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It seems like it's socially acceptable for "liberal" parents to say things like, "This is hard for me, I need time" as an excuse for saying offensive or hurtful things to their kids who are queer or transgender, and generally not making an effort to support them.  For some reason, this functions as a get out of jail free card to keep the parents from being seen as prejudiced or a bad parent, and I don't really think that is okay.

It's harder to actually belong to a marginalized group than it is to have your kid not turn out the way you were expecting.  Queer and trans people shouldn't have to deal with our parents being insulting and unhelpful on top of other things we have to deal with, and we definitely shouldn't be expected to act calm and patient when they're not even acting like parents.

Annie

(The story in this post might be upsetting to some people because it involves trying to pressure someone into taking medication and judging them for not taking it.)

I feel like I shouldn't be posting right now because I should be sleeping and I'll be tired on the way to work, but I feel like I use the excuse of sleeping to avoid almost everything, like church, and I barely sleep anyway so here I go.

"They say an unhappy man wants distractions--something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he'd rather lie there shivering than get up and find one."--CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

When we were freshmen Clayton and I had a friend, let's call her Annie. I don't know how much of this is 100% accurate but I don't think Annie reads this blog, so it's probably all right to just tell you how I remember it. Annie identified herself in conversations as someone who had a mental illness and sometimes hurt herself, and one day she casually told me that she probably should be on medication because she was at an age when the way her brain was was being solidified and if she didn't go on medication right now, she would always have problems. She told me this like it was funny and she didn't particularly care to do anything about it.

Clayton and I both have savior complexes and we made it a project to try and get Annie to go to student counseling. Never mind that he would later realize how fucked up he had gotten from the medication student counseling put him on, or that I've been virulently anti-medication of any kind since I was 16, to the extent that I would rather throw up from pain than take an Advil. For whatever reason we decided that we were right and Annie was wrong and we had to get her to go to counseling.

It was almost summer; Annie wanted to be outside when it was sunny so she could skateboard and hang out with her friends. Every day the two of us would descend on her and try to get her to go to counseling and she would say that she didn't want to go until it was dark. Student counseling closed at five in the evening so this was the same as saying she could never go. I remember how ridiculous and reckless Clayton and I thought she was, and how much we annoyed her.

Annie and I grew apart over the next three years but she is someone I admire a lot because she's so smart and interested in so many things. Sometimes it seems like she just has to think of something she'd like, and all the resources appear to make it happen. I found her hard to be friends with because she moved so fast--she would suggest doing something, I'd resist it because it went against my schedule, and by the time I started realizing I would like to do it she would already have left to begin it.

The point is though that a year or two ago I started really understanding how I could see Annie's decision as smart, not stupid. It got me through the last year and a half of college, trying to think that way--blinding myself to the big picture, trying to unfocus my eyes and look at seconds and colors. I couldn't do things right and I couldn't feel good a lot of the time so I stopped trying. I didn't fail. When I saw something in front of me that might make me feel good, I took it.

So for a long time I've been on that kind of track and I've realized how hard it is for someone outside to see why you don't listen to "reason." Why you'd rather ride in a car than worry about your problems taking care of yourself. Why you'd rather have fun smoking than figure out if you will let yourself live long enough to die of lung cancer. Why instead of constantly apologizing to yourself and everyone for not being more organized, you're making Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in a huge pot and watching YouTube videos with your roommate.

The thing I feel most clearly now is that it was none of my business what Annie did with her time. I'm not as clear on the rest of it--how being like Annie applies to me and how I should feel about it.

I found myself talking about Annie today. I was trying to argue why it's okay for me to be involved with men even though I am gay. I'm probably going to get upset writing about this because the conversation turned to an end that felt more permanent than usual. I know I was convincing him at the beginning. At some point it wasn't working anymore for me to say "we should live in the moment" and "I don't expect to ever have a family or a relationship with a woman, so we might as well try and feel as good as we can."

And I remembered, a few years ago I would have thought being with a guy was like throwing something in God's face, being too lazy and desperate for comfort to feel anything but the shadows of what I could feel. I would have thought it was the real thing or nothing, and even now it's hurting me to type that it's not the real thing, because I want it to be as good as the real thing when it's with a guy, but it's not and that's not my fault. And the boy wasn't hurt, he's the strangest, nicest boy--he was relieved.

The truth is it's very hard for me to work especially not being a driver, and it's really hard for me to live on my own, and the only people I talk to outside of work are men who try and bother me. Giving up smoking is a serious sacrifice not because of nicotine as much as the fact that I lose a reason people will talk to me. I'm really sad right now. Sorry if this is too much information, but I've been going back and forth on the Annie thing for such a long time, and I wanted to write about it. Not Annie herself because obviously she shouldn't have been on meds when she didn't want to be, but thinking about endgames vs. staying in the sunlight whenever I can.

The thing is I don't know if I ever felt so much this way since I was on meds myself in tenth grade. Every day I'd take stimulants and spend a few hours thinking everything was really special and important, not realizing how much I didn't notice or how fucked up everything had gotten. As the day went on I got sadder and sadder and the only thing that mattered to me was--guess what--the person I was dating, who I wasn't actually attracted to.

Towards the end of the drugs, in some sobbing state, I told my mom I wasn't happy. My mom saw me all amped and buzzed up on the way to school every morning after I downed my Wellbutrin and Adderall. She said, "But I see you happy every day."

I said, "but I'm not a happy person."

I built myself back up through the two depressing but somehow joyful last years of high school. I was a very sad but happy person by the time I turned eighteen. I'm not sure how lazy and distracted I must have gotten, to get so far off track--because yeah I have to look at the small things, but this has gotten small enough to seep into all of them.

I'm not a happy person.

And this is me telling God and myself that I'm going to get better.

I was thinking about identifying as gay and why that’s weird for me, I guess in the short term because I like a boy right now, but in the long term because I don’t consider this (or any other instances that may occur) to be exceptions to the rule of my orientation, but in fact to be consistent with it.

I wouldn’t correct someone who called me queer, as that also describes me, but gay or homosexual is the label I’d rather use. I see why the word queer is appealing because of its fluidity but it’s precisely that fluidity that causes me not to prefer it, and even caused me to hate and reject it when I was younger. As a teenager, I had experiences that shaped my personality and spirituality which were based in being not “other than straight” but a girl who was attracted to other girls and not attracted to boys. (I guess I should say female-assigned because I didn’t really identify as a girl for some periods of my adolescence.)

In the really lonely times that made me the person I am, being gay felt like the most important aspect of me even as it was the most damning. The fact that I was not attracted to boys was a big part of it because it wasn’t just “I’m different” but “there is actually no way I can fit into the world as the world seems to be.” I remember almost starting to cry at school one day when I was in a room with some girls who started having a conversation about which smells were most attractive on boys.

It also is a wonderful and painful part of my life that I have really close, physically and emotionally affectionate, friendships with straight guys. It’s wonderful for the closeness, but painful for various reasons: feeling outranked in importance by my friends’ girlfriends, feeling like I don’t count because I can’t provide sex, feeling like I’m seen as a threat because I’m a girl who’s close with someone’s boyfriend and I have to distance myself/quit being physically affectionate to show that I’m not a threat, being mistaken for a friend’s girlfriend and getting approval from straight people for our perceived relationship, which is kind of painful, and so on. All these experiences are ones that I have pretty regularly so being not attracted to boys is a big part of my life and I’d like to continue to claim it as part of my identity whether or not I happen to like a boy at the time.

Okay, so what do I mean by saying that I can like a boy without it being an exception, but I’m not attracted to boys?

Well, there are multiple factors that lead to me being strongly attracted to someone. I’m attracted to people who are very translucent about their feelings, who are clever, and who put me in a certain frame of mind sexually. Those are the three most important factors—well four I guess as gender is probably up there with those three as a massively important factor. Then there’s stuff that would trigger me to be attracted to someone, like having blue eyes, but that I don’t really feel the absence of in the strength of my attraction.

Let’s say that I said, “I’m attracted to people who have black hair and I don’t find any other hair color attractive,” and I lived in a society where the hair color that you were attracted to was really important, and I wasn’t raised knowing that I could like people with black hair, and I thought God might be punishing me for liking people with black hair, and it was this huge experience in my life. I mean, I’m giving this backstory to explain why I might say about myself on a regular basis, “I’m attracted to people who have black hair and I don’t find any other hair color attractive.” Because it would be very important, if I lived in that world.

But in the real world, where hair color preference isn’t seen as the most important aspect of your sexuality, if I liked someone who had blond hair—not because they had blond hair, but because everything else about them was one of my triggers for attraction—this really wouldn’t be some big shift in my sexuality where I’d now have to say, “I’m attracted to people with black hair and people with blond hair,” because I wouldn’t be any more attracted to blond-haired people than I was before, and in fact I still wouldn’t be attracted to blond-haired-ness at all. It would just be that it wasn’t the only defining factor in me being attracted to someone.

To make a really long story short, I am gay but although gender’s a hugely strong factor for me, there are other equally strong or stronger ones. But there’s not a word for this, sad times.

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.

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.

notes on my awesome book

Maybe you recall I am writing a book where I attempt to parody and reclaim a certain horror/pulp/gothic fiction trope where some or all of the following qualities:
breaking gender norms
same-sex-attraction
oddness, illness, and/or disability
childhood trauma
evil
depression
obsessive, unhealthy love
are treated as being related to each other and causing each other.

EG's mom killed EG's dad when EG was very little and was never caught. EG grew up with her mom in a very cold and isolated unit. Everything was super gothic, down to their house and their town, so EG's experience of life is very gothic as well. (I'm using initials because I don't like EG's current name.)

EG sits in her dad's study all the time and reads all her dad's favorite books and does all the things he liked to do and wear his clothes. When she is about 11, she begins to be sexually attracted to girls, which she sees as a manifestation of her father's spirit inside her. EG feels the way about her dad's ghost that some people feel about the Holy Spirit--it is working in her and changing her to make her more like him so she can stay close to him her whole life. So being attracted to girls is kind of like being able to speak in tongues.

Of course it's also a difficult and frustrating gift because EG still looks like EG and is treated as a girl when she goes out into the world, but she is her dad.

One reason I like this idea is because the narrative of lesbians and masculine women is always a narrative about hate--lesbians hate men, hate society, hate femininity. It's always an escape and rejection. Whereas EG resembles the most cliched lesbian characters but her narrative is one of love and seeking home. The difference between wearing men's clothes and wearing a particular man's clothes.

safety is not the worst

Since I haven't been posting that much I figured a desire to say anything is probably a good one even though this isn't related to disability (on the surface). It's sort of hard to remember being this enraged gay person to whom everything was really cut and dry, and I think some of my beliefs were wrongheaded but I also find them important. I was talking to a friend about high school the other day and I just found myself kind of buried in my old trains of thought.

Brief background (embarrassing to even talk about): I came out as questioning to my parents when I was 10, came out as bisexual when I was 13, came out as gay when I was 16 and that's when the realizations were occurring to me. But this doesn't actually line up with what I was identified as at school. When I started high school I found myself in an environment that was much less aggressive than middle school, but I was still really affected by my experiences being bullied. I was scared very easily and withdrawn from everyone but the friends I made at the very beginning of school; I could speak when I was with them. I really didn't like this about myself and because my school was so small I felt that it would be important for me to be openly queer because I thought it would make queerness more visible and acceptable to people if they knew someone who was queer. So I had a rainbow sticker on my notebook and when I was in ninth grade (when I was 14) a girl asked me if I was gay and I said yes. I didn't identify as gay at the time but I thought it was a simpler way to answer than saying I was bisexual (remember, trouble talking).

Over the course of ninth grade I spent a lot of time with Joan, a girl who wasn't very popular, and we were semi-dating for a little while, but I think that it wouldn't have made a difference even if we hadn't been dating. My school was really small and my admission that I was gay had kind of traveled around, and I found out that kids had discussed the rainbow button on my backpack, and discussed whether I was dating Joan. Joan would get really angry at me for hugging my female friends in public, following her around in an obsessive way, or saying in public that I thought girls were attractive, because she said I was making things worse for her. We stopped "dating" pretty soon for various reasons, but everyone still thought we were dating.

In tenth grade I cut my hair short and started dressing in a boyish way, and had another kind of clingy relationship with a girl (I guess we were technically open about it, but I don't know if people thought of her as being queer; she was very quiet but not unpopular in the same way as Joan). We also went to prom together. I became withdrawn from my friends because I was on Adderall which kind of fucked up my support network for eleventh grade combined with the fact that two of my best friends moved away and my best friend and girlfriend graduated. Our relationship was pretty dumb, and she broke up with me very reasonably at the beginning of the summer, but she did it by telling me she thought she was actually straight, which sent me into a huge spiral of feeling like I was the only person in the world who was queer. For a long time I thought of that summer and the months that followed as being a really defining period in my life, because I was really depressed but channeled it well and officially quit various things (any medication prescribed to me, self-injury, letting myself withdraw or obsess over one person) that had been controlling my life.

On my first day of eleventh grade, Joan and I skipped the morning assembly as we often did to go for a walk. She told me about the training trip for the soccer team that she'd just been on, and told me that most of the people on the team spent a lot of time talking about my supposed relationship with her. It was too bad because I was a lot more clear-headed than I had ever been before, but it was kind of too late to stop this stuff from happening. I also didn't know exactly how bad it was.

~BACKGROUND IS ACTUALLY OVER~

So, there was this girl, let's call her Martha, who was starting at my school as a sophomore. I was assigned to be her mentor who would introduce her to school, and I hung out with her and her friends once that summer. She knew Joan a little because she played soccer, but I didn't really see Martha much once school started. She made a lot of friends immediately, and didn't really make an effort to hang out with me or talk to me. But bizarrely, whenever my mom picked me up from school, Martha would be standing by the car carrying on a friendly conversation with her, and she would also occasionally, out of the blue, be very friendly and familiar with me. She found my livejournal and would comment on it. She also was close with Ms. H., a teacher who was really supportive of me re: queer and disability things, and would visit Ms. H. and talk to her several afternoons a week (which Joan also did).

Martha and my mom kept talking and eventually it was decided that my parents were going to drive me to Martha's house one Friday night after school. Kind of weird since Martha and I didn't really spend time together, but whatever. Because my school was so small (and probably because of the high percentage of kids with learning and emotional disabilities) it was pretty normal for kids to wander into random classes before they started, or even while they were going on, to say hi to teachers and students. So the day I was supposed to go to Martha's house, she wandered into my Latin class and said, "I'm excited for you to come to my house, we have a lot to talk about--something we have in common." She sort of laughed at me affectionately, as she usually did.

So, I'm sure you can guess from the buildup that what Martha told me when I got to her house was that she was gay, that she had been out at her old school, but that during soccer training it became immediately obvious to her from the way people treated Joan that there was no way she could be out at school. She freaked out and confided in Joan, at soccer training. She also came out to a friend in the dorms (she lived at school) who was the person who told her, "everyone always knew Amanda was different and then when they found out she was gay they had something." And one of her other friends immediately realized Martha was gay because she saw that Martha would be friendly to me but only when certain people weren't watching.

I guess I hadn't been--well, I had kind of known, but I hadn't really been sure if I was really The Gay Person At My School or not. But it became obvious from the way Martha talked about talking to me, that it was what defined me and that it was a reason for people not to talk to me. After that night at her house, we became good Internet friends but would barely talk at school, which she'd always pretend I was imagining. I was trying not to obsess over people, and I was starting to get really depressed and obsessive about our friendship, so I kind of detached myself from her. I really, really hated her in a way, even though I also liked talking to her and spending time with her.

I just remember that being gay felt really cold to me then. Like, I associated it with this almost physical sense of coldness, of wanting to drown, of drowning, of picking up things from the sidewalk and having to put them in my pocket because I'd have them, because I needed to have them. I kind of just thought that's what being gay was.

Anyway, I remember realizing, that night and the next day, that my mom of course had known about Martha being gay and had been talking to Martha's mom on the phone a lot about Martha being gay and other issues; that Joan, my only good friend remaining at school, had known Martha was gay; that Ms. H. knew; and that even though Joan and my mom presumably should have some kind of loyalty to me, and they'd known that I was really really isolated and lonely, they hadn't told me that there was another gay person at school, because it wouldn't be fair to Martha to tell.

And it all came down to this thing Martha said to me at her house on the Friday night: "Amanda, if you only knew how many people there are who really want to talk to you and be friends with you, but are just scared to--"

"Really? Like, who?"

"Well, it wouldn't be right to tell you. It's not fair to them."

Gosh, I'm sorry, and I don't know if this is coming out clear, but I remember that at that age I read Lockpick Pornography and I just took it completely straight. And I just remember this feeling that I was being used as a bulletproof vest for Martha and whoever these other people were.

Martha had this secret greatestjournal (I know, we're old, greatestjournal doesn't exist anymore) where she would pour out everything she was feeling about being closeted at school and how hard it was for her. I read it and I cared but I also would see her walking around school with her friends, when I didn't have any friends, and I'd feel like crying that she got to be close to people, and I'd just want her to shut up about her stupid problem of being safe.

Sometimes I just feel like I have nothing in common with people who were closeted in high school, or passed for some reason or another. It's not exactly the same as being radical--that seems like saying queerness is universal when that's the opposite of what I mean. For me, especially when I was in high school or very closely out of high school (a year or two) it just felt like, this is MINE. You can't have it, you can't fuzz it up, you can't make it different, you can't say it belongs to everyone, because I was by myself. I was like a warning.

So if you're going to take me as a warning (I felt) of what not to be like, you don't get to just turn around years later, or when you're alone, and say that you really are like me after all, that we're the same inside. You are NOT like me. We are not the same. Outsides fucking matter.

...Can someone tell me what I'm feeling or what I mean, by spending the last few hours typing this up?

So I just remembered something about the movie Legally Blonde, which is the kind of movie that you end up seeing multiple times at birthday parties and stuff when you're a kid, but the first time I saw it was in theaters with my mom, so I would have been twelve. There's a character in the movie, who according to Google is named Enid, who probably talks two or three times that I can remember. This character is a stereotypical lesbian feminist and all her lines are about that. I think there's also a deleted scene where she argues with the main character about the case while eating with a fork out of a plastic container.

The reason I remember this is because I actually thought it was cool to talk while eating with a fork out a plastic container, as a result of seeing the movie. Also I thought that the line "I single-handedly organized the march for Lesbians Against Drunk Driving" was super funny, even though it's not really a joke, it's just supposed to explain that Enid is a lesbian. I would even quote it.

The reason I'm telling you this is that I was thinking about how if you're a minority and you are unfortunately saddled with the desire to consume pop culture (and am I ever), a lot of the time you have to choose between getting attached to some really dumb character just because you're excited to see someone who belongs to your group, or just giving up on finding any characters who that part of you can identify with. Which is sort of okay when you're older, and besides as you get older you can find movies and TV shows that are less mainstream--but in retrospect it is so, so weird when you're a kid.

I watched this Skins episode and had some gay thoughts and some Autistic thoughts

So for a really long time I've been wanting to watch Skins because I knew the following information: there was this lesbian couple that everyone liked. And then one of them had sex with a guy with ASD because she felt sorry for him, and all the lesbians on the Internet were mad because it was like she was really straight! Argh! And hearing this, I was kind of like, gosh that's fucked up for the guy with ASD though. What about him? Queer Autistic TV investigation time!

So, I watched the episode where the lesbian sleeps with the guy with autism. And it was like...I actually can't believe it exists. The character with autism is the best fictional character with ASD I've ever read about or seen. It's so easy to explain why something is wrong, and so hard to explain why something is right, so I almost don't even know how to talk about why I love him so much. (Spoilers, obviously.)

The walls of his bedroom are covered with a chart he made about his relationships with other people. And that sounds so stupid and offensive, but somehow it's not. And he walks like he has ASD and he talks like he has ASD; like, the real kind, not the TV kind. And and and...I just can't even talk about it. I'll probably end up watching the entire show and then maybe I can try to write about him again.

It was such a good episode though. Like the wall chart, the "once-only charity event" sex wasn't as offensive as it sounds. Towards the beginning of the episode, JJ says something like, "If I could be normal for one day I'd lose my virginity, and then I'd tell my friends not to fight with each other and they'd listen to me instead of ruffling my hair." Emily (the lesbian character) replies that maybe he could have the things he wants if he actually pursued them. So he sets out to tell his friends what he thinks of them, with terrible results, but in the process he and Emily become closer and she announces that they should sleep together. It's not like, "I'm going to have sex with you because no one else would ever have sex with you," it's like, "I'm going to have sex with you because you think that you'll never have sex, and this will change the way you think of yourself." Which is kind of a messed up reason to have sex with someone, but it's not insulting. (And apparently he later has a real relationship.)

The episode ends with JJ's mom watching the two friends talking and laughing together, and realizing that she doesn't need to worry about him--which was one of the things he most wanted. And then I almost cried. It was so good. I just like, couldn't even handle it, from a gay or an Autistic perspective. Emily and JJ were, like, humans!

Like, if I can put on my other hat--as a person who's gay in a weird way--I really appreciated this. I feel like if people think a lesbian sleeping with men is just inherently offensive no matter what, then they don't understand what's so offensive about most "lesbians sleeping with men" plotlines. I feel like the problem is the implication that men trump women--so women can be involved with women, have sex or even a relationship, and they can even identify as gay or bi--but a guy can change everything, or a guy is the root of everything. For example, my understanding is that on House a female character was having sex with random women because she was depressed, and afraid of a relationship with a guy she liked. This obviously devalues sex/relationships between women because it's just presented as something you do, not something important like heterosexual relationships.

But what happens on Skins is basically the opposite of this. Emily is in love with a girl, she has sex with JJ as a gesture of friendship, and at the end of the episode she's still in love with her girlfriend. It shows that lesbian feelings can be secure and stable and aren't completely dislodged the minute you get the chance to sleep with a guy.

Like, I guess I'm gold star because I've never had sex with a guy, but I feel very un-gold star sometimes because I've had so many really close, affectionate friendships with guys, which have sometimes had a sexual dimension. These guys have always thought of me as gay and I've always known when involved in these friendships that if I get married I want it to be to a woman, and that when I'm sexually moved by something involving a guy, it's in spite of the fact that he's a guy which tends to mean my reactions are weaker.

To try to explain the sex thing without being too explicit, guys are like a bunch of grapes or some Easy Mac or something. I mean I love Easy Mac, but it's not a whole meal. And I don't think the fact that guys are sexual Easy Mac to me (instead of some disgusting food that I would never eat in any circumstances) makes me any less of a lesbian. I'm sorry but it's completely heterosexist to say that my feelings towards guys are on the same level as my feelings towards girls. If you say that, it's like you're saying men are just so super important that the weight of anything involving men gets multiplied by a billion so that it automatically outweighs anything involving just women.

Yeah so anyway I really liked this episode of Skins and I think it's awesome that they showed a lesbian doing stuff with a guy and still very much being a lesbian. And it was the Best Autism Ever. And I'm excited to watch more.

olympics

I remember feeling annoyed by some of the comments on Ari's Wired interview in the ontd_political community on LiveJournal. Basically the interviewer wrote something like, "Imagine a world where most of the public discussion of homosexuality was about curing it." And everybody flipped out and was like, "but that IS what it's like!! Oppression Olympics!"

First of all, the interviewer is gay, which I think matters. His experience as a gay person obviously hasn't led him to feel that most of the public discussion of homosexuality is about curing it, or he wouldn't have made that analogy. I understand commenters may not have known he was gay, but they assumed he wasn't. And I think the fact that a gay person made that analogy indicates that "public discussion of homosexuality is mostly about curing it" is a disingenuous statement in the US. I wouldn't make that analogy just because I don't think it's particularly helpful (plus I'd expect all the Oppression Olympics accusations), but as a gay person I don't think the basis of the analogy is untrue. Of course SSA people are oppressed but I think we moved out of the medical model a long time ago, which is a triumph.

I was also really pissed because at one point one of these people said, "Hey, people get KILLED for being gay, that's not a fair comparison." Getting pissed at someone else for doing Oppression Olympics on what you claim is not a true assumption, and then starting your own Oppression Olympics round based on an assumption that is incredibly untrue, and obviously so to anyone who's engaged with disability issues...is way way worse than what Steve Silberman did.

Oppression Olympics--let's call it "comparing oppressions" to be a little more measured--is a tricky issue. A few months ago I posted about this person who was saying, "Pop culture is so into portraying autism but eating disorders and depression should be portrayed too." That person's post really frustrated me because they obviously didn't have a good grasp on how autism is being portrayed or how people with autism feels about those portrayals. They didn't have the compassion, or didn't do enough research, and ended up complaining about how good people with autism have it in pop culture compared to them and their friends with psychiatric disabilities.

However, I do think that comparing oppression can sometimes be a good thing. Because I'm queer and disabled I'm obviously aware of things straight and non-disabled people do like "trying to explain alternate points of view and get you to think more objectively." (I'm not going into detail on this, but do you know what I'm talking about?) So I think this means that while I definitely don't "get" what it's like to be a person of color, etc., I'm at least a little more aware of my privilege and try not to go all, "But you're being mean! Think about white people!" This term I have also felt sort of weird in my fiction class because I've felt kind of synced-in to classmates of color's stories which address identity and experiences of oppression, but when my instinct is to respond to those stories as a minority, I worry that it will be rude because they may not read me as a minority or as the same kind of minority as them.

I recently had the interesting experience of saying to someone, "I mean I know comparing oppressions is wrong, but--" and having the other person cut me off: "I don't think it's wrong. I think the only way anyone ever learns anything about someone else's oppression is by having it related to a type of oppression they're familiar with."

Which...damn, I'm sorry, but that is how it's worked for me.

I feel like one way of looking at this is that there are just two different kinds of comparing oppressions and one is trying to prove that someone has it worse than someone else (which I guess you should say is about dividing people), and one is trying to help people understand other people's experiences (which is about allyship and connection), but I think this is really an oversimplified way of putting it, because a lot of the time someone will think they're doing the latter, but other people will feel that they're doing the former. For example, when the Special Olympics did ads where they used racial slurs to try to make people more aware of ableist slurs. That was really fucked up. At the same time I feel like trying to relate ableism to other forms of discrimination can be useful sometimes.

disabling queerness: Fingersmith

Before I start, there are two kinds of ASD (or generally mind-disabled) characters, besides those who are actually canonically identified as having ASD. There are people like Pete Campbell where I sincerely think that if they were a real person born in 2000, they would be diagnosed with ASD. Then there are people like River Tam from Firefly, who obviously doesn't literally have ASD or schizophrenia, because we know that her ASD/schizophrenic traits come from emotional trauma and brain injury. If I write something "reading" River as a person like me, I'm not trying to deny the canon of the show, but just saying that functionally, she is kind of like people with certain disabilities, and can be identified with/claimed by us.

The character Maud Lilly, from the book and movie Fingersmith, is the second kind of character; she comes off as being like a person with ASD because of her life experience. Although this isn't the reason I love the book and movie--they're just incredibly fantastic and creative--it is probably the reason I find the love story so affecting, because Maud's experience of infatuation is so much like mine.



If you are interested in watching the movie or reading the book Fingersmith, you should probably know that there's a big twist and it has to do with exactly what this post is about. I knew the twist beforehand and I still love the book and movie, but if you want to be surprised, you should stop reading here.

Okay. (I'm talking about the book, but the movie doesn't change any of the facts--it just doesn't focus in on Maud's adolescence and sexuality as much as the book.)

So Fingersmith is a gothic novel about a 19th-century teenage pickpocket, Sue, who is hired to scam a sheltered girl named Maud. Maud lives with her uncle in the country and would inherit a lot of money from him if she ever got married--but it seems like she never will get married because she's so isolated. Gentleman, a con artist, is planning on marrying her and then getting her labeled as "mad" and put in an institution so he can have her money.

Sue's job is to be Maud's maid, become friends with her, and do anything possible to get her to fall in love with Gentleman and elope with him. Sue narrates in the movie, "When I saw her I thought: 'This is going to be easy.'" Maud is very stiff and soft-spoken and has nightmares every night (during which she begs Sue not to leave her alone). Sue has grown up taking care of babies and young children, so despite her plans to hurt Maud she has an instinctive protective reaction to Maud's anxious, childlike nature.

Maud is "developmentally delayed"--I don't use this as a euphemism for intellectual disability, but as a term for something that most disabled young adults have, both because of disability and as a result of being sheltered and not learning to be independent. Maud is young for her age. She does not understand how to do a lot of things that most people her age know how to do.

Sue becomes very attached to Maud, and ends up kissing and having sex with her because Maud claims not to know how to have sex. But she doesn't know how to stop what she's doing, and the con continues as planned. In the days after Maud and Gentleman have gotten married, but before Maud is institutionalized, Sue becomes more and more distraught and depressed about betraying someone she loves, someone who is so innocent. Then Maud steals Sue's identity, and Sue is institutionalized as Maud Lilly. Sue realizes that Maud was actually working with Gentleman to scam Sue.

The twist of the story is that Maud isn't a "pigeon," the term Gentleman uses for an easily manipulated person. This is already a "fuck yeah" moment for disabled readers. But what's even cooler is that Maud wasn't faking very much. She really is developmentally delayed and she really does have nightmares, and she really is very stiff and impaired when it comes to other people. Nonetheless, she is calculating and capable of doing evil.

The unevenness of Maud's abilities, the fallacy inherent in categorizing her as "childlike" or "adultlike," is encapsulated by her knowledge of sex. In the second part of the book, which is narrated by Maud, we learn that her uncle collects pornographic writing and images, and she has been his secretary since she was a child. The servants in the house don't know what her uncle's library consists of, and became unsettled by Maud because she would use sexual terms at a young age; this led to her losing their motherly support, after which she began to bully and harass them. Her uncle's friends are attracted to Maud when they visit the house and she reads porn to them--they think of her as sexy, impure, and probably available, though of course she's never even kissed anyone. After Maud has scammed Sue and is living in London, she tries to get help from one of her uncle's friends, but he refuses to associate with her because of her reputation.

Maud can't be categorized as a virgin or a whore; she is physically and emotionally untouched, but seen as damaged goods because of her intellectual knowledge. To me, the most beautiful passages in the book are those describing Maud's attraction to Sue--her surprise at realizing that something she's very intellectually familiar with could actually happen to her; that sexuality isn't the boring, mildly disgusting thing she always thought it was.

After putting Sue in the institution, Maud realizes that she is in love with Sue and wants to save her. But it's very difficult for her to do anything because she has no common sense or understanding of how to move around in a city. I won't summarize the rest of the book, but don't worry, everything turns out awesome and there are some more twists. I basically just want to talk about what a great mind-disabled character Maud is. She comes off at first as being completely guileless and unable to do anything. Then we find out that isn't true at all and she's a force to be reckoned with, but her disability doesn't just disappear; there really are things she can't do. And she's neither good or evil, she's both, just like all the other characters.

self-centered fiction fun

(I had some ideas about "minority experience writing" but I just got excited and started describing everything I'm writing now. Sorry. I like writing because you don't have to feel bad because people can just ignore the parts that are boring.)

I think writing that sets out to "make a point" is bad. however, I generally write with the intention of feeling less alone or, yeah, let's be honest, sometimes making a point. But when I am making a point I develop love for the characters, or else I might as well just be writing on my blog.

I generally write about queer and/or disabled characters. I actually was thinking about stuff I wrote in high school and I realized that even during periods when I buried my disabled identity (11th-12th grade and some of my first year of college) almost everything I wrote had characters who could be read as having disabilities (a limp, an eating disorder, intense anxiety, kleptomania, and of course ocular albinism). I sometimes don't like to identify characters as having autism and other fairly newly recognized disabilities, because I write stuff that is somewhat stylized and I think it breaks the style--but at this point I certainly am personally aware of my characters' disabilities.

I've been kind of distractedly working on a novel for almost two years (hoping to work much more consistently on it next term, as an independent project) that is kind of a parody of 19th- and 20th-century fiction about "inverted," traumatized ssa people. The main character is a female-assigned teenager who's attracted to girls and had a very gory, gothic childhood. She starts going to boarding school after being homeschooled and isolated for years, and has a sense of passing as female, and heterosexual, but really just passing for everything because she's so nonstandard. She has a frame for thinking about her difference which is constructed out of basically every possible ssa and gender-variant horror/gothic trope, which isn't exactly overturned in the story, but isn't really supported as being anything more than a coping mechanism.

The secondary characters are a twin brother and sister and the main character is torn between her intense friendship with the brother, the only person to whom she doesn't pass, and her crush on the sister (who for most of the story she doesn't relate to as a whole person because her idea of romance is literary to the point of being medieval). Anyway, I originally had the brother being in love with his sister because that's a trope too, but then I didn't want that anymore but I wanted a different kind of attachment that would function in the same awkward/possessive way.

So, then I made up a whole backstory for them, which is basically that the brother is disabled and was stigmatized for it in their family, and that even though he's not obviously disabled by the time he is a teenager, he has an almost crushlike distance from his sister--he loves her and wants to be close to her, but he also feels extremely inferior to her. He resents his "invert" best friend's crush on his sister, because he thinks anyone he can relate to isn't good enough for his sister to be with. I liked this backstory so much that I got off track and have spent the past year writing completely non-gothic stories about this kid at the age of ten or twelve, growing up with an "invisible" disability and a non-disabled twin.

Last week I wrote my favorite version of this story so far, which I liked because it was the first version that was funny and angry instead of emo. It was just a story about this kid with a lot of weird obsessions and a feeling that he isn't human. I turned this story in to my fiction workshop and got like...surprisingly devastated by the results. For one thing I really liked the story and no one in my class seemed to like it. For another, everyone seemed to be talking about his thought processes and his obsessions and his anger in this really pathologizing way, which was kind of stressful...I don't know.

I didn't want the story to have an "agenda" exactly but I did feel political about it. Basically, I just wanted the reader to be on the character's side and see his meltdowns as not just a symptom of his disability, but a reaction to the way he's pathologized/othered at home and at school. The story was very restrained in a way because it mostly just described the character's interests and ideas, and didn't really explain why he had meltdowns--but I guess I was surprised it wasn't obvious to most of the people in my class. I guess I shouldn't turn in disability-heavy stories to workshops, because I'm a senior creative writing major and this was the only time I've ever cried and not been able to sleep because of a fucking workshop. So weird. I feel like a loser.

I was complaining to Noah about it, almost a full week later, and I said something like, "I want to normalize the experience of oppression." What I mean by that is that I don't want to write stories that are like "LOOK AT THIS OPPRESSION SOMEONE IS DOING TO SOMEONE ELSE." No one experiences life that way. I want to write stories that are good stories, with good characters, and when the characters are queer/disabled sometimes they are affected by that. And sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's annoying and sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's all of those things, but is not explicit and obvious or the "main idea" of the story, because oppression is the main idea of no one's life (except this guy).

It kind of reminds me of True Blood. It always annoys me when people are like "Alan Ball is trying to make vampires an analogy for gay people." Fucking no! (As Clayton put it, "Apparently gay people can only eat one kind of food, and as soon as we synthesized it they all appeared.") The aspects of True Blood that are references to a particular kind of gay American experience--having to go to another state to get married, "God hates fangs"--are actually the sign of Alan Ball's refusal to a)produce some really basic second-grade narrative of gay rights, or b)produce fiction that is exactly like the fiction produced by straight people. He just kind of throws it in there because it's a part of our life and it's kind of funny to apply it to vampires. People who try to interpret the gay=vampire analogy literally are just people who think that any reference to minority experience has to be super heavy and super sincere. That's not true, and it's othering; and more importantly, it's just boring.

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.

watching Huge AND writing a paper

This is seriously like the best TV show I've ever seen. Like it's too bad it was canceled and everything, but I can't believe it was ever on TV.

LOVE Alistair especially when he was pretending to be a cat. But he's also just very dear to me because of the whole trope of queer and gender-variant characters always being really "sassy" and brave...I almost feel like it's a form of homophobia, this assumption that we can take care of ourselves, even as children/teenagers, so don't worry about supporting us. I love that he is very guileless (seriously my fictional diagnostics fingers are twitching) and is a person you feel protective of. [eta: oh man when he was saying he couldn't shower with the other guys my heart just completely fell out of my chest and started dripping goo all over the floor. Poor kid.]

Really love Becca, wish she was a real person and a little bit older and went to my school. She clearly is possibly gay right? "Well, I don't know, I don't know any lesbians my age." What kind of straight person thinks about something like that when asked if someone seems gay?

my only complaint: [just kidding, was wrong. show is best show.]

some more passing thoughts

I wrote a long thing in a notebook to be a possible intro to my passing project if I do it...then decided I kind of don't want to have a big intro, I can just include my experiences mixed in anonymously with everyone else's. But anyway.

I talked about passing. I said it is often conventionally associated with people of color passing for white. I said that trans men and women talk about "passing," but it's not exactly the same since you are actually trying to be perceived as the correct gender, not the wrong one. But then I thought, if you are passing for cis that is kind of "passing as something you're not" because being cis implies stuff about your history and physiology, but nonetheless you are misleading people about small things in order to get them to recognize a big, true thing: your correct gender.

But then I thought about how passing as straight had once felt a little bit like this for me. When I was [one of] the only visible queer kid[s] in my school, everything else about me disappeared, so the person I was being perceived as wasn't me at all. When I started going into new environments and intentionally keeping quiet or lying about being SSA, I felt like myself again. People again noticed the details of who I was.

And also, the way normal people talk about people with ASD often deprives us of agency and an inner life. It is assumed that for example people wouldn't stim or monologue if they just understood that it is not normal. The way a person walks or talks is analyzed; the abnormalities are pointed out with no thought of how a person who walks or talks that way might feel as they are going about their life. Things are said, like, "The 'active and odd' type...I worked with an autistic boy and when I said hello how are you, he talked about his special interests. He wanted to engage with me--that's active--but he did so in an abnormal fashion--that's odd." So our choices and personalities just become symptoms.

I am canny. And I am careful to the point of having significant anxiety problems. So for a long time, I felt that being seen as ASD would actually erase who I really am. The fact that I have green hair wouldn't be seen as a choice or even a covering mechanism, but a sign that I maybe am not good at dyeing my hair and made a mistake, or don't understand what is a normal way for a girl to present herself. And I felt that stylized and strange things I do because I have too much anxiety to do things the normal way, or just don't know how, would be seen as thoughtless, and just "behaviors" that show what people like me are like.

The other week, I wrote an email to a kid I don't know super well, but would like to know better. He knows I have ASD because of a workshop we were in together where I wrote about it. My email said something like, "Dear ___, I would like to be friends with you, and when we ate together the other week it was very nice, but now when I see you I feel like you avoid talking to me for very long, do you think I'm weird? Sincerely Amanda. (This is a joke.)"

Now, the reason I said "this is a joke" is because I sometimes tend to try to initiate friendships in ways that seem very abrupt (although this kid has done some friendship initiation towards me, such as sitting with me in the dining hall and stuff) and to avoid being self-conscious, and because I'm not going to agonize over phrasing something in a super normal way, I will instead intentionally phrase something in a very twee, stylized, overdramatic way. It's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl act, a little bit, but I've dropped a lot of that I'm glad to say, but I still have an instinct to approach people in the twee stylized way, and you know, it works for me, I don't really regret it.

But anyway, then as I was going to send it I thought "But he knows I have ASD. So maybe he'll just think that I really write like that all the time and don't know any other way to write, and that I genuinely think he doesn't like me because the last time we said hi to each other we didn't have a conversation." So I added "This is a joke." And a while later he wrote back expressing positive/friendship sentiments (we'll see how this goes, but I don't think it was different than the sort of thing normal people say to other normal people when they're thinking of becoming friends) but also wrote "I don't know what you mean about it being a joke" and then I wrote back explaining.

Anyway. Um, I would like my passing project to be kind of a collage of voices, and maybe some actual collaging with images too around the words. But then I feel concerned that I will almost be taking away people's agency and using them as examples, just like I'm afraid of professionals, or people who are "interested in autism," doing to me. For example, if someone writes a very low-key, long, almost cheerfully listless description of some experience, but at one point buried in all that is the sentence, "The way she was acting was making me want to kill myself." If I take that sentence because it's striking and use it as a headline, isn't that a way of kind of erasing who the person really is?

I really like this Retard Theory post but I don't think that's an acceptable word for the poster to be using. Maybe more on this later. But I know that some trans women really don't like for transmasculine and genderqueer people to try to "reclaim" the word tranny--there's a web page in fact trying to collect evidence that the slur is mainly used against trans women and therefore doesn't belong to other trans/gender-variant people. I think this is important.

I like the word queer a lot and sometimes use it about myself. But when I was growing up, no one ever used that word as a slur, so it's funny--I feel like nowadays people who call themselves queer are not really reclaiming it, we're just using it because it's a cool word or it feels less constricting than another description. On the other hand, I fucking hate the word dyke, and I was really angry when someone I knew who had never been openly lesbian would throw the word around and use it about me. She said, "Well, I'm a dyke so I can use it." But I mean...I've actually been called that, so it's actually painful for me to hear it, and I don't see how someone can "reclaim" it when it was never used against them in the first place.

The SpeEdChange guy is implying in the comments of his "Retard Theory" post that he was labeled MR at some point and that's why he feels he can use it? Eh, I don't know. I just haven't ever heard of a person with an intellectual disability identifying that way, and I'm leery of absolutely anyone in the world who doesn't 100% for sure have that exact disability using it...I know this all seems very nitpicky, but I just am always against the idea of people saying things like "we're all the same, we all go through the same things." No, we don't.

I do think his intentions are very admirable though, and I certainly don't feel included in the terms crip or gimp (I may not be supposed to). I like the idea of saying Failure Theory, but YMMV.

hi kids, exciting development

so, because executive dysfunction is TERRIFIED of me and basically cries into its handkerchief when I'm around, I have finished putting new stuff on my website and reorganizing/writing some new bits for the disability section, something I've been planning on doing all summer, not one but ONE AND A HALF HOURS before my first class of my senior year. Come on you guys! Impressive!

Stuff is still uploading, so don't go to it right this minute that I'm posting it or you will be disappointed. But some possible things of note:

Difficult Cider (2010 musical odds and ends)

Lyrics for all the songs on the website

a terrible zine/diary thing I made two years ago, about something I'm trying to write a (somewhat more politicized) post about right now

On Speaking Badly: An Unintelligible Pop Opera

["It’s kind of, like, hard because, especially with speaking badly, because a lot of people speak badly who don’t have a disability, and I can’t really say that speaking badly is my thing, and that, um, it’s a hundred percent, that everyone who does it has a disability. I do think, though, that I can say that I think people have reactions to bad speaking that are unfair reactions, and I tend to think that those reactions come out of some kind of ableism, whether people can see it or not. Um...it’s analogous, I think, to, sort of, kids telling each other 'you’re so gay,' or sort of policing each other’s gender. And I think, you know, that can be going on in situations where all the kids are cis and straight kids, but there’s still this bogeyman. And I really remember, when I was a kid, that other kids seemed to not really even understand that a gay person was a real kind of person. It was just this sort of monster that we didn’t want to be. And, um, I feel like the same thing can be true with disability--even if people aren’t even outright saying, like, 'you talk like you’re retarded,' or something like that, or, like, 'you walk like a gimp,' I don’t know--but even if people aren’t saying those words, and even if people aren’t thinking about it as being about disability...I think that, um, we have a very deep sense that people who talk differently or move differently are not quite right. And, you know, whether that comes from not liking disabled people, or whether that results in not liking disabled people, I couldn’t really say, but, um, it’s definitely a problem."]

and last but not least, THE AWESOME DISABILITY SECTION, which is not that great actually, it only has like three things on it, but those things include:

Hi, I was just wondering why you keep using words like "ASD" and "autism spectrum disorder" and "autism" and "Autistic" about yourself when it's pretty clear that you have Asperger's and not autism at all.

What should I know about ASD that I'm not learning from pop culture?

this has already been up there for a year, but I still think it's like the best thing I've ever written, so: Pulling Rank and Involuntary Assimilation

also I have a suggested reading page which includes a transcript I made of Ari Ne'eman's awesome interview with Madness Radio, which as you may recall I love, cried about, became friends with him solely on the basis of, and so on and such forth.

Now it's 5:46, it's still not done uploading, except I think all the disability stuff is, but not the music. By six maybe it should be okay?

The Bible is always saying that you should hate the world and sometimes I feel like hating the world is a way of better loving it. And hating people is a way of loving them better. Being focused on your own pleasure from other people, being afraid of having conflict with the people you love if you don’t do what will make them like you in the short run, is really a way of guaranteeing that the love you experience with them is not real.

My dad and I got to go to my dad’s friend’s church which I really love. The priest was a gay person and he mentioned his coming out process in his sermon. I’m always disoriented when people assume that being queer and religious is some sort of conflict for me. And I am also disoriented I think when queer religious people hold opposing views, having relationships and being open in secular environments, but still kind of acting as though they think homosexuality is wrong when they’re in religious environments. I would not be with God if I was straight I think. And I really fear the loss of God now that I’m in an environment where my sexuality is not such a big issue, because being an oppressed minority breeds hatred—and by hatred I mean the disconnect from immediate gratification and easy connection that causes you to detach enough to treasure everything and try to be consistent and decent in your actions.

It is really frustrating that Christianity is so based in community because it makes it hard for me to do things like go to church because I have so much anxiety about groups. So I wouldn’t say that having autism is helpful to me in the way that being queer is, or if it is it equally helps and hurts me—because autism is a little like the kind of hatred I’m talking about, the tendency to focus seriously on details instead of being caught up in your impression of what’s really going on. And that is I think a gift. But the anxiety stuff is a huge problem and I just feel shitty when I think of all that people have gone through to be Christian when I can’t even talk to people and initiate actions enough to be baptized, which consequently makes it hard for me to make myself go to the church in Oberlin because I can’t take communion, blah blah blah. I pray a lot on it and all but I guess your own mind is the hardest thing to fight.

privilege scrounging

I think this has a lot of potential--not really to be posted or published anywhere else, but just to be a really complicated and decent post on this blog--but I kept putting off the first draft because it seemed so daunting, and at this point I’ve been writing it for weeks and I’m leaving for Vermont in three hours and going to have basically no Internet until I get home at the beginning of August. So I’m just posting the first draft, which is a bunch of pieces of things jammed together. Please, say anything you can think of to say.

This is not really a piece with ideas or arguments, it’s just a really long confession. Bear with me.
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On a related note, I can't help thinking of my tendency for gleefully tearing apart anyone I perceive as thinking that mild ASD is not a disability, or is especially interesting or cool. I mean I do think those views are fucked-up and fallacious, but they are not held by millionaires who pass without effort and have all the friends they could want. The situation is not a person who feels powerful wanting to push people with severe and/or visible disabilities even farther down on the food chain than they already are. That is what they're doing in practice, but it's my sickness too.

Before I go far, I should probably say that I don't think of ASD and intellectual disability as being two completely separate things, at least in practice. In addition to the facts that of course some people have both, and that people who really only have ASD are often misdiagnosed with comorbid ID, I just feel there's a lot of overlap in terms of what people with ID and ASD are like, and also what our oppression is like. I hope it's obvious that this doesn't mean I would refer to myself as ID, or try to be in spaces/organizations that are just for people with ID--but it is the reason that I don't think of this as an ASD blog or really think of my disability-related trains of thought as ASD trains of thought. Also people with ASD, ID, and both all make me feel safe, and feeling safe is the focus of what I’m trying to say.
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A bit of my history as staff or pseudo-staff, because I’m not really staff yet (actually at nine tonight I will be arriving at my first real staff job, at a summer camp). It is sort of a big identity thing, it’s in the sidebar, and I guess it gives me a somewhat different relationship to DD than someone who only has DD. Better and worse.

I once, like many people, was “interested in autism” (I can’t imagine being less interested in anything now). In my freshman year of college, when I was realizing that I wasn’t cut out for my previous aspirations, I took a psych practicum where we went into a special ed school and observed/helped out in a class of nonverbal ASD kids. I won’t pretend this was some kind of life-changing experience. I found it interesting and relaxing, and was fond of one girl who would somberly take hold of my hands and run her fingers over the collars of my shirts. Her aide was really shitty to her, and one of my psych classmates explained that it was hard to find people to work with disabled kids. So that’s how I started aiming in that direction--I figured it would be easy and I couldn’t possibly be as bad as the people who were already doing it.

That summer, when I was nineteen, I got my first job. I worked in Cape Cod at a complex that contained a golf course, a drive-in theater, a regular movie theater, and a flea market (which was located in the same place as the drive-in). Mostly I cashiered at the flea market snack bar during the day, which I really liked. Some days were incredibly slow and I could just read and write. I didn’t mind days that were fast either. I liked dealing with big crowds from a safe vantage point behind my register, seeing lots of different kinds of people, and endearing myself to the flea market vendors who would then give me discounts when I wandered out of the snack bar on my break. The other people who worked during the day were two middle-aged women who were easy to be with. We would joke around together.

Every week, I would have to work about a day and two nights at the regular movie theater, where most of the employees were my age. This was a lot harder because they all knew each other and some of them seemed slightly contemptuous of me. (I should have expected this after what happened the first night I worked there, when they reacted with barely-concealed disgust after a teenage boy with a DD was unwise enough to start a conversation with them.) I also had more trouble working there because I wasn’t just a cashier, and I didn’t work fast when I was being asked to do lots of different things at once. So they were always at least slightly annoyed at me.

Then later my boss started assigning me to work at the drive-in snack bar at night. This was sort of okay because I got to use the register I was used to, and watch the movie out the windows. But I didn’t get along as well with the people who worked there. I was going through some issues about being queer, and two of the people who worked there were a middle-aged lesbian couple. I always wanted to talk to them and have them like me, but they liked everyone else better. I especially wanted to talk to one who was a special ed teacher, but she was always rolling her eyes when I had trouble understanding the words she was saying or overfocused on how to do something. At both the drive-in and the movie theater, I spent some nights getting more and more depressed, feeling really cold and nervous as my mind went over the same circles (especially when I was sweeping or mopping floors). I didn’t know anyone in Cape Cod so my social interactions consisted of joking around at the flea market, and phone conversations and letters with my friends from school. I got more and more lonely and depressed.

The last night I worked at the complex, I worked at the drive-in. As I got to work and was punching in, getting ice for the soda fountain, and putting my hair up, I started to think about how I would soon be back in college with my friends. But when I thought of my friends, I thought that they weren’t real. I knew they were, but they didn’t feel real. They felt like people I had made up.

All night I felt like I was slipping away from myself. It was really hard for me to remember any errands I was being sent on (I had to make up little songs to remind myself which novelty ice creams to get out of the freezer which was about two yards away from where I was standing). I kept wishing they’d put me on the register, which I was good at, but when they finally put me on the register, I was fucked. Every time a new customer appeared, I couldn’t recognize the food they were holding. I looked at it really carefully and slowly figured it out: pizza, chocolate bar, Hoodwich. Then I had to look at the register and find the key to press (I normally knew the register like the back of my hand). During the rush between the first and second feature, the special ed teacher snapped at me for getting in her way and accidentally signing in to the wrong register. As soon as the movie was over, I did my share of the cleaning as fast as I could, pulled on my flannel shirt and my bag of books, and slipped out the back of the building while the other employees were hugging each other goodbye.
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That summer, and during the fall, I had occasional positive encounters with other DD adults. I was part of a school club that visited and arranged activities for the residents of local group homes. I also met a few people who came to the flea market and movie theater.

Once I remember being at the theater all day with a really intimidating girl named Julie--in the morning and early afternoon, almost no one came in. A guy with Down Syndrome came in with his mom, who went to the bathroom and bought gift certificates from Julie. As was usually the case when it was slow, one person was at the counter and another person sat down in the theater lobby. The guy came in and sat across from me in the lobby, and soon he was telling me about the upcoming Star Trek movie, which he obviously spent a lot of time reading about online. I am not into Star Trek (except the girl version, which I don’t think the movie was based on), but I could occasionally interject, “Oh, I love Simon Pegg,” and I was relieved enough by the non-stressful interaction that I enjoyed everything he had to say.

I remember wondering what Julie thought. It was probably obvious that I had no job-related reason to talk to this guy. Did she think I was being nice? Did she think, wow, Amanda’s so weird that she can only talk to a person with Down Syndrome? (Number two is of course the true assessment, although it’s interesting that I assume the agency is mine. “That guy has such a calming presence that even a giant freak like Amanda doesn’t mind talking to him” is an equally accurate way of putting it.)

These brief encounters were pleasant, but the real game-changer occurred in the spring term of my sophomore year. My friend suggested that we volunteer twice a week at the MRC sheltered workshop for DD adults. Ostensibly we taught a class about countries--we would discuss facts about a particular country, look through books about the country, and do a related craft. Talking and looking at books didn’t take very long, and coloring gets boring after the first thirty years, so we often spent a lot of time talking about whatever we wanted. After class, my friend and I would walk around the workshop saying hello to people we had met when visiting the group homes. Every time we were there, our beloved Mike Ward would come and find us at least twice (barging into the conference room to show us his fliers, running up to us before we left and giving us a drawing he’d stolen from someone else in his group home).

Over time, three things happened.

1. There were some people I became more close with, and would usually sit and talk with during class. I learned a lot about what was important to them and what they were happy and unhappy about. It was cool because it was the first time I really saw “that kind of people” on a regular basis and knew them well enough to consider them friends.
2. A lot of things I hated about myself were things I subconsciously associated with “that kind of people.” Once I actually met a lot of t.k.o.p., I was able to recognize the nature of my self-hatred; and once I got to know some of them, I was able to see that I should be unashamed of any resemblance between us.
3. I loved going to the workshop because a lot of the people were so loud and effusive in how they expressed themselves, and many people were really happy to see my friend and me. I felt that here, people liked me, I knew where I stood with them, and there was enough diversity of behavior that I didn’t have to worry about doing things right. I once said that I hoped the afterlife was in the MRC workshop.
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Most feelings can be accurately summed up by quotes from the movie Serenity. This feeling's quote is the thing the Operative says to Mal about how there would be no place for him in a better world. It sums up the guilty resentment I experienced as I became more advanced in how I thought about developmental disabilities--saying "ID" instead of MR or retarded (the words that the nondisabled people around me used), and becoming more aware that sheltered workshops and group homes weren't something I should simply accept as the places where MRC consumers would naturally work and live. The people at MRC were some of the only people in the world I felt uncomplicatedly safe with; although I recognized it as fair that I should feel scared of offending them the way I felt scared of offending everyone else, I felt that I’d lost something when I realized there was an appropriate word to use and I hadn't been using it.

I liked the workshop and the group homes, because they were environments where people without disabilities were in the minority. I hoped to work at the MRC school after college because it had the kind of low-key setting I felt comfortable in, and the building was full of kids who looked and acted different. I wasn't interested in being an aide for an ID or ASD kid at a mainstream school, where I imagined the halls would be noisy and chaotic, my student and I would sit in a neat row of desks, and the non-disabled students would bully us both. (If my student was socially successful, of course, that would also suck; my student would be my only person to talk to, since I knew I wouldn’t fit in with the teachers and other aides.)

I'm using the past tense even though not all these feelings were in the past.
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I've only been to the workshop twice this year. But I have cashiered at my school's dining hall during the period of the day when several people from the workshop also work there, and in light of becoming more guilty, this has been a tense experience.

First there is Laurie, who is someone I knew at the workshop last year. We weren't close because she was always with her boyfriend, but when she saw me at the dining hall she would say hello in the energetic way she did most things. Sometimes, in the first few weeks of my job, she would come up to the register and we would each ask how the other person was doing. This petered out, and I'm wondering if it was because I felt self-conscious around Laurie and talked to her in the shy restrained way I would talk to an acquaintance who wasn't disabled. After a month, she just said hello to me in a bored way, and this made me sad.

Second there are other people, who I liked to watch when I was at work because it's a relief to see people moving jerkily, swinging their arms, or concentrating on things you're not supposed to concentrate on. Some of them I wanted to talk to--a guy with a beard, a guy who warned me not to touch a stack of hot dishes. I would always walk by the MRC people to punch in and out, to get detergent, to throw rags away--it started to make me feel cold like I felt cold during nights at the theater complex, this feeling of not being able to talk to them because I wasn't good for them or was drawn to them for the wrong reasons.
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I think of myself as very normal-acting. And I am very normal. Acting. I have spent a lot of time buckling down to get through things without being immediately identified as extremely different. When you ignore feelings for long enough, they go away, and this means that in addition to my occasional dissociative symptoms, the fact that I for example have anxiety problems is something that I have to prove to myself logically by making a list of things I’ve done that could have no other motive. I tend not to feel angry when I hear people say things like, “Retarded people depress me because there’s no point to their lives,” because I do not feel anger on a regular basis. I figure that professionals who try to stomp stimming out stimming people are just coming from a place of not really examining their privilege or putting themselves in stimming people’s shoes. Actually a lot of the writing on this blog, I think, is a result of my numbness and subsequent willingness to engage with arguments that are quite irrational and hateful.

Anyway, I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think of myself as disabled. Or I do but I don’t. In terms of working with developmentally disabled kids and adults, I don’t think of myself as a DD person who feels understandably relaxed when I get to stop packaging myself for non-disabled consumption. Instead I just think of myself the way I imagine non-disabled people see me: this weird girl who is really drawn to DD people, beyond professionalism, beyond allyship...just, kind of creepy.

As I don’t experience anger and anxiety on an obvious level, I forget what it means for me that I am normal-acting. But I can try to construct the facts like a detective. I have some very good friends and they are different. But the truth is that most moments (airport, library, classroom) I never stop working, I feel incredibly inadequate anyway, and that’s painful in a way I don’t think about because it’s always there. Except with certain people at the MRC.

Passing is not some sort of miserable burden--the group homes I think of so nostalgically are not places I’d want to live myself. I like being in college and thinking about where I want to move after I graduate. I like blundering around alone more than I would like having people ask if someone like me should be left unattended. I like privilege, do I ever--but I would like to avoid having to earn it with the constant, barely successful work of passing. If I was staff in a segregated environment, that would be possible--I’d retain the social status of a normal person without having to actually be around n.p.s.

So I mean--I’m not saying I’m not a piece of shit.
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What I try to do is--and I mean, I don’t want to feel it all, but the other week I told my best friend that I could remember facts about him, I could remember how we started talking, but I felt emotionally like I’d never met him before. I was even kind of nervous, like I was talking to a celebrity for the first time, but trying to pass for someone who knew him well. I didn’t realize until my friend got upset that this wasn’t something that happened to lots of people. I conclude that this level of dislocation, while practical, is a little unbearable if I’m going to continue being alive.

What I’m trying to explain to myself is that I also count. Because of course I know that I’m a piece of shit--I understand that it is horrible to feel attached to segregated environments because those are generally environments where people have less control. I got very afraid of these feelings in myself, they were a piece of my sin I couldn’t even look at--and this was infuriating because I had felt like the person I was with MRC people was the only really pure part of me. I began to sort of resent progress, or at least hope it would happen slowly so I could still have the kinds of jobs I wanted to have.

I am trying to remember that I am in fact disabled and that I’m actually stressed out by real things, and that a better world for disabled people is not a world where Disabled People (whoever they are) get better and I am still stuck where I am. In a better world I would not have had to hit on a solution to avoid the wearing down of my ability to feel or sense things; I wouldn’t have to think about my life like Fantastic Mr. Fox, trying to locate the exact tunnel I can use to feed myself without coming in contact with Boggis Bunce and Bean. I’m trying to remember that if I wasn’t disabled I wouldn’t feel like I’m getting away with something when I get a job or have a conversation with a stranger. When people asked me out I wouldn’t avoid answering rather than wonder when they would realize what was wrong. If the MRC workshop is a refuge then it’s actually a refuge from something, right?

I think I’m trying to remember that while I can and do oppress MRC consumers if I accept everything the MRC does as The Way Things Should Be, instead of hating myself it is better to untangle it and try to remember that I can also be helped by that nebulous Progress.