If your understanding of ableism begins and ends with “I don’t say no-no words that I was told not to say” you do not understand ableism
ex: if you feel the need to go up to two disabled people having a conversation about their disability and say things like “actually you’re differently abled, not disabled” then you are actively addingableism not protecting people from it
[ID A threads of 23 tweets by Sara Gibbs (@ Sara_Rose_G)
If you’re not autistic, please read: here’s how the cycle of autism misinformation works:
Neurotypicals (parents, researchers, autism professionals) decide to do something to “help” us. Usually it’s something distinctly unhelpful 1/
For example, a book or movie about what they imagine our inner experiences are, usually getting it completely wrong & also usually received with feverish butt-licking praise from the non-disabled community, who tend to think it’s “beautiful” or “brave” 2/
Or perhaps a research project, again claiming to “help” but showing no signs of how it plans to do so beyond studying us like zoo animals with a potential view to “curing” us or maybe even making sure we’re not born in the first place 3/
Celebrity ambassadors are wheeled out to the media - almost exclusively parents of autistic kids. Now, this all sounds reasonable enough, right? Isn’t autism a disease? Aren’t autistic people unable to speak for themselves?
Well no and, for the most part, no 4/
1) autism is a neurological difference. In many ways it’s a disability. In many ways it’s our personality.
There’s nothing wrong with who we are. It’s just communicated to you in terms of our deficits. Think of all of your personality traits presented in a pathologised way. 5/
Imagine seeing a list of your character traits skewed in negative terms to make you sound disordered:
“Inexplicable enjoyment of large social gatherings”
“Rigid adherence to confusing unspoken social rules”
“Excessive need for eye contact” etc.
You’d sound disordered too 6/
Now - there are some things about autism that can be disabling - sensory processing disorder springs to mind. But instead of focusing on, say, developing a drug to help us cope or adapting society to give us better access, they treat our whole character like a disease 7/
2) can we speak for ourselves? A lot of autism misinformation focuses on the idea of “mild” to “severe” autism, often focusing on whether or not we can speak, which doesn’t chime with the experiences of actually autistic people. 8/
Link to the article attached in the original post.
Some autistic people are non-speaking. Some have other comorbid disabilities, chronic illnesses & pain conditions. Sometimes these things come together to form a complex picture with high support needs. However - whether or not we can speak is one part of a much bigger picture 9/
Not all non-speaking people are unable to communicate. Some communicate through AAC devices or in writing. And not all speaking autistics experience their autistic traits “mildly”. I am a highly verbal autistic person with moderately high support needs, for example 10/
So what does all this have to do with the unhelpful helpers I started my thread with?
The unhelpful helpers announce their benevolent, charitable autism project. They feel sorry for us. They think we’re diseased & need fixing. They think we can’t speak & need translating 11/
Except we aren’t diseased & we can, for the most part, communicate. Not all in the same way but many of us can.
So we speak up & tell the unhelpful helpers they’re being unhelpful. You’d think as they want to help us so much they’d listen, right? Well, no. 12/
It’s all smiles & sunshine & self-congratulation - until the autism community speaks up. Then it gets ugly. We’ve challenged their view of themselves as good Samaritans. If I were to pathologise NT behaviour I’d say they’re prone to cognitive dissonance 13/
They need a way to discredit us pronto. Either it’s challenging our autistic identities (if we can speak, we must not be autistic enough, therefore what we say isn’t valid) or patronising us (if we can’t speak, we must be confused & what we say isn’t valid) 14/
The media is often complicit in this, either exclusively focusing on parents, researchers & autism professionals instead of asking an autistic person or having us on their shows to sanitise a non-autistic person’s autism project 15/
I have my own stories to tell about the latter & one day I will but now isn’t the right time.
Anyway given that these art & research projects focus on trying to find out what our mysterious inner worlds could possibly be, autistic voices present a problem 16/
Because what’s the point of lucrative neurotypical projects that study our mysterious inner worlds if you could JUST FUCKING ASK US??!!! 17/
The autism machine, the media & the public absolutely love back-patting projects. They love autistic people & want to help us. They love us & want to help us until we talk back. They love us & want up help us all the way to the bank while silencing & demeaning us 18/
If you’re neurotypical & have read this far, THANK YOU. Listening is the first & most important act of allyship.
So what can you do to help the potentially up to one in thirty of us who are your autistic friends, colleagues, family etc. to be heard? 19/
1) when you see a project like this, ask questions. Are autistic people involved? Is the autistic community behind it?
2) if not, who is being allowed to speak on big platforms? Where are the autistic voices of dissent?
3) complain. We can’t make a big enough dent on our own 20/
4) read, watch & listen to books, shows & art BY AUTISTIC PEOPLE. Preferably ones that haven’t been through a massive neurotypical filter.
5) amplify autistic voices, online & elsewhere
6) don’t treat us like we’re diseased & need a cure. We’re not & we don’t. 21/
And finally please don’t believe sickly sweet people with patronising saccharine smiles who claim they’re helping us while shouting over us & ignoring us entirely. Don’t believe our tormentors because they look & sound convincing. Don’t disbelieve us because we’re angry 22/
That’s it for now - thank you for reading all of this & if you’re neurotypical, your autistic pals need you. Please share this or other threads on our exploitation. Please help us the way we’re asking us to be helped. Then you can pat yourself on the back & mean it. End/
End ID]
I’m sitting in that nebulous area where I’m pretty sure I’m neurodivergent, not exactly sure how, and not able to see a psychiatrist consistently enough to really figure it out. ADHD, autism, or both, or something else altogether? I’m not sure.
Anyway, around 15-ish years ago, I remember stumbling across various blogs and small sites (i.e. Geocities or AngelFire sites) for young adults with autism, especially students. They were full of life-hacks, study tips, etc. that really helped me out. Enough that I didn’t need to keep visiting them, and didn’t really bother preserving my bookmarks or anything.
I fast forward about 8 years and I was having a rough time in college, so I went looking for those. But most of those blogs and small sites were gone (often because the entire hosting site was gone). I found tons of new autism websites and blogs! …almost exclusively geared for the parents and teachers of children with autism. At most, ones for high school/college students were about self-advocacy. Which is useful, don’t get me wrong, just not what I needed and not what I remembered seeing before. All the advice for just day to day coping and strategies someone with autism or neurodivergence can use for themselves were gone.
In retrospect, those older blogs and small sites were probably written and created by people with autism. The blogs and sites that got popular enough to be the first 10-20 pages of search engine results later on were…most definitely not.
It’s like suddenly, the Internet couldn’t fathom the idea that someone neurodivergent could exist outside of what an abled person can do for them.
(Trigger warning for abuse, electroshock therapy, torture, and ableism.)
The US court has overturned the ban on shock devices being used against disabled students, predominantly autistic students in the US.
The shock device being legalized is called the graduated electronic decelerator (or GED). This is a torture device that is used to ‘correct’ autistic behaviors / symptoms. Autistic people are shocked for stimming, and for having meltdowns, ect. This device was made popular by a behavioral center (the Judge Rosenberg Center, specifically) that is infamous for its abuse and torture of autistic / disabled patients.
(Image ID: someone is holding their arm out and resting it on a table, with their sleeve rolled up. Attached to their arm are wires, which connect to a small cube device.)
This is what the device looks like. It sends electric shocks into the victim’s skin; the victim often being restrained and held against their will. This is torture. GEDs have been reported to cause intense psychological trauma, PTSD, and physical injuries.
In March of 2020, the FDA ruled for GEDs to be banned. (Although, of course, they were still illegally used at a number of places.) This ruling has recently been appealed, and today, the US court of appeals has re-regulated the law to stop the use of GED. Sounds great, right? It would be!
… If not for a huge loophole in the wording, which basically allows this torture to continue. This device is going to have continued use on autistic students in order to “correct their behavior.”
“So…. What can I do??”
Great question! You can:
Listen to and boost autistic voices to spread awareness
As-of now (July 7th), autistic activists are trying to get #StopTheShock trending on Twitter, so Tweet out the hashtag if you have Twitter
If you’re in the US, email / call your legislators
I think a lot of abled people get confused about ableism because they fail to recognize how diverse a category disability is. There are so many kinds of disabilities - intellectual, sensory, motor, chronic illness, neurodivergence, limb differences, to name a few - and people in these categories will have different needs.
Which is why you often end up with disability advocates saying seemingly “contradictory” things. One group may be advocating for more support while another wants increased independence. People with a terminal illness will fight for a cure and more research whereas some ND/sensory disabilities want to stop having their experience medicalized, and so on. The kinds of ableism that people experience will also vary for that reason.
And having one kind of disability doesn’t make you an expert on all of them! Which is why it’s important to have diverse disability rep within organizations and groups. I’ve encountered organizations in the past that claim to be accessible/disability friendly because they have one disabled person on their board, only to find them woefully unequipped to deal with my very different disabilities.
This disability pride month I really encourage abled “allies” to examine the ways they try to flatten disability into a monolith and to make an effort to listen to and uplift diverse disabled voices.
[ID: Two tweets by Mor the Book Dragon (@ MorTheBookWyrm) that read: Disabled MCs are NOT hard to sell, you’re just bad at writing us.
Ash Williams (Evil Dead) is disabled
Imperator Furiosa (Max Max) is disabled
Kaz Brekker (Six of Crows) is disabled
Cinder (Lunar Chronicles) is disabled
Long John Silver (Treasure Island) is disabled
And you know what, they’re literally just five I rattled off the top of my head. There are loads of us. You just no longer consider us disabled if we’re accomplished. You think that “disabled” is a euphemism for “failure” or “useless” when is really, really isn’t. We’re awesome. End ID]
They really don’t connect disability with accomplishments. Remember that one post that was like “how is Ed Elric disabled” when he is literally missing an arm and leg!?
Toph is disabled. She’s blind and she’s one of the best Earth Benders ever.
Professor Xavier is also disabled and he’s a super powerful mutant.
Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon is disabled, he had to get his foot replaced at the end of the first movie.
For real, it’s not that hard to sell these character, people just don’t try
Watching an ableist as fuck movie during class and realizing after I opened my mouth about it just how hard it is for disabled people to fucking get a point across about inspirational porn.
No, The Butterfly Circus is not inspirational. Disabled people pushing themselves to abled standards is a disgustingly common thing that can KILL disabled people. Fuck you and fuck your inspiration porn. Fuck you and your display of disabled suffering to entertain abled people. It was disturbing.
Worst of all was how my teacher took it, as a personal attack. “I just wanted to inspire you all for the weekend, now mine is ruined.”
You’re a fifty something year old woman, get over your fucking self, Jesus fucking CHRIST. I’m your twenty four year old student who just pointed out the MOVIE’S usage of disabled suffering as prop, and now you think I’m attacking you??
“Nico, you need to calm down”, no, Y'ALL need to realize that there’s a fucking disabled woman in our class and she had to mute her microphone as she began CRYING, sending me a private message to say thank you, that she was afraid the class would dislike her if she spoke up.
This is what you, as an able-bodied person can do. Speak up about this shit. It makes me so fucking angry, my blood is BOILING.
I get so fucking tired of people taking your valid arguments about a movies shitiness as a personal attack. “Hi this movie is actually incredibly offensive to real humans on earth” gets a general response of “how dare you insult this fictional movie about fictional people that I have grown attached to for some reason”
Just reading the description of that movie made my eye twitch. What the fuuuuck.
And this shit comes up in real life! I am disabled. I cannot work full time. And that’s all that I should have to tell someone. Right?
Yeah no. I had a former roommate who told me that she thought I was limiting myself too much. That I should look at full time positions, because she just knew that if I pushed myself, I could do more than I thought I could. When I told her that no, I straight up cannot do that, she went, “well how am I supposed to know that when you never talk about it?”
I never talked about it because she didn’t listen. I spent a very long time working with doctors and physical therapists and just pushing myself to improve to even get to the point that I can work part time. Having her say that I wasn’t pushing myself, that I could tooootally work full time if I just tried, made me feel like none of my hard work mattered.
I am disabled. And that means that I measure up using a different yardstick than abled people. Its taken a lot of work to get to the point where that doesn’t make me feel ashamed. My disability isn’t my fault. Im not lazy. I am trying my hardest.
And im not here to be your inspiration.
Inspiration porn isn’t just harmful because it fetishizes disabled people and reduces us to nothing more than an “it could be worse!” poster hanging up on their wall. It’s not just harmful because it teaches disabled people that if we are genuinely limited by our disabilities, that’s somehow our fault for not trying hard enough.
It’s also harmful because it teaches abled people that every disabled person is an inspiration waiting to happen. They can be the hero who helps you overcome your disability and become Normal, a new inspiration to the ableds, further proof that disability doesn’t *define* you, it’s just a tiny extra hurdle to jump over so you can succeed at life! All you need is to never give up - and to have an abled person who tells you to do yoga and meditation and go gluten-free and take CBD oil and, of course, reassures you now and then that You Can Do It! Just Don’t Give Up!
It teaches ableds that their job is to fix us. Not to accept us, or to provide the accommodations we ask for, or to be patient and understanding when we’re struggling, or show basic human compassion. Just to fix us.
And when we refuse to be fixed, insist that it doesn’t work that way, demand that they just accept that there are some things we can’t do, what we’re really doing is taking away their chance to be a hero. It’s selfish of us. We’re being unreasonable. After all, didn’t we see the news story of some kid who pushed themself to dangerous extremes in order to live up to the abled standard? Anyone can do it if they try hard enough!
It’s not that they don’t hear us when we say “I can’t”. It’s that inspiration porn has trained them to hear that as the intro to a heroic story where we eventually realize that actually, we can! We just needed the right abled hero to guide us!
“what we’re really doing is taking away their chance to be a hero” OMFG think of every abled person who starts to push someone’s wheelchair without asking, then gets all pissy when they get rightly put in their place. People like us who show that “You Can Do ANYTHING If You Just TRY!!!” is a fucking lie really disturb their shallow little world view.
i think you are mentally insane if you expect a woman who is solely sexually attracted to other women to be into penises. like what.
ive been bi for as long as i remember so im into both and personally i don’t necessarily have a genital preference, but using something called empathy i know i would not be happy if someone tried to guilt me into enjoying penis…… all to validate someones identity?
some women dont like penises. some men dont like vaginas. other women dont like vaginas. other men dont like penises. and god forbid men and women not liking either! fucking deal with it!!!
Maybe instead of talking about how you want to exclude disabled people from society to ‘prevent suffering’ you start building a society that doesn’t make disabled people suffer.
People will see someone with a heavily demonized mental illness say that people with demonized mental illness are not INHERENTLY bad people and immediately jump to talk about all the ways the mentally ill person could possibly be abusive.
Like you hate us, it’s obvious, stop using abuse victims to help disguise your bigotry.
actually i’m tired of reading good social comics and then the bad guys of the comic (police, nazis, misogynists, politicians) are all fat, with double chins or neckbeards or bald spots or stretch marks or they’re hairy or they have acne etc. and usually they’re the only ones with those features. like??? can we stop equating beauty with morality holy shit?
Because of my eating disorder, my hair is falling out. I think about the horror of going bald—a permanent loss of vitality. I think about how it would destroy the feeble androgyny that is my only comfort in this body. I think about my grandmother, bald from cancer, and what that did to her. And I hear my proudly misandrist-identifying cisfemale friends making fun of bald men as if it were a shortcoming or decision of the men themselves. Bald men make them think of television pedophiles. Bald men remind them of self-indulgent authors and desperate improvisers. I see men on the train losing their hair, their youth, their options, and I feel for them. It’s not funny. It’s a dysmorphic nightmare for anyone. I don’t bother mentioning that I find the jokes unnecessary and insensitive. I know what the girls will say.
I would ask everyone in the notes making “Just get married” jokes to pay attention to the fact that the person who tweeted this has a wheelchair emoji in their name and remember the fact that people on social security disability payments lose all their benefits the instant they get married.
A rule like this will fully back disabled people on SSI into an ultimatum of stay single and get evicted or marry and become unable to pay the rent anyway.
This is such a great point. We all need to be mindful of how a lot of these laws are used for ableism. There are so many things we do that we don’t know we’re doing that was put in place to actively harm the disabled community. Like the way a lot of jobs require you to be able to lift 50 pounds even though it has nothing to do with the job.
So I was just having a thought about how I have a huge fear of confidence. Mostly because my controlling parents always smacked it down, as it made me easier to control.
They were fortunatly the only super controlling people I ran into. But if you’re ND you def ran into some controlling people at some point.
Over time, this classical conditioning, will inevtiably teach you that being confident is bad and should be avoided. That’s the point.
However, interestingly enough, if we look at the rest of the world. Quite the opposite is often true.
Now, of course there’s a time and a place where being confident will draw attacks. But, is it always?
My experience has been that when I approach things confidently, they tend to go much better.
Not just on the main issue either. We’re in a major time of change right now. Any change is more possible right now then at most other times in history.
So, if you can, educate yourself, toss a little cash to worth organizations, call, email, or write your reps, and connect with like minded people. Talking with friends and family might be one of the most important things as they’ll actually listen to you.
Keep in mind though that we’re all capable of different things and burning yourself out ain’t helping no one. Least of all yourself lol. So do what you can, but don’t expect everything from yourself.
where are all those “let people draw whatever they want” folks whenever an artist is being harassed over their trans or disability headcanons? when artists of color are being chased off the internet for their personal interpretations of characters who are either fanonically white or aracial? where are you all hiding?
that’s right, you only come out of the woodwork when artists are being genuinely nasty and making people feel unsafe. you don’t really care about letting people draw whatever they want, you just want people to be complacent in disgusting practices
the real “problem with political correctness” is not that it’s considered offensive to use slurs, but that there are now many “progressive” environments where saying the right things is more important than doing the right thing. it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); it’s why so much potential activist energy gets poured into fighting about language; it’s why moderate liberals didn’t believe fer/guson had a problem until the police emails with actual racist language were leaked. (you can do racist things, you just can’t SAY racist things.) i don’t have a neat conclusion here but a related point is that i’m so much happier since i started focusing on like, being a good kind caring person instead of trying to remove the word “crazy” from the vocabulary of everyone in my family
