hello there! this is a new blog for autistics on a limited budget.
i will be posting things like cheap stim toys and where to find them, low spoons cooking and ways to make unfriendly foods into friendly ones, and hopefully some tutorials on making weighted objects.
please feel free to send in things you have discovered such as a good recipe or a store that has a lot of inexpensive stimmy stuff!
Tag: autism
This post is for…
- Aspies who sometimes can’t speak, despite having no speech delay in early childhood.
- Aspies who have permanently lost the ability to speak, despite having no speech delay in early childhood.
- Aspies who are quiet and sensitive, not loud and blundering.
- Aspies who sit out entire conversations because they can’t figure out where and how to join in, or how to initiate communication.
- Aspies who stim, a lot, visibly, to the point people assume they’re “low functioning” and are surprised to hear them talk.
- Aspies who can’t take care of themselves at all, despite what the DSM says about no significant delays in self-help skills.
- Aspies who have the stereotypical high-tech computer job… and secretly wear diapers because they’re incontinent and always have been.
- Aspies who are very echolalic, very ‘sensing’, other things more commonly associated with ‘auties’ than ‘aspies’.
- Aspies with autistic catatonia who have gone from being considered very high functioning to very low functioning in a fairly rapid time span.
- Aspies who are ‘passive’ or ‘aloof’ rather than ‘active but odd’ or ‘formal’.
- Aspies who look exactly like many of Kanner’s original patients.
- Aspies with extremely severe visual processing issues and other sensory issues, well beyond finding certain stimuli painful.
- Aspies with something resembling visual agnosia.
- Aspies with an IQ in the 70-90 range.
- Aspies with an IQ slightly below 70, who got diagnosed with AS anyway (despite this being against the criteria) because some doctors will diagnose AS in people with, say, a 65 IQ, if every single other thing about them fits the Asperger criteria and not the autism one.
- Aspies who did badly in school, and never made it to college, or did horribly in college or university and never got a degree.
- Aspies who grew up partly or entirely in self-contained special ed classrooms or schools.
- Aspies who find it easier to gesture than to speak.
- Aspies who find body language easier to understand than understanding language.
- Aspies who are extremely polite and careful about respecting people’s boundaries.
- Aspies who are quiet and gentle and shy.
- Aspies whose speech sounds like that of a very young child — they had no early delay in speech, technically, so they got an AS diagnosis, but their speech stalled at the age of five or so, and never got any better than that. And somehow that doesn’t count as a speech delay because it happened too late.
- Aspies who grew up being considered severely intellectually disabled, didn’t speak until they were 15 (after first learning to type at age 13), but didn’t have an autism diagnosis at the time. And now they’re adults and are being diagnosed with Asperger’s because they can speak now and there’s nobody to corroborate their speech or diagnostic history so the doctor just doesn’t care about getting it right. So now they’re officially an aspie. (I’ve seen this happen more times than you’d be surprised by.)
- Aspies who more than meet the criteria for autistic disorder, but aren’t being diagnosed with it because their doctors are ignoring the DSM entirely in favor of their ‘clinical judgement’ that someone has Asperger’s rather than autism based on seeing them as an adult.
Basically, this post is for ‘aspies’ who fit stereotypes normally reserved for ‘auties’, but had (or were presumed to have) no speech delay and (often) don’t meet the criteria for autistic disorder, so got diagnosed with Asperger’s. Because such people are all over the place, yet when people say ‘aspie’ they never mean them, of course. Even though they’re frigging everywhere.
so many of those examples are things i am / i deal with. i stopped calling myself an aspie a year ago (not long after i started) because of that, since it didn’t feel like it fit, because i felt alienated by the idea that being as ‘aspie’ meant i was supposed to function in certain ways that i almost never do. so i just call myself autistic.
anyway, i really like this post.
same. I call myself autistic because aspie doesn’t fit, even though it’s my official dx.
Film Review of documentary “Sounding the Alarm: Battling the Autism Epidemic”
Recently, I decided to watch the new Autism Speaks documentary “Sounding the Alarm: Battling the Autism Epidemic” and live tweet my reaction/outrage in real time.
Why did I do this?
Well, I had seen clips of the documentary. I’d heard some feedback that was concerning. I know that many of my friends wanted to watch but were afraid to. I think it is quite telling when a group called Autism Speaks puts out a documentary that Autistic people are afraid to watch. I wanted to watch it because I wanted to know what was being said about us, without us. Again.
Film Review of documentary “Sounding the Alarm: Battling the Autism Epidemic”
MBTI most accurate descriptions
ESTP: super attractive physically but it’s all downhill from there. never quite know what they’re going to do next but you can probably bet it will be irresponsible. somehow still lovable.
ESTJ: loud, logical, and get shit done — they are the warrior class of the life rpg. power stats make them unbeatable and if you encounter one, maybe just curl up and forfeit, to save time.
ESFP: giggly little shits. fun fun fun till her daddy takes the t-bird away. great for lifting your mood, not that great at lifting your credit score.
ESFJ: too appropriate, totally lacking in awkwardness. they’ll never forget your birthday, which will make you feel like shit when you constantly forget theirs.
ENTP: excellent companions if you enjoy people who instantly see through all your shit. very clever and very intuitive, you can’t fool them. i suggest you invest in other friends — ones you *can* fool.
ENTJ: impatient with people who make mistakes, namely, everyone. they’ll respect you if you stand up to them but why do that when you can run away instead. cuddle them and see what happens. i’m curious.
ENFP: too puppy to live. best suited for the profession of musical nanny. not advised for use around an open flame.
ENFJ: way too charming and capable, maybe they should stop making everyone else look bad. prone to making other people care about stuff they didn’t want to care about. so annoying.
ISTP: such butts. best suited for an apocalypse scenario, if no such scenario exists, they will create danger because they get bored. don’t encourage them, but don’t discourage them, as reverse psychology works too well.
ISTJ: low drama and low maintenance, best value at this price tier. best suited to actual human existence. least weird, which makes them kinda weird.
ISFP: squishy little darlings you might want to keep in your pocket, but please don’t or they will become forlorn. they notice everything, and it’s unnerving.
ISFJ: quietly and proudly do things for others. if you have a ring you need to deliver to mordor, take an ISFJ along with you for best results.
INTP: cute intergalactic spiders you want to hug and mistrust. prone to making you laugh but then days later you will wonder whether you were the butt of the joke.
INTJ: major dicks and kinda proud of it. prone to being right. prone to liking trance music way too much. all the ones i’ve ever met have been unexpectedly kinky. so i guess, expectedly.
INFP: they fall out of the sky and are raised by unicorns. if you feed one it will follow you home. they dissipate in water.
INFJ: chameleons appropriating your emotions and going quietly mad. prone to meltdowns and needing lots of naps.
I tested as INTP a couple of years ago when I took this MASSIVE quiz with 10-15 pages.
Sounds legit.
Holy shit, I actually am an emotion-appropriating chameleon who has meltdowns and needs plenty of naps/downtime, wtf.
Autism language politics and history
Some people emphatically prefer to be called people with autism. Others get very offended. Some people empathically prefer to be called autistic people. Others get very offended. There are reasons for all of that.
They have to do with the history of the intellectual and developmental disability community, the autism parent community, and the specific autistic self advocacy community.
For intellectual and developmental disability:
- Most self advocates have a very strong preference for person-first language
- Person-first language in this concept means “I am a PERSON, and I am not going to allow you to treat me as a disability case study, nor am I going to tolerate your diagnostic overshadowing.”
Autism is a developmental disability. There is a highly visible and destructive community of parents who consider themselves to be afflicted with their child’s autism. There is an autistic self advocacy community that developed in part specifically due to the need to counteract the harm being done by autism parents. The language someone prefers will often depend on which of these facts seems most important at a given time.
Regarding developmental disability.
- Folks who are primarily involved in the IDD self advocacy community usually prefer to be called people with autism
- This is for the same reasons people with any sort of developmental disability usually prefer person first language
- In that context, “person with autism” means “I am a PERSON, and you are not going to treat me like an autistic specimen.”
Regarding the destructive autism parent community:
- This parent community pushes the agenda of parents who believe that their child’s autism is a horrible tragedy that befell their parents and family
- They call themselves the autism community, but they consistently refuse to include or listen to autistic self advocates (especially adult self advocates). They only care about neurotypical parent perspectives (and only from parents who think autism is horrifying)
- They promote things like intense behavioral therapy for young children, institutionalization, group homes, sheltered workshops and genetic research aimed at developing prenatal testing. They do not listen to autistic self advocates who object to these things.
- They don’t care about the priorities of autistic self advocates. They do not do any work on issues such as self-directed adult services, enforcing the Olmstead mandate to provide services in the community rather than institutions, or research into skills for listening to people whose communication is atypical
- These parents have an emphatic preference for person first language. They say “people with autism.”
- What they mean by this is “Autism is NOT a part of who my child is, it’s an evil brain slug attached to their head, and I want to remove it at all costs.”
There is also an autistic self advocacy community. It developed in significant part to counteract the harm done by the autism parent community:
- A lot of the agenda of the autistic self advocacy community is the same as the IDD community and pursued in cooperation with the IDD community
- But there is also a lot of work that’s specifically about countering the harm that has been done by the autism parent community
- Much of the worst harm done by the parent community comes from the cultural consensus that autism is like an evil brain slug, and that any amount of brutality is a good thing if it might mean that the slug shrinks or dies
- For this reason, participants in the autistic self advocacy community generally have a very strong objection to person first language
- They call themselves autistic or Autistic.
- In this context, “autistic person” means “Autism is part of who I am. I’m ok. Stop trying to get me to hate myself. You do not need to remove autism to make me into a full person. We are already people. Stop physically and emotionally mutilating people in the name of treatment.”
Neither set of self advocates are wrong. Both positions are legitimate and important to be aware of. In order to know what someone means by their language choices, you have to consider the context.
Open letter to “theory of mind deficit” proponents
Either autistic people have a theory of mind, or theory of mind isn’t a fundamental part of being human. It can’t be a fundamental part of being human if some humans don’t have it.
I’m as human as you are. That isn’t questionable.
Yours sincerely, an autistic person
Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It’s that you are destroying the peg.
Paul Collins (Author of Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism)
We’re Presuming Competence
citations for why “theory of mind” is bullshit
this is the brief synopsis (in articles/citations) of over a years work reading basically everything ever written on these subjects. i still study them. i plan to continue studying them. but i want to crowdsource knowledge of this stuff, because “theory of mind” (as applied to autistic people, and as applied elsewhere) is actually an intellectual farce. here is why, if you’re up to reading:
why theory of mind is psychological/cognitive bullshit:
- it’s bullshit because 99% of psychological research is sooo non-representative of humanity as a whole that it’s not. even. funny.
“Joint Attention: Twelve Myths” by David A. Leavens in Joint Attention (2013)
- theory of mind is bullshit because this is literally the greatest thing you’ll read in a long, long time. i would propose marriage to david leavens solely on the basis of this piece. all his other work? ALSO GREAT. but thisss. this was published IN THE SAME VOLUME as (and was actually the chapter right before) work by almost ALL the most famous social psychology/’theory of mind’ researchers in the world.
- if you ever wanted to read someone INTELLECTUALLY WHOOPING SIMON BARON COHENS ASS IN A PUBLIC FORUM this is what you’ve been waiting for your whole life.
- these arguments are on the topic of comparative psychology (i.e. comparing humans and other species—in this case, other ape/primate species) but they are like ALL relevant to human developmental psychology.
- theory of mind is bullshit because the people who do all that research on babies and chimps and whatever else and autistic people and whatever…those people? yeah, they’re heinous at theoretical science AND heinous at experimental science. and here’s a discussion of why this is so by some great primatologists/comparative psychologists who work with non-human primates (including david leavens my boo).
why theory of mind is anthropological/cultural bullshit:
- (preface about anthropology: these are nerdy white male anthropologists acting as authorities on non-white, non-western cultures to which they do not belong. i dislike ethnography 99.9% of the time for these reasons, but these articles are tolerably not-dickish and very insightful/relevant, so i’m citing them)
- theory of mind is bullshit because none (NONE) of the “normal human social development” or “normal human social assumptions” that theory of mind researchers constantly reference are consistently present in cultures besides highly industrialized western cultures.
why theory of mind is sociological/ethical bullshit:
- boom boom boom theory of mind is bullshit because its so obviously an idea people have made up specifically to tell certain stories about autistic people AND about neurotypical people. and those stories they tell with theory of mind? they’re not innocent or neutral WHATSOEVER. they make up theories like this for a reason.
AND THEN the best of the best. this was published around the end of my year of researching this, when i had been told by my advisor that i needed to publish on the topic, and when i was sitting around saying “my life is in shambles, i am almost getting kicked out of school, all because i can’t write, how could i possibly write this now? but it needs to be written?” and then i saw this one morning, and spent the rest of the day dancing around campus. i squealed when i saw the title. just knowing that someone else was thinking about this in similar ways was enough to pull me through that time. i love this piece:
I always wonder who came up with the whole “person-first” thing with disability, because it feels like it would have been a non-disabled person. I hate the implication that my disability has to be removed from me, and separated from my identity, to make me okay.
Actually, it was people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who started it. Here is the history as given by The Arc:
On January 8, 1974, the People First movement began in Salem, Oregon, with the purpose of organizing a convention where people with developmental disabilities could speak for themselves and share ideas, friendship and information. In the course of planning the convention, the small group of planners decided they needed a name for themselves. A number of suggestions had been made when someone said, “I’m tired of being called retarded – we are people first.”
many self-advocacy groups of people with ID/DD are still built around a “people first” ideology, and that language is a conscious effort among them to resist dehumanization. of course, non-disabled people are given to using person-first language in dehumanizing ways — what else is new. they can pretty much figure out how to make ANY language dehumanizing.
but it’s important in cross-disability efforts to remember that person-first language is the product of people who were fed up with not being treated like people. and it’s still very important to many self-advocates with ID/DD.
of course, the Blind, Deaf and Autistic communities (for three) are staunchly opposed to person-first language because of the way nondisabled people have used it against us. (i don’t mean to say that everyone in these communities agrees, only that it’s the official position of the NFB, ASAN, the NAD, etc.)
so we all need to remember that different people prefer different language because non-disabled society has chosen a variety of ways to linguistically scorn us. either person first or ‘identity-first’ language can be used in a bad way. and either can be used in a good way. it really depends.
knitting in the dark 