Hi. This is re: the special interest terminology kerfluffle. I am an autistic person with ADHD. I have a request. Could you stop telling me that I have to use two different words to describe the same experience I have that I have no idea which “diagnosis” it comes from? (By the way, brains are not partitioned like that, so my neurology is affected by both, sometimes in very interchangeable ways that you don’t know which one is which!)
Related – the autistic community, as @alliecat-person points out here – has a pretty long history, some of which I have put together at @ourautistichistory, and some of which is probably lost as domain names expired or the list servs went defunct. But the moderator of @actuallyadhd, who has ADHD, has been involved with list servs and later platforms of the autistic community since 1994. She is an autistic cousin, which is a decades-old term that refers to someone “who is not NT, is not quite autistic, but is recognizably “autistic-like” particularly in terms of communication and social characteristics.”
To ignore that fact, along with @alliecat-person‘s note that these kinds of words have not been considered exclusive to the autistic community from the start – which is roughly three decades ago – is negligent. A community should know its history, and we need to know our history to work for change.
And it tells people that we are not a community that welcomes people unless they share our specific neurotype. It tells many people who are wondering if they are autistic that we are a community who will not welcome them. That may make them afraid to approach us, or learn more about autistic community and autistic culture. It tells people we are a community who is willing to gatekeep, and that is not what I want people to think of the community I love and fight for.
Tag: fences
bi women asking to not be written off based on relationship status =/= “forcing you to care about m/f relationships”, so jot that down
honestly this wouldn’t be an issue if people viewed bi women as fully fledged humans and not units within a relationship (usually m/f ones because people LOVE to treat us as extensions to men)
so what if she’s in a monogomous relationship with a man? she’s a whole person who has a whole world and identity outside of it. To deny her community based on relationship status is to deny her personhood outside of her relationships.
and to deny her personhood outside of her relationships is to isolate her and make her more susceptible to abuse from straight men!
Hi, autistic tumblr.
I’ve noticed that some of you are telling other people with disabilities that they shouldn’t use the term “special interests” to describe their personal experiences.
This is not a good look. It’s especially bad when you’re telling this to @actuallyadhd. A few facts about the blog’s moderator:
-She has AD/HD (duh).
-She has been involved with the autistic advocacy community as an ally and “cousin” for literally decades. (If you don’t know what a cousin is, read up on some of the earlier history. Our community has been around for a while!)
-She volunteers her time to answering questions from people with AD/HD, a population that includes many autistic people.
Yet some have you have chosen to fill her inbox with complaints and mark her as an enemy because she holds the autistic community’s historic position: that the words autistic people use to describe our experiences can be used by everyone. By doing so, autism becomes less stigmatized and medicalized.
Can you stop, maybe?
Yesterday an ADHD ask blog i follow said that special interest is for anybody to use, and it isn’t autism exclusive. They use it in place of hyperfixation every time, even when referring to other people who have already used the word hyperfixation to describe their interest. I told them it isn’t okay since they’re allistic and they told me that i’m wrong and it isn’t autism exclusive but i thought that the term special interest IS autism exclusive!! am i wrong???
Special Interest is exclusive to autistic people as we have been pathologized for our special interests.
Hyperfixation is the community wide term, and was coined specifically so people with ADHD could talk about the shared experiences around having hyperfixations/special interests without appropriating special interests.
– Os
That “special interest” is autism-specific and people with ADHD should say “hyperfixation” instead is not a consensus of the autistic community, and the human brain is not actually configured according to our political distinctions in terminology.
My opinion is that the ADHD blog (whose author I know personally) was correct, and autism-asks is incorrect.
Neurodivergent people should be able to use the words that accurately describe what we are experiencing. (FWIW, I am autistic, I do not have ADHD.) Some people with ADHD experience interests or passions in a way that isn’t substantially distinguishable from the way in which autistic people experience this phenomenon. They may not be pathologized for it in exactly the same way, but that isn’t what determines whether the experience itself is pretty much the same thing.
And like a LOT of people are diagnosed with ADHD (whether correctly or not) before they’re diagnosed with autism (whether instead of or in addition to ADHD). Their “hyperfixations” do not suddenly become “special interests” when their diagnosis changes.
And a lot of people who don’t qualify for any specific diagnosis experience isolated features of autism, because autism is caused by the combined effects of lots of common genes. 90% of mothers of autistic kids, whether they’re autistic themselves or not, experience some kind of sensory processing anomaly.
They deserve to be able to call those experiences what they are, in a way that enables them to make themselves understood. Nobody is helped by falsely separating out the allowed language for who is experiencing what, if they are substantially the same thing.
I do not know how things got this way, but I think some folks could stand to…learn to appreciate that some neighborhoods of the autistic and ADHD communities think of these topics a little differently than they do. People with ADHD who subscribe to this way of talking about them are not in the wrong.
(And some of us with autism hate the term “special interest.” Honestly, ADHD’ers can have it for all I care.)
I am kind of done with gatekeeping tbh going on like… My opinion is to agree that the ADHD blog was correct. I’m autistic and have ADHD so like… Hi, yes, defs not a consensus in all parts of the autistic community!
Also, “hyperfixation” means exactly the same thing as “special interest” (just look at what it’s been used for in the psych literature. And “hyperfixation” was proposed as an umbrella term by a Tumblrite in 2015, so people could use it in place of hyperfocus, special interest, obsession, etc. My problem with that is that it is not accurate, and can lead to some misunderstandings. If you write about your “hyperfixation,” do you mean your current special interest or the thing you’re hyperfocusing on right now? They are two different things. Your special interest isn’t necessarily the thing you are hyperfocusing on, though it’s more likely than not. But even so, talking about “breaking hyperfixation” could mean breaking out of hyperfocus OR it could mean changing your special interest.
I like accuracy. Umbrella terms don’t help with accuracy.
Yesterday an ADHD ask blog i follow said that special interest is for anybody to use, and it isn’t autism exclusive. They use it in place of hyperfixation every time, even when referring to other people who have already used the word hyperfixation to describe their interest. I told them it isn’t okay since they’re allistic and they told me that i’m wrong and it isn’t autism exclusive but i thought that the term special interest IS autism exclusive!! am i wrong???
Special Interest is exclusive to autistic people as we have been pathologized for our special interests.
Hyperfixation is the community wide term, and was coined specifically so people with ADHD could talk about the shared experiences around having hyperfixations/special interests without appropriating special interests.
– Os
That “special interest” is autism-specific and people with ADHD should say “hyperfixation” instead is not a consensus of the autistic community, and the human brain is not actually configured according to our political distinctions in terminology.
My opinion is that the ADHD blog (whose author I know personally) was correct, and autism-asks is incorrect.
Neurodivergent people should be able to use the words that accurately describe what we are experiencing. (FWIW, I am autistic, I do not have ADHD.) Some people with ADHD experience interests or passions in a way that isn’t substantially distinguishable from the way in which autistic people experience this phenomenon. They may not be pathologized for it in exactly the same way, but that isn’t what determines whether the experience itself is pretty much the same thing.
And like a LOT of people are diagnosed with ADHD (whether correctly or not) before they’re diagnosed with autism (whether instead of or in addition to ADHD). Their “hyperfixations” do not suddenly become “special interests” when their diagnosis changes.
And a lot of people who don’t qualify for any specific diagnosis experience isolated features of autism, because autism is caused by the combined effects of lots of common genes. 90% of mothers of autistic kids, whether they’re autistic themselves or not, experience some kind of sensory processing anomaly.
They deserve to be able to call those experiences what they are, in a way that enables them to make themselves understood. Nobody is helped by falsely separating out the allowed language for who is experiencing what, if they are substantially the same thing.
I do not know how things got this way, but I think some folks could stand to…learn to appreciate that some neighborhoods of the autistic and ADHD communities think of these topics a little differently than they do. People with ADHD who subscribe to this way of talking about them are not in the wrong.
(And some of us with autism hate the term “special interest.” Honestly, ADHD’ers can have it for all I care.)
Hi, autism-asks. Are you familiar with the history of the autistic community, particularly our inclusion of Autistic Cousins (ACs), which includes many people with AD/HD?
I’d like to reiterate that the person who runs the blog in question has long-standing involvement with the autistic community.
Many parts of the autistic community dislike this kind of language policing because it needlessly separates our experiences from other people, including other disabled people. This does not advance our interests of de-pathologizing autism.
You are entitled to your opinion, but you don’t speak for every autistic person and you don’t have the right to tell people with longstanding community involvement that they are wrong to use certain words.
I’ve seen a few people say on occasion that the fact aces feel “relieved” when they realize they’re ace is “telling” and imply it means being ace isn’t so bad.
let me tell you a thing.
I went years without one of my worst chronic illnesses being properly diagnossed. the day I got a formal diagnosis I felt relieved.
I felt relieved even tho I knew it still meant even with good insurance to help pay for the best treatment of it I’d still be dealing with debilitating levels of pain and fatigue. knowing that with my shitty insurance I would not be able to get the proper treatment to minimize it as much as possible. knowing that doctors don’t even know enough about what causes it let alone know how to fix it. knowing they know so little about it compared to something better studied that they’re still finding stuff out about the symptoms of it. knowing that some doctors and nurses still claim it’s a psychological condition. knowing I am going to live my whole life in moderate to severe pain and exhausted and never be able to live a normal life.
I felt relieved because I had a name for it, because that gave me a source of support. I could use the internet to communicate with other people who had it and get support and knowledge of their experiences with it from them. because it made me feel less alone.
that relief didn’t make what I deal with any better, it was because it gave me a frame of reference, made me feel less alone, and helped me find support from other people who experience the same thing.
I implore you people who think the fact asexuals feel relieved when they realize they’re asexual to think on this.
since this has started happening again I think it fair to reblog this and remind people this same “the fact aces feel relieved when they realize they’re ace means they’re not LGBT+” BS was already pulled over a year ago and they’re just recycling an old tune.
I felt relieved when I realized that I was actually trans. I felt relieved when I realized that I had BPD, ADHD, autism.
We felt relieved when we realized that we are a system.
Relief happens ebcause “holy shit there’s a name for this and people like me and I’m not alone!” It has literally nothing to do with oppression.
thoughts while driving home from work
If you think of asexual as “not having a sex drive,” then you’d probably be surprised to learn that aces used to be a part of the bi community.
But if you think of it as “not having a sexual orientation,” then it might suddenly become clear.
Because in a world where so many people only ever think of, or mention, “gay or straight” as possible orientations, there’s not that much difference between “not having a sexual orientation” and “not being either gay or straight.”
When the question is only framed as “which of these opposite points does your arrow point to,” I don’t feel like there’s a huge difference between your answer being “point???????” or “arrow???????”
Ohhh, everything makes sense now (says the bi ace)
SWEEET
Which is I think why a lot of aces identify as bi or pan at some point in their lives before landing on “asexual.” If you know you’re not gay or straight, there’s much more awareness of bisexuality than of asexuality, so it makes sense that people would end up there by default.
Yes! And if you were coming out 20 oror more years ago, there was basically zero awareness of any other things.
this perfectly describes my late teens, most of which I spent convinced I was bisexual because I was equally attracted to men and women. Thing is, I actually wasn’t attracted to either, and I thought that that weird uncomfortable feeling I got each time something was overly sexualized was because I wasn’t used to feeling lust and/or arousal, and those new urges were making me uncomfortable, instead of just being plain uncomfortable with sexualization. I didn’t even know that asexuality was a thing until I read about it in a fanfic a year ago.
Chiming in as another aro/ace person who identified as bi for a couple years before realizing the ace spectrum existed. The poster right above me pretty much describes exactly my thought process. Basically, it went:
I’m not gay, and I’m definitely not straight, so I must be bi, because I find people of many different genders attractive (notice i say find attractive, not attracted to). I chalked my icky-squirmy feelings when thinking about sex and to a lesser extent relationships up to lack of experience as I’ve never been in a relationship or even been on a date.
But then in the past year or two I finally learned about asexuality and one night I had this huge emotional revelation when things just clicked suddenly.
So yeah, until recently, bi is where i fit best, and where i felt most accepted.
Up until now I thought “ace ppl were bi/pan?? that makes no sense????’
But reading this I remember–I thought I was bi/pan too!! When I was in high school, I thought I was romantically attracted to men nd sexually attracted to women (I knew almost nothing about gender). I didn’t know about split-attraction so I was horrified of being some kind of freak and doomed to be alone and/or unhappy, to say the least.
People get all offended and insulted and furious about how aces identified as bi/pan, but you need to understand: I only did so because I didn’t know/think asexuality was an option. I wasn’t gay, I wasn’t straight. What else could I be?
At 15, when I was just starting to use the internet to learn about sexuality I came across this: “Bisexuality is the ability to reach down someone’s pants and not care about whatever you find.” And that was, I thought, the closest thing I could find about how I felt.
You might be thinking, “But this is such a wild contradiction to what asexuality is! How could you possibly be bi/pan?” In my experience at least, the logic was something like, “Being bi/pan is an attraction to all genders, but I don’t experience attraction to two+/any gender. Which is similar in that I’m equally indifferent to multiple/all genders. They cancel out, or something? I’m romantically attracted to men, sexually to women, they cancel out?”
When you don’t know what asexuality is, you’re going to come to some conclusions that may make no sense at all to someone else. And they might not make sense to you, either. But what choice do you have? You have to be SOMETHING, or so we’re taught.
And then once I realized I wasn’t REALLY bi or pan, I chose not to identify as anything, since no labels fit me. I thought it would be freeing, not having to worry about labels. But god, it was so lonely. Here I was, some kind of anolomy, brimming with so many questions and no answers. And this is why asexuality is an orientation, rather than a lack of a sexuality. Ahaha, high school was misery in terms of finding my sexuality.
I don’t know, does this make sense to anyone? It’s hard to explain, at least for me.
“I’m nothing” eventually became a common response for me as well.
and gee, I wonder if the feeling of “I’m nothing” contributes to the higher rates of suicidality for a-spec people, like bi erasure does for bi people
for that matter, I wonder if the double whammy of “what I am doesn’t exist” and “what I think I am doesn’t exist”, of bi erasure and the even worse ace erasure, does too
and by “I wonder if” I mean “I bet that….”
I relate so fucking much about everything said in this post. I also identified shortly as bi, then pan, before landing on the “nothing” phase, that made me feel like such a worthless human being. Finding out about asexuality was both a terrifying and liberating experience. It was hard at first coming to terms with it for me, but when it did happen there was this humongous feeling of relief, that I was normal
So when I first found out that asexuality was a part of the bisexual community before splitting up, it made a whole lot of sense already to me. It was pretty logical.
people have been debating the political efficacy and ethical concerns of using the word “queer” as a self-identifier, unifying term to describe populations, and/or theoretical framework for decades. these debates are not about two sides, where one side thinks it’s great and the other thinks it’s terrible and everybody in either camp agrees with everybody else in their camp. larry kramer’s argument against the use of “queer” is not at all the same as cathy j. cohen’s critique of queer theory and queer activism and their deployment of “queer”. similarly, the way that michael warner imagines the applications of “queer” is not the same as how karen barad uses “queer” to describe natural phenomena. the way that queer as folk invokes “queer” in its title is different than how the office invokes “queer” as an insult. “smear the queer” uses the word differently than “we’re here, we’re queer”. it’s a difficult word, largely by design when it comes to contemporary applications/reclamations.
any simplistic single history of the word “queer” or of feelings about the word “queer” is already a failure, not only in terms of accuracy, but also just in understanding of how people have come to conceive of “queer” as a thing that cannot be pinned down, easily defined or made stable. whether or not you agree what that understanding, to not include that aspect of the word in your attempt to theorize around it is an unforgivable blind spot. “queer” is complicated, it has multiple histories and meanings, and not accounting for that, especially when talking as if you’re an expert on the issue, is an enormous failure. lgbtq people have rich and complex histories and cultures. if you’re not willing to account for that, then get out of the business of trying to tell our stories.
One of the things that aggravates me even more about some more recent attempts at language policing, is just how obvious it becomes that there is literally no way for some of us to win. No matter how much goalpost shifting and just plain making shit up it requires.
I mean, as got touched on earlier, for at least 25 years I’ve been just having to avoid engaging with what are pretty consistently the same people with the same terrible attitudes. No matter what the details of the ostensible reasoning might be at any given moment for why we’re really the ones causing any problems that might exist.
(And yeah, funny how it keeps working out that a lot of the ones supposedly causing all the trouble and not using the Proper Words are not middle class people from the dominant culture…)
But, that last bit of commentary on a recent reblog also got me thinking again about some earlier discussion, and brought back some not so pleasant memories of the mainstream political situation when I was in high school and college. And some of the ways things have developed from there.
Part of my commentary there:
As some indication of usage and the politics around that over time in the US, it took some heavy campaigning to finally get the B officially included in the name of the 1993 March on Washington. The T was thankfully mentioned in the platform (also references to “the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender movement”)–but still didn’t make it into the official title of the event.
From Lani Ka’ahumanu’s speech:
I am a token, and a symbol. Today there is no difference. I am the token out bisexual asked to speak, and I am a symbol of how powerful the bisexual pride movement is and how far we have come.
I came here in 1979 for the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights
I returned in 1987 for the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights
I stand here today on the stage of the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Equal Rights and Liberation…
Bisexuals are here, and we’re queer…
Our visibility is a sign of revolt.
Recognition of bisexual orientation and transgender issues presents a challenge to assumptions not previously explored within the politics of gay liberation.
What will it take for the gayristocracy to realize that bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and gay people are in this together, and together we can and will move the agenda forward.
The rest of the speech is worth a look (along with more of the archives there), and a lot of it covers what is still some depressingly familiar exclusionist ground.
It’s a pain to carry over the links, pasting into the mobile editor. Already a lot of fiddly manual formatting required here. So, there are some source links included there if anyone wants them.
But yeah, as another commenter mentioned earlier? At that point in time, she felt the need to point out in that speech that bi people belong there as much as anyone else because we are queer too.
(Not even commenting on the situation regarding the T right now. This is turning long and ranty enough already. Lot of common themes, though.)
Now the same levels of overt surface biphobia are not as socially acceptable in the same communities. Using the word “bisexual” isn’t like the proverbial red flag in front of a whole herd of bulls to anywhere near the same extent. And I get the impression that we’re not supposed to remember when it was safer to call yourself basically anything but that around a sizable chunk of the “The Community”.
(Also, remember when we were the ones inappropriately sexualizing everyone else by using a term we didn’t even invent, ending in “-sexual”? Because I couldn’t forget that if I wanted to; there are a number of things like that. Interesting how essentially the same argument popped right back up more recently, applied to another unpopular group. Hmm.)
Now the “but it’s inherently transphobic!” thing really gets on my nerves, especially given some of the actual history there. But, just using the b-word usually won’t get you the same open hostility now in mixed groups.
So yeah, come back 25 years later and nobody is supposed to say queer. And that reclamation just never happened. Nobody could possibly have ever had any valid reasons for using it. We’re just intent on throwing around “violent slurs” and dividing “The Community”.
And, as I put it a while back:
A lot of the ones trying to pull that stuff now do not seem to fully appreciate that a lot of us have been IDing that way for a long time now precisely because we are those “pissed-off cockroach motherfuckers”.
If we’d been willing to shut up and go away, we probably already would have decades ago. Not planning on it anytime soon, personally.
Once again, it is really none of my business what anybody else wants to call themselves. I don’t have to like all the words anyone else is using. It would be really arrogant to insist otherwise.
That applies to everyone, though.
I also don’t really expect anyone without the same exact history and experiences to fully understand why I make the choices and form the opinions that I do, about pretty much anything. We’re different people, with so many things to decide for ourselves. Again, that applies to all of us.
I’m also really tired of people pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining. Again, pretty consistently the same people, and you’re not supposed to remember the last dozen times it happened.
how about you dont use the word queer to describe lgbt!!! its a fucking slur!
I’m a qpoc, This is what I’m talking about when white people straight wash POC.
@hijabby may I hop on this post to make a point? You’re quite a bit younger than me, which isn’t a problem or a bad thing, it just means you will have still been in kindergarten or not even born yet when the events I am about to discuss took place and given the nature of queer history, it’s totally possible I learned stuff that’s faded into ephemera for your generation.
QUEER WAS THE ACCEPTABLE, ACADEMIC TERM FOR “LGBTQIA” IN THE EARLY-TO-MID 2000s.
I took classes in Queer Literature. We discussed Queer History. Some of my professors–who were themselves gay, lesbian, and bisexual, mind you–referred to historical figures as queer on the basis that those figures did not exist in societies that had a modern-day understanding of sexuality, and so trying to box them into modern labels is an exercise in futility. I went to marches where we screamed “we’re here, we’re queer, we want our civil rights.”
All of this, by the way, spawns out of the Genderqueer and ACT UP movements of the 1990s; they’re the ones who invented the chant on which the above chant was based, the one you may have heard elsewhere: “we’re here, we’re queer, get over it.” I’m proud of my own part in queer history, but those people, the ones who created the AIDS quilt and the die-ins and the fierce demands for same-sex marriage so they could visit partners dying in the hospital, they’re the real heroes. And they called themselves queer.
And?
Most of them were not white.
I am. The radical activism of my generation looks very different from generations past because, I’m sorry to say, white queer folks sat back and let queer folks of color do the hard part, and then we grabbed the baton and charged over the first big finish line while the sportscasters talked about the stunning race we’d run. I’m not sorry to be an activist or to be working in my own generation, but I’m very deeply sorry that queer activism en masse has widely ignored the nonwhite, noncis people who got us where we are.
“Queer” has more uses than just being a slur that was reclaimed 30+ years ago. Queer is a useful term if, say, you’re 15 and you’re not sure if you’re asexual or a late bloomer, but you don’t want to just say “oh yeah, I’m gay/straight.” Queer is a useful term if, like me, you escaped a fundamentalist church and your whole life has been defined by strict labels, and you just want out. Queer is a useful term if you’re from a country where gender doesn’t fit a Western binary but you want a quick term to describe yourself to Western people.
And do you know what else queer is?
Queer is hated by TERFs because it encompasses trans people.
Because it embraces aroace people.
Because it says “you are here, you are welcome, you belong” to people who say “I know I’m not straight, but I don’t know what I AM.” What you are is queer, and queer is enough. Queer is the place you can sit, rest, and figure it out at your own pace.
TERFs started the narrative of “queer is only a slur, has never been anything else, and was never reclaimed and you should never ever say it ever” in order to gatekeep our community. When you try to deny this term, YOU ARE DOING THE WORK OF TERFS.
Queer is not a slur. Queer is a reclaimed word that is of huge help to people across the community, but most especially to our fellows who aren’t “just” LGB, and to the nonwhite members of our community who do not fit into the gender binary.
Stop. STOP. Stop listening to TERFs who pretend nothing of queer rights existed between 1880 and 2015. Stop being ahistorical and disenfranchising.
We’re here, we’re queer, get the fuck over it.
In addition to all of this, The Bi community in the 80s and 90s used Queer a lot as well because the word Bisexual was less tolerable so to still feel a part of the community they rightfully were a part of, they used Queer. Granted, this was when they were rallying and making sure people saw “Bisexual” on posters and pins but it made gay people uncomfortable and not every Bisexual could handle that.
So when I see things like “Q Slur” what it looks like is the active invalidation of lgbt+ people who find safe haven in a word that is all-encompassing without specification. When I was confused and having panic attacks over the fact no label fit me – Queer saved me.
I think people have a right to choose not to use a reclaimed word for themselves, marginalized people get that choice. But to demand NO one use it often comes with the implication of an unawareness to the history behind it and how our community fought tooth and nail for that word to be reclaimed for us to use – decades ago.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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