A topic I’ve been seeing a lot recently in the Autism community is what is being derogatorily called “Aspie Supremacy”. This perspective suggests that autism is evolutionarily superior to allism in general and Neurotypicality specifically. It appears to be called “Aspie Supremacy” because it centers Autistics with low support needs (who have historically been called…
Category: Other essays
On Learned Helplessness
(These are initial thoughts as I process through this concept.) I was prompted to start thinking deeply about learned helplessness by this tweet and its follow-ups: https://twitter.com/heymrsbond/status/1603757493171232768 (Source: “What is Learned Helplessness?”, Medical News Today) At the same time, though, I recognized a lot of this in my own behavior, as well as the behavior…
Is the Club Q shooter nonbinary? It doesn’t matter.
The person who allegedly killed five people at a gay bar the night before Trans Day of Remembrance has announced through their lawyers that they identify as nonbinary and use they/them pronouns. It would be easy to conclude that the alleged murderer is cynically trying to avoid Hate Crime laws by falsely claiming to be…
Twitter: Autism Story Time
Prompt on Twitter: “When did you first notice feeling confused by social expectations?” Reply: I don’t remember “first”, but… story time! When I was in fifth grade or so, the bully wanted to beat me up. I told him he could, but only if it was after school where nobody could watch. I told him…
Othering and Otherkin
There’s an urban legend going around that says that furry youth are demanding–and getting–litter boxes in high school bathrooms. I have yet to see any credible evidence that a single such box has been seriously demanded, let alone installed. But that doesn’t stop people from railing against these fictions. This morning I saw a photo…
FB: On automatic gender identification
Let us assume for the moment that transgender and intersex people don’t exist. Let us assume that every single human has either XX or XY chromosomes and genitals to match. This is not true, but let us assume it is. Even under this assumption, recognize that our brains are culturally programmed to identify within seconds…
FB: Changing My Name
Yesterday I saw a FB ad for a credit card offering cards with your chosen name, and several comments were sneering about “Why don’t you just get a name change? Anyone can.” So. Having just finished the court process of changing my name, here’s what it involved: 1. I mailed in my application on May…
On Jada Pinkett Smith and the “Joke”
I’m not going to talk about the slap. I’m not going to talk very much about the joke, because there are at least three levels to it. I’m going to talk about one of those three levels. I want to make it clear that this is a small part of The Incident. The Incident and…
FB: On Trans Women in Sports
This next sentence may seem odd coming from me, but keep reading. It’s not transphobic to say that trans women athletes have a physical advantage over cis women. The medical truth of that statement has been debated, and I believe that, on the whole, it’s not true. There are certainly cases of trans women who…
Canceling is Not Censorship
(A Twitter thread) Effective censorship requires systemic power. This is related to the conversation about *ism and the non-existent “reverse *ism”: I can have prejudices that are negative about cisgender people, for instance, but I don’t have the power of the system behind me. When we transgender folk “cancel” JKR and DC, our power is…