withasmoothroundstone:

People here have probably at some point read my descriptions of what ‘cousin’ meant in autistic communities and why I think reviving the term is important.  I wrote about it again on my other blog for Autistic History Month.  I also submitted it to the people doing Autistic History Month so hopefully they’ll post it somewhere.  I’d been going to write something else, but this post came out of me at the last minute, and seemed far more useful than what I had been going to write.

Bringing people together with words like ‘cousin’ allows people to identify with autistic people, without putting pressure on them to figure out instantly whether they are actually autistic or not. It allows people to acknowledge that most skills and difficulties autistic people experience are not totally unique to autistic people. It allows people to acknowledge the vast grey area that is both outside of standard definitions of autism, and outside of neurotypical, but that resembles autism in important ways. It allows people to acknowledge that the boundary between autistic and nonautistic is fuzzy at best. And it does all that while contributing to people understanding more about themselves and each other, and bringing people together into friendships, communities, and other relationships they might not otherwise have.

So I really believe that it would not only be a good thing to remember the word ‘cousin’ and what it used to mean, but to revive it and expand its use for more than just autistic people. It allows for so much more flexibility than people are currently given about a lot of different identity groups, and that’s important. So if you like the idea of cousins, by all means, use it and adapt it as much as you want, for whatever groups of people in your own life you think it would best apply to.

Reviving the concept of cousins.