RantWoman are you SURE you don't want to rethink that title?
WANT to is one thing. Whether or not it might be a good idea is another. As RantWoman has been known to say, "...not required to like..."
But RantWoman aren't you a little afraid someone will feel attacked or intimidated or squelched?
1. It doesn't seem like Friend M intimidates or squelches easily, except when RantWoman is trying to have a conversation in email, with help of a clearness committee....
2. RantWoman could be a little bit worried. And RantWoman would find it easier to worry about this Friend feeling squelched if this Friend had not been helping edit a whole bunch of concepts important and relevant to RantWoman out of community conversation for...
3. RantWoman wonders what if anything anyone else has to say about disability in general or this topic in particular.
4. There is a whole ton of terminology here that RantWoman thinks might be unfamiliar to many readers. So...?
Joyfully
Autistic
Mackenzie
Barton-Rowledge
So
many people associate disability with pain, shame, being kept out or held back.
And of course, disabilities often include those things—but that’s like saying
that being a woman means being objectified: true in some sense, but nowhere
near a whole truth. There’s a lot more to disability (and womanhood) than that.
I
have been enjoying reading articles about being joyfully disabled, or
brilliantly disabled, or queerly disabled, or revolutionarily disabled. I’d
like to share with you all the Autistic Women
and Nonbinary Network (AWN), which is a fabulous organization
run by autistic people, for autistic people. In paticular,
I enjoyed their article, “12 People On What It Felt Like To Discover Autism.”
Autism
is a type of neurodiversity that can be disabling in a world that does not
accommodate divergence from one so-called “normal” way of being, thinking,
feeling and inter- acting. For many years, it was primarily thought to be something
that affected boys and men, but more recently it’s been discovered that autism
presents differently in women and girls. Many autistic folks who were assigned
female at birth grew up not knowing that they were autistic.
This
article relays twelve people’s responses to figuring out that they were
autistic as adults. These two reactions really stood out to me:
“I
finally had an answer: I wasn’t WRONG for being the way I was[,] not a broken
version of a “normal” person. I was just different. After discovering, I was
able to forgive and go easier on myself. I understand now when not to push
myself too hard. It was like putting the key in a lock and opening a door to a
world where I made sense.”
“…
being autistic isn’t a disease—it’s a beautifully made puzzle-box. I still
struggle with finding a place in the world that suits me, but now I feel less
like I’m a badly-made neurotypical and more like a half-open bud with a
beautiful neurodiverse future.”
The
full article is a five-minute read on the AWN
Network website. 12 women on what it feels like to be autistic
OKAY RantWoman, and so...?
Do you have to identify as non-binary to be a proud autistic?
Does anyone think they have enough information to answer the question "What does accessibility mean ...?"
But never mind. The answers especially to the second question are much too much for one blog post and RantWoman insists on thinking about more pieces of the picture anyway.
Worried about terminology? How about a whole lot MORE terminology?
Wikipedia article on autism spectrum disorder
By amazing coincidence as a result of RantWoman permitting Twitter to guess at things RantWoman might find valuable, here is an awesome list of tweets and blogs by non-speaking autistics
Tweet
I have undertaken to post a piece of writing, or a video or some other artefact every day from a nonspeaking autistic person who uses words or word-linked symbols to communicate.
"So the fundamental question remains - do meltdowns, whether it is due to sensory overstimulation or any other reason, define the entirety of the nonspeaking autistic who is still a living, breathing and thinking individual?" (Cont'd)
"If such sensationalized scenes are the only images being flashed over and over, in movie after movie, what impression is being cemented about the members of this group to the rest of society?" (Cont'd)
"What kind of opportunities can this group hope to have if society deems them incapable or is even fearful of them at the door itself?" (Cont'd)
"Will they ever be allowed to be included and visible in mainstream society? What about the potential internalized harm and trauma of this stigma for members of this group?"
Read the full text by nonspeaking autistic activist Hari Srinivasan:
I'm not going to ever be able to give up sarcasm while the people I admire keep setting me this kind of example! Here's nonspeaking autistic activist Ido Kedar:
And a couple more links in case people want to start from one place instead of seeding search engines with terms such as:
autism or asperger's syndrome
Easter Seals all purpose Disability resource
Autism Career Pathways
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment