Autistic Hedgehog

I’m curious–as much as getting parents of autistic children to write in lieu of actually autistic people, they haven’t actually done anything wrong yet (they said to apply/think about it). I agree that disabled people need to get a voice in media, but wouldn’t it be good to ask people to apply to become a blogger, rather than just shut down the idea entirely? (sorry if I misunderstood your post)

————-

The blog is meant to be for and written by people with disabilities, and right in the FAQ they say that people without disabilities shouldn’t apply. Then the very first thing they do is turn around and agree to consider people without disabilities, in spite of myself (someone with the disability in question) and several others pointing out that we’re not comfortable with that. 

I explained in my own response why I didn’t think parents should be considered, and linked to the blog for Autistics Speaking Day to show that we can and do speak for ourselves just fine. That was never acknowledged. Not at all. By anyone. 

And if you read the comments, other people point out that this is not the first issue the site has had with regards to cognitive and developmental disabilities. I’ve seen mention that people speaking out against ableist language were simply dismissed as trolls, in fact. That’s not exactly a good track record, and the fact that no one will acknowledge concerns about this just makes it worse.

As well, they have a parenting blog already. If parents of autistics/disabled children have something to say, there is already a place for that. This was supposed to be a blog for disabled people, a place for us. To say people who aren’t disabled weren’t allowed, then immediately turn around and start considered exceptions, is not cool. Especially since it speaks of the sort of ignorance that people tend to have about autistics, that we can’t speak for ourselves. There are enough of us who can and do, who might be willing to apply, that there’s just no need for parents to even be a consideration at all. 

Please sign and signal boost this petition!

TW: ableism, homophobia, murder

‘In the early hours of the 23rd of June, Steven Simpson was set on fire by 20 year old Jordan Sheard, who had gate-crashed his house party in Cudworth, near Barnsley. He had been verbally abused, stripped of his clothes and had phrases like “I love d*ck” and “gay boy” scrawled across his body. He was then doused in tanning oil and Sheard lit his crotch with a cigarette lighter, and the flames engulfed his body. Those involved fled as Simpson’s neighbour tried desperately to put out the flames. Simpson died the next day after enduring 60% burns to his body.

Steven Simpson’s murder was the result of the hatred and humiliation caused to him because of his sexuality, and his disability. He was bullied, de-humanised and then killed. It follows the format of many killings of LGBTQ people world wide.

Sheffield Crown Court’s view on the matter has been frankly disgusting. Judge Roger Keen dismissed the crime as a ‘good-natured horseplay’ that had gone too far, and sentenced him to a unusually short sentence of three and a half years in prison. Sheard’s defence lawyer called what happened to Simpson as a ‘stupid prank that went wrong in a bad way’.

This was clearly a hate crime. Simpson was being taunted for his sexuality and his disability. He was devalued so much in the eyes of those involved, that they thought setting him on fire was somehow acceptable. He was a bright young man studying at Barnsley College, but his last moments alive on this earth must have been dehumanising, painful and terrifying.

How Judge Roger Keen can dismiss this so flippantly as “horseplay” is beyond us. He is re-enforcing the same notions that lead to Steven’s death: that homophobic bullying is fun, rather than a crime against LGBTQ people, that it is okay to mock or take advantage of someone’s disability, rather than looking out for them and treating them with respect, that setting someone on fire and burning them to death is a joke gone too far, rather than one of the inevitable consequences of the way we still treat people like Steven in our society.

It makes us sick to the stomach to think someone so young has been killed because he was different – and the frightening fact is that could have been any one of us that lives with a disability, or who is LGBTQ. Many have commented on the lenient sentencing of Steven’s killer, however I think this misses the point. The point here is the criminal justice system is complicit in the oppression of LGBTQ people and disabled people, when it makes comments like those of Judge Keen’s. It is churning out the very same ideas that lead to hate-crime.

It is not a joke, funny, or horseplay to treat someone in the way Steven was and we should not condone it as such. If we do condone this behaviour we are sending out the message that LGBTQ people and disabled people are fair game to be bullied and preyed upon. We are sending out the message that this okay for other young people to do what was done to Steven. It appears it is all okay with Judge Keen, just as long as you don’t kill someone.

But the point is, the way Steven was killed, was precisely a result of how he was treated. If he had just been treated like any other young person, with a bit of decency or respect, it would never have happened.

This is the message that Sheffield Crown Court should have put out. 

We hereby condemn Judge Keen’s remarks, call for him to make a public apology, and to make a statement recongising the daily battle people like Steven face because of their sexuality and their disability.

Steven’s death should serve as a reminder of what our LGBTQ and disabled youth face today.

https://www.change.org/petitions/office-for-judicial-complaints-judge-roger-keen-apologise-and-commit-to-protecting-lgbtq-disabled-youth

I’ve not seen much about this on Tumblr, presumably because it happened in the North of England and not in the United States, but our disabled LGBT youth are important too! I encourage people to reblog so as many people sign the petition as possible.

Now What Do I Do? Please, Please Help.

neuroatypically-speaking:

[TW: Ableism, bullying, self-harm]

Normally I find myself answering requests for advice, either here or on Autistic Hedgehog, but this time I’m the one at a loss for what to do. (Sorry it’s so long, but I really am desperate for some help.)

On Wednesday my brother- and sister-in-law came for a visit. We (them, me and my husband) went to the Tutankhamun exhibit—which honestly turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, all told. The structure of it encouraged people to gather in large flocks like sheep and not move an inch for long minutes at a time, meaning I was constantly surrounded by the crowd and didn’t ever feel truly comfortable stopping to examine the artifacts (which were sadly all replicas anyway). That, as you might imagine, left me pretty exhausted and worn around the edges. 

The trouble really started sometime later, on the bus on the way to the bookstore and while at the bookstore. Somehow we got on the subject of TV, and on Elementary and BBC’s Sherlock. My husband and I love Elementary, but they’d never seen it because some people told them it was horrible. Of course, they love Sherlock. I pointed out that we hadn’t seen it and explained the reasons why—actors and creators involved saying horrible ableist, sexist, and other bigoted things, the show itself having, by all reports, tons of other problematic elements. 

Suddenly my husband and I were having that conversation. The one where the other party, secure in their privilege, is spouting things like “Well I don’t see anything problematic with it” and “Why would I want to look for problems in something?” and “I don’t just dismiss something simply because it might have problems.” Y’all know what I mean, you’ve seen the same arguments about a thousand bazillion times here on tumblr and elsewhere. (And the hypocrisy didn’t help. It’s okay for them to dismiss a show because some people told them it was horrible, but me not wanting to watch a show I have very good reasons to believe would offend and possibly even trigger me is somehow unfair?)

They know I’m autistic, btw, and I tried to explain Cumberbatch’s comments on the matter of playing Sherlock as autistic and the issue that’s brought with it, which brought on a “what if he was just saying that to stir conversation?” thought experiment apologism from my brother-in-law.

So of course, my long years of “training” kicked in and I’m like “Hey, I got the book I wanted, let’s just go buy it and go to dinner.” I was punished so much for being bullied (no, that was not a typo) that my kneejerk reaction to shit like that is “Fuck, if I defend myself there’ll be trouble and it’ll be my fault.”   

Then we’re at the restaurant and I’m hoping we can just avoid anymore of this stuff, but the universe is never that accommodating for me. Which meant that my brother-in-law, while checking Facebook on his phone, found a “hilarious” joke he just had to share with us:

Being popular on the internet is like sitting at the cool table at a mental institution.

Oh yeah, so funny I forgot to laugh. I know I don’t need to explain to y’all why that’s so horrible, and that’s a relief, because It gets old real fast having to explain that shit to privileged people.

Thus followed the typical “arguments” including the ever-popular classic: “It wasn’t an insult, it was just a joke.” And the whole thing about how it didn’t have anything to do with me, it wasn’t personal. (It was very personal. Autistic Hedgehog is close to 500 followers. I just got told my success with that deserves to be automatically stigmatized.) Then he had the nerve to ask me how many times I’d been in a mental hospital and I—and I’m quite proud of this—looked him straight in the face and told him it was none of his business.

That seemed to quiet him down and I thought that might be the end of it. We ate dinner and afterwards, I took out my phone and began looking at Tumblr. My in-laws already know that being around people stresses me out and sometimes I need to spend a few quiet minutes to myself, which isn’t a personal thing, it’s just me. Being at a restaurant, I didn’t really have that option. I thought a little time with my phone would help me fix some of my frayed edges, so I could get through being overwhelmed by the whole day and everything that had happened and we could just move on with our evening without further incidence.

The problem with trying to smooth my frayed edges is that while I’m frayed, I can tune out the rest of the world, but as the pieces start coming back together, the world comes back to me. I started to notice my husband and brother-in-law having a pretty heated discussion in Danish and it didn’t take long for me to realize they were talking about me (despite the fact that I know maybe 5 words in Danish, I’m not oblivious). 

They did eventually switch to English at which point followed a barrage, mostly from my brother-in-law (with some support from my sister-in-law) about how terrible it was, that I was acting like he was such an asshole when he wasn’t. And what’s the problem with that joke anyway? Oh, it’s stigmatizes mental illness and developmental disabilities? Well, that’s not his problem. And why should they always have to walk on eggshells? Um excuse me, I was the one walking on eggshells, biting my tongue, swallowing how offended and hurt I was and trying just to move on. I was not the one who brought it up again. 

At one point my sister-in-law chimed in that she “has an autistic brother” (and no, miraculously enough I did not in fact go through the roof at that, though it was a near thing) and they always just treat him “normally” (nope, somehow managed to avoid going through the roof at that, too). And my brother-in-law in law says that they just talk around him like they would around anyone else because they don’t want to disable him. To which I said “But I am disabled” and I know autistics aren’t always good with tone, but the unspoken “and there’s nothing fucking wrong with that!” was pretty hard to miss. 

If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed and tattered, I might have had the wherewithal to point out that by treating him “normally” they’re teaching her brother to internalize hatred towards himself and people like him, but by that point I was losing it. They kept pressing me, barely giving me time to speak or gather my thoughts and anyone with eyeballs could see I was falling apart. Then my brother-in-law sent his enemy troops across the border to declare war.

“I don’t have a diagnosis that allows me to get away with things that other people consider rude.”

Supposedly he didn’t mean I was using my autism as an excuse, but so the fuck what. I’ve had people say things like that to me before. I’ve had it screamed at me, had it implied, had it said bluntly to my face, had people give me looks that expressed the sentiment with plenty of clarity. I’m actually usually pretty forgiving about people intentions, because of what happened to me in middle school, but this was too far across the line, intentions notwithstanding. I broke. I left the restaurant, I stood in the freezing cold waiting for my husband to join me, I cried my eyes out (which is a messy affair when you’re wearing five pounds of glittery eye makeup) and I just didn’t care anymore what people thought of my behavior. 

Some important points:

1. Apparently the argument my husband and brother-in-law were having was because me spending a few quality moments with my phone was rude, but the “joke” my brother-in-law made came from Facebook, which he checked on his phone periodically throughout the day.
2. My brother-in-law knows I don’t speak Danish, but proceeded to have a conversation about me, speaking in a language I don’t speak, while I was sitting right there. My husband has apologized for not turning the conversation over to English sooner, but hello, I was sitting right fucking there, if you have a problem with my behavior speak to me.
3. Often when we go out together, my husband, sister-in-law and brother-in-law will start speaking in Danish (all my Danish relatives do this sometimes). It used to sting, being left out of the conversation like that, but I’ve learned to accept that my in-laws are Danish and sometimes they’re gonna be Danish. I thought they understood that I’m autistic and sometimes I’m gonna be autistic. Yet somehow them checking me out of the conversation is a-okay, but me checking out of the conversation for reasons of mental health is rude.

Being a white, cis, straight, able-bodied Danish person is about the most privileged position in the world. It really is, and they pretty much never have to face their privilege because of it. My husband and I have had some serious knock-down, drag-out fights over it (don’t get me started on the Julian Assange Incident) and the thing is, he’s learned. So maybe they can learn too. Maybe they can learn to understand why they were stepping all over me. My husband says they feel bad for hurting me but…

But they’re not the ones stuck in the cycle of “I’m so angry, I’m so hurt, this is all my fault because I didn’t keep my mouth shut. I’m so angry, I’m so hurt, this is all my fault because I didn’t keep my mouth shut.” (Shampoo, rinse, repeat.) They’re not the ones who wanted to go home and find the nearest sharp object. They’re not the ones who were pushed into a meltdown by people they thought they could trust. My family accuses me of never forgiving, but the fact is my family never dealt in forgiveness. My mom used to say “life is too short to stay angry” which was code for “let’s sweep this under the rug and never deal with it” so bad things happened over and over again until forgiveness wasn’t possible. 

I don’t want to get caught in that cycle again. I don’t want to cause trouble between my husband and his family. At the same time, I’m nowhere near ready for forgiveness. I want to stay in my ball with my quills out, because I feel so hurt and betrayed and it’s the only way I know to protect myself. I want to accept that it’s okay that I’m angry, but I’m caught in all those years of being taught that everything I do is wrong, that I’m abnormal, that I’m cold, that I’m unfeeling and unforgiving, that I’m monstrous, that standing up for myself is wrong. (And I feel like a hypocrite, because I tell people on AH never to let others convince them that standing up for themselves is wrong, but it’s so, so hard to get over all those years.) 

It’s making me irritable about small, silly things. It’s disrupting my focus and my sleep. Part of me knows my in-laws aren’t shitty people, they just did a shitty thing, and part of me is so, so angry, and I don’t know how to reconcile the two. It’s hard to trust after everything I’ve been through, but I don’t want to be so inflexible that I always shut people out and never give them a second chance, and I don’t…I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to feel. I’m at such a loss and this time I’m the one that needs help. 

From my personal blog. I’m reblogging it here in the hopes that maybe some of my AH followers can help. 

[High-functioning

Ain’t no goddamn super-power!]

Stop trying to ignore everything I have to say by claiming my superior functioning skills make me fundamentally different from your kid, even if I’m closer to thirty than three.

I am not Functioning Man.

mod note: Word.