unquietpirate:

youneedacat:

We used to have a term in the autistic community, we called it ‘cousins’.

It started when Xenia Grant was talking to a guy who had hydrocephalus and had a lot in common with autistic people, but was not autistic.  She took a look at him and happily exclaimed, “Cousin!”

(I like to keep track of who coined terms.  It can be meaningful.  Xenia is the friendliest person I’ve ever met, autistic or nonautistic.  That’s the spirit that ‘cousin’ started in.)

Back when NT meant a nonautistic person, another abbreviation cropped, up, AC.  AC meant “Autistics and Cousins” and covered autistic people and… cousins.  So you’d talk about “ACs and NTs”.  But who were cousins?

Cousins were people with a neurological condition other than autism, but it gave them important things in common with autistic people.  Especially sensory processing, cognitive, and social traits in common with us.

Cousinhood wasn’t something that was based on a condition.  It was based on how that condition worked for a particular person.  So while sometimes we’d talk about ‘cousin conditions’, there was no condition where everyone with it was a cousin.

But some common cousin conditions included:  Tourette’s, hydrocephalus, OCD, schizophrenia, and AD(H)D.  Just as some examples.  Not everyone with those conditions was a cousin, but lots of cousins had those conditions or related ones.

The cool thing about cousin was that it dealt with the ambiguity of life.  It made it so that it wasn’t just ‘us and them’.  There was a broad hazy area around autism where people could be considered in many important ways ‘like us’ without being autistic.

Two people on tumblr that my brain automatically classifies as cousins are karalianne and lichgem.  (That’s assuming they’re not unknowingly autistic, of course.  Some people think of themselves as cousins but turn out to actually be autistic.)  I don’t see them as outside of the circle I draw around ‘autism’ for social purposes, because I draw that circle at the ‘cousin’ level rather than the ‘autism’ level.  

I kind of wish that most identities had this ‘cousin’ thing going, because it would resolve a lot of boundaries that people want to be strict and are not.  It deals with people who are a lot like a certain type of person, without exactly being that type of person.  And it does so in a really friendly and welcoming way.

I know that Tourette’s has a similar but not quite the same idea, called “Tourette’s Plus”.  Where the “Plus” conditions are conditions that people with Tourette’s often have in addition, like autism or OCD.  Not quite the same idea, but similar.

Eventually people started deciding that the problem with ‘cousin’ was that it made ‘autistic’ the center of the neurodiverse landscape, and that this wasn’t fair.  And maybe it wasn’t fair.

But still, I miss the days where you could say “AC” or “Cousin” and people would know what you meant, immediately.  And where cousins were considered an actual inside part of the autistic community, not just “allies”.  I know there are parts of the autistic community where all of this is still the case.  But not nearly as many as there used to be.

So I’m throwing the idea out there just in case anyone likes it as much as I do.  It’s not my idea, I didn’t think it up, it existed long before I even knew there was an autistic community (and I go pretty far back compared to a lot of people these days).  But I think it’s a useful idea, in some contexts, as long as you do keep in mind that autistic people aren’t the center of neurodiversity.

(But honestly I think if all neurodiverse people used the ‘cousin’ idea in their own communities, then it wouldn’t be about autism-at-the-center anymore it would just be a useful idea for people who are very similar to you in important ways without being quite the same.)

Anyway… Karalianne was talking about how she feels sometimes like she can’t even talk about certain things without qualifying them a lot, because she’s not autistic, and she’s afraid of encroaching.  And I remember a time when she was not considered encroaching because everyone knew she was a cousin and that was her place in the community and nobody (that I know of) ever questioned it back then.  And it upsets me that this is not the case anymore.  Because she totally is one of the first people to spring to mind when I think ‘cousin’.

And I wish that Xenia’s exuberant friendliness would somehow infect the term ‘cousin’ once again, because it needs that push.

Oh, wow. I really, really, really like this. In general, I mean, as a welcoming way to think about people who are on the “margins” of all kinds of marginalized communities.

The social and emotional distinctions between calling someone a “cousin” vs “ally” feel really salient to me. And certainly there are people who are allies more than they are cousins. But there are definitely other people in my life who feel much more like cousins than allies. Particularly when we think about this in terms of LGBTQIA communities, and the fact that people who start out seeing themselves as “allies” in those communities often end up with far blurrier or queerer senses of sexual selfhood than they came in with.

And thinking of these folks – that hetero friend who’s always getting read as queer, or that cis-identified queer whose experience of gender is unusually transgressive, etc – as “cousins” seems very much in keeping with the longstanding queer tradition of referring to each other as “family.”

I can see it making sense in many other spheres of my life as well. (I definitely feel like my particular brain wiring gives me some cousinly traits with some other neurodiverse folks, even though their brain condition and mine are not the same.) But queerness is the first thing that comes to mind for me, since it’s the community where I’m most familiar with the blurriness around and battles over identity boundaries.

Like. Like. Like.

I… always used cousin in that way?

By logic, if someone is a cousin to me, I am a cousin to them. We are each our own centre, yes, but none of us is more central, or more important than the others by virtue of our neurotype, diagnosis or pattern of symptoms/expression.

Cousins I recognised included people who were epileptic, bipolar, had movement disorders, cerebral palsy, were blind or deaf or used AAC for whatever reason, had traumatic brian injury, were synaesthetes, had sensory processing disorder, dyslexia, or auditory processing disorder. The label of cousin can be applied to anyone whose brain works differently and has a shared experience with autistic people because of this. Neurodiversity is a wonderful thing. Our family is vast, and is a circle. Like the round table, there is no head, no central figure higher than the others.