A Discussion on the Gender Binary

Trigger Warning: References to forced normalization, anti-trans bigotry+violence, cissexism, binarism

In the current society, it does not appear possible to live entirely without gender- it is certainly possible to have a genderless identity, and it is possible to perform in ways that make it extremely difficult for others to determine a gender, but it seems impossible to avoid having others read the performance as belonging to one of the two binary genders. (The performance may, however, be read as being a defective or incorrect version of one of these two genders.)

I claim that it is possible to identify with no gender at all due to both knowing people who do so and to having run across statements from those who do so over the course of research for another project, namely discussing the erasure of Queer Autistic people. In this research, I had difficulty finding anything academic about sexual orientation, perhaps due to assumptions that we are incapable of relationships (a false assumption) and that our sexuality would therefore be irrelevant (I had better luck with Autistic bloggers, who have written both about their orientations and about the erasure of their orientations.) One wrote about navigating a world full of gendered signals that were invisible to their genderless self, and another wrote that questions asking about gender remind him of being asked for "miles per gallon" of a vehicle powered by solar electricity. (Jack 2012.) Using writings from many Autistic people as well as researchers not identified as on the spectrum, Jack discusses a view of gender as a copia from autistic perspectives, noting that many Autistic people have non-traditional gender identities. Sometimes, these identities are a matter of dis-identifying with both binary genders, stating a genderless identity, or claiming to lack the internal wiring to see gender as an important variable (Jack 2012.) Given this sort of identification as part of newly more common questioning if gender comes in more than just two flavors (Rosenberg 159,) it's clear that a genderless identity is possible.

However, I do not think it is currently possible to be read by others as genderless- gender identity, assignment, and presentation are three different things (Lee and Shaw 107,) and I would argue that attempted presentation is not the same thing as how presentations are read by others. The idea of androgyny many have is one that emphasizes the masculine, viewing it as neutral (Lee and Shaw 109,) so a performance that is actually a mix of masculine and feminine will be read as feminine. This is the issue I run into with my performance, which includes a mix of masculine and feminine pieces and is read consistently as feminine, sometimes as poorly done feminine. It is also part of a social construction of gender which privileges masculinity as ideal or as neutral- men are not often thought of as a gender group (Lorber 127.)

Society is, in many cases, terrified of those who may break the gender binary, assigning a gender at birth, then using surgery and hormones to make those who are biologically intersexed fit (Lee and Shaw 106.) Forcing performance in alignment with the gender assigned at birth is often considered a part of therapy for autistic children (Bumiller,) noted in her essay about autism, political theory, and working against forced normalization. This is not, of course, exclusive to autism- anyone who veers too far from gendered social standards is subject to sanctions, both formal and not (Lorber 127.) These sorts of sanctions are what many trans* people run into, having been pushed into one gender box their whole lives but fitting better in the other (or in neither!) Trans* people are at risk for all sorts of discrimination and hate crimes (Rosenberg 160,) which looks like an adult and higher stakes version of the sanctions Lorber describes.

This fear of those who break the gender binary, or even those who simply wish to take the "other" position within an untouched and unquestioned binary as Richards seems to (qtd. in Rosenberg 161,) stems from the institution of gender as a way of creating social groups to assign jobs to (Lorber 127.) If a person steps outside of their assigned place within a hierarchical system, people worry that others might wish to follow, that the system could be about to collapse, and so any deviation must be eliminated swiftly. To make men fit, shame is often the weapon with which they are taught that they must not be like women (Wexler 141,) and women are socialized to be all the things men are shamed out of. This shame could not work if femininity were considered equally valuable and simply different, but masculinity is privileged, and so the ways of making women conform to femininity need to be slightly different. They are also less stringently enforced, with far more women willing to admit to "tomboy" tendencies than men willing to admit to being a sissy (Lee and Shaw 105.)

It's socialized. It's all socialized, everything is culture. Things that are really results of socialization, such as the idea that men are more honest, intelligent, and courageous, while women are passive and dependent, are often stated as "biological fact" and used to push people into jobs that gender stereotypes say they are best qualified for. Even when people actively rebel against gender norms (or simply fail to understand why they are so important and innocently ignore them,) gender is still a huge part of life. Others will read us as belonging to one gender or another, based on things like a baseball cap, earrings, or choice of shoes (Lorber 126.) From those readings, we are shuttled along one path or the other, sometimes physically separated from those on the other path. When Beka, the protagonist in one Tamora Pierce novel asked how men and women could understand each other when kept separate, her cat (this is fantasy and the cat is also a constellation) replied, "They aren't expected to understand one another," he replied. "The women will learn to flirt over a friend's shoulder, instead of close. The men will see the women as distant and unknowable. Their friends will be only men. The women will see men as strong and unknowable. Their friends will be only women" (Pierce #.) That is an extreme effect, but men are often taught today that they can't understand women because of innate gender differences, when it is really socialized gender differences that make it hard for members of one gender to understand members of another.

Works Cited:

Bumiller, Kristin. "Quirky Citizens: Autism, Gender, and Reimagining Disability." Signs: Journal of Women  

     in Culture and Society 33.4 (2008): 967-91. JSTOR. ITHAKA. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.

Jack, Jordynn. "Gender Copia: Feminist Rhetorical Perspectives on an Autistic Concept of Sex/Gender."  

     Women's Studies in Communication 35.1 (2012): 1-37. Taylor & Francis Online. Taylor & Francis 

     Group, 16 May 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.

Lorber, Judith. "The Social Construction of Gender." 1994. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic 

     and Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher 

     Education, 2011. 126-128. Print.

Pierce, Tamora. Mastiff. Random House, 2011. Print.

Rosenberg, Debra. "(Rethinking) Gender." 2007. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and 

     Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher 

     Education, 2011. 158-162. Print.

Shaw, Susan M., and Janet Lee. "Learning Gender." Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and 

     Contemporary Readings. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2011. 105-120. Print.

Wexler, David. "Shame-O-Phobia." 2010. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and 

     Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher 

     Education, 2011. 141-144. Print.

Later, shorter, or not really relevant thoughts that I still want to say:

• I think I know Lindsay of Autist's Corner who got cited in Jack 2012. A couple others are in Loud Hands: Autistic People Speaking with me. I... am apparently citing a paper that cites the blogs of some people I know. Huh.
• I wonder how much the whole "trouble reading neurotypical social cues" has to do with the number of Autistic people who "don't get" gender and how much it has to do with what I semi-jokingly describe as "My brain is different, and by the way, my brain is different." When I say that, in this case, I mean that Autistic people are definitely wired differently, and that there does seem to be some brain difference component to being LGBTQ+ of any flavor, and the actual neurological differences aren't that well understood for either group. For all we know, the relevant brain differences for each could be related to each other. There is some evidence of correlation.
• I prefer to think of the masculine and feminine spectrum as being two separate sliders rather than one spectrum because more masculine doesn't nessesarily mean less feminine, at least in terms of identity. My levels of each seem to move around pretty much independently of each other, anyways. (In response to the continuum description on page 110 of the text.)
• "Born male" and "born female" along with "man living as woman" and that sort of thing all kind of bother me- what we are assigned at birth should not get precedence over identity as what we "really" are.
• It sounds like Smith is discriminating against transwomen. That's not cool.
• Trans* is a notation I see trans* people use on Tumblr for basically everything other than cis. I'm going with the language choices I see trans* people actually using here.
• I'm still working on figuring out exactly what my gender identity is. It's something in the gender-neutral/androgyne area, but exactly where is a good question. That's why I often say "they" about women.
• Tamora Pierce was the female role model I posted about in my introduction. This is part of why. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where my copy of Mastiff is, so I'm not sure what page it's on.
• I don't know how to walk "like a girl." I've been told there's something about swinging my hips, but that doesn't tell me how to actually do that.

GWS Week 1 Discussion

This is my response to the first week discussion questions- we're supposed to talk about what we think feminism is, what "feminist" means to us, what we think we're going to learn after reading the stuff from the first week, how the readings affected us/what we thought of them, and a thing that we think will be hard in the class/what to do about it.

Commentary/changes I added later are in brackets.

Trigger Warning: References to sexism, ableism, classism, racism, etc and some description of the intersection of sexism and disability/ableism. (Yes, sexism and disability/ableism, it's the effects that my actual impairments have on my experience of sexism in addition to how people react to the impairments.)

In my head, feminism is the movement and gender and women's studies is the academic discipline. The two go together, and scholar-activists, those who work in both the academy and in activist circles, are extremely important to making sure that the two do not fall too far out of sync and in making sure the historically exclusive academy remains aware of the day-to-day needs of the activists. In an ideal world, activists and academics would find where the ideals of what can be and the practical needs of the world intersect, then push their respective worlds towards those goals- this should be true of any movement with both academic and activist portions. Both feminism and gender/women's studies should address issues relating to gender as the main focus, making sure to cover intersections of gender with all other marginalizations. Thus, a feminist should also be anti-racist, accepting of gender and sexual minorities, anti-classist, and anti-ableist, and academic work in gender and women's studies should avoid perpetuating other -isms in rhetorical arguments against sexism.

While the word feminist brings a man-hating lesbian who probably does not shave her legs to many minds, to me, it simply means someone who understands that gender inequality and discrimination exists, privileging masculine performance, identification, and legal assignment over the feminine and believes that all the gender identities and presentations should be equal. (I will admit- I actually don't shave my legs. It's more a matter of sensory processing issues, clumsiness, and knowing I won't remember to keep up with it than a political matter, though. Autism: it's a thing.)

From my initial readings of the text, it looks like I will gain knowledge of what to call many of the things I have been thinking about and a more detailed understanding of them- I had noticed previously that my androgyne (as in, actually has a mix of masculine and feminine things in it) presentation and identity was consistently perceived as female, and I had put together that this was only partially due to my having been assigned female at birth and looking like it. Part of it was also the fact that people often perceive maleness as neutral, which looks to be part of androcentrism (Shaw and Lee 1.) Seeing the word androcentrism, I notice that androgyne as a mix of the two binary genders has "andro" in it, which would mean male if androcentrism is male-centrism, but I do not recognize a root for female. Perhaps the term we use for the in-between state of a mix is, in fact, another example of androcentrism. [I realized that gyne was a female root about 10 minutes after turning this in. My teacher did not wind up calling me on this, and I forgot to change it in this. But then Irena told me in the comments, so not I remember- yes, gyne is in there.] I also expect that I will learn more about issues that are applicable to looking at the intersections of various marginalizations, which was one of my goals in this course- the text mentions the intersection of race and gender as early as page 2; Carestathis writes specifically on intersections focusing on race and gender (Carestathis;) Rich implies that education opened to white middle class women before other women (Rich 23,) an intersection of class, gender, and race; bell hooks notes that the face of feminism is typically white women with material privileges and that "white men were more willing to consider women's rights when the granting of those rights could serve the interests of maintaining white supremacy (hooks 35.) The ability to look critically at intersections, even (and perhaps especially!) those which reside outside my initial area of interest, disability, is an important part of what I hope to gain from this course.

As I was already aware that women with more privileges tended to dominate conversations in mainstream feminism, ignoring the concerns of those with fewer, hook's statement that many stopped thinking about revolution when they got a bit of power (hooks 35) combined with the reminder that feminism must be concerned with ending all oppression, for no one is truly free until everyone is (Carestathis) only serve to remind me of how much work there is to be done, that the whole system needs to be rebuilt in order to achieve true liberation, possibly from scratch. It is a daunting task, which will require people working together- not the "We're all women, be quiet and let me be racist/ableist/classist/etc against you" or "We're all disabled, be quiet and let me be sexist/racist/homophobic/etc towards you" sort of working together, but the sort where the people who have privilege in a given situation listen to those who do not.

bell hook's piece resonated with me, with her statements about a "Christian" culture, and how a white supremacist capitalist (and therefore classist) patriarchy would never change enough to end oppression. She noted a split between reformers and revolutionaries, with the reformers focusing on equality based on gender and revolutionaries wanting to change the whole system, recognizing that simply fixing gender discrimination would not make the world free (hooks 34-35.) 

[Yes, I'm about to start talking about how my experiences are different because I'm Autistic now.] Few of the statements made by Quindlen resonated, with much of her writing seemingly speaking more to the experiences of women who are able to decode and understand social rules, rather than being consistently mystified by the whole mess. Without the ability to comprehend (or even necessarily detect the existence of) quiet social pressures unless someone brings them explicitly to my attention, "effortless perfection" and all it entails is something I can only see as a thing that society somehow got people to do. [I can also academically understand how it works, but I can't feel most of the pressures unless people state them explicitly.] I can never experience the subtle pressures of what I "should" do, because in order to even know that there is a message, it must be relayed so explicitly that the issues within become obvious, which is far from subtle. That is not to say that I do not experience sexism [or that I could not/did not absorb messages perpetuating other -isms]- I do [and did]. It is just in different ways. Instead of the subtle pressure of media images telling me I should shave my legs, I get told by well-meaning [but misogynist] neighbors that I should start. Instead of media subtly suggesting that I need to wear makeup to get a man, classmates demanded to know why I wasn't covering my acne and told me explicitly that I would never get a boyfriend if I didn't learn to apply makeup properly (not going to happen- it's a sensory issue. Autism: Still a thing.)

Her statement about only 14% of sciences faculty being female (Quinden 39,) however, I noticed, having found myself outnumbered by men at even greater ratios in many of my engineering courses. In one course, I was the only female-presenting student in a class of nearly 50.

One of the hardest parts of the course for me, I suspect, will be taking off the disability studies goggles long enough to look at the world through a differently focused sociological lens. In reality, I suspect that I will be one of those who hits the intersection of gender and disability most, but that by making sure to look at the other angles first, I will get better at using the gender lens.

Carestathis, Anna. "Intersectionality & Feminism." KickAction.ca. N.p., 13 Feb. 2008. Web. 24 May  

     2013.

hooks, bell. "Feminist Politics: Where We Stand." 2000. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and 

    Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher 

    Education, 2011. 33-36. Print.

Quindlen, Anna. "Still Needing the F Word." 2003. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and 

    Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher 

    Education, 2011. 39-40. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. "Claiming an Education." 1979. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and 

    Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher 

    Education, 2011. 23-25. Print.

Shaw, Susan M., and Janet Lee. "Women's Studies: Perspectives and Practices." Women's Voices, 

    Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher 

    Education, 2011. 1-22. Print.

Turkey: #OccupyGezi, Police Brutality, and a Petition

If you want to sign petitions, you can find them here, here, and here.
Trigger Warning: Police Brutality

It begins with Turkish people gathering in a part, in front of bulldozers, to prevent it from being destroyed. They did not have a greater political ideology, they just wanted to protect their one big public park. They were going to camp out, they were singing. They were not violent.
The police came. The police were violent. It was a mess. Public transit was shut down, roads closed, in order to keep the protesters away (it grew, oh how it grew!) People kept coming in on foot. Some restaurants refused to take in protesters looking for shelter from the tear gas, the hoses, and the rubber bullets (Starbucks and Burger King among the ones I know about.) Later, the bullets stopped being rubber. People have died at these protests, without protesters starting any violence.
The park was cleaned up, quickly. Protesters did that, too. The city claimed credit, of course.
The protests continue, as far as I know. The violent crackdown continues. Agent Orange has been used. (Agent Orange is banned by the UN.)
Anonymous has called out the Turkish administration, and as far as I know, has already made progress on hacking things. The article about this is in Turkish, the video of them doing so in English. 
That's the general overview. Twitter has the #occupygezi and ##DirenGeziPark, and there was an @OccupyGezi that seems to have been suspended. (The government is onto social media and arresting people. It's pretty dire.)
And people who actually live in Turkey are blogging about it. Listen to them. Here's one. Here's Amnesty, who I think is getting their updates and "what to do's" from Turkish people. They've got the info on what you can do beyond the petitions.

The PoliteYeti Criteria and How I Measure Up

Below are PoliteYeti's criteria for autism. I like them better than DSM-IV, and much better than DSM-5. (My diagnosis is under DSM-IV, though one of the screwed up lines from DSM-5, which is the one with the way they grandfathered old diagnoses in, means I qualify under DSM-5 for sure. I think I meet it anyways, but yeah.)
So.
Bolding the ones I definitely have, italics if I'm not sure, comments in brackets after if applicable. The criteria can be found here.


A. Differences in perception (at least 3)

1. Sensory defensiveness (ie, complaints or avoidance of any of the following: loud noises or places, bright lights, textures (food or object/clothing), tastes, smells, touch) [STROBE LIGHTS OH MY GOD.]

2. Sensory seeking (ie, stims or stimming behaviour such as rocking, flapping, finger flicking, hair twirling, spinning objects, etc or actively desiring any of the following: deep pressure or touch, vestibular sensation [swings, spinning in any context, etc], specific smells, tastes, or textures)

3. Auditory processing difficulties [I think I have this. I have no hope of understanding either person if two are talking at once. Can't filter to understand one.

4. Unusual, awkward, or delayed motor skills, or asymmetry between gross and fine motor skills (ie, clumsy but with [some] strong fine motor skills, good gross motor skills with poor hand-writing or table skills, strong skills in a special-interest related area but poor overall [such as an ability to manipulate small objects but poor handwriting])

5. A reduced or lack of conscious awareness and/or use of allistic (not autistic) nonverbal behaviour and communication such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. This criterion should not exclude persons who have learnt to read or otherwise comprehend nonverbal behaviour by rote learning, particularly adults. Intentional learning to overcome an inherent difficulty in comprehension is supportive of this criterion. It should also not exclude persons who have been taught to use nonverbals to be less visibly different. In such cases, internal report of difficulty should take precedence over apparent behaviour.

B. Differences in cognition (at least 3, one of which must be 1 or 2)

1. Difficulty in beginning or ending (at least 1):

• Perseverative thoughts or behaviours  
• Needing prompts (visual, verbal, hand-over-hand, etc) to begin or finish a task
• Difficulties planning complex activities
• Catatonia
• Difficulty switching between activities
• Lack of apparent startle response [Nope, mine's over active]
• Preference for sameness (same food, same clothes, same travel routes, etc)

2. Difficulty in using language (at least 1, not necessarily present at all times):

• Problems with pronoun use that are developmentally inappropriate
• A reduced or lack of awareness of tone in self (ie, speaks in a monotone, childish, or otherwise unusual manner) and/or others (ie, does not [usually- I sometimes can] perceive sarcasm or follow implied prompts, responds to rhetorical statements and questions in earnest)
• A reduced or lack of awareness of volume (ie, speaks too loud or too quietly for the situation)
• No functional language use (includes sign, PECS, spoken, written, and any other communicative language regardless of form)
• Echolalia
• Mutism in some or all situations
• Uses scripts instead of spontaneous language (these may also be delayed echolalic in nature) [sometimes]

3. At least one special interest in a topic that is unusual for any combination of intensity (ie, does not want to learn/talk about anything else, collects all information about the topic) or subject matter (ie, unusual, obscure, or not considered age appropriate). Topics may be age appropriate and/or common (such as a popular television show or book), but the intensity of interest and/or specific behaviour (such as collecting or organising information as the primary focus) should be taken into account.
4. Asymmetry of cognitive skills
5. Talents in any pattern recognition, including music, mathematics, specific language structures, puzzles, and art (any one meets this criterion, not all must be present) [I present my box of math trophies, my history of chorus, my love for Chinese and pretty good skill with it, my box of 4-leaf clovers, and the entirety of Because Patterns for your perusal.]
6. A tendency to focus on details instead of the broader picture, across contexts.

C. These differences cause impairment and/or distress in at least one context (ie, school, work, home), which may be variable over time. Impairment or distress may be defined variably, including meltdowns, anxiety, depression, a pervasive sense of not fitting in, and compulsive behaviours [And Shutdowns.] It is necessary to remember that while the symptoms are not necessarily disabling in themselves, the social response to these symptoms can be disabling. The impairment or distress may be historical, with appropriate evidence to support this claim (ie, a documented history of meltdowns as a child, and only mild anxiety as an adult), as distress may decrease over time and with education.

D. Symptoms should be present in early childhood, but may not be noticable until social demands outpace compensatory skills, at any age [Hindsight 20/20 means we can find them quite well, as does my mother having figured out that some of the stuff that "the whole family does" is actually autistic stuff. Plus I had put the pieces together myself by the time I was 8, so I clearly knew what was up by then.]

Echolalia Gets Me Pickles: Autistic Playing Ultimate

I'm Autistic. I'm in college. I play on my college Ultimate Frisbee team.
I don't pass for neurotypical, either. I'm not consistently capable of speech, and Ultimate is a sport where we're typically expected to be talking to our teammates. The team knows that I will do this if I am capable, but that this is a bit of an if. And that's OK. It took some time for them to figure out that I really do understand when I should say a thing and what I should say, I'm just not always capable of doing so (it took until I managed to explain this, which it doesn't occur to me to do except right after this happens- you know, while I'm probably still not able to speak? There's a bit of a catch-22 there, but I did manage to explain eventually, after I started bringing my iPad to tournaments.) But once I explained that? That was it.

Or the fact that I'm not always going to be particularly social, that parties for "team bonding" can be overwhelming? The captains agreed to send me an email or tell me at practice later if anything important was announced at a party that I hadn't been able to go to, had left early, or had gone to sleep under a table early. (Yes, I did that my freshman year. The party plan had been to bring everyone to the captain's house, party, and stay over before the tournament in the morning, and I was the first one asleep by a long shot. And that was OK too.)

Or, back during a week full of tests where I was also dealing with some cyber harassment issues (not related to the team,) and then at practice we were supposed to do a thing that I'm just not capable of. I kept trying, though, because "I can't do this" isn't a thing I'm supposed to have to say... ever. I'm not really autistic, after all... (That's completely false, by the way, I'm Autistic and pretty obviously so. It's just an internal monologue that gets installed in every autistic person who accomplishes things. If you're not a pity case, you just need to stop pretending to have problems, or something like that, it's the functioning labels false binary again, and ableism is to blame for both sides of it.) My continued attempts to keep doing a thing that I can't actually do, combined with old bullying (again, not with this team) coming back to haunt me, plus having been under a lot of stress all week, meant that I melted down at practice. I had enough warning that I found a semi-hidden corner behind a hurdle and next to one of the structural columns, and then welcome to meltdown-land. Both captains came over, asked me if I was OK (no) and if there was anything they could do (back off, ask again when I'm done flipping out,) and then actually did what I'd said. They checked in with me later, I let them know what all was up. They told me that if there is a thing that I really don't have the motor skills to do, I should do what I can and not worry about dropping out of the activity, which I've been working on. Oh, and I proceeded to melt down again after practice because I'm always scared of reactions and I was convinced it was only a matter of time until the other shoe dropped and they kicked me off the team.

A couple practices later, they wanted to talk to me after practice. I was convinced that was going to be the "you can't be on this team" or some such thing. Nope. It was a "Spring Break is going to have this set of things that we think could be difficult for you, these are some things we can think of that we may be able to do to help, and it's up to you to figure out anything else to run by us/anything else you can prepare for yourself/if you're better off skipping, let us know if there are other things we can do to help" talk. That's the one where I told them that I'm Autistic. Our coach already knew that I had some sort of disability, but I don't think he'd known exactly what it was.

I went on Spring Break with the team. It was good. I didn't do all that much social stuff with the team outside of the actual tournament games, and I sometimes went off to the side on my own when the rest of the girl's team watched the boys team play, but it went fine. Spring Break is when echolalia got me pickles, too.

See, we were in Florida, at the Tally Classic tournament. They had an unopened jar of pickles at the food tent (tournaments often supply food to participating teams.) And I saw them. And I was all "There are pickles! Because pickles! Pickles pickles pickles pickles..." jumping and flapping. I was acting very stereotypically Autistic. They hadn't been planning to open the jar for another hour or so, but they did, right then, and gave me a PICKLE. I like pickles. I walked back to my sideline singing "pickle pickle pickle pickle..." to myself, eating my PICKLE. So yes. Echolalia got me a PICKLE.
Early in the season, I had used my iPad to type when I lost speech at practice and still wanted to go for dinner/ice cream with my team mates. Later in the season (en route to Sectionals) I joked "My autism's showing, don't let it run away!" and people laughed. At sectionals, I used the iPad in front of the whole team- after the games, we went around and said a thing that we thought the team did well, a think we thought we did well, and a thing we thought we needed to work on. That was three separate circles around for three different open-ended questions of the sort that I have trouble with. For the first, I was able to type and then read my answer, but for the second two I wound up passing my iPad over to a teammate to have her read what I'd typed. And no one had an issue with it. My team did well at "Autistic person on the team" and the whole "Autistic adult is an adult," and it was good. So yeah.

I think that "Echolalia gets me pickles" being the biggest thing that sticks out in my mind from the season says good things about the team.

This is in the Down Wit Dat August 2014 Blog Hop, BTW. The theme is about how disabilities and such are a natural part of life.