Don't change other people's pronouns!

Pro tip for editors: Don't change the pronouns in contributor bios. Your contributors almost certainly did not accidentally type the "wrong" pronoun for themselves several times and not notice.

— Alyssa (@yes_thattoo) November 25, 2017

I've been sitting on this for a while, waiting until the point where I'm ready to write about this. The tip  applies to more than just editors, and it's more than just editors who've changed my pronouns on me. I don't mean that I've told them my pronouns, and then they've written something about me using incorrect pronouns. That's a problem, and as another tip, don't do that either. I mean I've been asked to write an introduction or bio for myself, I've done so, I've sent the text in, and then the final posted text has been edited specifically to change my pronouns.

Maybe they think I accidentally typed the "wrong" pronouns for myself, with the "wrong" conjugation, throughout? I assure you, I am intentional enough about my word choices to avoid making this error consistently for the whole paragraph. I make typos, and sometimes words will be entirely missing, but I don't accidentally misgender myself in text. Discomfort with doing so is how I figured out that 1) I am nonbinary, and 2) my pronouns are they/them/theirs. (Sie/sier/siers is also acceptable in text, but sounds too much like "she" for my comfort when spoken.)

Maybe they think my pronouns are grammatically incorrect? Whenever someone tells me an introduction or bio I wrote for myself, or really, anything I wrote about myself in the third person, has grammatical issues, my first question is if they mean my pronouns. Never mind that singular "they" is older than they are, it's a common statement. I've heard it from people who don't know my pronouns ... and people who do. (Once, a professor pointed out a grammatical issue that had nothing to do with my pronouns or their conjugation. I fixed it, and I thanked him. He didn't say a word about my pronouns.)

Maybe they don't personally have an issue, but think my pronouns will confuse readers. I've been asked before if the plural might confuse a reader. Here's the thing: you can add a note about my pronouns! I've had people do this. It's OK. You can write Alyssa (they/them/theirs) in a text when you talk about me so readers explicitly know "they" is being used as a singular pronoun to refer to me. You can say "Alyssa uses they/them pronouns" in a footnote after my name. You can do both! I'd love it if this weren't needed. However, it's common for people to read text that just uses my pronouns without a note and then use the wrong pronouns to describe me. This note may both reduce any real confusion (as opposed to transphobia masquerading as confusion) and serve as a reminder for people who don't just don't really notice singular they pronouns in text.

Because here's the thing: When you edit text to change my pronouns, it is misgendering. The excuses people make don't hold up. Singular "they" is grammatically fine. Singular "you" is actually newer than singular "they." (Singular "you" and singular "they" get the same verb/adjective treatments because they have similar histories in terms of starting off plural and becoming singular at a later date. It's just that both these dates are long past.) Expressive difficulties are real, but they don't apply here because you didn't need to edit my already existing text.  Direct explanations are the way to avoid confusion without lying. Changing other people's pronouns is misgendering. Don't do it. This is a case where the no-effort option of not making changes is the correct option.

(If, after reading this, you're wondering if I'm talking about you: only if you've actually done this, and there's enough of you that I neither want nor need to single anyone out. I just want people to be aware of this as a thing to not do.)

Language choices and history

Yeah, yeah, I know, I've talked about this before. Assuming I caught all my prior posts, this is the sixteenth time I've talked about language choices for autism, though this one isn't quite the same as the others. It’s coming as the result of a good discussion that helped me clarify thoughts I'd been having rather than the result of someone insisting my language choice is wrong because they were taught so.

So: I hate being called “differently abled.” It feels euphemistic to me, like we can’t admit to the fact that I’m disabled. I also hate being called a “person with autism.” Even being called “on the spectrum” rankles, and not just because I think the idea of autism as a spectrum gets used to reduce everything into a spectrum of “less autistic” to “more autistic” and also “higher functioning” to “lower functioning,” with these two incoherent concepts also being considered to be the same[i]. It’s also the way the term has been used. It’s a sort of (very recent) usage history that makes me extra wary of “on the spectrum.”

And history is the key to my current thoughts. Every way I can think of to identify myself as Autistic or as Queer has history. Usually as a slur, in the case of Queer identity - Queer itself is an example of this. “Autistic” as noun? It’s part of the dehumanizing nonsense that got person-first language started in the first place.

Person-first language, or “person with autism”? Yeah, it started in a good place, where people with disabilities, mostly intellectual or developmental disabilities, decided that they wanted that language to emphasize their personhood. Professionals were (frankly often still are) forgetting that we’re people. Said professionals picked up the language. They didn’t pick up the intent: remember that we’re people. At least in the case of autism, and probably for other disabilities, they picked up a completely different idea: that the autism or other disability is somehow separable from the person, and there’s a “normal” person underneath. That’s a history I want nothing to do with – don’t call me a person with autism. Also, if you need a language construction to remember that I’m human I don’t want you anywhere near me. I don’t. I’m not sorry.

“Differently abled”? Technically true, I guess. It’s another one where there may have been good intentions originally – recognizing that we have abilities that typical people may not have access to, and that this can be a direct result of our disabilities. (Or, or different abilities?) It gets used as as a way to ignore the realities of disability, of access barriers, and sometimes of the reality that there are things we just can’t do.

“On the spectrum”? It’s been touted as a compromise solution to this language debate. Mostly by professionals who think “person on the spectrum” is less euphemistic than “person with autism” and by people “on the spectrum” who are willing to be tokenized, as far as I can tell. It’s not only unclear (there are many spectrums), but also still a person-first construction. That’s not a compromise! But folks insist it is one.

“Aspergers” or any variation thereof? 1) False. Literally does not apply. 2) When it was a diagnosis in the DSM, it was frequently applied to mean “high functioning” or to avoid scaring people with the “autism” label. It ties in with aspie supremacy, and that can kill. No way. That’s not just a history I don’t like. That’s a present I find morally reprehensible.

Now, I need to find a way to talk about who I am, what my experiences are as an Autistic person. I need to use language that will be understood. Making up new words is a valid option. It’s where new language comes from. I use plenty of words that were created in my community. But take a look at the history behind some of the words I said I have issues with. Some of them started in my community, or communities like mine. Then they got picked up by folks who want to pretend that the difference isn't quite real, isn't important, or can somehow be separated from the person (maybe needs to be in order for the person to count as a Real Person.) Even language that could be good has this happen. Then there’s the reclaimed slurs. (A lot of the language around Queerness is of the reclaimed slur type.) Just about all the language has problems of this sort. At this point, reasonable people can reach different preferences based on which bad history, which bad associations, which ones are we going to tolerate or reclaim for the sake of being understood?

Now, I am of the "queer as in fuck you" school of thought for most of my divergences[ii]. Disability is a word that scares people. “Good intentions” behind folks saying they don't see me as autistic, or as disabled are an indicator of how much disability is seen as a Bad Thing. Making people face the scary concept is actually an argument for using capitalized, identity first Disabled and Autistic in my case. Folks can sit with that particular discomfort, and if they tell me they don't see me that way or I shouldn't call myself that, they're getting asked 1) why they think their idea of me trumps my own, and 2) why they think they know better than I do what I should be called. If my identity is so uncomfortable for them that this is taken as attacking, we’ve got a big problem.

---

[i] That would totally be enough for me to hate being called “on the spectrum,” though.

[ii] This includes my actually being Queer, just to be clear.

#Rhetoric and #Aphantasia (1/2, not academia)

So I'm Autistic. I've seen all sorts of contradictory ways of thinking about autism. Somehow we both lack imagination and are lost in our own worlds? You kind of need to pick one, considering that making our own world involves imagination.

Well, about a year ago they gave a name to one of my other cognitive quirks. "Aphantasia" is now either an "intriguing variation in experience" (specifically stated not to be a disease!) which about 1 in 50 live with, or it's a "newly described condition" we'd like to investigate for insights into the imagination and ways to boost visual imagery (presumably in the folks who have such visual imagery) in order to "improve our memory, increase our empathy and even gain new treatments for conditions like addiction and anxiety."

The basic idea of aphantasia is that I don't have a mind's eye. (I do have a mind's ear, and absolutely get songs stuck in my head.) If you ask me to picture an object, I'll either sit quietly and then relay factual information about the type of object, or I'll bluntly tell you that I can't do that. Most creative exercises, there's a way around actually visualizing the thing. I can tell you this because I don't see images that are not literally in front of me, not when I'm awake. My mind just doesn't work that way. (So no, I don't think in pictures. I suspect that "no minds eye" and "thinking in pictures" is a combination you can't actually have in one person.)

And yes, I am interested in better understanding how my own mind works. I don't think that's unusual. Pop psychology exists, after all. And Tris, from Divergent, made her cooperation with Erudite's tests contingent on her getting to understand the results of the tests they were performing on her. She wanted to understand how her mind worked, and especially the ways her mind didn't follow the operating procedures she'd been implicitly taught were standard. But that's not why I'm following the discussion on aphantasia, really.

I'm watching the rhetoric.

Shortly after the publication of "Lives without Imagery -- Congenital Aphasia," a letter to the editor in Cortex authored by Adam Zeman, Michaela Dewar, and Segio Della Sala, we see a human interest story on aphantasia in the "future" section of BBC.com. We talk about one adult man who does not visualize, and we talk about the difficulty inherent in understanding the internal mental processes of another person. We see discussion of potential advantages of reduced or missing mental imagery -- not needing to re-watch disgusting or traumatic events, for one thing. It's mentioned that verbal and logical skills tend to get practiced more (hi, did you know that I'm a mathematician?)

This is also the article with the mention of treatments for other conditions -- anxiety and PTSD among them. Which ... well, I've got anxiety and already don't have any mental imagery. If reducing mental imagery helps some folks with anxiety, that's great but let's not pretend that will be a silver bullet, ethics around activating and suppressing cognitive abilities aside. (I think that it's fine to do so by the request/desire of the person whose head you're messing with, but there's a lot of space for coercion towards "typical" cognitive processes.) There's some talk about manipulating people's levels of mental imagery for various reasons, but it's in both directions. Despite calling aphantasia a newly described condition (as opposed to cognitive style/variant), this article is probably the furthest away from disability tropes of the BBC articles. (Which isn't that far.)

B percent live with, affects as many as X in Y. These are condition words, pathology words, but they show up in the article that calls aphantasia a variation and specifically states that it is not a disease. And the article's headline? "Aphantasia: I can't visualize my own children." It's in the "health" section. A professional describes the effect on memory more generally, and then three people give short descriptions. One talks about how he does things. Another talks about what he can't do. We close with another professional, speaking to medical history and to educational impacts. (As an aside, I hate mindmaps.) This article reads more like a personal interest story describing the experience of a disability than anything else. It wants to be a disability story, but this Adam Zeman guy who was first author on the congenital aphantasia study won't call it a disease.

Another piece in the health section discusses both aphantasia (not visualizing) and hyperphantasia (visualizing extra.) Zeman continues to insist that aphantasia is not a disorder, thank you very much. I'm sure he's seen enough of the discussion to realize that the way we talk about it is going that way. The discussion for aphantasia here is largely focused on what we can't do, though. His insistence reads as a bit incongruous with the way the rest of the article talks about aphantasia.

(If you want to call it a disability, or conditionally a disability, I'd give you that. The social model of disability, which recognizes interactions between people and their environments, is a thing. The insistence on visual methods of learning and things like mind maps is also a thing, and presumably just as inaccessible to other aphantasiacs as it is to me. Now we're bringing in ideas of neurodiversity, where a neurological type can be a disability without it being disordered. There's not just one right way for a mind to work)

Then there's the aphantasia forums. These started shortly after the first BBC articles, if I remember my timing correctly. I've got an account, and will probably be sharing my thoughts there too, but I honestly don't post much. There's places where people share articles about aphantasia, including ones they wrote themselves. There's crowd research. (I notice that one of the questions is about people having other cognitive disorders as well, which positions aphantasia implicitly as being a disorder.) I've seen general discussion where quite a few people talk about having trouble with mathematics, which is opposite what some of the published articles hypothesize (compensatory skills in logic, verbal stuff, and/or math.) That could be going in the direction of mutually contradictory stereotypes.

Blake focuses on the experience of realizing that the way his mind works is most definitively not how most people's minds work. It's almost an attempt to analyze the psychology of the visualizing majority from the outsider perspective of an aphantasiac. Which, I mean, if they're going to do that to how we think, yeah, let's do this. Let's add a wing to the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical. We've got an Autistic wing and a Dyslexic wing, why not an Aphantasiac wing?



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Alyssa Reads Uniquely Human: Part 3

I'm now reading Chapter 2. The previous part (Chapter 1) is here, and the start of my reading Uniquely Human is here.

I think I've put my finger on one of the things that's been bugging me. Yes, we go on to (at least partially) reframe the ways the students Dr. Prizant describes are acting, but it's still a behaviorizing (or sometimes partially behaviorizing) portrayal. The behaviorizing portrayal is then followed by investigating motivations on some level, but we're still starting with the standard tropes.

It's part of the general theme I've been coming to, where this is better than most autism narratives (I haven't thrown the book at the wall!) but there's a lot of "has a good idea but doesn't quite follow through on it."

Another example is the big idea of not thinking of autism as a bunch of symptoms/deficits. Yes, this is a good idea. But then, re: echolalia:

In children who can speak it is often among the first indicators to parents that something is amiss in a child, when, instead of responding or initiating with the child's own language, the child echoes words or phrases borrowed from others. (37).

Reaction the first: Uh isn't that describing a symptom or deficit.
Reaction the next: I think original language is what's really meant, echolalia is our language for a lot of us... (see also my echolalic poetry, here, here, and here. Really want to argue the recombinations aren't my own language, even if the pieces are echoed?)

Parents apparently worry that echolalia will mark kids as... quirky. Yeah, I've got a complicated relationship with that word. (Comparative and deceptive) safety, erasure, "soft" disclosure, so many meanings behind that word.

I'm not sure why the part of trying to stop echolalia that is worse is the part where it's on the path to learning more "standard" communication (what I assume he means when he says learning to communicate and connect, since he's said in other spots that echolalia is communcation) as opposed to the part where it's silencing current communication (which he also points out as a problem.)

In this chapter I finally get to see advice from an adult on the spectrum cited as such, where he's learning from us as the experts he says we are rather than from (more humanized than by most clinicians) objects of study. The tendency has definitely been to treat us as subjects that he observes, which, yes there's useful stuff to be gained from observation but it took a while to get to the "actually using information you can get by asking us" for a book that calls us experts.

I really do approve of his pointing out that for none of the children that he worked with was echolalia actually meaningless. This is important! He studied this fairly heavily, it seems, and I would love to grab the citations because as much as echolalia as communication is one of those things autistic adults have been saying since ever, I don't know of too many clinical/academic citations to back it up. Finding that we use echolalia for all the same reasons and functions neurotypical folks use more "standard" language for is a handy thing to be able to cite.

However: If we're going to call echolalia part of language/a language, maybe we shouldn't call it a path to acquiring language, with no modifier on language? Echolalia really can be a path to acquiring non-echolalic or less-obviously-echolalic language, but 1) it's made of words and 2) serves the purposes of language so it's already language, so we should really note what kind of language it can be part of acquiring. I'd like to point you to the last three full paragraphs of "If you don't use your words you won't be indistinguishable" now. Really the whole thing but those last three paragraphs are what's most relevant to my points here: less-obviously-echolalic language is not the same thing as not-scripting or not-echolalic language. It's often a defense to make the echolalic nature less obvious, because folks will often assume the speech is meaningless if they know the speaker is autistic and they recognize that it's an echo/reference. (As opposed to neurotypicals apparently being clever when they make references?) Privileging language that you can't tell is echolalic, whether or not it really is, ties in to that same problem. Stop that.

Similarly, we don't take our "turn" in the coversation by merely echoing and "not really respond" (47). Remember that echolalia as studied and described here is 1) made of words and phrases and 2) serves the purposes of language so it's already langauge and is a response. That doesn't mean it's not useful to break long and complex sentences into smaller chunks. It is. Doing so gives us a larger library of phrases to work with and recombine, if nothing else (and it probably helps with understanding in ways that make recombination easier anyways.)

Then we get a story where Dr. Prizant asks a student why they do something. Yay, asking us. (So when I started reading Folk Psychological Narratives, which I swear I will eventually finish and then poke holes in the places where it doesn't follow it's own logic when applied to autism either.... the point is Hutto repeatedly emphasizes that the best way to get information on why a person acted as they did is to ask them. There are times where that could not work, but autism is not inherently an exception.)

In Justin's story, I think that there is some interesting framing of motivations, or some interesting motivations, even if the actions are good. Justin was getting nervous, and he was scripting (and the script was noticeable because it was not normative for the situation,) seemingly out of anxiety. So:

To replace this unusual greeting with a more conventional one, his parents prepared an index card with reminders of what to say in social situations. (49).

So we're doing this to replace the unusual greeting? Not to ... help with the anxiety? (Which could absolutely have a side effect of a more conventional greeting happening.) Interesting priorities there. If we're doing it because of the greeting, that really is trying to get rid of autistic behaviors because they're noticeably autistic. If we're doing it because in this case the script is a sign of anxiety, we're trying to help reduce a source of stress. Rather different goals.

Continue to Part 4 here.

#AAC Awareness Month: When speech output isn't best

First, an explanation of the abbreviation. AAC stands for Alternative and Augmentative Communication, and it's the fancy professional word for how disabled people communicate when we can't talk or when speech alone isn't meeting our communication needs. I've written before that I'm not a huge fan of it being considered alternative because that implies speech as a default. I still have that issue. However, I am a huge fan of people knowing more about the ways we communicate when speech isn't working or isn't enough, and I am a huge fan of better support for folks who use communication methods other than speech.

I am usually able to speak. I am often highly verbal. I am reasonably fluent (but not always speaking) in two languages --English and Mandarin Chinese. I am definitely literate, and I type about 60 good words per minute. That's not typical conversational speaking speed of typing, but it's still pretty fast, at about 85th percentile of typing speeds overall.

I have several methods of communicating when speech isn't working. Two of them have speech output: eSpeak on my laptop and Proloquo4Text on my iPad. These two see the least use of all my AAC options. Not the most. The least. It's not because these are the wrong sorts of speech generating devices for me, either. I have iPad, laptop, or both with me most of the time as a college student. As a quick typist with little use for visuals and a good understanding of language in general, typing out what I want to say is faster than searching for saved phrases. Word and phrase prediction are handy and can sometimes speed things up, but Proloquo4Text has that capability.

It's not that these are the wrong speech generating devices for me. It's that my speech generating devices are not usually as effective as my other AAC options, in the environments where I spend most of my time.

That still leaves the question of what I do use, because I absolutely don't just stop communicating when speech stops working! And I don't hide away, either. I still go to class. I still present at conferences. I still go to sports practice, and I still get on the field and play points in Ultimate (Frisbee) tournaments.

In my math classes this semester, I sit in the front row all the way to the right. Because of the classroom set-up, I can reach a side board from my seat without needing to get up. I carry a white board marker, and if speech isn't meeting my communication needs, I'll uncap my marker and write on the side board. I came to this solution when speech went offline unexpectedly in measure theory (one of the math classes I'm taking this semester) and needed to improvise. Since then, I've brought the iPad to class a couple times and even tried to use it once. I've found the board to be the better choice.

I also write on a white board in my office, in my classmate's offices, and in the graduate lounge. I answer questions about our homework assignments and have full conversations this way, just not very loudly since writing on a white board is nearly silent. I tutored someone in real analysis (senior math class) writing on my office white board once as well. The white boards in the math department get quite a bit of use from the times when speech isn't working for me.

Picture of me writing "This is my most used communication board" on a white board. My shirt reads "My other disability is a bad attitude." 

Take yesterday for an example. Two of the lights in my building started to flicker, and completely predictably, this did a number on my ability to talk. As soon as I saw the first light, I reported it (seriously those are a safety risk, photosensitive epilepsy exists, my losing speech is nowhere near the worst thing that could happen because of a flickering fluorescent.) I also knew that I needed to make sure I had a workable communication method other than speech at all times for the rest of the day. As it turned out, speech stuck around until about 1pm, then I got it back briefly around 2:40. It went kaput again right before 3 and came back around 4, after which it was iffy but extant for the rest of the day. Two of the three no-speech hours, I wrote on a white board to communicate. Writing on a white board is definitely my most-used "AAC."

It's also something every single one of my colleagues does as a supplement to their communication when teaching, but it doesn't go under the "augmentative and alternative communication" umbrella when they do it. I think that's because it's not alternative or unusual for a teacher to write on a board while speaking, but it is unusual for a teacher to write on a board while not speaking.

After writing on the white board, my most-used communication method is probably Flip Writer, on my iPad. This is an application designed for use as AAC, unlike the white board marker which was not designed with disabled people in mind. When I'm having a conversation one on one, probably sitting down, where it'd make some degree of sense for us to be on opposite sides of a table, I'm using Flip Writer. Yesterday, when I wasn't expecting speech to stick around, I brought my iPad to lunch with a professor. (Lunch wound up being the last thing I did before speech went.) I actually used Flip Writer yesterday before seminar to talk to a classmate, and I used it at Autcom to order food at a restaurant when I couldn't speak.

Next up is regular old pen and paper. I've used this at ultimate practice a couple times to talk to a captain or the coach, and I've used it when I didn't have the iPad with me and either didn't have my laptop or didn't want to take it out for something fast.

Now we get to my speech generating software. I tried Proloquo4Text once in measure theory. Once. Technically it was after class had ended, but everyone was still in the room. I tried it for one sentence and went straight back to the white board I could reach from my seat. I do use Proloquo4Text on the side lines at Ultimate (Frisbee.) I also used it meeting with my department chair when I needed a permission number to register for measure theory. I typically use Prolquo4Text when I'm in a small group, want to address everyone in the group, and don't have easy access to a white board.

I use eSpeak for similar reasons to Proloquo4Text, under similar circumstances. The big differences between eSpeak and Proloquo4Text are that my laptop takes more time to set up than my iPad (point for Proloquo), my laptop has a physical keyboard while my iPad does not (point for eSpeak), eSpeak doesn't have word prediction (point for Proloquo), and eSpeak can generate speech in Mandarin Chinese (point for eSpeak). Proloquo4Text currently can't do Mandarin, so this probably the biggest reason I use eSpeak. It works with Chinese. (So does Flip Writer.)

Educational experiences interview

Today (October 9 as I write this) I participated in a follow-up interview for a study some folks at my university were doing on the educational experiences of students with disabilities.

The interviewer defaulted to person-first language. Which, whatever, I don't actually care what you default to as long as you can handle the part where some people in the population you're referring to will have a different preference, and even for reasons! Those reasons tend to relate to the particular ways people have dehumanized us, as well as with community identities.

However, what I found interesting was that one of the things he said was, "You said last year that you identified as a person with autism--"

I don't know where he was going with that because I interrupted him. No, I guarantee you that I did not say that, because I didn't... a year ago I already had quite a few posts on my blog about why I don't identify that way. Since one of the big things from the interview is how we identify and I have literally never identified that way, that was an important thing to get right. Nope, nope, nope.

I identify as Autistic. I identify as an Autistic person. I didn't say this one in the interview, but when I'm feeling particularly snarky, I'll even sometimes call myself an "autism whose life experiences coincide with the diagnostic label of personhood."

Since the general focus was educational experiences (as opposed to identity as a big sub-focus, but still a sub-focus) that bit was a fairly short part, but it's one of the things that stuck out to me.

He also asked me about how I handled the not-always-able-to-speak deal, since I'd mentioned that I can't always speak and that it's mostly a logistics issue for me. As long as I still have a good way to communicate and do what I need to do, I really don't care if speech is working or not. (I''m still working on the logistics for classroom teaching with large, face-to-face classes, but as a student and as a tutor it's definitely not an issue.)

For my two graduate math classes this semester, I sit in the front row on the right side so that I can reach the side board in the room from my seat, and I carry a whiteboard marker with me. That way, if speech stops working but I want to say something, I can write on the board and everyone can see it.

Another bit I noticed is that he (like most people) seemed a bit surprised by the extent to which I will joke about pretty much every aspect of my disabilities. Pattern recognition tells me that most people, especially enabled people, are going to be surprised by that one, but it always sticks out to me just how much people expect disability to be so serious, all the time.

Nah, I'll crack jokes, because a lot of the issues either genuinely amuse me and because many of the ones that don't fall under laugh to keep from crying territory.

The way one of my teachers this semester, who I'd had a couple times before, reacted the first time he saw speech go kaput on me was one of the genuinely amusing ones. (He refers to it as being "offline," which isn't my word but as long as we're clear on it just being speech that's offline I think it's as good a word as any.)

See, I corrected all of the typos he made on the whiteboard... from my seat, without speaking because I couldn't. He'd written the "element of" symbol instead of the "subset of" symbol a few times, if I remember correctly. Anyways, after I got them all, he told me to "be quiet!" He was laughing, so I wrote on the side board, "But I'm not talking!". So he said I knew what he meant (true.)

The next day, I went to check in with him since he'd never actually seen speech give out on me before. His one question? Whether or not he'd been too hard on me about it. I'm not actually sure what he did where he'd worry about that, since I'm fairly sure I'd have gotten a laughing "be quiet!" type reaction had I done the same thing while speaking... but that's a whole lot better a concern than whether or not I'm OK to be in class when I can't speak (yes...)

Finally, I thought it was interesting (and definitely good) that he asked what advice I had, both for students and for educators. For students I said to remember that smiling, nodding, and doing what you want anyways is absolutely an option, and also that when people are talking about evidence supporting various strategies, look closely at what the evidence is of: no matter how much evidence anyone has that they can get you to a particular goal, it's not relevant you don't share that goal.

For educators? I said to remember that students at least sometimes not doing what they're told is totally expected, because 1) students are people with potentially different goals than you, and 2) sometimes we are literally not capable of doing the thing. When it's the first, that's not a disability issue, and when it's the second, consequences won't make us magically gain abilities. 

Computer Assisted Translation and Cognitive Interpretation

This semester, one of the three classes I'm taking is a programming class meant for scientists, rather than for computer science majors. (I'm only taking three classes! What is this?)
This is pretty cool, because it means I'm with other graduate students, and also everyone realizes that they need more programming skills than they have.

Our final projects are all supposed to relate to our research, if at all possible. As a masters student in math, I don't have official research with my department currently, but I do have research interests through the disability side of things. I'm interested in cognitive interpretation, like what Neurodivergent K is describing here, and in treating disability-related communication barriers as translation problems. (Sign interpreters totally already do this, so this is not a new idea, not on its own.)  In full generality, this would be a huge project and nowhere near appropriate for a semester, but by taking a smaller project, like applying one already existing translation-related technology to communication barriers similar to those I face, I can hopefully get somewhere this semester.

I'll be looking at Computer-assisted Translation (CAT), which already has software to support it. The idea behind computer assisted translation is that sometimes you need to translate a sentence, phrase, or communication similar to one you've needed to translate before. The software that is assisting the translation finds similar phrases that have been translated before, finds what their translations were, and suggests those translations.

Because the translation or interpretation that a cognitive interpreter is doing is between a "standard" dialect and the (non-standardized) communication patterns of a disabled person, we can't really draw on most already existing translation histories. However, relevant translation histories could be created. It may well be possible to give the software some translation history based on the interpretations of a human interpreter, and because certain communication traits are more common among people with particular conditions, it may be possible to create "starter" or "default" translation histories that come with the software. I think that including translations or explanations of common internet language uses would make sense, as one example -- many Autistic people, including myself, are echolalic, an plenty of us tend towards code mixing rather than code switching, which means we may well use internet language in contexts where it won't be understood.

I could also try to bring in comparable corpora, which is something I've been reading about in Comparable Corpora and Computer-assisted Translation. The idea behind comparable corpora is that when people are writing or speaking on a given topic in their own language, this reads and sounds different than translations from other languages do. By using texts on similar topics which were originally in different languages, we can have translations with less "translationese" in them. I think bringing in comparable corpora is unlikely this semester, but that I do want to incorporate it eventually.

Interfaces could also be modified to better match with use by people whose disabilities affect communication and who might not be experienced at translating documents between "standard" languages. (I have some translation experience for personal use, so I do know that this sort of experience is not mutually exclusive with communication disabilities.)

I found one computer assisted translation program, Virtaal, which is free and open source, written in Python, the language we're learning in the programming class. Because Virtaal is a many-file program with a graphical user interface, there's a lot going on in that program that I don't understand yet. My project is going to be based very heavily in learning to understand the code for this already existing program, which I'll then try to make some modifications or additions to over the course of the semester. I'd like to do even more with it later -- I want this software to exist already, and I want it on my laptop, fully functional, now. That's why I'm trying to build it!

On #WAAD I...

Check the calendar.
It's really today.
Can it not? Can we not?
Please.
One year, one day, someday.
But no. Blue is here.

I sigh, and don my armor orange.
April 2 is still a Thursday, still a long day.
Flap my way to class,
Rock in my chair,
Look a foot to my teacher's left.
No hiding today of all days.
No letting people think autism is only children.

In class, we are asked of stresses and strains.
(I'm an engineering student, and a math student.)
I flap for words.
I speak.
I flap for words.
Fewer words come.
I flap for words-No words.
They're gone.
I flap for words-No words.
Dare I type instead?

Don my armor orange.
No hiding today of all days.
Out the iPad comes, to speak.
Autism doesn't speak unless autistic people are speaking.

The Set List

I think rather echolalically at times. I use lyrics a lot for this.

So I've been throwing around in my head the idea of what set list I  would choose for, say, a concert "for autism." Which is totally code to get more people in in and then hit them with reality in the form of angry Autistic singers. (Mostly Autistic singers- there's a couple songs  I think should be a mix of Autistic and non-autistic singers or just a non-autistic singer, depending on choral arrangements (a cappella is awesome) or more typical band with lead singer sorts of arrangements.)

So, in order:

1. Numb, by Linkin Park.
2. Strangers Fate- first verse and chorus (possibly with first verse of One and Only for a medley), by High Tide, now known as The Saturday Nights. As far as I know, there are no publicly available recordings of Strangers Fate anymore, but here's a link for One and Only.
3. The Jumper, by Third Eye Blind. I think this song should be either mixed or non-autistic singers.
4. People of the Sun, by PONS (another name High Tide/ The Saturday Nights have gone by.)
5. King of Anything, by Sara Barellis. Specifically, I want the version used in the Loud Hands Project video. And to have the video part (not audio) going in the background. Synchronization would get interesting.
6. I'm not sure if I want to finish with Defying Gravity, straight up (Glinda would be a non-autistic singer, Elphaba would be an Autistic singer) or with a blending of Let it Go and Defying Gravity, similar to Let It Defy Gravity but not with the exact same set-up. I'd want to end on Defying Gravity, not Let It Go, and I'd do some of the transitions differently. (Also make Let It Go way louder and and more blatantly defiant than it's being sung.)

I'm not entirely sure about the order of Strangers Fate and Numb, because I'm not sure if "basically losing" (Stranger's Fate) or "knows what the goal is and can't see how to get it" (Numb) is the bigger "low point." But it's those two, then The Jumper, which is fairly straightforwardly someone saying "Just leave it all behind and get out, your life is more important than all that stuff." 

After that, we turn around. People of the Sun still doesn't feel like all that successful a rebellion or of fighting back, but we've got denial that the other people know better and the idea of starting a revolution. The King of Anything video makes a really good transition from the bad space prior to there actually being some revolution type stuff going on. There's momentum! And then Defying Gravity (and Let it Go) are pretty direct defiant middle fingers to expectations of what's right and possible. 

Long story short, BRB figuring out the lyrics and transitions I want for my personal Let It Go/Defying Gravity Medley to close with. 

Language and Interaction, Online and Offline

Something I've noticed different between online and offline is reactions when I say things.
Especially about language.

I say offline/online rather than online/real world because the internet is a subset of the real world. "Digital" doesn't mean "not real" any more than "socially constructed" means "not real"- that is, it's real, it exists, but there's a certain limit on where you'll run into it.

Anyways.

Online, I hear a lot of "not like my child." I hear a lot of "so high functioning." I hear a lot of "You mean a person with autism."

Offline... at least in the offline places where I am, not so much. It might be more about the types of spaces I'm in offline versus online, in that offline, disability services is about the most disability-centric place I wind up on even a semi-regular basis.

I get a lot more "Oh, I'd love it if you could talk to my kid, he doesn't know any adults with autism," and I semi-joke "Oh, he still won't, I'm an Autistic adult. Very different, you understand." And they maybe ask why, maybe don't, but they don't insist I'm calling myself the wrong thing usually. At least, they haven't done it at me yet.

I do get a lot of "I couldn't tell," still, but it's always followed by "huh, you're right" when I point out that the descriptions they'd see in media are mostly little white boys rocking and screaming in the corner, not, well, adults.

I get a lot more "I never thought about that" when I say... often times the same words about disliking the word "differently abled" or "assistive tech" (though in assistive tech's case I'm not sure what to replace it with, for differently abled I just don't use it because it was already a euphemism for disabled.)

What got me thinking about this was the comments section on X Years of Experience (actually a nice short discussion) and how that seems to be unusual. Whereas that kind of discussion isn't all that unusual when I get disability related topics going offline in places that weren't disability-themed before.  I'm  not sure what that means (other than that I'm pretty lucky to be surrounded mostly by not-terrible offline.)

Translation?

Going through my drafts and doing some editing as I go to get stuff scheduled, make sure I really do start posting again. The Chinese quote is something I saw on August 27, 2013, for reference. (That was my 21st birthday, here is what I published that day.)

每个人想要的成功或许不同。

I saw that as someone's background for their laptop on the train to the airport to orientation for my study abroad program almost a year ago (omg.) I've actually got a tag for things about China/Chinese, and another for things that are in Chinese

Anyways, this was translated as "Different people value success differently." Which is true. It's not exactly how I would translate it- my understanding is that this is about what people think success means more than how they feel about success, but it works. [I am not saying the translation is bad or wrong. The meaning I think the original is saying is one of the meanings the translation can have, it just seems easier to get a different reading from it than the one that I think is intended. Translation is subjective, and it's definitely easier to translate into one's native language than out of it.] I'd have translated it to "Different people have different ideas of what success is."

There's a couple directions I could have been going from there [I wrote down to the end of the last paragraph on the train on August 27, 2013, and I'm writing this on November 5, 2013, so I'm not sure which way I was going to go.]

I could talk about how translating stuff is complicated and interesting. It is. Translation isn't a word for word deal, and I've run into this a few times since. I saw someone say that the social model of disability didn't translate properly into Chinese because one of the sentences that's apparently fundamental to the English version, “Disability is a social issue” or something of the sort, doesn't translate well. The translation I think of, and the one thought of by the person claiming this, is more along the lines of disability being a social problem, or a burden on society. That's kind of the opposite of what we want to say.

残疾是社会问题 is the translation I think they were thinking of, by the way. And honestly... the reading implied by that is one you can get out of the English version too, which is part of why I don't actually use that as my first explaining sentence for the social model.

Also, this is translation! We can be creative! In fact, we should be creative. Telling Chinese people with disabilities which model they should use to look at disability (or even assuming that their views will fit any of the main USA models) is a problem, and I'm not going to do that. But I'm also not going to say an idea can't be translated, especially when it's just not so. 

“残疾人最严重的问题并不是从自己的（障碍？残疾？身体？）来的，而是从社会的障碍来的。”

There. All I had to do was take a different core-ish sentence describing the social model of disability and see if it translated better. The one I went for was “The worst problems Disabled people face don't come from our own impairments, but from society's barriers.” That's a sentence I'm more likely to use introducing the ideas of the social model in English than “Disability is a social issue” anyways.

In the end, translation is... I've been told it's like a dance between the translator and the original author. Let's just say there's a reason that anything of mine that gets translated into a language I speak (English to Chinese is the only example that seems likely, though I suppose that Chinese to English is possible since when I write in Chinese I don't normally do it by writing in English and then translating into Chinese,) I want to be heavily involved in the translation to make sure that the ideas come through properly. I don't mind if the words get messed up a bit, or even if whole sentences get lost, but the ideas need to be the same.

Oh, and that's why I'm slightly mistrustful of the English version of “The Reason I Jump.” The translator and the author almost certainly have extremely different views of autism- one is a parent, and one lives in an autistic mind-body, and I'm aware of how basic worldview differences between translator and author can lead to differences between the translation and the original.

Back, I hope.

So it's been a month. I think that's the longest time I've gone without posting since I made this blog. And this isn't super-duper much of a post, either, really. I made a word of the day for a language exchange I'm in- in the absence of actual Chinese people in the group, I'm the best Chinese speaker/writer they've got for the time being, and that means I'm in the rotation for making words of the day and helping other folks learn.

Which feels weird. But the Chinese government is trying really hard to get more people learning Chinese, and when I meet folks whose first language is Mandarin Chinese and they realize I speak, they tend to be excited (iffy on happening, because I'm not going to go up to someone and randomly start speaking Chinese outside China, but if I hear folks sounding lost and speaking Mandarin, I'll help in Chinese assuming I'm not lost too.)

Anyways, without further ado, here's the word of the day I prepared. Maybe it'll even get me back in the habit of posting here.

Chinese Word of the Day- Day 15.

Image description: The five elements are in a circle, clockwise from the top are wood in blue, fire in red, earth in yellow, metal in white, and water in black. Each element has a relationship arrow pointing towards the next element clockwise and the second element clockwise, which isn't labeled in the picture. The one position clockwise relationship is a creation relation, while two positions is a destruction one, eg, water quenches fire.

Chinese- 五 (wǔ)

English- Five

The exact origins of this character aren't entirely certain: some scholars wonder if it may have originated as horizontal bars and then changed over time much as other characters did, while others think it began as two horizontal bars with an X between them. (Considering how long it was before characters were standardized, they may both be correct.)

五, sometimes written as 伍 in more formal contexts, such as on the 5-dime (五毛 wǔ máo) coin, is a culturally relevant number, as there were traditionally five elements: wood (木 mù), fire (火 huǒ), earth (土 tǔ), metal (金 jīn), and water (水 shuǐ).

When tallying to five (五, wǔ) Chinese people typically use the character 正 (zhèng.)

EXAMPLES

五块 - wǔ kuài, five bucks, five dollars. It's less formal than 五元 - wǔ yuán, which has the same essential meaning.

五毛 - wǔmáo, five dimes, fifty cents.

五分钟 - wǔ fēnzhōng, five minutes

五行 - wŭ xíng, the Five Elements

你家有几个人？ Nǐ jiā yǒu jǐ gèrén? How many people are in your family?

我家有五个人。Wǒjiā yǒu wǔ gèrén. My family has five people.

Language play off 因才而教

因才而教 is a pretty traditional Chinese statement on education. Confucius (孔子) said it. (A lot of traditional sayings come from him or from Lao Tzu (老子).)
因 is the same character from 因为, "because." 才 is from 人才, the person, the person's abilities. 而 is one of those complicated characters, but here the closest I can come is "therefore." In combination with 因 it's like "according to." 教 is to teach, or to educate. As a whole, 因才而教 is saying to teach according to the person's abilities, according to how the person learns.

Sound a lot like the ideas of individualized education, inclusive education, presuming competence? It should, because it is similar. That's not what mainstream Chinese schools are doing right now, but the idea has been around a while.

Anyways, now it's language play time.

The original statment:
因才而教.

Some things that I think are along similar lines:
因才而考: Assess according to the person's abilities.
因才而选话题:  Choose topics according to the person's abilities/interests.


Some things that the statement is really, really not.
因诊断而教: Teach according to the diagnosis.
因诊断而不教: Fail to teach because of the diagnosis.
因以为无才而不教: Fail to teach because of believing wrongly that there are no abilities.
因缺而教: Teach according to defects. (Not saying ignore the stuff that we're bad at. But don't choose to teach only to remedy percieved defects.)
因缺而不教: Fail to teach because of defects.

And of course, question the idea that the things we're thinking of as defects currently are deficits. What is valued, and what is not valued, are cultural ideas.