be hateful by any means, but it was the first time I connected the adults to the children in my head.

Daniel Mont wrote a book, A Different Kind of Boy. It was about his autistic son Alex. Daniel wanted to put Alex in a gifted program, because Alex was ahead in many areas and he read literature suggesting that Alex’s social and perceptual differences might actually be partly the consequence of intellectual differences. There’s an entire chapter on it that everyone should read. Alex took an IQ test and met all the requirements for the program. Then he went to one meeting of it. The other children, who were regarded as perfect and exquisitely sensitive, decided, apparently, that they didn’t want Alex around. The parents backed them up completely:

“You mean, you’re not letting Alex join?” I was incredulous. “He passed your IQ test.”

“Yes, but the other children feel he really isn’t one of them. Do you konw what I mean? I’m sure there are other programs he can sign up for. We’re sorry, we feel bad because you and Nanette were so nice.”

“Well, what did he do?” I fought to restrain my anger.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mont. Our decision is final. We really have to trust our children on this.”

I hung up the phone. I was furious. Absolutely furious. What kind of monsters were these people raising, anyway? “They are not like us. We can tell if he belongs.”

And at that point he realized the elitism that runs through most such programs (all that I’ve seen anyway, and not just intellectual elitism either — the gifted programs I was a part of were mostly populated by middle-class or wealthy white kids, most of whom wouldn’t have been put there were we anything else), and the disturbing nature of the assumption that the children were the ones best able to make the decisions in this matter.

I have read in the past about schools in some places — most American schools are not like this — where children work together to solve problems, and where the kids who learn faster in any particular area, instead of being separated out and told they’re special and above everyone else, end up being taught to use their talents to cooperate with the other children. “Winning” or “getting ahead” isn’t the goal there — and all the children tend to learn more than they do in the more cut-throat style of schools. If schools have to exist that sounds like a much better set of principles to run them on.

As I mentioned in my other post — my brother was, as he describes it, the “town scapegoat” in the small town I was born in. People sometimes think he’s exaggerating to say that everyone hated him there, just like they sometimes say my friend Joel and I exaggerate when we say teachers joined in with some of the other kids’ bullying towards us. From what our parents say, if he’s exaggerating it’s not by much.

Oddizm claims that autistic people are “eminently hate-able”.

I don’t think we are. But I think that we are, like many other disabled people, subject to widespread hate. And that the hate often wears a lot of other masks — but is, basically, hate, in all its guises.

And hate in some of its most raw guises is what autistic people encounter in kindergarten.

If schools are going to exist and teachers are going to teach in them (and I’m not a big fan of schools, but I know to say they’re widespread is an understatement), they ought to discourage hate and exclusion. As should parents.

They ought not to join in.

And they sure as hell ought not to outright invite it and celebrate it the way this teacher has.

If this were the way things were done, then anyone who was the wrong kind of “different” of the day — autistic or non-autistic — would be voted out of every kindergarten where prejudice against people like us existed. I would’ve been “voted out” in preschool, and the kids were doing their darnedest to try even without a teacher’s encouragement.

Children aren’t born knowing how to behave towards other children. None of them are, autistic or non-autistic. They have to learn that everyone’s dependent on everyone else, that people aren’t better than others just by being better at something, and that tendencies to do bad things to other people are things we all have to fight, not give in to, if we want society to be remotely just to anyone.

And this teacher is leading these kids in the wrong direction to learn any of those lessons.