Party Giraffe, Hot Spicy Autism, and Small Acts of NO.

By inclination, I'm a bit of an imp. I will say a true thing (I'm nonbinary) in a slightly silly way, messing with people using truth. ("Good man. Wait. Woman." gets responded to with "still no" followed by "nonbinary, good luck".) This is a character trait, not an isolated incident. On National Coming Out Day, I wrote "I draw cool stuff using straight lines, which is funny because I'm not straight." One day when I was pointing out "typos" on the white board while non-speaking, I was told to "be quiet." So I wrote on the side board, "I didn't say anything!" It was technically true. 

I like puns. (Nonbunnary!) I like satire. (Turn it Down Taupe!) And while I wear many metaphorical hats (mathematician, engineer, graduate student, teacher, Autistic person, "person in the lab who can sew", writer, AAC user, Queer person, culturally Jewish person, "that weird person who doesn't get cold", and on and on), I don't necessarily choose to emphasize the set of hats I have in common with the other people in the room. I tend to emphasize the ones that are most effective for messing with my colleagues, even. See again: bit of an imp.

So of course it makes sense that I would have shirts that say things like "Autistic Party Giraffe" (explanation), "Hot Spicy Autism", "We Are Like Your Child", and "I Love Someone Lacking Autism." Recently, I've started wearing those shirts more frequently. And yes, I can trace this back to the election. 

No, I don't think that wearing my identities on my shirt (or my bag, as I've been known to do) will magically make everything OK. That's not the point. Reading Trump Presidency to be Large-Scale Replication Experiments in Destructive Obedience: Here is How to Resist will help the actual points make sense, though. Even though Milgram's experiments were based on a pretty unrepresentative sample in terms of people generally, it's 1) a decent sample in terms of who tends to have power in the USA, and 2) not the only study that's been conducted, though Dr. Alfano's link on the subject loops back to his own post, presumably accidentally. In any case, I'm not after the "most people obey" information. I'm after the "what did the disobedient do?" information.

Point the first: If you want to be able to refuse immoral expectations later, starting earlier helps. There's not been any orders about wearing snarky autism T-shirts, and I don't expect there to be. Why would there be? But I said expectations, not orders, and there's a reason for that. Preemptive obedience (doing what you expect the authority figure would want before there is an order, or on things too small to ever deserve an order" is a thing, and not doing that would logically fall under refusing/resisting early. So instead of hiding or closeting the identities that an incoming administration wouldn't like, I get more open about them. I get (visually) louder. T-shirts. Flapping and rocking in public. Using AAC as a teacher. Throwing myself conspicuously into a wall at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. There can be no compliance ahead of time, because there should be none later. (As opposed to because I think the ahead of time bits are going to fix things on their own. I don't. They just keep me in a "no, you move" sort of mindset for when I'll need it.)

Point the second: Resist noticeably, and you increase the likelihood that those around you who notice will also resist. I don't want to be alone here. 

Point the third: I'm a Queer Disabled Jew. I may not be near the head of the line of people who'll be victimized, because I am also educated, also have class privilege, and am not Muslim. But I've heard the rhetoric about queer people (including trans people, remember that I'm nonbinary?) and about disabled people. I've seen the antisemitism getting more obvious. Let's not pretend I'm not in that line, even if people sometimes forget. (Read: prefer not to think about it?) So when paying attention to the individuality, to the personhood, of (potential) victims is part of how you make it easier to resist, reminding people I'm on that list seems like a good idea. 

I know myself. I know that, impish nature and all, it took me until I was eleven to figure out, even in theory, that intentional defiance was an option. A special education teacher had to tell me, so I'm not sure how much I can claim to have figured it out. There's a heck of a lot planned that I'm going to need to resist. So I'm going to need all the help I can get. (All the help I can give myself.)

Multicultural Psychology Post on Health (care) Disparities

This was a discussion board post for my Multicultural Psychology class. The topic was culture and health, and the chapter focused pretty heavily on health disparities and health care disparities. We're supposed to write at least 600 words and cite at least 5 research sources outside the textbook per discussion, though I usually (as here) will be making at least one of those citations in my responses to other students. (So, uh, professor? If you do a plagiarism check, yes I am the math TA in your class. Congratulations on finding my blog.)

Chapter 8 discussed culture and health. Part of the chapter is on health (care) disparities. Health disparities are the different rates of being healthy or sick (or having specific conditions) between groups, while health care disparities are the differences in treatment and in access to treatment (Mio, Barker, & Tumambing 2012). These two disparities can not be reasonably separated, as receiving poor care (or no care) can lead people to try to deal with health problems on their own and mistrust doctors, which in turn rather definitively leads to not accessing health care. I know that past healthcare experiences have influenced my decisions to (not) seek care for illness or injury. After I had a doctor explain that my injury (which I had already said was a month prior) could not be a broken foot because for a broken foot to appear as it did on the MRI, the injury would need to be about a month old, my trust definitely decreased. It was, in fact, a broken foot. I suspect he couldn't believe a person would be able to walk on a broken foot for a month. Another doctor taking my inability to assign a number to my pain to mean I wasn't in pain decreased my trust further. The only pain scale I've ever found that I could comprehend is based on behavioral cues, and since I'm fairly sure walking on a broken foot isn't supposed to be 2/10 on any pain scale, I can't exactly use that scale at the doctor's office. There are many who believe that autistic people have a reduced sensitivity to pain or don't feel pain as well, which really doesn't help when I'm trying to seek treatment for issues where pain is a symptom. Fitting that particular stereotype only makes getting medical treatment harder (Allely 2013), and I expect the experience is similar for other groups who are often assumed to feel less pain.

Mio et. al. give multiple examples of people of color receiving care later or receiving less treatment than white people in the chapter, both in personal stories and in statistics (2012). Racism has historically played a role in treatment, and knowledge of this racism plays a role in the decision to seek care or not (Bhopal 1998). Similar forces are in play for people living in poverty, who may choose to delay care due to an inability to pay for it or wait until they are in need of the emergency room because the ER (theoretically) can not turn them away entirely. Interestingly, decreased utilization of healthcare by those of lower socioeconomic status holds even when they have health insurance (Fiscella, Franks, Gold, & Clancy 2000).

In terms of the choice to attempt access to health care or not to make the attempt, historical and current racism play a significant role for many people of color. Medical and scientific racism, such as that which was partially involved in eugenics and in experiments like the Tuskegee syphilis study, led to continuing mistrust of the medical system. In addition, research on health care disparities has often framed the problem as lying within cultural choices of the marginalized group, which does little to create trust (Bhopal 1998).

In connection to these issues, I look back at the concept of imposed etics: “imposition of an outsider's worldview on a different culture” (Mio, Barker, & Tumambing 2012, p. 64). There really are differences in (attempted and successful) health care utilization between marginalized groups and privileged groups. However, in assuming this is because marginalized people culturally don't care about their health or don't believe that modern medicine can be effective at what it claims it can do, researchers are imposing their worldview and ideas of what reasons for action make sense on members of other cultures who have other worldviews! I know that as an Autistic person, I absolutely care about my health, including my mental health. I also totally believe the analysis suggesting that autistic people who are referred to interventions earlier and who received applied behavioral analysis are more likely to achieve the “optimal outcome” of losing their diagnosis (Orinstein et. al. 2014). I just don't care. No amount of evidence that an intervention can “help” me achieve a goal I don't have and rather explicitly reject is going to convince me to pursue that intervention, because it isn't evidence that the intervention can help me reach goals I do have. In fact, the imposed etic where outsiders presume my ideal outcome for mental health care is to stop being autistic, or at least act less autistic, contributes to my reluctance to pursue any mental health care. Even therapy meant for issues comparatively unrelated to autism gets sidetracked by this assumption, and also by assumptions about what it means to be mentally healthy that may not apply given that my natural cognitive styles are, by definition, not standard.

References

Allely, C. S. (2013). Pain sensitivity and observer perception of pain in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder. The Scientific World Journal, 2013(2013), 1-20.

Bhopal, R. (1998). Spectre of racism in health and health care: lessons from history and the United States. British Medical Journal, 316(7149), 1970-1973.

Fiscella, K., Franks, P., Gold, M. R., & Clancy, C. M. (2000). Inequality in quality: addressing socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic disparities in health care. Jama, 283(19), 2579-2584.

Mio, J. S., Barker, L. A., & Tumambing, J. S. (2012). Multicultural psychology: Understanding Our Diverse Communities (3rd ed.) New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Orinstein, A. J., Helt, M., Troyb, E., Tyson, K. E., Barton, M. L., Eigsti, I. M., ... & Fein, D. A. (2014). Intervention for optimal outcome in children and adolescents with a history of autism. Journal of developmental and behavioral pediatrics: JDBP, 35(4), 247-256.

In which summer involves doing things

Many things. This post is going to mostly be updates about "I did X, Y, and Z" this summer.

I went to the Computers and Writing annual conference in May, as you might be able to guess from the fact that the last post on here is my notes for one of the sessions. While there, I participated in the digital rhetoric collaboratives wiki quest, and I was one of the winners from that. As such, I got a book! Yay, books! I also reviewed two sessions for the collaborative: D5: Disability and universal access, where I got to watch Sam Harvey be awesome about demolishing the nonsense that is most applications of theory of mind. I've written a little bit about turning the concept inside out, a while back, when I asked if Autistic people might spend more time and effort guessing the mental states of others than neurotypical people do, and Sam seemed to be focusing on the ways the concept and rhetoric around it get applied as an oppressive force. I also got to meet Dani, another autistic academic, who then proceeded to write about me as the "Friend." That was cool too.

The other session I reviewed was F8: Refashioning and reimagining community identities: Performance and online spaces. That was cool because both panelists were members of the communities they were doing research about, and they got to talk about issues related to that, plus they just had really interesting projects to talk about.

I also presented about plainer language in calls for participation as an important thing- the idea of nothing about us without us includes making it so we can understand the questions being asked and therefore know what even to contribute! And then I chaired a panel after that, which was cool. Back to back panels on the last day of the conference for the win!

Shortly thereafter, I went to the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) annual conference. I was on the Digital Access Facilitation Team (DAFT) which was fun and worthwhile but also exhausting. And, just like at Computers and Writing, I was on back to back panels on the last day of the conference (this time immediately followed by tweeting two panels in a row for DAFT.) Here, one panel was on my more scholarly stuff, wanting to create software based around treating disability related language issues as a translation problem rather than something that the disabled person is 100% responsible for "fixing." The other was more on the activisty side of my stuff, talking about some experiences with disclosure on a panel with a pile of other autistic people.

Also at the SDS conference, we got to see Autonomous Press launch. I was at the launch party reminding everyone ever that I did the cover art for Typed Words, Loud Voices. On that note, did I mention that I did said cover art? It's a good book. Since my birthday is coming up, I will say that people who want to do a thing for my birthday are more than welcome to go get a copy for themselves or to donate to a library that will put it on their shelves. Given the funding structure for the upcoming Spoon Knife anthology and my plans to submit to it, this is even a semi-directly self-interested idea for what you can do! (Yeah, if I get a piece into Spoon Knife, I get more for it if more people buy Typed Words. I have a vested interest in people getting it, beyond also honestly wanting more people to read it.)

I wrote an abstract and submitted a piece for the INSPIRe annual virtual conference, entitled "Democratizing Disability Innovation." I plan to edit that piece and send it... somewhere. Not sure where yet, but I think it's worth sending somewhere. I started working on my piece for Spoon Knife. I did some editing on my piece on the translation (or cognitive interpretation, since that's a word that some autistic people use for it when they get a handy dandy friend to do this translation and support for them, see Kassiane's piece,) in the hopes of getting it into a journal. I really need to transcript the presentations I gave at the conferences, but ugh auditory processing issues are a thing. Making transcripts of my own talks, even with good recordings, is not easy, and I suspect that I actually have meh recordings. Oh well, it needs done so I will get it done. And then I'll post about it when it happens, since I'm pretty sure this is where said transcripts are going. At the least, it's one of the places.

In the last few days, Kerima made an important post about appropriation and erasure in activism, with a good bit of the focus on two good friends of mine, Lydia and Kassiane, because they are Autistic people of color, Lydia genderqueer and Kassiane a woman. This is relevant to "what Alyssa did this summer" because Lydia and Kassiane are friends, but also because Kerima linked to a post of mine for documentation and explanation on one of the issues, which means "got linked in an important post" is a literal partial answer to the question.

Computers and Writing Session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access.

I attended the Computers and Writing conference at University of Wisconsin-Stout. One of the panels where I took pretty good notes was session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access. I'm now posting my write-up of the panel and my notes. 

Here's the nicer write-up, which I also added to the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative's Wiki. Maybe someone else will edit it with additional information, so that may not remain the same as what's below.

This panel began with Steven Hammer of Saint Joseph's University presenting on “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions.” Hammer's presentation is concerned with Western art history and multimedia writing's tendency to ignore the perspectives and contributions of disabled people, and with the tendency towards a deficit model. He notes that after a diagnosis, there is a prognosis, which rather than simply describing what life will or could be like, it uses a presumed (and now unavailable) norm as a basis and describes how life will be different from that norm due to the diagnosis.

He suggests, rather than asking about how only certain people with certain diagnoses have bodies which are failing or considering how all bodies will eventually fail, asking “how are you failing right now?” He proposes that we consider the medicines we are taking to keep our bodies running every day.

With this question, however, Hammer mentions the risk that people will presume their experiences of bodily failure is equivalent to that of people with disabilities, who face oppression and marginalization based on their abilities in addition to the primarily practical concerns of keeping their bodyminds running.

Hammer then spoke about projects done together which use open source and glitch-theory methods to increase the accessibility of artistic production. One such project was his work on instruments for Arduino.

Hammer also drew a connection between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

After Hammer's talk, Samuel Harvey from Saint Cloud State University spoke on “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet.” Harvey's talk covered the history of work on identity formation and on theory of mind, including the relations of these issues to autistic people. Noting that work on identity formation presumes that identity formation rests upon social interaction and the ability to understand what others are thinking (Theory of Mind,) and that autism comes with difficulties in social interaction, he asks what this would mean for identity formation in autistic people.

From there, he continues on to enthymemic dehumanization of people, particularly autistic people, where statements about identity formation, humanity, and theory of mind are made which logically lead to (never explicitly stated) denial of identity or humanity to marginalized people. The two primary examples Harvey notes are: 1) If identity formation depends on an understanding of what others think, or a theory of mind, and autistic people lack a theory of mind, then autistic people would be unable to develop an identity, and 2) If theory of mind is innate to humans, and certain groups are found not to have a theory of mind, that members of those groups are not human.

Harvey also notes issues with the current methods of testing theory of mind, primarily the Sally-Anne test, in that passing these tests depends on linguistic ability and upon cultural factors. He finds that rather than being innate to humans, theory of mind is innate to dominant groups, who use it as a tool of oppression to rob people of identity, agency, and personhood.

The third planned speaker for the panel, Annika Konrad of University of Wisconsin-- Madison, did not appear to speak on “Visually Communicating Visual Impairments.”

Liberty Kohn of Winona State University spoke third, on “Sound Pedagogy: Sound Art as Rhetoric, Poetic, and a Voice in the Composition Classroom.” He explored audio assignments, noting that while it is common to assign students to read multiple kinds of media, if students are not also writing multiple kinds of media they are not participating in a fully multimedia experience. He spoke about meta-language, and having students make versions of audio both including and excluding the meta-language in their assignments, and of the rhetoric of these choices.

In addition, he covered the idea of teaching non-musicians to produce audio in the classroom, as audio assignments are currently primarily the domain of people whose areas of study relate directly to audio. 

___________________________________________________________________________

Now for the less polished notes I took during the session:

Session D5: Friday May 29, 2015, 3:00-4:15, Disability and Universal Access themed panel.

Steven Hammer, “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions”

Diagnosis, puts a thing on us.

Prognosis. Based on knowing that a person has a given thing. “What's life like based on what it could have been before.”

What does “no significant development” mean?

Asks, “How can we get beyond a deficit model?”

Amundon, 2000 “normal/abnormal is the basis of the deficit model.”

“human variation rather than pathology” Reid & Valle, 2004.

“[the] non-neutrality of techno-social artifacts and contexts... they are embedded... theya re not sterile, they're imperfect...” Cates 2014.

“from temporarily able bodies to always-already malfunctioning bodies” is on the presentation and he said it and I think that's original wording to Hammer. Also I like this wording.

Asking “how are you failing right now?” rather than the thought of this as “someday” your body will fail, think about the medicines you're taking.

Of course, we need to make sure people aren't concluding that they belong in disabled people's spaces because they have a headache or some such because that'd be fucked up.

Draws a parallel between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

The world is built for people who have an identity that is fucking fictional!

Samuel Harvey, “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet”

Henderson, Davidson, Hemsworth, and Edwards 504?? Something Sam's citing.

“If identity is formed through communicating with others, and autistic people struggle with communicating with others...” [Ask Sam if I can see his slides after?]

Samuel brings up the possibility of written language as a discourse where autistic people could develop their identities.

Davidson 796. “NT conversations have a very fast-paces rhythym...”

Erikson+Cohen=> identity is formed by having a theory of mind.

First two publications of theory of mind, the titles are Does the X have a “Theory of Mind”?, with Chimpanzee and then Autistic Child. Erm erm erm.

Enthymemic dehumanization, leads to Autistic people not being able to have identities because we lack a theory of mind... yup.

Theory of mind innate in humans, bunch of folks don't, therefore those groups aren't human.

Yeargeau+Heilker state that autistic people have our own rhetoric and language, oh hey, that fucks up our test results in the area of language.

Halle and Tager Flusberg (2003), Lohman and Tomasello (2003) as cited in Miller.

Folks like to claim that language has no impact on the results of the test, which 1) Wrong, and 2) claims the test is arhetorical.

Tons of other factors wind up actually messing with theory of mind results. Whoops. Cultural stuff, socioeconomic stuff, linguistic stuff, and also quite a few kinds of neurodivergence.

Theory of mind is (maybe) innate in dominant groups, used to fuck over the disadvantaged groups.

“Theory of mind is innate in dominant groups, it is a tool of oppression meant to rob people (mostly autistics) of identity, agency, and even personhood.”

Harvey thinks theory of mind is a theory of the minds of dominant group members. That is, the folks who have a theory of mind don't actually have it about members of the groups said to “lack” a theory of mind.

Fiction and Representation (For Me)

After many, many years of being asked to visualize things and never being able to do it, and not forming pictures of characters or places in my head as I read, and never being able to accurately guess what a place actually looks like based on floor plans, I have reached the conclusion that I don't have a minds eye. (I reached the conclusion a while ago, so this isn't new, but it's relevant to the slightly unusual way I interact with representation in fiction.)

In fact, not only do I not come up with a mental image of a character as I read, but I also don't really remember the details of how a character is described as looking. (For similar reasons, I don't pay much attention to those details while I'm writing, which I'm working on because I know representation matters to people in all the ways they can interact with the information, and if I don't provide descriptions that show otherwise, people are going to assume all my characters are cisgender heterosexual able white people.)

One example I like to use for this is Hermione. The book descriptions of Hermione could be describing me, and I didn't realize this. After I saw the first movie, with Emma Watson as Hermione, while they were still trying to give her actual frizzy hair, I picked up on the bit where Hermione is a character who looks like me, but that didn't make Emma's Hermione take over the non-existent slot for my mental picture of Hermione. It didn't make me take over the non-existent slot either, because that slot doesn't exist. (Also, the book version of Hermione and I are fairly similar, personality-wise, which is the way that I can understand and interact with.)

For me, the non-existence of mental images for characters means that I personally don't much care what a character looks like. I care about it for the people who'll notice and care because they have minds eyes like that, and I care about it some (still not much) in movies because the pictures are given to me, but as far as making me feel represented goes, it really doesn't matter what the character looks like. I need characters who act like me, whether or not they look anything like me.

Give me characters who are awkward even when it isn't cute. Give me characters who avoid shopping because it's loud and bright. Give me characters whose interests don't line up with the idea of "geek" or "jock" or "creative type" or any of those, but have a mix from all. Give me characters who are good, really good, at some of the things they like but have to work hard to even manage "not terrible" for some of the others. Give me characters who act like me, with personalities like mine.

The physical descriptions matter for the people who can translate those to images, but that's not me and it will probably never be me. 

"Live" blog of my presentation to the Five Project

The Five Project is an autism organization of some sort (I actually didn't know much about them other than that they wanted a presentation on autism and neurodiversity, and now that they liked it and are apparently hoping I'd be willing to do something like it again.) I wrote a script that was kind of a mix of English and Chinese but mostly English, Vivien (an exchange student working with Steven Kapp) helped me translate, and then I recorded and edited a video that was mostly along the script, though rarely actually identical. We each updated the script to match about half of what I actually said. And then yesterday morning, I logged into the virtual presentation, which I live-"blogged" into Notepad++.

Now I'm sticking that here.

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IT IS HAPPENING NOW AND I AM A BALL OF NERVES.
People are interested to hear me talk, and they're impressed with my ability to speak Chinese, and they're not NLMC-ing at the moment (there's time yet and considering the opinion folks tend to have of white people's ability to speak Chinese combined with my actually being able to speak I'm expecting it any minute. Wonder what it looks like in the more subtle/委婉 Chinese way.)

Not a lot of comments going on at the moment, which is OK with me. I can hear comments arrive, and I can hear myself talk (ugh I sound so not-fluent, even compared to my usual Chinese, reading aloud sucks), so I can do something not particularly thinking intensive to try and distract myself from my nerves until I'm needed.

want to add "很多人以为自闭症有悖于好好生活。" (A lot of people incorrectly believe that autism contradicts with a good life, ish.)

Just learned that 卡=lag, that's cool, but the reason for learning (apparently the meeting room and video are laggy for some people) is less cool.

It's a good thing we did transcript because of the lag. Captions wouldn't have solved the lag problem, though I do still want to get those done. I have less time pressure on captions than we did on the transcript, so that's good.

At the bit where I say "my carrying my computer around isn't because I want to be able to play computer games whenever I want" in the video, I typed "(I also like to play computer games)" and that got a laugh. Typed in Chinese, of course.

Oh yay, comments so far including folks saying "huh, never realized that" kinds of stuff about the sitting still and not stimming taking the energy we could use for learning.  And needing to learn to understand our body language rather than assuming we have none or assuming it'll be like neurotypical body language.

Still no sign of "not like my child," I am so confused. Happy, but confused.
Also convinced that not like my child is coming in the Q&A, because it's not like that's how things usually go or anything, and it's not like I have anxiety or anything, of course not!(SARCASM on the "it's not like" statements.)

Q&A has a lot of "when did you start typing" and "what'd you do in China" type stuff. Also some questions about kids, and about managing sensory sensitivities. How is there no NLMC I AM CONFUSED.

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Note after: No one did the whole "not like my child" thing. I wish that didn't surprise me, because it should be typical.  But I am surprised, and getting "not like my child"-ed at is a common enough problem that We Are Like Your Child exists, and is a thing I contribute to sometimes.

I've actually been asked if I'd be willing to do something like this again. And I totally would. I'd let people share the video, as long as credit to me for actually saying all this stuff and Vivien for translation+transcripting help. It's on Youtube, not captioned yet so still unlisted, but I know Youtube is blocked in China. 

Some more on Li Jinsheng (李金生)

So I am now finally talking about the ways that Li Jinsheng （李金生） and his taking the college entrance exams (高考) has been represented in some Chinese media. I'm looking at articles published online in Chinese, on China-based sites, something that I don't think most USA folk look at, and most of my readers are from the USA.
The articles are

1. 盲人高考河南第一人参加体检 盲人试卷或将亮相 April 23, 2014 article, headline about the first Blind person in Henan (a province) to take the entrance exams.
2. “河南盲人自考第一人”报名高考遭拒 自言不放弃 December 14, 2013 article, headline about the first Blind person in Henan to take the independent study college entrance exams (Li Jinsheng was that person a while back) planning to take the regular exams. 
3. 黄诗欣：高考交白卷的权利 June 12, 2014 article, headline is the authors name followed by "the right to turn in a blank test on the college entrance exam" (Li Jinsheng turned in a nearly blank exam after being given a paper version- he'd practiced on and requested electronic versions.)
4. 46岁李金生：今年全国唯一一名盲人考生 June 11, 2014 article, headline is 46 year old Li Jinsheng: The only blind person in the country to take the college entrance exams this year.
5. 盲人高考白卷亦是一种公平与进步 June 16, 2014 article, headline is that the blind person's blank test paper is also/still a sort of progress for fairness.
6. 交白卷无损盲人高考破冰意义 June 9, 2014 article reprinted from the Nanjing Daily. The headline says that turning in a blank test paper does not diminish the "break ice" meaning of a blind man taking the college entrance exams. Break ice here is figurative language for breaking down barriers in general.
7. 盲人高考交白卷“破冰”还是浪费？ June 11, 2014 article, headline asks if the blind person turning in a blank test paper is breaking the ice or wasting resources. The article goes for the ice breaking meaning.
8. 李金生的高考，不是一个人的战斗 June 9, 2014 article, headline says that Li Jinsheng's participation in the entrance exam isn't just one person's battle. 
9. 教育部发文部署2014年普通高校招生工作, a ministry of education release from March 28, 2014. I'm really only looking at one paragraph from this release from the 教育部, and it's the second to last one. That's where they changed from their old decision of not letting Blind people take the regular exam to allowing it and stating some available options. 

This is a lot of articles, so this is probably going to be multi-part. Ah well, suc

So, here's the quote from the department of education: 

《通知》指出，要以考生为本，要做好招生服务和宣传工作。教育部要求各级教育行政部门、招生考试机构和高校要加强作风建设和职能转变，着力解决考生和社会关心、反映强烈的突出问题。为考生提供更加专业化的招生政策咨询服务、更加人性化的考试服务，热情关爱弱势群体考生。特别是要积极采取措施，为残疾人平等报名参加考试提供便利。有盲人参加考试时，为盲人考生提供盲文试卷、电子试卷或者由专门的工作人员予以协助。

As for what that means?
We've got what reads to me like fluff about how students and fairness are important, test structure needing to suit students, professionally serving the students who are taking the test, caring for test takers from "vulnerable groups." Then the second half of the second last sentence and the whole last sentence look more like meat, like actual statements. They're talking about "working for disabled people's equal participation in the test" and then the last sentence specifically addresses Blind people. "When Blind people are taking the test, they should be provided with a Braille test, an electronic test, or assistance from a worker." I'm guessing the assistance from a worker would be having the test read aloud, but I'm not sure.

That's actually a decent thing to be saying, I think. My issue is that saying this is a reversal of the old policy, and that it was done really close to the test date, which seems unfair to a lot of people- Li not knowing how or if he was really going to get to take the test and the test-writers not getting a whole lot of notice (though given that the legal right was already extant and it was just policy makers ignoring this, I don't have all that much sympathy for them.) This should have been the re-iteration of an old policy, not a change in policy, especially considering that other already extant laws guaranteed the right to take the exam and all. But since it's a new policy, hey, at least there's progress?

Now to start on stuff that's not ministry of education legalese. Happily, the news coverage I'm seeing is talking about how the opportunity to take the test is more important than how well Li Jinsheng did, which is something Li himself has been saying since well before the test. It's mostly commenters who seem to be calling it a waste of resources to have let him take it at all, and according to the one article with numbers, even that's a minority. Loud minority, but minority.

And now it's time for sleep for me, given that I have an oral proficiency exam in the morning. They generally ask about news, so I'm totally going to be talking about Li Jinsheng and how he is awesome and such. Next bit about him is probably going to be me finding words he said to journalists from the various articles and translating them into English, because they actually have a lot of words from him! There's some history stuff, too, and some of his words are about that- he did a similar thing with the version of the exam for students who did independent study about 10 years ago, so he's got a history of being activisty around higher education for blind folks.

Disney connections and the ableism in the descriptions

Warning: Discussion of ableist mess, discussion of ableism, murder, abuse, improper medical treatment

EDIT: I got asked what the burrito test is. Essentially: Can a resident microwave a burrito to eat at midnight because they feel like it/are hungry? If no, probably an institution and abusing power imbalances.
There is an extended burrito test with a bunch more levels as well, but a surprising and scary number of residential places for disabled people fail even this level.

I read this New York Times article. I wouldn't have read it on my own, I could tell from the title that it was going to be an ableist mess, but when a disability studies professor is looking for Autistic reactions to a [frankly pretty terrible] article about autism... yeah I'll sometimes dig through the pile of ableist nonsense. And that's what it is, almost entirely. [There are a few good bits where parents make a breakthrough in their own understanding.]

Heck, the first sentence is terrible. “In our first year in Washington, our son disappeared.” Way to buy into the disappearing and kidnapping and autistic people aren't really there rhetoric. Do you know how much mistreatment gets justified because we (all the disabled people with speech issues, not just autistic people) supposedly aren't really in there and supposedly don't know what's going on? Do you know the kinds of abuse those of us with mental and cognitive disabilities received at the hands of caretakers who believed we could not feel pain, that we weren't really there? Do you know how recent that is? My aunt, who I'm named for (her name was Hillary) was often not given needed pain control medications for medical procedures because of her disabilities. Amanda Baggs was not given propersedation for surgery just last year. I know about Amanda because Amanda blogs, but there are more cases like this (and ones where the surgery doesn't happen, where autistic people are just allowed to die) all the time, because people think of us as not really there, as empty shells. Is this rhetoric a loving parent should ever go anywhere near? NO. But it's the first sentence. You know this is going to be a long and rough ride.

It continues. They describe looking for ways to help their child, ways to figure out the regression (and there were skills lost, this happens sometimes, not just in early childhood) as looking for clues to a kidnapping. I'd look for clues to overload and burnout, also to see if seizures are happening, you know, things that can often cause a person to lose skills or not have the resources to use skills they would still have if only they had the energy, but no, it's clues to a kidnapping.

Then they vanish. That child's gone. Enough with the “not there” rhetoric, parents and caretakers and doctors. Enough with the idea that autism struck.

And maybe, just maybe, if a kid seems happy and focused while doing something you don't understand, the assumption should be that they're doing something with a use you don't understand rather than something pathological? Maybe the assumption that our misunderstood speech is gibberish could fall to the assumption that maybe we're running words together or having pronunciation issues? Kids have pronunciation issues sometimes, you know. [My “r” sound is still not-quite-standard for English, folks kept telling me it was in the back of the throat and I couldn't make that one, but in sixth grade I started taking Chinese and I learned to make the “r” sound used in Mandarin Chinese. Which is the one I use in English as well because it's a lot closer than the “w” I used to make.]

Owen's repetition of “Just her voice” as they eventually figured out it was, that? Oh, I'll totally buy that Owen is making the connection between losing oral speech himself and Ariel losing oral speech. People make connections like that, and when someone who can often talk or who used to be able to talk now can't? Yeah we notice, cause shocker, we didn't vanish. Speech giving out on us is very different from us vanishing.

Then we hear from the doctors. They need to shut up and listen to Autistic people about echolalia and scripting: Yes, sometimes it's not the words we're intending to say, Emma's mentioned that and her mother expanded on it, but often it's how we learn language and often it's how we put together our language and it absolutely can be used for communication. And, oh hey, we get parents being happy that kid isn't flapping as much. STAHP. Stimming isn't the devil, it's something we do for a lot of reasons including calming ourselves down. Trying to keep us from stimming, though, that absolutely can be the devil.

Ugh assumptions that we don't understand what's being said to us. Whyyyyyyy. [Though deciding that it doesn't particularly matter, the important thing when kid goes to theme park is that kid is happy? I can get behind that.]

I'm glad that they figure out Owen is thinking interpretively when he says something that makes it pretty obvious, but the shock that a kid can think interpretively? This is not presuming competence. When you presume that disabled people can't do a thing, you don't give the opportunity to prove that we can. And often, we can. Often, we know more than people realize we know. Not being able to speak is different from having nothing to say. We have rich experiences, same as everyone else.

[Reminds me of the “of course he can't read it” bit that I think comes later. You don't know that. Plenty of autistic kids do start reading before they start talking. Neurodivergent K did. This happens. I don't know that he can read, but I'm mistrustful of parents basing “can't read” on “can't read aloud.”]

Oh here we are. Iago, the parrot. That was actually a smart move. I'm not a fan of deception, but I'm not going to deny that “work within echolalia as a character from a movie your kid echolails” is a good idea. It's a really good idea, actually, working with what your kid does in order to help them learn stuff in the way their brain works.

At the point of the Iago breakthrough on the parental side, they do seem to finally have some understanding of how Owen is learning. [Yes, this is a breakthrough of the parents figuring something out, likely happening around the same time that Owen locked the skill down enough to start coming out in sentences again. And yeah, going really fast from pretty much no speech to full sentences is a really common autistic thing. I don't know for sure that the parental interpretation we're seeing is correct, even here, but this is at least an interpretation I'd buy until and unless Owen says different. It makes sense, and working with it got words and sentences spoken to other people.

Uneven, unsteady progress is kind of the name of the game for a lot of autistic people, so I'm not surprised that Owen's doing this too. And the frustration of a school administration deciding that a child is just too disabled, boy, do I sympathize with Owen and his parents there. That's a horrible thing to hear, and since it's a private school, they can do that. That doesn't make it any better. And it stings to hear ““Look, not picking up social cues is just too great a burden.” Because guess what I have trouble with? Guess what, at 21 years old, as a triple major in a pretty freaking selective study abroad program, can't consistently do? (the program directors have done a really good job protecting me from the nonsense of a university that initially didn't want an Autistic student and probably wouldn't have taken me at all if the USA side hadn't pointed out that it's bound by the ADA, even if the Chinese side wasn't.) So yes, I'm writing this while in a program that didn't want me because of autism awareness, telling you that I have this problem too. My advantage is that I'm good with language. Making oral speech happen is iffy, but when it's working, I can be very good with it, too.

And of course Owen knows. Of course he does. The face that his parents have learned to recognize as one where he fears he might cry, of course he knows what's going on, being rejected for who he is. (Why is he afraid to cry? Has he been pubished for meltdowns?)

Ok, so why is the term for stimming “silly.” No. No. No. That's not what anxiety-stimming is (and that's my guess for what's happening, some sort of upset-stimming.)

Eventually we get to another parental breakthrough, of learning Owen's language- connecting to the idea of the sidekick, and Owen's statement that “no sidekick gets left behind.” It's terrible to see the idea of only ever being the sidekick, not the hero of his own story, but the sidekick to someone else's, so internalized, but if it's going to be internalized, at least he's doing it by seeing the value in himself and others, in what they are good at. And it is true that the sidekicks in Disney movies (especially the princess ones) are more fleshed out, given more flaws that real people have, than the main characters have. This is actually true of a lot of stories, giving fewer identifiable quirks to the hero's so that more people can paste their own identities onto the hero's face[i read an article about this recently, where's the link], but here's the issue: what if you're told you can't be the hero, explicitly or otherwise? What if you better identify with real characters with real quirks? It's those of us with the biggest differences from that mythical but privileged average mind, that mythical but privileged “normal” body, who are told we can't be the hero and left to identify with the sidekicks. It's those of us who most need to be told we can be the hero of our own story who are left to be sidekicks.

Finally, we see a therapist who seems decent: One decides that the family realization of using Owen's interests to help him learn is actually smart. Shocker, it goes well.

Now we get an interlude for the monetary cost. I could see it as an argument for universal education, for universal health care, but in a piece about an autistic person and connecting with them? Unless the point you want to make is that the system is very, very broken, no, this does not belong. It fits too well with the burden rhetoric, that same rhetoric that makes people think it's OK to kill us. No. Stop.

Worry about the future is very real. I won't argue with that, though their nightmare probably shouldn't be a nightmare. Owen doing well in his program, starting a Disney club, is also cool, though I worry about residential programs because I know what kinds of freedoms they tend to take away. I wonder if this program passes the burrito test. The Disney club, though: I will make no effort to deny how cool that is. That's win. Starting and running a club based on an interest, finding others with similar interests, the club growing? That is wonderful.

The insights made when people interact on our interests? Also wonderful. The shock and astonishment at these insights? Not so wonderful. It's missing the idea that we're interested in things for reasons, something that tends to get lost when our interests are pathologized. This happens unfortunately often, and it cuts off a lot of opportunity for growth.

The end of the article, I mostly like. I think that's because it's mostly stuff from Owen, his own insights, like how life isn't a spectator sport and how the gargoyles are different because they're vessels for things that the character already knows but maybe needs a trick to access.

But the realization of “Oh jeez, Owen already is an adult.” That's a thing. I go back through this. Owen's about a year older than I am. How does he feel about this article, about the book that this is apparently adapted from? Did he give permission for his life to be spread across the page like this, to be spread across the web? The internet is forever, if and when he applies for a job potential employers will read this article, and they will see what he was like at 3 and 4 and 5 and 6. I'd love to be able to trust that Owen gave permission for this, freely, but without it being stated somewhere explicitly, I can't trust that. That's a sign of how people tend to think of Autistic people: not fully people, not deserving of the same privacy as others, obligated to spread our lives on the page for theeducation and edification of the privileged norm.

Internet and Disability Notes

I was looking at a call for papers/chapters that I missed about internet and disability stuff, and when I thought I might submit something I did some research and took some notes, which are below. No, the notes aren't all that organized, but if they help anyone then yay.

(The idea I had was about disabled people using the internet to create access for each other, because I know that's a thing. It's not good that we wind up needing to because the rest of society isn't, but it's awesome when we do it and in disabled-run spaces it is, in fact, disabled people's responsibility to make things accessible.)

Per DOI 10.1300/J113v21n01_04:

By 2002, legal scholarship began predicting that commercial web sites would fit under Title 3 of the ADA and therefore require reasonable access for people with disabilities.

Access includes, but is not limited to: text labels for graphics and for all functions to be activateable with the keyboard.

Check their source#7 for 98% of websites inaccessible to the disabled.

Java script and other graphic-based writing are typically inaccessible to those using screen-readers.

Section 508, which amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1793, requires federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible, including websites.

Per source 19, Department of Justice argued that the ADA applies to non-physical accommodations, including web sites during the Clinton Administration.

Limiting places of public accommodation to physical structures negates significant portions of the protections provided by the ADA to those with mental disability, which the District Court of Minnesota has used to argue the ADA would be meant to apply to non-physical entities.

If you sue under Section 508 and win, they'll pay your attorneys fees.

ADA is required to be interpreted as providing at least as much protection as the Rehabilitation Act
Enforcing ADA requirements on the web would require more resources than the government is likely able (willing) to provide. [What, they could totally steal it from military, our military does not need as much money as we currently give it.]


Cite the ADA:

As the ADA's purpose is to "address the major areas of discrimination faced day-to-day by people with disabilities" and to "provide a clear and comprehensive mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with Disabilities," the spirit of the legislation should include web sites, which have become a part of daily life.

Discrimination includes "a failure to make reasonable accommodations in policies, practices, or procedures, when such modifications are necessary to afford such goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to individuals with disabilities."

Look up Access Board, EITAAC, accessibility standards for electronic and information technology covered by Section 508.
World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility Guidelines
San Jose Web Page Disability Access Design Standard

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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Neurodiversity Michigan Begins

Warning: These are my responses to things with problematic elements. There may be references to ableism, bigotry by ignoring differences, and disease models of autism.

So there is a class about autism, culture, and representation going on at the University of Michigan. They made a website with student posts, which can be commented on publicly. You can find the whole thing here.

I am commenting. Not on everything, there's a whole class worth of stuff and I'm in China studying abroad and I have my own stuff to deal with like finishing editing my Neurodiversity in Tamora Pierce essay for FYT Writes a Book and figuring out where my paper on the erasure of Queer Autistic people can get published and actually doing my study abroad stuff. But some. I'm putting my comments here, too, so that my readers can see them. 

On The Struggle with the Categorization of Autism, I said:

Hi!

I think that the way language works is really important to think about here: if you don't have access to the words to describe something, you're not going to be able to do so using language, and lacking the words to describe power dynamics between various neurominorities and the majority who are close enough to the mythical norm to get privilege from it doesn't make the dynamic go away. I think that's why the word "neurotypical" is important. Because "Autistic people and normal people" has implications to it that "Autistic people and allistic people" or "neurodivergent people and neurotypical people" doesn't have, even if neurotypical does literally mean neurologically typical.

[Think sociology and how people don't seem to think of heterosexual as a sexual orientation, but it is one- neurotypical is a neurology, even if folks tend not to think of it.]

On Perspective, I said:

Hi Aaron, 

I'm also an engineer- I'm in mechanical engineering, math, and Chinese, though I did research in a chemical engineering lab for a while. I think it's super-important to have more people in STEM fields who know at least some about disability, especially since we kind of design the world the next generation is going to live in.

I think the point you make about how recovery has a lot of important stuff tied up in it is good. I've never had anyone suggest that I've recovered from my gender when I do something where I'm the only girl, but my doing things where I'm the only Autistic person sometimes leads to people thinking or saying I must have "recovered" from autism. Which is silly! How would I recover from my neurology?

And yeah, Autism Speaks being seen as grassroots. It's got some support that could be called that, but they did not start off as anything like grassroots and I think it'd be a lie to call them grassroots. They're pretty top-down in everything except perhaps fundraising, where having at least some grassroots-looking stuff will get them more money and they know it.

On Learning to Live, I said:

Your point about people being too focused on changing their loved ones and not thinking about learning to live as they are is important. I do want to point out that autism is a neurotype, not a disease- diseases are generally things like malaria, cancer, etc- dangerous by nature, something that you try to cure, something that is not a natural part of the person.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "the disease aspect." Do you mean the difficult parts of being autistic? We can't ignore those when trying to find ways of making Autistic life easier, since making life easier means looking at the hard parts and trying to help with those. Do you mean the stigma part? Ignoring stigma unfortunately doesn't make it go away. So I'm not sure what that aspect is.

So there's that. I'm sure I'll say more, and I'll probably put that more up here.  

美国中国的博客

I was supposed to find 5 American blogs and 5 Chinese blogs and talk about them. Yes, I talked about my own, yes, my teacher said that was OK before I did it. The Chinese ones were found pretty hurriedly, and I make no promises that my statements on what they seem to talk about is accurate.

在美国，5个（比较）有名的博客是 “Yes, That Too,” “Autistic Hoya,” “Mark Reads,” “The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism,” 及 “This is White Privilege.” “Yes, That Too”是我自己写的，热点是自闭症者和残疾人面对的问题。别人感兴趣的原因大概是“自闭症者谈自闭症！”“Autistic Hoya”谈的内容跟我的差不多，别人看她博客的原因也差不多。“The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism”也是谈自闭症的，比我的博客和“Autistic Hoya”有名的多。[自闭症者的父母写的博客比自闭症者写的博客有名。]“Mark Reads”是 “Mark”看书，写下来他的感觉。如果他看的书比较有名，很多人会看他的博客。“This is White Privilege”谈的是社会问题，特别是白人不面而别人面对的事。几个大学教授让学生看这个博客或者上课的时候用这个博客提出的例子。
在中国，课文说的王建硕在写他的博客还很有名。看起来，他的热点是旅行和他住的地方。 “Life Behind The Wall”也是比较有名的。这个博客是黑美国女生跟她中国丈夫写的博客。她写的是在中国生活的事，但她也写一点的中国新闻。百度了，我找到“安顿的BLOG”写他自己的感觉。“快乐大哥的博客”常谈教育或专业问题，也谈自己的生活。“星子山地博客”常谈学习/教育的事：他学的是历史，所以常有历史的问题。
看起来中国的博客大多是个人写自己的生活事情。有别的，例如教育问题，新闻等，而这样的博客没有那么多。而且，那样大多是谈自己生活的博客加了一片谈社会问题的文章。

Sources. So Many Sources

I finished writing my paper: "The Erasure of Queer Autistic People."
These are a list of all the sources I either cited in the final paper or made notecards for while doing research. [Some things I did both, and some things I only did one or the other. Yes, I cited a couple things I didn't make notecards for.]
Have fun. [No, the swears are not censored in the actual blog titles. Or in the actual paper!]
The source list should be fine, but assume trigger warning for any sources you track down.

Ali. "Addendum to Latest SBC Rant." Web log post. The Polite Yeti. 2 May 2011. Web. 3 Apr. 2013.

Ali. "So Glad You're Writing These." Web log comment. B*tch Media. 6 Jan. 2012. Web. 20 Aug. 2013. 

Ali/Eliot. "The Very next Day Was My Birthday." Web log post. The Alternate Lexicon. 1 Apr. 2011. Web. 20 Aug. 2013.

Amialone. Web log post. This Is Not a F*cking Thinspo Site. July 2013. Web. 24 Aug. 2013. <http://amialone.tumblr.com/post/56116672621/throwing-in-one-or-two-female-pronouns-when>.

"Any Other AS Transwomen Scared That You’ll Be Socially Forever Male?" Web log post. Queering Autism. Apr. 2012. Web. 20 Aug. 2013.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. "La Prieta." This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. By Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983. Print.

"Autism and Transsexualism." Transsexual Roadmap. 6 Mar. 2012. Web. 21 Aug. 2013.

Autism Survival Manual - Autism and Sexuality. By Craig (weaveintothewin2). The Autism Survival Manual. Youtube, 12 Aug. 2010. Web. 26 Aug. 2013.

Baggs, Amanda. "Please Violate Only One Stereotype at a Time." Web log post. Ballastexistenz. 16 Dec. 2007. Web. 24 Aug. 2013.

Baggs, Amanda. "This Is Not the Post I Started out Writing." Web log post. Ballastexistenz. 19 Nov. 2009. Web. 22 Aug. 2013.

Bascom, Julia. "Whose Stories Get Told: Regarding Feeling Unsafe In The Glee Fandom." Web log post. Just Stimming. 14 Oct. 2011. Web. 24 Aug. 2013.

Becker, Corina. "The Beginnings of Autistic Speaking Day." 2011. Loud Hands: Autistic People Speaking. Ed. Julia Bascom. 1st Ed. Washington, DC: The Autistic Press, 2012. 70-74. Print.

Bedard, Cheryl, Hui Lan Zhang, and Kenneth J. Zucker. "Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation in People with Developmental Disabilities." Sexuality and Disability 28.3 (2010): 165-75. Springer Link. Springer, 20 Mar. 2010. Web. 29 Mar. 2013.

Bev. "The Ever-expanding List of Neurotypical Privilege." Weblog post. Square 8. 29 July 2009. Web. 22 Aug. 2013.

Brown, Lydia M. "How They Hate Us." Web log post. Autistic Hoya. 19 Aug. 2013. Web. 21 Aug. 2013.

Bryce, Landon. "John Elder Robison on Autism and Sexual Orientation." Web log post. ThAutcast. 20 May 2012. Web. 3 Apr. 2013.

"Call for Submissions: TFW Forum on Disabilities, Ableism, and Disability Studies." The Feminist Wire. 26 Aug. 2013. Web. 26 Aug. 2013.

Cat. "Meet Your Moderator: Cat." Web log post. Nonbinary Autistics. 10 Jan. 2011. Web. 20 Aug. 2013.

"Database of Sexuality and Disability Resources." Ed. Grace Kelly, Lorraine Hone, Zoe Hughes, and Adrianne Pullen. Connect People Network, 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.

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