Disabilarchy?

I've noticed that some portrayals of the disability experience in fiction are pretty much diametrically opposed to the disability experience in real life.

In fiction:

• Employers have no choice but to hire disabled applicants even when they are not qualified, because they could be sued for not hiring a disabled person
• Disabled people's work is disproportionately rewarded even when it's bad, because people feel sorry for us or are just positively biased toward us
• It's easy and profitable to fake a disability in order to get disability benefits from the government
• Professors have to provide ridiculous accommodations for students who say they are disabled, when in fact those students are lazy or not smart enough to be in college
• People with mental disabilities are the perpetrators of violent crimes
• A "black transgender disabled lesbian" has a big advantage in life because people want to give her jobs and other opportunities

In reality:

• Employers often do not want to hire disabled applicants because of their mistaken ideas about what our disability means.  It's easy for them to discriminate against us because they can just say "We didn't think you'd be a good fit for the job" or something like that.  They also can fire someone for being disabled if they just pretend to fire them for a different reason.  Even if an employer admits that they are not hiring someone or firing them because they are disabled, suing someone is expensive.
• Some disabled people are legally allowed to be paid a fraction of minimum wage if their employer says they cannot work as fast as a non-disabled person. For example, Goodwill does this, and plenty of people think it is acceptable. (Articles about Goodwill: here and here, and many comments asserting that disabled people are not good enough workers to deserve minimum wage: here, here, and here; and saying that people who need accommodations do not deserve minimum wage, even though accommodations are their legal right: here).
• In the US and the UK, it is a lot of work to even apply for disability benefits (more work than some disabled people can do); many disabled people are denied benefits for stupid reasons; and the benefits are not very much.  You also then can't save money, or you will lose your benefits.
• It's a lot of work to get accommodations in college (again, more work than some disabled people can do; my post about that here); and even if you do all the work to get accommodations, a professor might refuse to give them to you if they feel like it.  This happened to someone I knew whose professor thought it was stupid for her to get a note-taker, so he dragged his feet on arranging it and then tried to arrange it in a way that revealed the disabled student's identity, which he was not allowed to do.  Many disabled students in college are struggling due to lack of support, and about half the (smart, hardworking) disabled kids I met in college had to drop out.  Still, some people imagine that disabled students are coasting through life on a fluffy cloud of accommodations (here).
• People with mental disabilities are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and society often makes excuses for the criminals, causing this type of crime to seem more and more acceptable for potential murderers and abusers.
• A black transgender disabled lesbian has to deal with racism, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, and sexism; the intersections thereof; and feeling like an outsider even in minority communities.  Plus, she's constantly invoked as a joke to show how bad "political correctness" supposedly is.

So, you have to ask: why is being disabled portrayed as being so easy and coming with so many opportunities, when in fact it comes with a lot of disadvantages?  Watching TV (and hearing some people talk), you would think that we live in a society ruled by disabled people.

Fallacy Week: The Contest Fallacy

Hi guys it's FALLACY WEEK! Every day you get some fallacy action from a post I made a super long time ago at LOVE-NOS.

The Contest Fallacy

JOHN: It makes me upset when my parents always say that they wish I wasn’t disabled.
MARY: But that’s totally legit. It limits what you can do with your life and it means things are going to be harder for you.
JOHN: I mean, I get that, but how would you feel if your parents were always saying they wish you weren’t a woman because things are harder for women?
MARY: That’s so stupid, John. Being a woman and being disabled aren’t the same thing!

or

JOHN: I’m not saying that parents don’t have a right to say if they’re upset about their kids being autistic, but, like…it’s basically like if every time there was something on TV or in a magazine about gay people, it was gay people’s parents saying that they wish their kid could be straight and how depressed they are.
MARY: Can’t you explain how you feel without doing Oppression Olympics? People try to make their kids straight all the time. Haven’t you ever heard of Love in Action?

Rebuttal:
In both examples, John tried to explain how he feels about something as a disabled person by replacing disabled people with a group that Mary belongs to; but Mary either turned it into a contest between the two groups, or thought that John was trying to have a contest.
The first example is easier to take apart because it’s obvious how much of a subject change there is from John’s analogy to Mary’s response. John was trying to explain that your parents can imagine an easy life for you to an extent that makes your real life much harder. Mary responded as if John was saying that because women and disabled people both have harder lives, they are exactly the same.
The second example is more tricky to discuss because it involves an accusation of Oppression Olympics. Oppression Olympics basically means that you say that your minority group has it worse than another minority group. Sometimes people do it intentionally in a conflict, but other people just have a lot of trouble understanding that the problems of the group they’re advocating for are not worse than the problems of everyone else in the world. Hence the astonishingly self-centered, and astonishingly common, declaration that whatever prejudice you care about it is “the last acceptable prejudice.”
Basically, Oppression Olympics is really annoying. You don’t want to do it. But was John doing it? Let’s think back.
Did John say that gay people aren’t oppressed?
Did he say that people with autism are more oppressed than gay people?
Did he say that gay people’s parents never try to make them straight?
No, he didn’t say any of those things.
He did state that the majority of media about gay people is not about parents wanting to cure their gay kids, which is true. Such a statement could be used in Oppression Olympics, if John was trying to argue that he is more oppressed than Mary–but in fact, rather than trying to “win” by convincing her that their oppressions are on different levels, he was trying to explain his experience in a way that would be accessible to her through her experience. It’s perfectly likely that his intentions were to connect with her, not to be malicious and deny her experience as a gay person.
I do think this can be a little dodgy, and the best way to make this kind of analogy is by comparing two groups that you belong to. However, not everyone can do this; and while John made a risky comparison, he was not wrong.

the ultimate (ridiculous) showdown

The reason I've been thinking about intersectionality even more than usual is that I keep seeing these little queer/trans (usually just queer, but trans, in this case) vs. disabled setups.

Sometimes the person doing it doesn't see it.

A queer person attempts to talk about intersectionality and they list race and class. Talking about situations where disability would OBVIOUSLY be an issue, they list race and class.

A guy wrote a column in the school newspaper saying that the "It Gets Better" project is comparable to telling someone to stay in an abusive relationship and it should be called the "You Can Make It Better" project. (Maybe I need to explain my reaction to this further, but--how does he know?)

Then these actual open conflicts happen. How dare anorexic cis people say they have body dysphoria! Or, my favorite--how dare Autistic people (assumed to be straight, usually wrongly, as the Autistic community is heavily queer) try to explain our situation by saying, "What if all the dialogue about gay people was controlled by straight people and was about curing homosexuality?" We obviously don't understand Their Struggles. After all, a gay person pointed out in this conversation, no one gets killed for being Autistic.

Brilliant, guys.

In terms of the Autistic community, at least, it just especially bugs me because...it's so queer, and not just because many of us are. A straight person in the Autistic community is so much smarter and more familiar, when it comes to queer stuff, than nearly any non-disabled straight person, because you just can't get away from queerness. So like, when a bunch of queer non-disabled people who know nothing about disability, the Autistic experience in particular, or our community, start fucking trying to educate us because they think we're cluelessly comparing ourselves to them, I just explode. My head explodes. There are little pieces of my skull and hair lying on the floor around me.

QUIT IT.

I'm taking a student-taught class where we watch Disney movies and analyze the portrayal of (mostly) gender and sexuality, but other stuff when it comes up. Most of the people in the class are queer. Someone asked me what my paper was on, and I said it was on non-humans trying to be human and how that relates to disability. "Oh, wow, disability?" the person said like I was so creative for thinking of such a thing.

something just hit me!

privileged identities also interact with marginalized identities.

(gay is an example.)

we often describe ourselves by our marginalized identities because of course those are the ones we've been forced to think about. but white + gay is an experience. when people say, "don't talk about the gay experience as if everyone who's gay is white," what I think this should mean is that instead of saying gay when we mean white + gay, when we say gay we should mean a very specific isolated factor, and when we mean x + gay we say x + gay, and we are aware that there are so many "____ + gay" experiences and we try to talk about ours and not get in the way of other people talking about theirs.

I'm trying to articulate what bothers me about a particular way the term "intersectionality" is sometimes used, and I think what I want to say is that people sort of start using gay to mean "marginalized identity + gay," which, while obviously less harmful because it doesn't have the same oppression behind it as saying gay and meaning "white + gay," is also inaccurate and gets in the way of talking about The Whole Thing. I also think that people can kind of get on this track where it's like, being gay only counts as a marginalized identity if you have it with another marginalized identity. You have to have more than one to have any.

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm saying it about a lot of people because the post I'm making is basically about how much I love intersectionality. But I do think sometimes the word is used to mean something that actually makes things worse--and I think of intersectionality as this math that explains everything, but this misuse of intersectionality runs the numbers together and wastes the clarity of the idea.

notes for something longer

(This looks better in my notebook in a bunch of little squares and lumps and stick figures, but oh well.)

PRESCRIPTIVE IDENTITIES (this was a flow chart)

A. Identities which are based in transcending stigma.--->Not everyone can or wants to transcend.
B. Identities which are based on denying the reality of stigma, embracing stigma, and/or denying categories.--->Stigma is real. Not everyone can afford the consequences of embracing it. Some people need or want to think about their lives in terms of categories so they can understand the ways they are disadvantaged and try to function.--->B ultimately becomes a denial of difference and privilege
So, A and B, as descriptors for minority groups, fail because they make assumptions about members of the group. An A or B identity may pretend to mean one thing, but actually it means many unspoken things. More than one fact must be true for a person to belong.*

*"People whose favorite color is blue" comes to be synonymous with "people who have a blue car." John's favorite color is blue, but he doesn't have a car. Where does he go?--->Actually, it is worth discussing blue cars and maybe blue cars could be considered a blue issue or a bluish issue, but this must be done without erasing John.

(the other side of the page)

Intersectionality is sometimes invoked as a weapon and marginalized people are criticized for not having enough marginalized identities. In the most aggressive forms of this, the actual top-level oppressors disappear. "Gay white men," "disabled white men," etc., are responsible for the problems. "Gayness" or "disabledness" can't be discussed as individual factors. Sometimes people start to imply that you can't have real oppression unless you have more than one kind. To me this is a misuse of intersectionality and privilege/oppression thinking, which should be mathematical.

OPTION C--OPPRESSION MATH

Identities are facts. They're constructed, but presently they are real.
John has X marginalized identity. No matter how many other marginalized identities and/or privilege identities he has in addition to X, he has X.

JOHN<--------X oppression Say John also has Y marginalized identity. JOHN<--------X oppression JOHN<--------Y oppression is what we know for sure, and in various complicated ways, something like this is probably happening: X oppression-------->JOHN<--------Y oppression JOHN<--------X oppression + Y oppression JOHN<--------(X oppression)(Y oppression) JOHN<--------X oppression^(Y oppression) JOHN<--------(X oppression + Y oppression)(X oppression) The possibilities are endless. This was better as a drawing, by the way. But anyway, this is all we know about John.
To me, intersectionality means that we don't take X to mean anything else but X because there are so many other factors that work on an individual. X is not a prescription, it's a fact.

OTHER NOTES

1. Obviously when I talk about the misuse of intersectionality (which actually isn't intersectionality at all)...well, if you think I'm insulting you or people like you, then I can't stop you. The misuse of intersectionality is like Oppression Olympics in that sometimes people really are engaging in it, and other times they're being accused of engaging in it by someone who is just an asshole.

2. What is the definition of a marginalized identity? Some axes that obviously count, like class and disability, are often ignored or even scoffed at.

2a. What about factors that interact with a marginalized identity, that can't really be called a marginalized identity, such as certain life experiences or subcultures? These things start to feel kind of political and intersectional when they mean that someone feels locked out of their identity because of them. I think these things are very important, but what do you call them?

religion, queerness, disability, background, and consent

I was at my college's queer/faith group today and felt kind of bad because I said something like, "I'm not from a religious background and I came to God through being queer so it's really weird for me when people see gay + Christian and imagine that I have some sort of conflict or that this has caused trauma for me." (Or even imagine that I realized those things in the opposite order from when I actually did.)

This seems really privileged as if I think that the reason people see gay + Christian and associate that with a really terrible set of experiences is just some anti-religion bias. I mean, the people who've said this to me are atheists so I do feel a little bit like they're stereotyping Christianity and religion in general and failing to understand that at its core there's nothing that would inherently be my enemy as a queer person. And I kind of like expressing how much that isn't my experience because my type of experience is so rarely expressed.

At the same time, it's a very rare experience. I grew up with liberal atheist parents and I go to a college that is primarily liberal atheist--that is a tremendous privilege for a gay person. So for me to be like, "Yeah, God and I are buddies, why wouldn't we be?" is kind of a dick move. It's actually kind of like the way I feel about queer people who have overcome certain things, that I can't overcome as easily due to being disabled, and act like all queer people can overcome those things.

I know a lot of people's experience is one of religion being forced on them. But mine is one of being expected not to be religious and even feeling uncomfortable as a religious person in the spaces I tend to be in, and once having someone compare the fact that I believe in God to unusual stuff I do that's related to my disability. Which is really not cool.

This also applies to disability. My disability has been (cognitively and emotionally) a huge barrier to my ability to participate in things like church--largely because church is unfamiliar. So I'm very jealous of my liberal atheist and otherwise non-Christian* friends who had a sort of upbringing where they were brought to church, confirmed, etc., and the fact that they went away from that wasn't such a big deal to their families but it was just kind of how they did things as they were growing up. Because that structure would have been really important and my life would be totally different if I'd had it. I'm really lucky that my dad is as supportive as he is or I would never have (finally) been baptized and would have even less experience going to church than I do.

*(not that atheist=non-Christian but I'm thinking of people who are agnostic or "spiritual but not religious"--not people who have converted to another religion or heavily identify as anything.)

When I was a kid I had a babysitter who was Catholic and would pray with me when she put me to bed, against my parents' wishes. I'm extremely grateful for this because it gave me familiarity with prayer and the knowledge that it was an option. I still pray the way she taught me, every night. But I know what most atheists, and even many Christians, would think of her decision. And I don't know how to reconcile that with my gratitude.

I'm looking for a job next year and I'm interested in a particular facility for kids and teenagers with disabilities, which is Christian. It would be really wonderful for me to work in an environment that's Christian and I do relate being staff to being Christian (I don't mean this the way it probably sounds, but it's a huge other thing to talk about--it has nothing to do with me being better than the people I serve). But I feel creeped out also because, while they write on their website that the people they serve have a choice about being Christian or going to church, religious education, etc., they use the word "encourage."

In my experience, some people with disabilities have been taught to be compliant to the extent that if you "encourage" them to do something, or even ask them if they want to do something, they perceive it as an order.

I mean, I also have known people--and actually, this doesn't just mean more severely disabled people who I've been staff for, this also includes me, and maybe this includes me more than anything in terms of religion--who have a very hard time saying they want to do something, asking to do something, even saying "yes." My camper Stephen from this summer would say no to everything, including things he had previously shown he liked; after bringing up the subject again and again, you might be able to find out whether he really didn't want to. Sometimes this didn't work and you had to put him in a position where he had to make an effort to opt out, instead of to opt in--this was generally how you found out for sure what he really wanted.

I'm not saying this in terms of the facility, because that word encourage really does bother me and I'm not applying there until I can figure out what it means. But when it comes to religion, I am a great deal like Stephen. Which is very confusing for me and which, I'm afraid, often results in me saying things that ignore the very nonconsensual and/or negative history that a lot of people from my communities have with religion.

Disabled Staff Person

I think I've mostly written about being a DSP in terms of identity and also aspects of disability that aren't related to impairment, like movement--basically that it is disorienting to always be assumed to be non-disabled or be someone who moves/acts normally because you are staff, especially but not only when staff have an insulting or patronizing attitude toward the people they work for and expect you to share in that.

However, there's obviously something else that makes a DSP different from other staff people, and that is impairment. While I do think the assumption that staff people are non-disabled often comes from just general...um, ablenormativity? is there a word for that?...there's also a more solid reason for that assumption, and that is that staff are supposed to be helping people do things they can't do on their own. So, if you are a DSP (unless your disability is absolutely unrelated to your client's disability, like you have paraplegia and they have schizophrenia) you may sometimes be in the position of being expected to help someone do something that it's hard for you yourself to do without help.

Which kind of begs the question: are DSPs good staff people (assuming there is some impairment overlap between staff and client)? Should DSPs be staff people?

Well, let's try to think first of all what it means to be staff. Let's say there are two kinds of staff: staff and aides. I tend to think you should think of yourself as an aide (it's a word I prefer but I'm not sure if I deserve it). To me the relationship between staff and client is that the staff person has authority, usually because they work for someone else more powerful, and they try to get the client to follow rules. The relationship between aide and client is that the aide's job is to help the client do things that they need or want to do. Depending on the impairment, like if it involves memory problems, an aide might say something that sounds staff-y like, "Hey John, it's time to take a shower," but there will be a different motivation and the aide and John will have discussed when John wants to be reminded to take a shower.

I think impairment matters more if you are an aide. Since staff/client is mostly about staff making clients follow rules, a lot of the things the staff has to do are pretty random and have nothing to do with impairment. In some cases, you could actually switch the client with the staff and the client could perform the staff's job pretty well. For example, at the summer camp where I worked it was a rule that campers (who were mostly adults with intellectual disabilities) couldn't serve themselves at meals. Obviously some people actually did need help serving themselves, but mostly I was sitting at a table asking a bunch of people if they wanted carrots who, if not for the rule, could have just gotten some carrots themselves. And this completely artificial rule added all these dimensions to my relationship with the campers at my table, which was weird.

There's also the fact that having a good relationship with clients becomes more important if you are staff. If John and his aide Sarah don't particularly like each other, it's not any bigger a deal than someone not liking one of their coworkers. They can just be polite to each other because they're both getting what they want (Sarah is getting paid for doing her job, John is getting support he needs). But if Sarah is staff--i.e. she has to get John up at seven every morning to ride in a van to the sheltered workshop--you'd better hope the two of them are really close because John is likely to be pissed off at her a lot of the time.

No one does their job right all the time, so I feel like the measure of whether someone's good at their job is just whether they're good at the majority of the things they're required to do. Let's say I'm an aide for someone who constantly forgets what they're doing from one minute to the next. I've mentioned how extremely difficult this is for me because, well, that's what I'm like except I guess I'm slightly above the line where I get staff for it. I am going to suck at helping this person dress, shower, etc.--if I'm this person's aide I'm basically going to suck at my entire job. (I also know from past experience that I start resenting the fact that if the person doesn't get dressed etc., that is considered to be my fault not theirs, whereas in my own life if I don't get dressed etc., that is considered to be my fault too; and stuff like that.)

However! If I'm this person's staff person, I could be great at my job. I can do a bunch of random easy stuff that my employer inexplicably requires me to do instead of letting the client do it. I also--and yes I feel very creepy saying this--am very good at convincing "non-compliant" people to do stuff, and calming down people who are upset. So my success rate at doing the tasks required of me suddenly goes up from, say, 50% to 90%, in the change from aide to staff person. I become competent, for some very dumb reasons, and at the cost of someone else's freedom.

I think it's very important to explore these facts because there is not very much writing about being a disabled staff person (let's include any kind of figure who offers support and can abuse power--teacher, psychologist, etc.) for disabled people. I have to figure this out for myself. And I think just as non-disabled people assume all staff are non-disabled, it seems like disabled people kind of do too when setting up the staff/disabled relationship as simply oppressor/oppressed.

So let's be clean about this.

1. I don't know why non-disabled people choose to become staff. Maybe they think it will be easy because they have someone disabled in their family who they get along with. Maybe they do it out of charity. Maybe they just think it's fun. Maybe they couldn't find another job.

2. I decided to be staff because I am disabled and it seemed like the only safe option. If I work in environments where no one is disabled, then I end up feeling under a lot of pressure to pass and I feel depressed and isolated, and end up experiencing the whole dissociation and self-injury swarm of awesomeness. I'm also not good at a lot of normal jobs because I can be very slow and don't think about big systems very well. Being staff not only frees me from a lot of these problems, but often provides me with the experience of getting to be around other disabled people, which makes me calmer and happier. I don't feel that I have another choice but to do this kind of job.

3. But it's very, very important for me to think about the ways that my attempts to protect and look after myself can damage other people. I wrote a post addressing some semi-related issues a long time ago--mostly about how I prefer working in segregated environments. Now I find myself thinking about how I prefer (for myself, if I resolutely ignore how it affects other people, which I can't) being a staff person rather than an aide.

So where does all that leave me?

I think there are two directions I can go in. One is to practically accept that I could easily contribute to fucked-up situations (either contributing to oppression by being staff, or contributing to someone's life being a little worse by being a subpar aide), and to decide that I will always avoid those situations by:
    a. being an aide for someone whose support needs are primarily physical, emotional, and/or communicative, rather than cognitive
    b. being staff (i.e. an authority figure) in an environment where I don't think it's wrong for me to have authority--for example, working with kids instead of adults

The other direction is to argue that maybe I actually am a good aide for people who have my kind of impairments, even though I suck at some stuff, because I have more rapport with them and am good in emergencies or something, and that that should outweigh my drawbacks. But I don't know if those things do outweigh them. Emergencies don't happen enough to really become the kind of task that can change your success percentage from 50% to 90%. And like I said--although I wouldn't want to be an aide for someone I didn't click with, and wouldn't keep a job like that for long--I think that getting along with clients is awesome but it should not be part of the job because if you need to use your bond to get them to do something, then there's something wrong with the job. So I will go with the first option.

Next year I'm planning to work as a school aide for kids with disabilities (don't get confused by the terminology, this is a staff person job), and I may keep doing that for a while to get my head straight and figure out what else is okay for me to do. Before you ask, "But Amanda, why don't you just apply to a place that gives people aides, and tell them that you have a disability and you need these kinds of clients, or if you have clients who have certain kinds of impairments, you can only work with them on certain things?" I'd like to remind you that this blog is not a comedy club.

some complaints about being same-sex-attracted and not adapting well

(totally switched into my old anti-"queer culture" whining mode while writing this, and I apologize tenfold, I really am better now in this area at least. But I'm just posting this without reading it over because if I don't I will never post anything like it at all.)

I guess this is probably bad, but I'm not making an It Gets Better video because I'm not better.

I was working on a long post about this, since August, but it never really solidified.

When I was in high school, someone who wasn't my friend said this to my (secret, closeted) friend, who then told me: "Everyone could see there was something different about Amanda, and then when they found out she was gay, they had an answer."

When I was in high school, the word dyke or lesbian was a way to easily quantify all the things about me that didn't seem right. When I was in high school I felt very alone.

When I was in ninth and tenth grade, I actually brought all this on myself by not denying that I was gay or bisexual, and presenting in a masculine way. I felt that this was an important thing to do because other kids needed to see that queer people were just regular people. The problem with this idea is, in hindsight, obvious: I am not a regular person. Being openly queer in a heteronormative environment is a noble thing to do, but maybe not if you have anxiety about pretty much everything and have trouble talking to people.

A lot of my coming-out process happened when I was on a lot of medication and overwhelmed by the relationships I was in. By the time I was in eleventh grade, I was more able to clearly see what was going on, and I knew that I'd made a mistake by not being closeted. My school was very small, some people were genuinely afraid to be friends with me in case someone said they were having sex with me, and I wasn't a person who could charm my way out of this stigma. But my school wasn't violently homophobic and I feel like a more normal person could have made a difference. It would have to be a person who fit in every way, except one.

I think this is something that's always been hard for me to conceptualize--I've been in situations that other people would have been able to handle, but I haven't been. I feel like there's an attitude of, "It's not that bad for queer people to be under a little more pressure, if it's an amount of pressure that a normal person can handle, if they have nothing else on their plate."

At my college being same-sex-attracted is a non-issue; I remember the first time I told someone at college I was gay, and how hard that was for me. When I was in high school, I had huge problems saying the word and wouldn't be able to finish sentences if they contained it. In the first semester or two of college, I felt afraid of hugging my female friends or even sitting close to them while watching TV. I don't feel that way anymore. I don't feel separate from my friends because I am not straight. And that is a really big thing that means a lot to me, but it's all I'd be able to say in an "it gets better" video, and on paper, it doesn't sound that great.

I'm incel (don't know this word very well, and if it's associated with a subculture of assholes I take back my identification). I've never had a serious relationship with anyone.

[Edit from 2018: Even though someone tried to explain to me in the comments, I did not understand the depths of the "incel" community at the time I wrote this post and would NEVER use that word to describe myself now. I don't know if "ace spectrum" would be a better word to use, but it was and is the case that I'm rarely attracted to people, and my needs in a relationship are somewhat unusual; so it's not very common for me to be attracted to someone who's both attracted to me and compatible with me. I think a lot of my early-20s complaints about lesbians not being up to my standards were really a way to avoid admitting that relationships and dating don't usually work for me because of how I am.]

I have always wanted to get married and have a big family (big by liberal not conservative standards, so 3-5 kids). But I have never really thought this will happen. For a while I used to think that I might end up marrying one of my male friends and raising kids together, but I'm no longer okay with that prospect; it would just make me too depressed.

Even though my school is ssa-positive, most of the people at my school are straight just like most of the people in the world. I have enough friends that I never feel lonely, but I don't belong to a group of friends (partly because I don't like groups), and I know very few ssa people because I don't have stereotypical queer interests.

A few years ago I posted on a lesbian advice forum saying I was depressed and stressed because I wanted to believe I would someday get married and have kids, but that I had never been in a relationship and didn't think I ever would be. People responded telling me that if I was on a date with a girl, I shouldn't tell her I wanted to have kids, because she would think I was creepy. One person went to my livejournal, saw where I went to school, and told me that my school wasn't any place to complain about and that I should "stop whining." She provided a list of various social groups and activities that would help me to meet "dykes," including eating in a co-op (which would mean being organized enough to eat at the same time every day, taking up a lot of executive function cooking and cleaning, and constantly interacting with a large group of people I didn't know).

I try not to think about any of this.

I used to have a political problem with the way other ssa people behaved. Whenever I thought about it I got so upset that I didn't know what to do. The way I saw it, there were two kinds of ssa people:

1. "gay" people (such as people involved in the HRC) who were very normal and wanted to have normal jobs and normal families. They didn't think much about trans people, non-homosexual sexual minorities, or anyone who wasn't normal.

2. "queer" people (such as a lot of people at my school) who were very into not being normal, playing rugby, performance art, co-ops, and so on. Many of them identified as trans but didn't seem to understand that some trans people actually take hormones and get surgery and are poor, and are not students at a liberal arts college who change their pronouns every week.

(Part of the focus of #2 arose because my only good lesbian friend, and one of my only non-straight-and-cis friends, was a person who was transitioning in college and had before transitioning fit squarely into the category of "very serious person who likes obscure music, old movies, and complaining." This was not such a bad personality for a straight guy, but it just added to the awkwardness she already felt whenever she tried to go to any kind of trans-related group or event at school, since most of the people were female-assigned and also just acted super "queer"--i.e. running around being spontaneous and talking about how we just need to break down all the labels and categories and let people be themselves, man! [Seriously, once I asked a very annoying queer-identified guy, who had previously been a pretty cool gay-identified guy who hated queers, but I think they stole his brain or something, "Well, what do you actually think we should be doing if everything 'gay' people are doing is so racist and classist and normative?" to which he replied that "trans issues are important, like we shouldn't have male and female bathrooms," at which point I couldn't take it anymore and said "Well what about fucking HEALTH CARE COVERAGE FOR TRANSITION" and he said he didn't really know what he thought we should be doing but we'd discuss it later and I should read Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.]

Anyway, it was just pretty annoying for my friend and me, and we used to kind of feed into each other, and one time a queer feminist girl called out my friend in a filmmaking class for making a film about a female character when [the queer feminist thought] my friend wasn't a woman. [The person wasn't intentionally being transphobic--my friend was still using her birth name at the time and maybe still looked ambiguous--but I still think it's not okay to say something as harsh as what she said to my friend, on the basis of the assumption that someone isn't a woman.])

I just got really upset because I still felt alone/depressed about my future as an ssa person, and I also could see that trans people were in genuine financial/physical danger, but I felt like no one cared about just Making Things Better For Everyone. They wanted to either make things better for a small group of normal people, or go totally abstract and just "queer everything" and "break down all the categories and walls," which meant fuck all in the short term for real people.

I felt weird because I wanted to get married but I wasn't normal and I felt like "gay" people wanted to help normal people get married and "queer" people were anti-marriage so neither one included me.

For quite a while when I was nineteen and twenty I insisted on being referred to only as "homosexual" and "same-sex-attracted" because I didn't want to be associated with any cultural groups. A straight friend-of-a-friend referred to me as queer, and was a bit surprised when I spat out, "I'm not queer, I'm gay." In the past year I have started calling myself queer just because I like the word and I don't really give a fuck about how alienated I feel from most people who identify with it.

The only reason I stopped being so upset about being ssa was just because in the last year I started getting into Autistic/disabled stuff and I actually feel like I share the values and am included and not ignored because I'm too weird or not radical enough. So now I feel like I can actually work on stuff that's important, by working on disability stuff, and not feel like I'm alone in what I care about.

But when I go back to thinking about being ssa, I never feel better.