Multifarious Threads

Stop presuming incompetence, Autism Parents.

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This is my entry for Autistics Speaking Day. There are content warnings in place for emotional abuse, shame-based training, anti-autistic sentiment and fundamentalist religion.

Edition to clarify, 1 November 2015: My family and teachers did know I was autistic; I was diagnosed at a very young age, in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Their actions toward me were an example of wilful ignorance and shame-based thinking, but it would be unfair to say that they didn’t know I was autistic.

My childhood predates the widespread phenomenon of the “autism parent” who infantilises their child well into the adult years, writes long jeremiads about how burdensome their child is and how much better off they would be if their child were dead, constantly presumes their adolescent or adult child’s incompetence, and avoids facing the reality that their child is an independent and autonomous person. Nevertheless, despite the different social landscape surrounding autism that existed in the late 80s and early 90s, I had much of the same destructive rhetoric and behaviour directed toward me throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, primarily concerning the pervasive presumption of incompetence and ignoring the root cause of particular behaviour patterns.

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The AutCom 2015 clusterfuck

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I am utterly appalled by the lack of attention given to true accessibility and inclusion on the part of the non-autistic organisers of Autcom. Kassiane Sibley, one of the autistic presenters (and one of my co-presenters!) who also has a seizure disorder, has written about certain Autcom organisers’ callous attitudes towards the potential risks of seizure triggers like flash photography here. 

People who make a big deal about presuming competence and supporting human rights for all need to practise what they preach. Don’t use fancy slogans if you don’t actually mean it, especially when this is literally a life-or-death matter. People can die from seizures and it’s one of the last things people should be taking lightly. 

I had my own incidents of fail. They’re definitely not life-threatening like a seizure trigger, but they’re still shitty enough that they need calling out.

When I was there there was a woman who would constantly try to touch people without their consent. I’d feel a light tap on my shoulder or back nearly every time I passed her. You’d think she would have been told that this was an access issue because a lot of us autistic folks have startle response issues or sensory needs regarding touch, but no! I did hear somebody say ‘don’t touch’ to her once, but she didn’t stop and continued to do it throughout the conference. This woman turned out to be the sister of one of the people who was presuming incompetence on the part of the flash photographer so… I really don’t fucking know what’s going on, but if you want to talk about accessibility, look at your own damn family. I don’t like people randomly touching me at odd times without my express consent. Your right to do what you want ends where my body begins. 

Later, I presented on a panel about autism and race with some of the only people of colour/non-white people who were at the conference: Kassiane, Lydia Brown and Morénike Onaiwu. My portion of the presentation was about racial profiling and how it intersects with autism, primarily about how ‘odd’ behaviour can be interpreted as seeming drunk or high, and how many people end up with dangerous – or even fatal – interactions with the police. At the end of the panel, Sandi (she of ‘maybe you don’t belong here if you have epileptic seizures’) asked me ‘as a black man, how are you afraid of the police’ (paraphrase). Like, seriously, what the fuck? I spent ten fucking minutes talking about why law enforcement is such a danger for black people and you ask me THAT question? If you’d actually listened, maybe you’d have avoided parting your lips to ask that nonsense. 

(More from Wandering Autistic and Turtle is a Verb) 

Don’t compare Rachel Doležal with Caitlyn Jenner

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(Editor’s note: this post is an expanded version of a Facebook status, made after some people were making one-to-one comparisons between the two.) 

Please don’t equate the Rachel Doležal scandal with Caitlyn Jenner or other trans people’s transitions and gender identities. This is not only for people who wish to criticise both Doležal and Jenner, but for those who want to defend Doležal’s deception on the ground that her behaviour is no different from that of Caitlyn Jenner after she announced her gender transition. 

This is why you shouldn’t equate Rachel Doležal and Caitlyn Jenner.

There’s a difference between gender identity and race. Gender is personal in a way that race isn’t. 

Somebody’s race is bounded by the community or communities they were brought up in. It’s external. By contrast, gender is based on a lot of internal self-perception. There are several ways of expressing maleness, femaleness and non-binary identities, whereas ‘expressing blackness’ or ‘expressing East Asianness’ are based on phenotypic classifications of people. A skin colour isn’t even a culture; it’s just an appearance. When Rachel Doležal attempted to take on the appearance of a black woman for nearly a decade, she based that blackness on phenotype. She defined the community based on the colour of her skin and the texture of her hair, rather than by their culture and traditions. That act is in fact racist and deeply hurtful. 

That’s different from gender identity identity in all its different permutations, which transcends different cultures and ‘races’. In any culture you will find gendered people.

It also seems as though Doležal has a background of lying to elicit more sympathy or to garner her more advantages. She’s lied about her childhood, claiming that she had to hunt for food with bows and arrows and that she was born in a tipi in Montana. She also claimed to have grown up in South Africa and Colorado, when her family and adopted brothers ended up living in South Africa on a missions trip after Doležal was an independent adult. She had, in fact, never visited them there. She lied about her family composition as well, claiming her adopted brother was her so and saying that an unrelated black man was her biological father and that her actual biological father was her stepfather. 

And again, Doležal fabricated parts of her past in order to create a black identity; Caitlyn Jenner didn’t fabricate anything through her transition. 

When people transition to reflect their gender identity, they don’t change their entire past to match a newly adopted identity. They don’t lie about who their parents or siblings or children are. They don’t say they’ve lived in countries or states they’ve never been to. This isn’t remotely the same thing. (Caveat: I know in the past many trans people were encouraged by doctors to hide their pasts in order to assimilate in the community, but this is 2015; it’s different for most trans people now. And yet again, gender transition is in no way, shape or form related to Doležal’s web of lies.) In any case her behaviour stinks of cynicism and opportunism.

I don’t have an issue with her being involved with the NAACP or teaching Africana Studies. I have an issue with her fabricating her past and trying to pass herself off as black so that she could get a job. I recognise that she may be struggling with some mental health issues or other difficulties. From that standpoint I extend the same level of sympathy I would towards any other struggling human being, but that doesn’t mean I will in any way, shape or form excuse her behaviour. 

Please, please don’t equate the Doležal affair with gender identity with a simple one-to-one comparison like this. 

Internationalising disability activism

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One thing that I find a bit frustrating is how atomised the various disability-studies communities are, even when many of the issues affecting people in one country may be similar to, or related to, the issues that affect people in other places. I could go for days in various US-based disability groups and not hear a single thing about things that are happening elsewhere, even if they’re obviously related phenomena. It’s very difficult for me to talk about these issues in those groups because I worry that no-one will pay them any attention because they’re not being directly affected by it.

Let’s use the 2015 general election in the UK as an example. (If you’re in the UK please correct me if I’ve got any of these details wrong!) From 2010 to 2015 the Conservative Party was in control of the British government in a coalition with the Liberal Democrat party; after the elections in early May, the Conservatives were able to win enough seats in the House of Commons to form a government without needing to be in a coalition with the Lib Dems. The Conservatives have been derided by British disability and anti-poverty activists for their continual marginalisation of poor and disabled people in the country (especially England and Wales), including the implementation of workfare (usually in the form of unpaid labour in service-sector jobs in exchange for Jobseekers’ Allowance, a form of government benefit in the UK), extreme cuts to social services, draconian tests run by contractors like Atos to determine whether people are fit for work or not and the increased use of food banks instead of receiving direct cash benefit. There has even been recent discussion of introducing American-style fees paid at the point of service when patients see their doctors on the English and Welsh NHS, similar to co-pays that are paid at American clinics.

Many American readers will recognise many of these policies as ones that were implemented during the Reagan, Clinton and George W Bush administrations. American cash-aid programmes that are not specifically for disabled people will often require recipients to work without payment in order to continue receiving their benefits, as a perverse incentive to persuade them to work, even though people who tend to seek benefits either have trouble seeking work in the current economy, or struggle with it because of a disability. Most people who have ever applied for Social Security disability benefits have found themselves subjected to constant questions about whether they’re ‘really’ disabled, repeated rejections and court hearings, and humiliation at the hand of government officials whose goal is to make sure that they don’t actually seek assistance.

You won’t hear about this issue in any US-centric disability discussion, even though the British government’s behaviour is clearly inspired by the actions of American politicians. British politicians are looking at the US and copying some of the worst policies to inflict on poor and disabled people in the UK. I remember participating in a Facebook group that’s composed of an international group of neurodivergent people, and a few people in the UK expressed concern that very few American posters showed interest in what was happening there when they themselves, or their friends, were having their lives threatened by the Conservatives’ war on poor and disabled citizens and saw them come back to power with even more seats than they had before – and when many of those same British people would monitor American politics during a presidential election. This isn’t even a country that isn’t discussed much in American media; I’m talking about the UK, a country that shares a language and several cultural traditions and is a major strategic ally in US foreign relations. I could have chosen another country and another set of issues, but I chose this one to show exactly how bad the atomisation is.

I really wish there was more international solidarity when it comes to disability politics, instead of the current atomised mentality I currently see. Let’s stop acting as though the only disability rights that matter are the ones of our immediate neighbours; injustice is injustice no matter where it occurs.