Jobs for autistic strengths and "autistic strengths"

Full disclosure: Real Social Skills got me thinking about this with some tweets (first tweet, second tweet, third tweet), and then a blog post, both of which I think you should read. That said, I think my thoughts are parallel rather than identical and it's still worth my writing my bit.

To me, what she's saying reads a few main points:

• Some models of autistic strengths assume that attention to/liking of detail is one of the strengths.
  
• They then assume this means we will enjoy repetitive, detail-oriented jobs most people find mundane.
  
• That's still putting us into different sorts of jobs than everyone else (segregation!) but calling it strengths based and assuming we're all the same.

Since this is May 1 (Blogging Against Disablism Day), I've got some "spot the (dis)abl(e)ism" thoughts. Let's break those down. Here's what I'm reasonably certain isn't ableism:

• Thinking it's a good idea to play to an autistic person's strengths does not read like ableism to me.
  
• Recognizing that some strengths may be statistically common in autistic people does not read like ableism to me.
  
•  Understanding that the jobs we find interesting or want to do may be different from what "most people" find interesting or want to do does not read like ableism to me.

Helping an autistic person find a job that's a good fit for them based on their (autistic, since they are autistic and autism is pervasive,) strengths would also not read like ableism to me It would be helping someone find a job for their autistic strengths. Unfortunately,  the way programs around finding jobs for "autistic strengths" often run ... does have ableism involved.

• Assuming that "autistic strengths" means exactly a certain set of (perhaps statistically common) strengths is treating us as a monolith, and therefore ableism. Not all autistic people are detail-oriented, for example. (I appear to be a lot more detail-oriented than I really am thanks to pattern-recognition.)
  
• Assuming that a given strength will correspond to a given interest is stereotyping based on interests. If you're only doing this in the presence of an assumed disability, it's ableism. If not ... it's still inaccurate stereotyping but it might not be ableism?
  
• Celebrating how we can therefore do these jobs other people find boring and pushing us into those jobs is effectively workplace segregation, definitely stereotyping based on autism, and therefore ableism.

And this is what a lot of autism employment programs seem to be doing. It's not what we need. My jobs? Based on my actual strengths, some of which are a bit stereotypical and some of which are decidedly not. Math? Yeah, I'm good at that and I like it. People tend not to be surprised by that one. Grading? I guess that involves attention to detail, or pattern recognition that makes breaks in expected patterns stand out. Teaching? Seems a bit social, yes? Well, explaining things to people in ways they can understand is absolutely part of my skill set. As a student, I often explain math-heavy neuroscience papers to my non-math classmates in the neuroscience program. As a teacher, it means finding the way to explain a given concept that actually makes sense to my students. I don't think any autism employment program is going to suggest that a person who can't always talk become a teacher, but that's what I do. Editing? I guess it's attention to detail, but it's also language. None of my work has been in areas typically considered "boring," and a lot of the work people consider "boring"? Really wouldn't be a good fit for me. Assuming it must work for me because I'm autistic isn't going to work. I'm an Autistic person, not a machine made of autism stereotypes. 

Autistics Speaking Day 2015

Autistics Speaking Day 2015 was a day when I did not speak aloud.

Not because I couldn't.

Because I didn't need to.

I used social media sites to talk to the people I wanted to talk to, today.
I rode my bicycle around the town, exploring, and then I sat and watched a river flow by, today.
I worked on applications to PhD programs, today.

And because I did not spend the energy on speaking aloud, I have the energy for other things.

I write.

Today, like every Autistics Speaking Day, is November 1st. That's the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I am a bit of a NaNo Rebel this year, because what I am working on is not a novel, but I am participating. I have quite a bit of writing that I am working on -- statements of purpose and personal history statements and various other essays that I need as I apply to PhD programs, short fiction with autistic characters, either of the two novel ideas I've got on the back burner, blog posts, poetry, narrative of some sort for Autonomous Press -- the list goes on, I'm sure.

I read.

Like most writers, I read a lot. I read fiction, both in the genres I write (science fiction and fantasy, mostly) and in other genres. I re-read Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black today. I started reading Accessing the Future today. I read blogs. I read non-fiction. Right now I'm reading Biopolitics and Utopia, and also Neurotribes.

I meditate.

Like many Autistic adults, I have pretty bad anxiety. Meditation isn't a miracle cure, not by any stretch, but it calms me down a little. One more tool in the box is always handy, in any case.

I speak, metaphorically.

Because I have the time and energy and platform to do so, I can tell my stories to anyone who'll listen. I can tell people how oral speech doesn't matter that much to me, that whatever they might imagine being unable to speak is like (for the folks who have to imagine), that's probably not how it is for me.

Here's the thing:

I don't actually care when speech gives out on me, not in itself. I might be annoyed about the reason, like when flickering lights gets me. I might be frustrated if it's disproportionately hitting one activity (sorry, measure theory.) I might be scared if I'm around people whose reactions to speech going offline are as yet unknown, because sometimes people do react poorly. I might need to think about the logistical question of how best to communicate without speech, if it's the first time I've needed to in a given environment.

These are all different from being upset about the inability to speak. Some of them boil down to being upset about ableism, whether about access barriers or about biases against people who don't speak with their mouths. Even the logistical question could fit under that category, since there'd already be an easy answer if society were really set up for people who don't speak orally.

My concern about disproportionately losing speech during one particular class I'm less certain on how to classify. Partially, as much as the professor and my classmates seem to be totally fine about my not always being able to speak and my writing on the side board instead when I can't, I'm worried about what they're going to think. As a teaching assistant, I teach a class, face-to-face. As much as I know teaching without speech can be done, as much as I know people who do it, I haven't done it yet. Not classroom teaching with 30-50 students in a lecture, while I can't talk.

I've done tutoring without speech, and I gave a conference presentation without speech, but I've not done regular classroom teaching without speech yet and I don't really want my colleagues wondering how I would manage that until after I've got an answer I know works.

Whatever it is, it's still not finding the inability to speak inherently frustrating. And I've solved the logistical questions for most of the environments I spend much time in.

And here's what I don't do:

I don't purposefully avoid methods of communication I know I can use, and effectively. I don't think that doing so would teach me what it's like not to be able to use those methods, because times when speech is working fine but I am choosing not to speak for some reason (someone else is talking, sore throat, not actually having anything to say) are very different from the times when speech isn't working.

That's what Communication Shutdown would have been, and it's what taking an hour of silence (at a time you choose, too!) to try and understand what it's like not to always being able to speak would be. 

Yes, That Too Acceptance. Love, and Self-care: #AutismPositivity2015

I have been writing less on my blog since... well, ever since I left for China at the end of August 2013. Spending an academic year at a university that really, really did not want me to be there was extremely draining, and I've already written a lot of things on this blog. I'm not really out of things to say, because there are always new ideas and new connections and new events, but I'm low on energy to say them here, so I am posting less often than I used to. (I used to post every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and that hasn't been the case since 2013.) 

That's OK, and deciding that it's OK is part of my accepting my limits and taking care of myself, which is this year's theme.

I've also been using some of what I write for academic purposes. I've done some short fiction, and this past year I was in a capstone engineering course that involved 50+ page reports at the end of each semester. That's a good bit of writing. I've also been working on a chapter for a book, which is currently at 30+ pages, and conference presentations, and I've been reading and taking notes for multiple projects. I've got papers and chapters to write, and will continue to, and if I want to be making a living, I'll need to be using my writing for places that help with that goal. 

In a very literal and physical sense, earning a living is required in the current system (and that's not an endorsement of the system, just an acknowledgement that to survive, I need to exist in it) so prioritizing placement of my writing in places where I get compensation is kind of self-care, in a physical and pragmatic way. 

Not so much choosing to write things that would be palatable to the mainstream. I don't do that so much, because writing things I disagree with to survive is survival but not self-care. Ensuring that I have the resources I need to live through placement is a different thing than getting resources by silencing myself or others, and only one of those am I talking about here.

And you want to know what else is self-care? Using my AAC device when I'm tired and find it easier to type than to speak, not just when speech is completely gone. That's self-care, and it's something I've been doing, with friends and at school. I'm glad I'm doing it. Pushing for normalcy for the sake of normalcy is kind of the opposite of self-care, and I've had enough of it.

Late for Blogging Against Disableism Day

Disableism/ableism seem to be pretty much the same thing, so far as I can tell, in case anyone is familiar with one or the other. I think it might be a regional thing? Both are about all the kinds of discrimination and stereotyping and barriers that disabled people have to deal with.

I think what I want to talk about today is related to passing (or not passing) and outing myself and what happens after, when people say "I would never have known!" or "You don't need to tell me that!" or "I'm so sorry!"

Because... there is ableism there, and it's the most recent example that's coming to mind. That's a big improvement over last year, when I was struggling with a school that was pretty actively trying to block things I was doing and made attempts at preventing me from coming and then later at having me sent home because I'm autistic. That was really blatant and nasty, and I'm glad to be out, and in comparison what I'm dealing with now- well, let's just say I'm in no hurry to go back to last years situation. Here is good. Now is good. Not perfect, hence still having something to talk about, but pretty good.

So.

Because this is for Blogging Against Disableism Day, or BADD, I figure there might be some folks reading this who haven't read anything else. I'm Autistic, I usually can and do speak at least some, but not always. When speech is either non-existent or not doing everything I need communication for, I write and I use text to speech. I'm also a graduate student in math and a teaching assistant in math, so I work as a math tutor and teach a section of precalculus.

Last Thursday (bit over a week ago) I had two exams in a row, and then two more classes and work. By the end of the exams, speech was not working, which for me is not even a little bit of a surprise. I went to my next class, graph theory, and I mostly didn't need to talk. I wrote a little bit to my classmate who sits next to me, but mostly language wasn't needed. In between that class and the last one of the day, functional analysis/operator theory, I was in the classroom (both classes were in the same room) and one of the engineering students in operator theory came in. He tried to talk to me beyond what I could handle with gestures, so I went to the whiteboard with one of my markers and explained that I couldn't actually talk with my mouth right now and that it was related to my being autistic.

"I'm so sorry."

Um.
Why are you sorry? What is there to be sorry about? In that situation, I can't think of a reason for him to be sorry that doesn't involve ableism.

The assumption that disability is something to be sorry about, something to feel sorry for, is ableist. (Someone not being a fan of their own disability, or being angry about the barriers they face, is very different from someone assuming that we must feel a certain way about our own disabilities.)

When I tell someone I'm Autistic, I don't want the first thing I hear in response to be that they are sorry. I really, really don't want to know how they think I should feel about my autism. I'm not sorry. Why should they be?

Carnival of Aces: The Unassailable Asexual

That's the theme. It's not what I am. One of the pretty common things folks say to try to invalidate asexual identities is "you're all just autistic." Unfortunately often, the group response is "We're not just autistic," which, um, some of us are Autistic and asexual. This is a combination that exists. (There's a difference between a person stating that they personally aren't autistic as a factual correction and someone playing into the idea that autism means "fake" asexual while defending themselves from that trope. Disability and Asexuality might have been the theme I went with when I hosted the carnival, and by might I mean totally was.)

Since I'm not entirely sure where to start on this idea, I'm borrowing a bit from "Oh the stars you can earn!" By that, I mean I'm going to go through each of the stars there, explain briefly why I do, don't, or kinda get this star, and any effect that I think that has on me. Or whatever comes to mind from reading about that star.

The GOLD star: "You do not resemble someone who is broken."

I don't think neurodivergence means broken, but enough people do that I completely and totally fail to earn this one. But I fail in a way that assumes nonsexuality (more like the way children aren't sexual) than asexuality. I guess it's sort of an assumption of not entirely understanding sexuality?
Also school abuse has happened.
So yeah, I don't have this one, not even close. But mostly it's occasionally made me feel like a bad disabled person (that whole nonsexuality thing) rather than messing with the asexual identity directly.

The SILVER star: "You have certain knowledge."

Well, certain enough for me. I don't have a sex drive, I don't have a desire for sex, and on top of that, it seems like I've got sensory issues in that area. (I think that means I get to dig up my gold star, reanimate it, and kill it again?)
That means certain enough that I'm happy to just tell people to shut up until they have a clue if they get splainey, but meh on them actually listening. This whole being 22 thing, it's a thing.

The BLUE star: "You conform to societal norms."

Eh. Not really? My gender is weird. I don't entirely get it. But it's definitely not binary. I'll get back to you when I have a clue. But I do fall in love, I think. Also, what is desire to see people face to face?

The RED star: "You are different from the norm."

In a lot of ways, yeah.

The RAINBOW star: "You conform to subcultural norms."

Yeah, probably. I fit in fairly well in a lot of autistic spaces, as long as they are ones where being asexual is an accepted thing as well.

The GIANT BALL OF GAS star: "You conform to 'the way things work.'"

NOPE.
I am gender-weird, but was absent from high school more days than I wore not-a-dress-or-skirt. Not because of a uniform. I just like dresses and skirts for sensory reasons. It's a very nice woosh, and they are loose and long and it's great. Jeans are sensory terrible. Therefore skirts and dresses.
Or sex just sounds terrible to me. I'm not the opposite of desire as indifference. I'm WHY NO GO AWAY.
Or I like my hair long.
Or I'm actually kinda into (funky) fashion design.
Also I was in tenor bass choir as a tenor second, only chick-like person on Ultimate Frisbee, yadayada.
Oh, also I was simultaneously the slowest person on the cross-country team and the captain. That's not 'how things work.'

The BLACK star: "You conform to asexual community narratives."

Eh. There's a "but I like pleasing my partner" narrative that, well, no. I really didn't have much of a thing for that. He wanted to be able to please me, but in this particular area the only way to do that is just never need to go there, and it was incompatible, and that was actually part of why we decided to go back to being good friends. Which we still are, by the way.
There's also one about cheerleading sex for other people. I don't want to hear about it. I don't usually like romance subplots. I don't like movie kissing. I see folks writing about how people make a fuss about open same-gender displays of affection but not different-gender displays of affection? I know that's absolutely a thing, I see the reactions all the time. Totally not going to argue with the pattern. As an asexual person who is NOPE on the sex, I actually do avoid the different-gender displays in media. Often more than the same-gender ones, actually, because the same-gender ones are at least written with fewer sappy tropes, usually.

The PURPLE star: "You represent asexual demographics or asexual diversity."

I... think that applies to everyone?
WHO DOES THIS NOT COVER?
I mean, without being not-asexual. 

Blog hop: Accessing The Future Fiction

I just found The Future Fire thanks to a friend of mine, That Crazy Crippled Chick, because she linked me to an article listing 5 positive representations of disability in science fiction. As a disabled person (and a disabled writer who sometimes does science fiction and fantasy,) that's totally a thing I want to see.

Anyways, they author of that post is also crowdfunding for Accessing The Future, a planned anthology of speculative fiction (so basically everything I read and most of what I write) with disability themes. I'm totally going to submit a story once they get to that point.

Also a blog hop.

1. Tell us about your Work In Progress (WIP) / Current Read (CR) and the world it's set in.
   
   I'm almost done with a story tentatively titled Where None Have Known to Look, where a smuggler and her friend visit a race of sentient computers on a planet no one else knows about... and the friend has the choice to become part computer. It'd be useful, certainly, but people already think he's not fully human- is he willing to let them be right?
   
   The reason folks think he's not fully human is that he's autistic, so while I didn't think too much about the world it's set in before... I'm going to say it's socially pretty similar to that of today, just adding in contact with interstellar trade routes and the extra technology involved in making that possible.
   
   By almost done I mean tomorrows post is probably going to be the announcement that you can buy it on Amazon. (I've got other stuff there already.)
   
2. Who are the most powerful people in this world?
   
   At a local to planetary level, there's a good bit of variation, but in general, the folks who control interplanetary trade control most everything else. At planetary levels, that means whoever was rich enough to get into the space trade early (for their planet) has come out on top.
   
3. Where does their power come from?
   
   Controlling trade means they're controlling how goods and services flow, which means they can make or break a planets economy if they really want to. Mostly they just want to have that as an unspoken threat, but it's effective enough. Think the current corporate mess, just at the interstellar level.
    
4. What physical and/or mental characteristics underpin their positions of power?
   
   Whatever underpinned power on their planet before they made interstellar contact still does- so on Earth, being white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, ambulatory, generally able-bodied, close to neurotypical, and having received a western-style education is still a big determining factor.
   
   If you get off your home planet for whatever reason, most people you meet won't know what your species-typical and culture-typical things are, so it reverts to your place within the trade hierarchy, unless and until you're dealing with someone familiar with your planet and species, at which point the same biases you deal with at home are coming into play.
   
5. How does this affect the weakest people in the world?
   
   It's theoretically possible for someone closer to the bottom of the heap to be an exception and get off-planet, which is totally a functioning escape method: Trevina is Hispanic, and she faces racism on Earth. But she's an independent trader/smuggler (mostly grey market,) and when she's off planet she'll rarely run into anyone who knows enough about humans to understand that skin color has any significance... or even that we come in multiple colors. She'll just deal with her status as an independent trader (common folk love her, big trading companies hate her, law enforcement doesn't really trust her but will probably look the other way unless she does something really egregious because she's considered a little fish) and as a foreigner.
   
   But she's made it to that level, which means she's rather emphatically not one of the weakest people in her society. She's got some social categories in common with her planet's share of them, which is very different, especially considering that she's mostly not on her home planet.
   
   People generally don't starve- it's gotten to the point where starvation would be bad enough publicity that they make sure everyone can eat- but it's not pretty. Shelter is not a given, nor is medical care, unless you can pay. Most people don't actually have any contact off-planet unless a close friend or family member has gone to labor on an asteroid or in helping make a new planet fit for life, but jobs are often moving to planets where wages are lower or resources cheaper. For the moment, resources are fairly expensive on Earth but wages are low, so service jobs and low-resource crafting (artisanal work) are easy to find. 

I didn't realize I knew this much about my universe. I might need to write more in it...

BADD: Not what I was planning on but it's ableism and I'm against it

Warning for ableism in school/educational settings.

This is my post for Blogging Against Disablism Day. It's not the post I was planning on writing but then I melted down over this so it's what we're getting. If I'm lucky, I'll manage one on my planned topic thanks to time zone differences.

I don't phone. My program people know that I have issues with phones, but don't seem to get the full extent of the issues: I am pretty much limited to scripts and noncommittal sounds on the phone, because I am not processing phone conversations in real time much of ever. So if they're calling to say "I said I'd call you when I got here and here I am" I'll be fine: I go meet them. If they're calling to say "Yo, you forgot your book in my office," I'll be fine: I know that script, I say thanks and ask when I can get the book. I might need to supply some information that I already know, but I don't need to figure out what script to put it in or create one from scratch.

But if it's communication for a job and I need to be able to react to new and potentially unexpected information with actual solutions and real-time reactions? I've got to be text based. That's just how it is. Email is good. Text messages are manageable, though kind of annoying for long things because of the keyboard and screen size and not really practical for job communications thanks to that.

My program people have been good about many of my issues, but not all. Mostly it's been cognitive stuff that they've been bad at: Newsflash, a person can be cognitively disabled and still meet the ADA "otherwise qualified" thing when the stuff that cognitively doesn't work isn't the core duties of the job/the core expectations of the academic program. And still need accommodation for those things.

So: This paperwork is not cognitively accessible to me, I need the questions in a different, less open-ended form or to not be the one doing this paperwork.
They wouldn't believe me until they actually saw me melt down related to it. Twice. Once at orientation, and yes I told them what the problems were then [the questions aren't accessible to me and also your person talking about cross-cultural communication is using the same words that the people telling autistic people how we interact wrong in all the ways use.] Once after I told them and their suggestion was to have the residence director help me with it, ending with my melting down in her office.

So: I need significant support writing a cover letter for a job. Basically it means the person helping me asks a ton of questions and I answer them and then edit into niceness, I actually posted the progress on We Are Like Your Child after a friend helped me in English.
The friend helping in English happened because my program people didn't provide the help needed. Residence and Academic directors totally talked to each other about how my issue was "worrying" but they didn't tell me what they were worried about and they didn't give me the help that would have led to there not being an issue.

So: I don't phone. They've been told multiple times that I don't phone.
Academic director calls me on the phone to tell me that my internship teacher isn't using email for a reason I don't understand. But one of the big things is that people often don't understand the reasons behind very real needs so I'm not going to argue. It's something about computers not being good right now. Fine. Since I'm getting this information second-hand from someone with no such issue, how about telling me this in a mode of communication I'm OK with? But no, this is apparently too much to ask, for people who don't have issues emailing to remember that calling me should only happen for things that are both urgent and important. At the start of a break over which I am not working, this is not urgent.
Also the teacher-given suggestion is not practical: texting for all job-related (sciency!) communication is not practical. Small screens, small keyboards, not good for reasons that I don't think even have anything to do with my being Autistic.

Yes, these are individual incidents faced by one person, but there is a pattern: I am disabled. I have a need related to my cognitive/thinking/processing stuff. It's not believed without huge piles of proof often involving meltdowns, and even with the proof the offered solutions are often impractical. These needs are special and it's expected that people won't understand them. I should be grateful that I'm here at all, really, my program had to bring up the fact that they could get sued if the university rejected me over disability after the program accepted me to get me here.

That's saying that these needs, which are considered part of a disability instead of "sometimes people have things they can't do," are special and I should expect them to get ignored or forgotten. That's ableism. It's part of a pattern of how differences in how people can think and process get us excluded, you know, ableism. That thing we're against today?

Love, Not Fear

This is for the Love, Not Fear flashblog happening tomorrow, done by Boycott Autism Speaks. Figured I should start off with that. Also, I saw Neurodivergent K's post before mine posted and it's saying things I would want to add, so I'm just gonna leave you with that link... the Litany Against Fear is really cool, and the way she added other stuff in between with relevancy is really cool and I kind of wish I'd thought of it.

So, what does "Love, not fear" mean to me?
Um.

I think love and fear can exist together, actually. Love of, fear for. Fear of autism and love for autistic people don't go together, certainly, but fear of what others do to autistic people can totally go with love for autistic people. And I'll admit it: I'm often afraid. I'm scared of the ways people limit our language use, and I'm scared of the things parents apparently think it's acceptable to do to autistic people, and I'm scared of a whole lot of other things too. Because love, I stand and fight these things that I am afraid of. Not autism, I won't fight a part of a person, that's not love for the person. But the terrible things that others do in the name of fighting autism? Because I love autistic people, I will fight those battles.

Love sometimes leads to fear that others will hurt the ones you love, and it sometimes leads to anger about the ways others have hurt the ones you love. But it also gives the courage to stand up and fight against those horrible things. Love gives the strength to say "I am afraid, and I will love anyways."

Am I afraid of the effects of autism's demonization? Yes. I am.
Do I fear autism? Do I fear autistic people? No. I don't. That's not love.

And I will close with a thing I remember from a series that I think was called Fearless. The idea was that courage doesn't mean "I'm not afraid at all." It means recognizing what it is you're afraid of and doing what needs to be done anyways because we love. Feel like Nita from Young Wizards would do that too. (Yeah I'm apparently in a book reference mood.)

T-21 Blog Hop: Social Justice

IRONY UPDATE: One of the things that inspired this post was an Autism Speaks fail that I thought was over and taken care of. The day after writing this, I find out it's not actually over and that Autism Speaks are white-texting liars and also put the white-texted toolkit back up. Story here.

Today, I'm talking about a social justice issue that probably a lot of you don't think of as social justice or as related to disability. But it is. I'd describe it as "cite your sources," but it's not a full MLA or APA or Chicago citation that we necessarily need as a justice thing. Frankly, making my own citations of those kinds is a cognitive access issue for me, so I either use an automatic generator or get someone else to do my citations. But the idea of saying where you got the ideas you're using and building on? Yes, that is a social justice issue.

So. Here's the part where I talk about why.

Advocacy comes with innovation. People need to figure out what it is in their situation that needs to change, and they need to figure out how to change it. People are coming up with new ideas- that's what innovation is. When people neglect to list where they got these ideas from as they build on them, there's a few things that happen. (Links Democratizing Innovation and my post about the book, because relevant.)

First, people tend to forget where the ideas actually came from. When we're talking about technology stuff like in Democratizing Innovation, that means corporations don't know which customers came up with the ideas.

Then they forget that it even was customer who came up with the ideas. They think they came up with the ideas themselves.

Now the big group probably has control over the idea and thinks they came up with it, but they didn't!

This applies with advocacy things too, sending credit for ideas up the power gradient- how did Queer Rights stuff start up in the USA? It wasn't about marriage for people of the same gender. Trans women of color started that up, predominantly Black trans women. Today the face of this sort of advocacy is white gay men, and the T for trans that started this movement tend to get ignored. There are people in those movements who legitimately think it was white gay people who started it.

In disability stuff, parents of kids with disabilities generally have more power than people with disabilities do themselves. (Less so if the parents are also disabled, even less if they're openly so, and there are some organizations that make sure to give their power to Disabled people to try to combat this, but overwhelmingly it's parents who get listened to. Check the readership on blogs if you don't believe me.) Within disability, the image we have is usually a young white boy with whatever the disability in question is. Sometimes it's not, but that's the usual. A white man with the disability is probably going to get listened to more than someone who isn't a white man and has the same disability, or than someone who has multiple disabilities. There are a lot of power differentials. Access to academia is one of them.

When we fail to cite/link/acknowledge where our ideas are coming from, we wind up erasing our sources. This can cost them opportunities for authorship and scholarship and other things that can help with being not impoverished. Poverty is a big issue for marginalized groups, like, you know, people with disabilities. People also sometimes act like a group doesn't really exist, which can get into an ugly cycle with this: the idea can't have come from them because they don't exist, and we know they don't exist because they don't come up with ideas! So we ignore the ideas they came up with (or pretend they came from someone else), maybe we'll come up with the idea that they can't think. Wait, that's already a disability stereotype. It'll just get worse.

So yes, if you're building off an idea someone else wrote about, say so. Give enough information that people can find what the person wrote. Since this is the internet and most of us are bloggers reading other bloggers, link it! Links are good! They drive traffic to the people you linked, which is good for plenty of reasons, including social justice type reasons when you're linking disabled bloggers. Boosting the voices of people from the groups you want to help is a big part of how you do allyship.

Oh, and a note for the folks who think citations and copyright law and such are evil and bad: that's great, if you want to tell the world that they don't need to cite you go ahead and do that, but if you enforce that "no citations" rule on others, that's not OK. You might be couching it in the language of justice, but if you're erasing the marginalized folks who came up with these ideas, it's still helping oppressors. And yes, this applies to ethnographic stuff and sociological stuff, if you're talking to members of a marginalized group about their experiences and one of them tells you they don't want to be anonymous, you listen. Enforced anonymity erases scholars who are members of the groups being studied, and that's unacceptable. (Offering anonymity is still important- it's enforcing anonymity that's a problem.)

Also, creative commons is kinda cool and probably has a license that will keep some big corporation from taking your work and making it proprietary like happened to the work of a bunch of MIT coders and which still lets people use your work in the ways you want them to be able to use it.

This was for the Down Wit Dat T-21 Blog Hop.

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This is autism

I've actually talked about this sort of thing before. On Tumblr, I have a "This is what autism looks like" post from about a year and a half ago. I'll be reblogging myself to get it out there again. I've written some poems that are relevant, too. They're copied and pasted at the end of this.

Anyways.

What is autism?
It's always a person or a group of people. There is no autism detached from the person- there's no way to split off "this is the autism and this is the person." Any metaphor that tries is going to be a bad metaphor. So I'm not going to do that.
It's also probably a lot of different things, because seriously this isn't specific. There were a lot of ways to meet criteria in DSM-IV-TR. There were 3129 different ways before getting into single criteria that can be met in different ways and known traits that aren't on the DSM list.
Even when the core bits are the same, presentation isn't always going to be the same. It might not even be all that similar.
Autism is better understood as a foundation everything else gets built on (kind of like a neurotypical makeup is a foundation that a neurotypical person's mind/personality is getting built on) than as... probably most of the things I've seen it understood as. Environment and experiences and such are going to affect what happens from there, just like with neurotypical folks (and with allistic folk who aren't neurotypical.)
So what's autism?
It's all the A/autistic people and the people with autism and the undiagnosed who think they're just broken or wrong and the undiagnosed who've gotten along OK. It's all the people whose minds and thoughts and experiences are built and reacted to using an autistic foundation instead of one that's close enough to "average" or "normal" to get called neurotypical.
Autism is people. It's not an outside force stealing them away. It's people, right around 1% of people.

Now have the poems woot.

Anniversary

I stand in front of you.
I tell you exactly who I am.
I am a college student,
And I am Autistic.

And yet, and yet, and yet you assume,
I must be a parent,
I must be writing about my child,
An anniversary of diagnosis must be for my child.
No, it's for me.
An anniversary of diagnosis must bring back sadness.
No, it is a victory for understanding and hope.
An anniversary of diagnosis is a difficult day.
No, I want a cake. (Or ice cream. Ice cream is good.)
An anniversary of diagnosis is a day to reflect.
That much, at least, is true.
But what to reflect on, what to think?
Autism: 0, You: 1?
This is not zero-sum
Defeating autism?
We're not separate.
Remembering that my child (what child? I have no child yet) is still my child?
How could I forget that?
How could a different neurology cause anyone to forget that?


Autism Is

Autism is a word for the ways I will never, can never be normal.
It is also the word for "why this doesn't bother me."
Autism makes me a foreigner in my own country.
It also protects me from culture shock, as I am accustomed to being "other."
Autism makes it harder for me to find friends.
It also keeps false friends away.
Autism makes it harder to take notes in class.
It also means I don't need to.
Autism makes mint, strobes, sirens painful.
It also allows me to stim.
Autism makes oral speech less natural to me.
It also provides my abundance of words.
Autism means challenges.
It also means solutions, if only I am allowed to use them.

Autistics Speaking Day 2013

Warning: References to Ableism (super-vague)

Oh hey, it's November 1, Autistics Speaking Day. I'm Autistic. I don't always say words with my mouth, but I communicate, and that's the version of “speaking” I'm using. I've got two main ideas for what to talk about: I've got an autistic character planned for my NaNoWriMo novel(s) who types “I was able to say words. That turned out not to be the same thing as speaking” about a potion that let her... say words. The idea was to let her talk. It's a fantasy novel. I've also got the speaking I do in my daily life, educating people by way of being the autistic adult that they actually know of. The way diagnosis looks in China, there aren't exactly a lot of autistic college students who know they're autistic here. That's not to say there's no autistic students: I think that one of my classmates in graph theory might be autistic. But there's not really people my age who know they're autistic, or there's not a lot of us and we're mostly not in colleges.

First off, offline stuff. I'm out as autistic to my Chinese language teachers, my Academic Director, my Residence Director, all my classmates for my language classes, my roommate, and a couple people in my materials science class. My roommate knew pretty much nothing about autism when I met her, and then I told her that I'm Autistic, and then I lent her Loud Hands because she wanted a book that was in fairly simple language but wasn't meant for young kids. So that's a way of having several Autistic people speaking to her about autism from across the ocean. That was pretty cool.

There's also been conversations with my Academic Director. Some have been really productive. Like this one. It was in Chinese, like basically all our conversations, but here's approximately what was said. She is Zhu Laoshi, I'm me.

Zhu Laoshi: So are you interested in visiting one of the schools for autistic kids while you're here? I could go with you.

Me: Uh, maybe? I'm a wee bit scared, though.

Zhu Laoshi: They learned a lot of stuff from American NGO's.

Me: Yeah, that's what scares me.

Zhu Laoshi: Why?

Me: Because the biggest autism related organization in the USA is really bad.

Zhu Laoshi: Have you told them what their problems are?

Me: Yup. So have a ton of autistic adults. One of the problems is that they don't listen to autistic people.

Zhu Laoshi: That would make it hard, yes. [Conversation continues, but that was the bit I wanted to share.]

Or I explained both a problem I have [I don't always realize I'm cold] and how I handle it [I get goosebumps normally, so I check for those instead of checking to see if I feel cold.] That happened with a classmate for materials science, after which I explained that no, autism does not always mean incapable of oral speech. That's just one of many autistic things, and not all of us have that specific one. Selective mutism, learning to talk later, and word choice differences are all possibilities, and yes, one person can have all those things at once. Not me, I talked super-early, but it's possible.

Now for NaNoWriMo. That's National Novel Writing Month. I'm Autistic. I'm writing fantasy, and I'm including multiple disabled characters including multiple autistic characters. Not that they have the word “autistic,” but people reading in the modern day are meant to read these characters as autistic. One is non-speaking. She designed her own AAC device- it's based in magic, because fantasy, and she spent a really long time studying magical theory in order to design it. After spending similarly long studying to try to make a potion that would let her talk. It sort of worked, but not entirely- the potion that she came up with would let a person who just has physical issues with speech, but if there's also a disconnect between the languaging and the mouth-making-words, the potion doesn't fix that.

And yes, her dealing with ableism is a major part of the plot. Like, the decisions she makes, often in response to people being horrible in various ways, are probably the biggest factor in driving her story arc. Yes, I'm writing a non-speaking autistic character with agency into a fantasy story, and yes, she's got some magic, but it's not because of her being autistic and people missed her magic for a while because she's autistic. I'm not entirely sure about how organizing the bits of story will go and I won't know until I'm well into writing, so I'm not sure exactly when you first meet her, but she's important. And pretty cool. If she were real instead of being a product of my imagination, she would write an awesome post for ASDay. But she's a product of my imagination, so I talked about her a bit instead. Woo autistic people being in fiction. I seem to do this a decent bit- started a series of Young Wizards fics following a non-speaking Autistic character while trying to keep myself away from my NaNoWriMo story until November started. Because being reflected in stories is important. It really is.

Asexuality and Disability for the Carnival of Aces

Like the title suggests, this is for the Carnival of Aces. Specifically, it's for the October edition, which I am hosting about disability and asexuality.

I'm Disabled. Specifically, I'm Autistic. I'm also somewhere asexual spectrum. As of right now, my best guess is that I'm biromantic and asexual. Sex drive? Not a thing. Wanting to have sex with someone? Not a thing. It's just not.

That said, no, not all disabled people are asexual. Not all autistic people are asexual. Not all asexual people are disabled. Things get ugly when people make any of those assumptions, often related to folks deciding that one of these identities causes the other and the one supposedly being caused is therefore not valid. I actually talked about something like that with autism and gender identity once, the point was pretty much that even if autism was causing autistic trans* people to be trans*, they're still trans* and people shouldn't be invalidating the trans* identity based on the person being autistic.

Well, the same thing goes with asexuality. Even if I were only asexual because of sensory issues (no, that's not the case, I'm just not interested. Really,) I'd still be asexual. Even if a person were only asexual because their hormones were a bit off what's "expected," if they're not experiencing sexual attraction and choosing to identify as asexual, they're still asexual. [My surprise level would be exactly zero if I found out my hormone levels were a bit weird. Seriously, I'm DFAB and a natural tenor second/baritone. But the thing that weird hormone levels can actually cause isn't the same thing as asexuality. It's decreased sex drive, which is different from lack of sexual attraction. I don't seem to have either of these things, but if I'm not going to have sexual attraction, I feel no particular need to get a sex drive, even if hormones could get me one.]

I think a lot (not all, but a lot) of the harm done by people assuming that asexuality is because of a disability is that people decide it's therefore somehow not valid or needs "fixing." Of course, disability is a natural part of the human experience and the assumption that it being related to a disability is why it needs fixing is an ableism thing. Being a sign of a disability shouldn't be why something needs fixing. Causing distress to the person who has it and them deciding they want to fix it should be why something needs fixing. Which, um, if you're identifying as asexual, the lack of sexual attraction is probably not the thing that's causing distress? Other people's reactions to it might be. That would make sense.

Other parts of the badness cause interference with self-understanding. It's hard to reach self-understanding when people are chucking lots of bad information at you and insisting it's good information. That's a problem that some autistic people have with therapists, actually. Sparrow talked about that in her book, where therapists would tell her how she was feeling based on her body language and she wouldn't be sure what she was actually feeling but their statement was wrong. They were working with the assumption of neurotypical body language appropriate to the part of the USA she was in at the time. Other cultural assumptions can get bad information passed about our asexuality, and all of the bad information makes self-understanding harder.

So there you have it. I have dumped thoughts about disability and asexuality into a post, and now it is a post. Cool.

One Week More

Autistics Speaking Day. This is going to be my second one (wow when did this happen?) It's also my second one being involved with helping run stuff, because this is me and apparently helping all the blogs be things is what I do (really what is this?) Not even joking. AutisticsSpeaking Day. Autism Positivity. Pile of one-shot flash blogs. Autistic Alligator. Allistic/NT Privilege. We Are Like Your Child.

The thing in common between all of those? It's about Disabled people making ourselves heard (usually specifically Autistic people, though Allistic/NT Privilege is all neurodivergences with a focus on autism because I'm autistic and We Are Like Your Child is any disability with some autism focus because of who the mods are.)

 

And looking at the history of Autistics Speaking Day, it looks like what I'm doing on those other blogs, what I'm doing on my personal blog? Are pretty well in line with the idea behind Autistics Speaking Day. I can work with that.

 

So there it is. Autistics Speaking Day is coming. I've been doing stuff that's in line with Autistics Speaking Day. That doesn't mean I know what I'm writing for it. Last year I talked about Autistics Speaking Every Day. I want to do something different this year. Not sure what. I should get thinking, because it's only a week away, and I don't want to be writing my post on the day of because then it won't be my November 1 post. Also because November 1 is the start of NaNoWriMo. I'm more than happy giving some of my non-writing time on Day One to helping run ASDay, but no, I am not writing anything other than novel on November 1 outside of class time. That is not a thing that is happening. Not if I'm making my Day One Ridiculous Goal of 10k words and my Weekend One Ridiculous Goal of 50k words at the end of the first weekend. Yes, that is “winning” NaNoWriMo in three days. At my typical/low-ish typing speed, it's about 20 hours of writing over the course of Friday-Sunday. I can get faster, but I'm calculating off the low end because it's a lot of words and a lot of time.

ASDay and NaNoWriMo Day One are the same day. That's gonna be fun. One week more....

A Carnival of Aces: #Disability and #Asexuality

It's October 2013, and I am hosting this month's Carnival of Aces. What this means is that I choose a theme (Disability and Asexuality) and put out a call for submissions (this) and then people can write stuff and send it to me.

So:
The theme is Disability and Asexuality.
Things you could think about include:

• Assumptions that disabled people are asexual...
• Ways this hurts sexual disabled people
• Ways this hurts abled asexual people
• Ways this hurts asexual disabled people
• Something else?
• What happens when disabled people actually are asexual?
•  Trouble admitting it to ourselves?
• Trouble admitting it to others?
• People insisting it's internalized ableism?
• "Well, no one would want you anyways..."
• Something else?

• People treating asexuality like a mental disability
• Ableism in some asexual spaces
• Parallels between how society handles asexuality and disability

Lydia Brown gave a talk at the University of Washington that is super-duper relevant, and there is more information on that here. I suggest taking a look. (As far as I know, there is not a transcript. Sads.)

Erin wrote something relevant to how assuming disabled people are asexual hurts (one specific, queer) sexual disabled person.

You can also totally look at the Spectral Amoebas carnival from 2011 for ideas, plus Caroline Narby wrote about autism and asexuality during her Double Rainbow series. [Yeah, I might keep running into stuff worth looking at for ideas while working on my paper on the erasure of Queer Autistic people.]

Now, submissions:

You can send them to autisticflashblogs@gmail.com. You can leave a comment on this post. You can use my Tumblr submit box. You can message Yes, That Too on Facebook. I will get all of these things. If you don't have a blog, I am more than happy to post your piece on my blog. If you do have a blog but want reprinted anyways, I am happy to do that too. (I'll link to your copy in the end-of-the-month masterpost and in said reprint.) You don't have to be reprinted if you don't want to.
 

If you want reprinted or you are being published only on my blog because you don't have your own, the sooner you get your piece to me the better. If you get the link to me by October 30th, I will have you in the initial posting. If you get a piece for sole publication on my blog to me by October 20th, it should get a day to itself on my blog, by October 30th and it will be published in time for the initial master post. Reprint links given to me after October 20th may be reprinted after the master post. Getting retroactively added and/or published remains open essentially forever- I know disability can affect executive functioning!
 

Things that are submitted do need to have been written in October (or a later, executive functioning etc.) That doesn't mean you can't cite earlier stuff you or someone else wrote, it just means there needs to be new content. Things that are not blogs or not written are also fine.

Dear Issy

Trigger Warning: Attempted Murder, Ableism, Hate Crime Against an Autistic Person

So there's a flash blog for Issy Stapleton that is a thing. Yes, as the flash blog Autist I am fairly heavy in the running of this, as per usual.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Issy,
I want you to know that you deserve to exist. I want you to have the best life you can, and I want it to be your life, and I don't want anyone to take that away from you. I want you to be happy, whatever happy means for you, and I want you to be satisfied, whatever satisfied means for you. I want you to know that the way you are is OK. The whole being in the hospital because your mother tried to kill you thing isn't OK at all, not in the slightest, but it's not your fault. No matter what anyone tries to tell you, the way you are does not justify what was done to you. You're a person, with all that entails. You deserve to exist. You deserve to live.
The problem isn't with you. The problem is with your mother trying to kill you, and the problem is with her thinking that the status woe is a good way to describe raising an autistic daughter, and the problem is with her thinking that she had any right to make a decision about someone else continuing to live or not. It's with a society that encourages the parents of disabled children to take a martyr status. It's with a society that sympathizes with murderers and attempted murderers. Note how none of things are you being autistic or you being broken or wrong. You're not broken or wrong and you're not the problem. Never believe that you are the problem.
I want to take you away from all this and let you be somewhere that you'll be safe and where constantly triggering your fight or flight while making flight impossible (just taking a guess that your violence may be related to that) won't be a thing. I want you to be somewhere that accepts the person you are, not the child who never arrived, and where you won't be pushed to be the child who never arrived.
There may be people who say that they need to do horrible things to you because of the way you are. They're wrong.
You deserve to exist. You deserve people who care about you, really care, the kind of caring where they want you to have what you want even when it's different from what they think you should want. You are not broken. You are not a mistake. You are a person, with all that entails. Your life has value. You are not a burden. You are allowed to take up space. You deserve to exist. You deserve to live.

Ad-Gag Laws: The Flash Blog

Trigger Warning: References to animal abuse, mention of JRC in first paragraph

It's a flash blog! It's a flash blog! It's also not my usual fare, but it's got some parallels. Remember how hard it is to legally get any footage of what goes on inside the Judge Rotenberg Center? Well, ad-gag laws make it that hard or harder to get footage, take pictures, take recordings, get any evidence of wrongdoing for certain kinds of corporations. Which kinds depends on the specific law, of course, but agricultural stuff and industrial stuff tend to be common, and agricultural is what this flash blog probably focused on considering that it's put together by an institute for critical animal studies.
Basically, they can make it so that if you take pictures to prove that there is abuse or maltreatment of workers or animals, or if you take pictures to document violations of any kind, workplace safety or anything, you get in trouble. Not the people who actually had the violation, the person who blew the whistle on it.
There's supposed to be protections for whistleblowers, not laws that criminalize gathering the evidence it takes to get anywhere blowing that whistle.
But that's what ad-gag laws can do, are doing. Someone actually got charged for taking video from a public sidewalk under one of these laws. The charges got dropped, but think about that. Person with a camera on public property, taking pictures of something you can see from public property? Illegal under an ad-gag law that already exists. Think about the police officers who already try to stop people recording them on public property, even when there are laws that specifically state that doing so is allowed. Think about companies that bully people into deleting their footage, even when there are laws that specifically state that taking that footage is legal. Think about how many people get fired for bringing major issues to public attention, even when there are laws that are specifically supposed to protect them.
Whenever surveillance is being outlawed or protected, we have to think about the power differentials and who is getting protected by this law.
So:
Who are the stakeholders in an ad-gag law preventing people from recording anything from a slaughterhouse or farm (or combined facility?)

• Butchers and slaugherhouse workers
• Potential consumers who want to know the preparation of their food
• Farmers who raise the animals
• The animals themselves
• Owners/Owning corporation of the facility

The one with the power here is the owners. Animals can't talk and are owned, so they clearly don't have the power here. Workers are pretty consistently subordinate to their bosses, especially when there are more people wanting jobs than there are jobs, like now. Unions can sometimes level the playing field, but not always, so they aren't the ones with the power either. Consumers can choose not to buy specific brands if they have the money, but they do need to eat something and the companies with the lowest standards (and the most violations of even those standards!) tend to be the cheapest, so there is a definite economic factor. So it's not them either. Farmers... they could try to go independent, but that tends to come with an economic cost. Small-scale farmers can sometimes manage it by going organic and selling directly to consumers, but not always. Nope, unless it's a corporate farmer, they aren't the power holders. (Oh, and the corporate farmers are often also owners of the slaughterhouses, and they often have violations in both places.)The people owning the facility are doing a bit more than middlemen, but they are the ones who make bigger money and they are the ones with lawyers and who can afford lobbyists. They are the ones with more institutional power here.
Now who does an ad-gag law protect, and who can it hurt?
Safety violations get a lot harder to report and prove, so the workers are hurt.
Potential consumers don't find out about any violations of safety, ethics, or purity. So they are at risk of hurt.
Farmers need split into small independent farmers and big corporate ones. Small ones who don't have enough pull to call someone in to enforce this rule against people recording them aren't getting the benefits. They also probably don't have their own slaughterhouses, so they are a consumer in terms of needing to purchase the services of a slaughterhouse, which they can't get as much information about. So they don't realistically get the benefits of this law, though they legally do, and they have the potential for getting hurt in that they won't know if the slaughterhouse does something bad.
The big corporate farms are direct beneficiaries here. They can stop people from recording any violations they might have.
Big slaughterhouses are also direct beneficiaries, for the same reason.
Animals are at risk of being abused without anyone ever being able to prove that this happened, which isn't OK. They're at risk of harm beyond that of just "going to get eaten" and are not getting helped here.
People with more institutional power and people getting protected look to be the same group. That's generally not a good sign, and right here, right now, it's definitely bad. Because it the abuses that are made illegal to prove are happening, and ad-gag laws make them impossible to stop.

Blogging Against Disablism Day #badd2013

Trigger Warning: Abuse, murder, restraint of disabled people, ableism.


This is not the post I planned to write for Blogging Against Disablism Day. I planned to write about medical discrimination.
But then I saw this.
I changed my mind. I had to write about this meaning of disability.
Disability meas that things which are abuse and torture when done to anyone else, anyone at all, sometimes even things that are illegal to do to convicted felons in jail, are suddenly A-OK. It means hate crimes against us, and it means that the sympathy goes to the person who committed the hate crime against us, not the victim (I can't say survivor because we often don't survive it) of the crime, and it means people often not acknowledging that this is a thing that exists.
Parents kept an autistic child in a cage, naked, and he was sitting in his own urine and feces when the authorities found him. (The parents say they do their best to keep the cage clean, but that's not what they found and it's kind of besides the point. KID IN A CAGE HERE, FOLKS.) They've been charged with child endangerment, and the kids were briefly removed from their custody, but they do apparently have them back now. Also, their case worker knew about the cage for several months before the tip went in and apparently went to her supervisor, who didn't do anything. Straightforward child abuse allowed to continue because... why?
And it's not even the first time I've heard about where an autistic child was kept in a cage. John Eckhart and Alayna Higdon kept John's autistic children in a caged room, the court was able to demonstrate that. But the jury still found them not guilty on all charges. And as per usual, all sympathy went to the parents. And there was an article about how this isn't all that rare... but it didn't remember the important part where autistic people are people, people with disabilities are people, holding the well-being of people hostage for information, acting as if insufficient information somehow excuses this sort of thing justifies the abuse and that is completely unacceptable. Even the article about how keeping autistic people isolated like this is probably more common than people realize was ableist.
Or schools build caged areas on playgrounds for autistic students. (In one case, this was after the family raised money to create an appropriate play area. And a council member said that the cage was built with good intentions. If you can build a cage with good intentions, there are bigger problems than your intentions. And if you wonder if a disabled baby should be allowed to live, with good intentions, there are bigger problems than your intentions.)
Seclusion rooms, restraint, the fact that the Judge Rotenburg Center still exists, the lists of disabled people murdered by their caregivers, most of whom got lighter sentences or none at all. And the pity goes to the abled. The sympathy goes to the abled. Not to the people who were just abused or caged or killed, the people who did the abusing, the caging, the killing. That's ableism. It's not isolated. It's widespread, it's pervasive, and it's killing us. Literally.

Yes, That Too Celebrates 1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013

AutismPositivity is back!
I was pretty new to the blogging thing when it came around last time, but I did find out about it and write a thing. And some of the stuff I talked about then still fits now!
So in list format, cause I like lists, have ten of my Ausome things:

1. As long as speech is working and I know the topic, I can do some serious damage in a debate. Like there was that time that I showed up to a debate in my Honors communication class not having done any of the research, not having any evidence to cite, nothing. I won that debate. I did so by explaining why every piece of evidence my opponent brought actually supported my opinion. I am not even joking, this is a thing that happened. When I got the rubric back, my opponent had more evidence, better evidence, was better prepared, but I still won the debate. That's what the teacher's grading said.
2. Stimming is THE BEST THING EVER. It can just be made of awesome (ausome) or it can be a coping mechanism so I can manage even when everything else is made of bad. Either way, useful. Silky blankets are a really good example of this, since they can do both of these at the same time. Same goes for olives. The sensory processing differences that make certain sensations horrible are frustrating, but I wouldn't get rid of them if it meant losing the differences that let me stim. Sorry, no, stimming is too awesome (ausome.)
3. Special interest, Autistic Obsession, whatever you want to call it. It's a hug for my brain. So math spent a long time as a hug for my brain, and I was able to get really good at it, too. Like, I'm twenty and I've already got a bachelors in math, I'm a first semester masters student in that major now. (Still an undergrad in mechanical engineering and Chinese, my other two majors. I didn't quite break eCampus, I just have two records in it both connecting to one account and confusing my advisers.)
4. Pattern recognition! I find all the four leaf clovers, all the five leaf clovers, and some of the six leaf clovers. I also found a seven leaf and an eight leaf, but only one of each. It's quite awesome (ausome.) I actually think in patterns, but through language. If that makes sense? I don't know, it's how my brain works, which is kind of weird and kind of awesome (ausome.) Which finds me four leaf clovers, which is probably responsible for a good bit of my math ability, which is probably also relevant to my sewing ability. (I can't read a sewing pattern, but I can make clothes that fit me and look good.)
5. Pattern making! That's where Because Patterns came from, after all! (BTW, ONE LAST PLUG FOR THE GIVEAWAY. Today is the last day you can enter and vote on entries. It's on Facebook, it's for an artist proof of my Autism Acceptance design, entry requires liking Because Patterns on Facebook and answering what Autism Acceptance means to you. Yes, you can hang a proof up. It's like a print in almost every way- same size, still signed. Coloration could be a little different, it says proof where the number would be. That's it.) Anyways, have a pattern! Because patterns are one of many Ausome things about my autism, and they are a pretty cool looking one too. I think that this pattern would totally be modifiable to make an infinite tessellation, too, which is a thing I've been getting into making mode of. Those ones work for fabric, after all.
   
6. I can listen to the same song on repeat for weeks and not get sick of it. Talk about patience! Recently, it was Knights of Bostonia.That one started about a week before Patriot's Day, and I only switched to Amy MacDonald songs this past Saturday.
7. I can eat the same food for years and not get sick of it. No, really, I brought the same lunch to school from fifth grade through tenth grade every day except Passover and some field trips and it was fine. I took a bagel with lox (lots of lox, it was almost like a roast beef sandwich amount of lox I am not even joking,) an apple or two, and a big thermos of milk to school for lunch basically every day. The thermos was 16.9 oz, and my cross country coach was annoyed that I still drank milk on meet days instead of switching to water, but switching my diet would mess with me more than milk that I am used to having in my system possibly could. Also, this was the same coach who thought that you shouldn't drink too much right before the meet because then you would get cramps. Which can be caused by dehydration... Anyways, I can eat the same food for a long time and it's fine. Which is useful when on a budget, since buying in bulk is cheaper. It's also useful because it means I don't need to remember as many recipes.
8. My brain works really fast sometimes. That's what covered me for all my years of executive dysfunction, which is the same as all my years. Sure, I might not remember I had homework due first period until I was on the bus, but I could still get it done by then. I think my record was having something due in all five of my academic classes and drama (seven period day that day,) starting on the bus to school, and turning in everything on time. I can be that fast. I was close to that fast on a regular basis throughout middle and high school. I wrote a paper on 1984 in about 4 hours once, including the research for it. It's on my blog, somewhere, and it gets me hits from people looking for essays about 1984 every so often. 
9. My writing is proof of "You can totally write good poetry without much of any metaphor." Because I don't metaphor much, but people still like my poetry. I won't claim all of it is good, but certainly some of it is. One of my poem-ish things is actually published in the Loud Hands anthology, which I'd say is a sign of some sort of good. I'd say making (one of many) proofs of this concept is pretty awesome (ausome.)
10. I'm immune to culture shock. See, so far as I can tell, culture shock is "Everyone is doing stuff that doesn't make sense!" combined with "I feel like a foreigner!" and possibly a dose of homesick. I'm not sure why I don't really get homesick, but when the first two things are just a part of every day life, they can't really cause a shock. So I get to China, or I get to India. Sure, people are doing a different set of things that don't make sense, but it's not like it makes less sense or anything. I just need to learn this set of rules. It's nothing special, nothing particularly scary, nothing shocking. So I am immune so culture shock, and autism totally gets the credit for that. It's pretty awesome (ausome.)

1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013 Flashblog Announcement

This is tomorrow. Just saying.

We know you have been waiting… and we have been working and organizing behind the scenes. Now we are ready and we are excited to announce the theme for the second annual Autism Positivity Flashblog Event on April 30th, 2013: “1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013″
Last year hundreds of bloggers came together in a show of support and solidarity in response to an anonymous person’s Google search “I wish I didn’t have Aspergers”. The posts that came flooding in from all over the world were a beautiful example of the power of strength in numbers. With so much negativity still surrounding Autism and the misinformation and misconceptions that continue to abound, we invite each of you to share one, or two, or more “Ausome” things!
We invite all of you, anyone who is Autistic, anyone who has an Autistic person in their life and all who blog about autism to share a message of support, wisdom, hope, and pride to this year’s flashblog by posting to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDdPQjAxV244VjdCcXdYX0pPQ0RBblE6MQ
Please join with us on the last day of Autism Acceptance Month – April 30th, 2013 – in a Flash Blog of Autism Positivity.
To participate:
1. Publish your post on April 30th in the following title format: “ [Your Blog] celebrates 1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013″
2. Share your post on Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media site using that hashtag (#AutismPositivity2013)
3. Add your link to the Autism Positivity website and grab the badge.(submit here or above)

4. Share/reblog this message to your blog, page, etc.
Thank you,
The Autism Positivity Project Flashblog Team, 2013
If you have any questions, please contact us at autismpositivity@gmail.com
Please also support this project on facebook, pinterest, tumblr, and twitter! AUSOME!!

Autism Speaks, I Want To Say

Before I even watched the documentary, reading your description on your site gave me a pretty good idea about what I want to say.
From it:
Autism Speaks, I want to say that for something "about" AAC, the described focus is all wrong. It shouldn't be about the parent's emotional struggle to communicate because it's about the kids. It shouldn't be highlighting the increased diagnosis because that's not the point of AAC at all. The hope and promise of AAC is potentially good, though knowing your organization, I wasn't convinced the hope and promise that you described would be the one of "how this actually helps AAC users."
Watching it, in the first minute I had to pause, cringe, wait to calm down. There was SO MUCH touching of the kid, and there was no way to get his permission because he didn't have his AAC out to answer or anything. Yes, I know that she's probably his mom, but... I'm Autistic. I have touch sensitivities. That kind of constant light touch drives me nuts. Then they got him set up. (He's using what looks like FC?! Was not expecting Autism Speaks to use that, I'm... actually kind of impressed by that, but, like, why "I am excited"? That's not actually telling us what he wants to say, which is the title of this...
And then they call autism a nightmare. NO NO NO NO NO.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that you need to stop using that kind of rhetoric because it is actively hurting the population you aim to serve. I don't care why you think calling autism a nightmare is OK, I don't care what context you think you have to justify it, you need to stop doing that, and NOW.
Autism Speaks, I want to point out the irony in having your autism expert say on camera that other's ignorance is responsible for some of our suffering when it is your brand of awareness that causes it. Yes, you. I have dealt with the ignorance of "never heard of autism before" and I have dealt with the ignorance of "educated on autism by Autism Speaks." The latter is far worse. Autism Speaks, I want to say that you are part of the problem by your own description.
I don't know if the things that we see on the screen next were things that the featured AAC users actually typed, but if it was not by them, another person with autism, or an autistic person, then it should not have featured. It's dishonest to mix things AAC users actually typed with things that we only imagine them to have typed, so it needs to be clear which is which. (I could see those things having been typed by a person bearing the education of Autism Speaks on what it is to be autistic, what it is to be non-speaking, so I could believe that this paragraph is moot. But I could also see it not being moot, since we know that Autism Speaks has written in first person about things that they are not in the past.)
And then we cut to kids doing things that I have done, some of which I still do. I suppose it is supposed to be illustrating how different and tragic we are? I don't know, they just look like kids to me. Autism Speaks, I want to know what the purpose of that was, because different and bad are not the same and either that scene was pointless or you're using the merely weird as evidence of bad.
Almost 3 minutes in, we see an AAC user typing a thing that has substance. "I am ready to change the way people view us." So am I, so am I. Autism Speaks isn't going to do that in the way I'm guessing and hoping you would like to see, always viewing you as a cut below normal, but goodness do I want the way people view us to change. It's part of why I'm here.
Now we get to the part that highlights the increasing diagnosis.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that you really need to quit it with comparing autism to AIDS, diabetes, or cancer. Not that those are particularly great to compare to each other, even, but they all have "has the ability to be fatal on its own" in common, at least if left untreated. Autism can't do that. Autism Speaks, I want to say that you need to stop comparing autism to death, stop calling autism a nightmare, stop making it about the parents, stop focusing your conversation, well, anywhere except the autistic people and what will help us most. (Hint: Actually giving nonspeaking people iPads and other AAC devices and paying for them to be taught to use them is a better use of your money than pretty much anything else you do, including making this video.)
"He's really sweet for being an autistic child."
Autism Speaks, I want to say that if you have provided the education that leads people to think that is a compliment, rather than the statement that autistic children, autistic people, can't be sweet, then you are Doing It Wrong. And yes, I feel safe saying that you're the group that provided the "education" leading there. Acceptance does not mean thinking we are sweet... for autistic people. It means understanding that we have the full range of sweetness and meanness and happiness and sadness and anger and frustration that all people have, realizing that anything ending with "for an autistic person" is stereotyping us and going to be wrong, going to be bad.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that leading parents to believe that they know for sure that curing their childs autism would lead to them having a happier life is not autism acceptance. I want to say that it is, in fact, the opposite of acceptance, and it isn't even true. Being autistic doesn't prevent happiness. It is a failure of this "theory of mind" so many claim we lack to assume that we must view our lives as you view them. Remember that we have never lived another way, remember that autistic people have this tendency to not like change, remember that our life of experience will still be of things that line up with autistic, remember that there is no way to make everything as if we never were and that a neurotypical mind with autistic memories is not a combination that is going to work well. It is one that will lead to all kinds of confusion, all kinds of pain. Happier? I doubt it. More normal seeming? I'm sure of it. And I think that conflating normal with happy is one of your main rhetorical issues. Maybe it always has been, that and conflating different with bad and the specific difference of autism with death and despair and nightmares of your own creation.
And Autism Speaks, I want to say that speech and communication are not the same thing. In a piece about AAC, you should know better than to have the two conflated. It's not the same. Some autistic people will develop speech "on time," others later, others never, some speak and then stop, and keeping speech linked to what we want to communicate takes a lot of work for many of us. Keeping our AAC linked to what we want to say is often easier, even for those of us who do speak. Typing is more reliable communication than oral speech for many of us.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that the purpose of AAC is communication. It is not, was not, should not be to make us more normal, but to let us express ourselves as we are.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that conflating whatever it is that means a kid is in constant pain with the fact that he is autistic? That's not responsible. Like, at all. Because, yeah, sensory issues are a thing, but "failing to accommodate sensory issues" isn't autism, assorted chronic pain conditions aren't autism, autism on its own doesn't do that.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that "swallowed by his autism" isn't an OK way to describe anyone. Ever.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that not being able to communicate in ways that others understand does not imply a disconnect with the world as a whole, just with the people who can't understand. There is a lot of world besides just other people. And there are a lot of things that can be communicated through behavior, even negative behavior, if only you know how to listen. "Autism Speaks, it's time to listen." Sound familiar? Well, Autism Speaks, it's time to listen to the behaviors in front of you, because behavior is communication and part of meeting us halfway is understanding that, even if it takes longer to figure out exactly what it is communicating.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that oral speech and communication are not to be conflated. Even in a video about AAC, you are making that conflation. It needs to stop.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that realizing that every autistic person whose hands you got communication into could, in fact, communicate, was, in fact, competent and thinking, should be a step. It should be a step towards presuming competence for all autistic people, for getting communication into the hands of all autistic people. If you are truly out for our best interests (I know you aren't but hey, let's offer up what you would do if you are,) the thing to do is to make sure that every autistic person has access to AAC, that AAC meetings are one of the first things done. Maybe the first. Because an autistic person who communicates in ways that others understand can and should take an active part in deciding what to work on and how. An autistic person who types can speak for themself.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that "these children are normal!" is not the proper follow up to the glimpse of understanding that they are competent. They are wired differently in fundamental ways, they experience the world differently in fundamental ways, just as I do. They are not your illusion of normal, and they never will be, and that's fine. They don't need to be. They are human, and they are autistic, and they are completely distinguishable from their peers, and all of these are fine and good and none of them contradict each other and normal is an illusion that no autistic person should be forced to emulate.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that normal isn't the point. Normal was never the point. AAC is for communication, not for normal. If it were for normal, I would have let people thought I was "just quiet." No, I am a part time AAC user, and my friends have, by and large, seen me use it. I've gone out and socialized beyond what I needed to do, using AAC, because I wanted to spend time with friends. If normal were the point, I would have gone home. None of them had realized speech had gone kaput on me until I pulled out the iPad. But communication is the point, along with everything communication can lead to. Socialization, writing things that move others, telling others about your decisions and, if so chosen, why you made the decision you made. Wants, needs, hopes, dreams. AAC lets us tell of those. It's not about normal, it's about showing the unique and completely distinguishable selves that we are.
"I want to say I think technology has changed my life. I can communicate with the world, and I have choices in my life." Yes. She gets it. Most of this video suggests to me that you don't get it, Autism Speaks, but she gets it. She knows what this is for, she knows how this makes her life better, and those words are the sign of a self-advocate blooming. (Yes, self-advocate. Right now, she is advocating for herself, though if she does as she says she plans, the activist is coming.)
That's not to say there was nothing good here. They showed a range of people. They showed boys and girls, they showed people of color. They showed what looks like reading off what they had typed, which is related to how AAC helps people develop oral speech. (Yeah, AAC use makes nonspeaking autistic people more likely to develop oral speech and to do so faster. Also, for part-time users like me, I find that "reading things I have already typed" lasts longer than "just speaking" when speech is going kaput.) They showed Kayla, the same one who typed about technology changing her life, being at what seems to be college. Yes, college.
But those good things don't make the video as a whole good.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that your metaphors and rhetoric for autism are just as damaging as ever, just more manipulative and better hidden. I'm not sure that's actually better.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that your videos about us aren't even really about us, but about our parents and teachers speaking about AAC as if it is some sort of magic.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that making it about others views of what we do is part of what's wrong with this.
Autism Speaks, I want to say that you need to do better, and I want to say that doing so will require fundamental changes, not just surface paint.
And Autism Speaks, I want to say that I will keep saying these things, and that I and my Autistic brethren will keep typing and speaking.
Autism Speaks, it's time for YOU to listen, and to hear, and to answer. For real.