Tag: stereotypes

aroworlds:

wixley-kryptonese:

ameliaace:

quick note: autistic ace/aro people aren’t problematic or perpetuating stereotypes because they are real people living their lives and not fictional characters written by somebody drawing upon stereotypes. They are also not in the wrong for wanting to see themselves represented in media. 

also: our ace/aro identities aren’t rooted in our autism and therefore there is nothing wrong with wanting both our identities seen at the same time.

I want my autism and aromanticism acknowledged, supported and celebrated at the same time; this should be a given. But I am aro to large degree because I am autistic, and I need this relationship acknowledged more than it is.

I find it difficult–impossible, actually–to run this blog and talk about my aromanticism without referencing my autism. My aromanticism is caught up in my dislike of touch, in finding rules about what is and isn’t romantic to be absurd and nonsensical, my inability to perform or experience emotions and behaviours that are deemed romantic by allistic society, my difficulty in emotional connections with other people. Autism and aromanticism are linked enough for me that I’ve been feeling the need for the aro-spec equivalent of autigender, because I am aro, and I am autistic, and often they can and should be discussed separately, but just as often they are so entwined it makes better sense to state that my aro-spec identity is autism-flavoured aromanticism.

I am hyper-conscious of the fact that I am risking alienating allistic aros when I bring autism into aro spaces like this one, and having a specific autistic-aro identity, one that slots underneath the aro umbrella as another way of being aro, would make me feel more comfortable as an autistic aro in aro spaces. It’d let me be autiaro (or maybe autiromantic?) in the same way other aro-specs are demi or quoi or greyro or arovague; it’d give me space to talk about the specific feels and experiences I do have.

(Side note: conventional terms like “arovague” and “nebularomantic” don’t centre the autism aspect of aromanticism flavoured by neurodivergency enough for me. I’m glad both words exist, but they’re not quite for me.)

Are all autistic aros going to feel that way? No, and that’s awesome. Just like, despite the fact that I am genderless, I feel no need for the newly-coined word “arogender” because I don’t feel my lack of gender and my aromanticism to be linked this way, but that doesn’t negate the feelings of those who want or need it (and should be able to discuss this relationship as an aro-spec experience in aro-spec spaces). We all have a wonderful diversity of identities that fit together in a variety of shared, unique and individualistic ways, and a healthy community supports and celebrates this.

Blanket statements about what we are not, even in response to stereotypes that harm us, do nothing to foster the diverse community we’re trying to build.

We need a better social construct for responding to stereotypes or assumptions that harm us that isn’t a blanket denial of said stereotype ever being relevant. The problem is that the stereotype is treated as universal by outsiders who use this–a stereotype comprised of qualities they consider harmful for other reasons, often relating to another experience of marginalisation–to dismiss, diminish and deny aros as human individuals and as a community.

We need a way of saying something like this:

Treating all aro-specs, or people/characters coded as aro-spec, as fitting any given stereotype is erasing and damaging, because it denies aro-specs agency and validity in being, like any other community, a wide, wonderful, diverse collection of people. On this basis alone, we object to its use. We acknowledge, however, that the stereotype may and can apply to individual aro-specs. We will also acknowledge that there is nothing inherently harmful in being an aro-spec person who fits said stereotype, because they harm us most often by taking qualities associated with other experiences of marginalisation and applying them to aro-specs, or people/characters coded as aro-spec, as an indication of our assumed inhumanity. We will not diminish or erase otherwise-marginalised people–especially otherwise-marginalised aro-specs–who are also hurt by this stereotype in our fight against the pain of stereotypes used by others to hurt us.

Because our current conversations in rejecting damaging stereotypes with blanket “we aren’t this” statements, speaking as someone who fits several negatively-regarded stereotypes about being aro and autistic and aro, do nothing but make a world where I still don’t get to exist.

luckynicklausse:

captainsnoop:

i honestly dont know what i would do if healthcare was free here. i feel like i’d go to the hospital and they’d put me in the government funded sickness scanner and they’d be like “holy fuck dude, you got like, syndromes and shit. how are you even walking around right now” and i’d be like “i dunno, i didn’t wanna bother anybody about it” 

#then there are too many working for the #nhs#‘this isn’t america you know! we can’t treat every minor worry like a crisis!’#‘that’s not how things are done here! you don’t need an asthma inhaler what you really need is to lose large amounts of weight!’#and so on #wish i were exaggerating#probably different if they don’t want to discriminate #worst health in my life#and i had a tumor before

Re: clatterbane’s tag, ugh, I’m sorry to hear that. systematic fatphobia is dreadful and I feel like it’s not being treated like it even really… exists? People seem to either want to deflect to America, like “we don’t have the same level of obesity crisis they have :)” or they want to support gross campaigns like the Cancer Research UK one this spring.
Sorry this reply isn’t particularly constructive, just offering solidarity really.

Re: someone else’s tag about ‘how do they just test you for generally Being Sick?’, my friend and her mom were in a car accident and they were treated at an NHS hospital, and my friend told me that the staff had to run a screening on them as routine and that’s how they found out her mom was diabetic.
to my limited knowledge, screenings are p general but can give indications of warning signs to follow up on although following up can take months if it’s non-urgent / or sometimes even in some urgent cases it can take too long but afaik staff try to ensure you get treated in time / they’re overloaded atm though

Tbf, both those examples which popped into mind were from the same terrible GP. (The first one I registered with, because that was the only surgery I could find accepting new patients for our catchment area. No wonder that guy had room for more patients…)

When my parents were visiting, they ended up staying longer than intended and had to see him for blood pressure medication refills. Just in that type of first appointment, he was blatantly racist enough dealing with my mother that she jumped down his throat. Which he was obviously not expecting, and it was more gratifying to watch than it should have been. He laid off me after that with the really overt stuff, but yeah. Any excuse to brush people off. Not a good situation in general.

Thankfully, that guy was a bit of an outlier. But, as serious a problem as systemic fatphobia is dealing with the US system? I really have run into more problems with it here, for whatever reason(s). Even when my BMI has been in the officially “acceptable” range. That’s a new one.

As with about anything, results are probably going to be much better if you’re not working against various types of largely unexamined bias. And if you’re more familiar with how a system actually works on the ground. Theoretically universal coverage doesn’t necessarily mean that access to appropriate treatment is truly equal, unfortunately. There’s always room for improvement.

(Probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s still worth saying.)

naasad:

naasad:

ja-ll:

eevee-morgan:

autism is widely underdiagnosed in girls because autistic women tend to present as quiet and reserved, which is just how women are supposed to be.

personality disorders are underdiagnosed in men because they tend to present more explosively and involve more narcissistic behaviours, which is just how men are supposed to be.

sexism isn’t good for anyone. don’t be fooled.

when ppl ask why gender roles are dangerous!!!!! peep this!!!!!!

Another reason autism is under-diagnosed in girls! Special interests! When I was little, my special interest was horses. But every little girl has a horse phase, right? When I was a preteen, it was makeup. But every girl has a makeup phase, right? Then it was books, mostly Lord of the Rings, and well, I’m a short brunette who wears glasses. It wasn’t until I spent years “obsessed” with superheroes that anyone suspected I related to my interests a little differently than your average allistic.

Stereotypes are harmful. Besides the above example, stereotypes kill at least thousands of people of color every year (I don’t have the emotional energy to look up the actual statistic right now, but I’ll insert a source soon.)

Gender roles are another set of stereotypes, steeped in sexism, widely accepted by society either as “the way it’s supposed to be” or “the way they’ll always want us to be”, and they really just need to be done with.

Let them die, kill them if you have to. (I still haven’t seen that movie.)

Also, I feel like op is talking just as much about how disabilities are stereotyped as they are about how sexism impacts the healthcare industry. Maybe that’s just me, idk, but I see a lot of other people calling them ableist for their phrasing and wanted to share my thoughts on that.

Another effect of the layers of stereotyping that doesn’t get discussed nearly as much: If you’re seen as a girl and not presenting autism/ADHD more quietly, it’s liable to get viewed as particularly Bad and Wrong.

There must be something horrible going on if a child is acting that far outside some particular cultural expectations. (Whether or not they’re actually coming from the same culture, as an additional confounding factor.) They may be extremely sick and fucked up from a medicalized perspective, and/or they may be deliberately disruptive because Bad. Too often both. But, unexpected sterotype-violating behavior is likely to make some adults even more upset and get pathologized in some different ways.

Filtered through sexist/racist/etc. assumptions, the exact same behavior can get interpreted in a completely different light. Often as indicating issues seen as even worse, and requiring Sharp Measures to “fix”. And everyone knows that autism and ADHD are for middle/upper-class white boys anyway, right? :/

Similar no doubt holds true dealing with kids perceived as boys violating stereotypes, but I don’t have the same direct experience there.

Basically, there are just so many ways these layers of stereotypes can harm real people.

Expecting ways of communicating to define an Autistic person

mulder-are-you-suggesting:

k-pagination:

“Some Autistics who talk neurodiversity on the Internet also like to ascribe certain Autistic traits to select narratives. One such narrative is that those of us who identify ourselves as speaking Autistics tend to be non-visibly Autistic and have few direct support needs. Often, the narrative includes the idea that we’ve learned how read non-autistic people’s behavior or at least mimic it…There are Autistic people who fit this narrative, and there is nothing wrong with that. The issue occurs when the narrative doesn’t make room for other people’s stories.

…

People who espouse this narrative seem to assume that other Autistics have the same struggles and the same strengths – and therefore there is no room to even consider what high-support Autistic people, and other people who don’t fit the narrative, can contribute to our movement.”

I’ve found that, even in autistic spaces, people often seem to assume
that autistic people like myself (I can communicate via speech, am
considered “high functioning” and didn’t get diagnosed until adulthood,
but I’m also very obviously autistic, and can’t successfully do the
“pretend to be a neurotypical” thing) don’t exist. I hear a lot of
people talking about why dividing autistic people up into “high” vs.
“low functioning” is bad, but at the same time, I see people who do this
also making the assumption that people who get put into these
categories actually fit the stereotypes associated with them. So it gets
turned from “what people who are high or low functioning are like” to
“what people who get called high or low functioning are like” and
I don’t fit a lot of the stereotypes about what
people who get called “high functioning” are supposedly like.

Expecting ways of communicating to define an Autistic person

withasmoothroundstone:

moteinthedark:

Controversial opinion:

Geekiness is neither feminine nor masculine. It’s neotenous, or genderless. There’s a cluster of people who read more as “little kid” or “robot” or “serious, sexless nun/monk/scientist” than as “man” or “woman”.

There is a cluster around science/tech, introversion, neoteny, a particular kind of gender weirdness, and some flavors of autism. The geek stereotype is based on a real kind of person. I am that kind of person.

I actually like being that kind of person. Sometimes it means I Fail at Girl, but mostly it feels natural and good.

I get the sense that society has gotten way more interested in gender, and assigning genders to everything, and arguing about gender. And that’s good on net, because it results in more freedom for LGBT people. But also…the pinks are pinker and the blues are bluer, y’know? Marketing has gotten more gendered, and that includes the marketing of “content.” Everything you read is either marked blue or pink. It wasn’t, in the 90’s. Tech is marked “blue” now , and it didn’t use to be.

Feminism is very pink these days. 70s feminism had women who looked and talked more like me. Judy Chicago was dinky and Jewy and nerdy and slightly butch. She would have been easier for me to make friends with than most of the feminists I read on Tumblr.

I see people who are my kind of people, who are in the cluster, and they primarily talk about it as a “trans” thing or a “disabled” thing. What I see is a type that includes some trans and disabled people and some who are neither, but all of whom have some of this weirdness regarding gender and thinking style (and interpret it/react to it differently.) There’s a “geek phenotype”, so to speak.

Contemporary culture doesn’t really allow you to talk about that. “Geek” is defined to include everyone who likes Marvel movies. When you try to talk about the specific thing that is Our Kind Of People, you get accused of being insular. Or people say “oh you mean autistic” and it turns out that there’s overlap but there are lots of autistics who definitely aren’t “geek phenotype”. If you claim “there are more men than women who are phenotypically geeky”, you start being suspected of sexism. So you can’t really talk about this cluster that everyone knows is more-or-less real.

I mean, there’s a “nerd accent.” We’ve all heard it.

What *is* it that prevents us from identifying as a group?

I am… not that type but have known tons of people who are and at times hovered near social circles with a lot of such people in them and emulated elements of it.  I don’t know how much of the above observations I believe or don’t believe – by which I mean I literally have no opinion because there’s a lot I don’t know.  But I think I know what general type of person is being described.

Something that is not directly related (or may be, but not sure), but for some reason I kept thinking while reading this:

I have long observed that there is one set of traits that is read in two supposedly opposing way depending on context.  In some contexts it’s read as like the super-genius uber-geek.  In other contexts it’s read as retarded.  (I’m using that word, no matter how offensive it is, because I don’t mean intellectual disability, I mean an idea in people’s heads that correlates with the idea of ‘retarded’ most people have.  An idea closely related but not identical with intellectual disability. Just as ‘genius’ is an idea in people’s heads related to the idea of high IQ but isn’t identical to it at all.  If I meant high IQ and low IQ I would’ve just said those things.)  

The common denominator is autism.  These are traits of voice, appearance, habit, and mannerisms that are absolutely identical to each other and it is only context clues that make people sometimes read them as one thing and sometimes as another.  

Like I was trying to describe möbius mouth (one of the earliest ways to screen for autism in infants, and something that usually persists for life, and part of the stereotype-that-goes-both-ways) to an MIT professor, and she couldn’t see it as an unusual expression because it’s so damn common at MIT.

And that thing is related to the geek phenotype thing.  As in, the geek phenotype thing is like… one of several things that can happen in a lot of autistic people and some other neurodivergent people, that causes a couple different stereotypes in people’s heads to form, and which one they see depends entirely on context.  There are other things besides the geek phenotype that can be read in a similar polarizing way.  I’ve been able to notice this contrast because I have been seen as gifted and put into gifted programs, and I’ve been seen as developmentally disabled and put into DD programs, and I’ve watched the way utterly identical behavior is treated as opposites within these two contexts. 

Explaining to an MIT professor why I was terrified to lie down on the floor… she acted like my ideas came from outer space.  I’d seen people get the crap beat out of them and tied to tables for lying on the floor not bothering anyone at all.  Apparently lying on the floor is socially acceptable at MIT.  I felt so horribly out of place there – like I was an infiltrator who would be revealed to be not as smart or useful or interesting as they thought I was.  The last time I was on a university campus, several people with a lot of authority told me I didn’t belong on a university campus at all.  And then the professor took me to a neighborhood of a type I have been thrown out of for walking alone.  I couldn’t explain any of this to anyone and still can’t entirely.  It has to do with experiences that have shaped me on levels I can’t describe without any conscious awareness until events like this brought them up.  Emphasized the most emphatically because the day before MIT I was at an amazing DD self-advocacy conference where I felt a sense of belonging and rightness i’d never felt anywhere, and the contrast kept piercing my heart into pieces.  I kept trying to get them to be as interested in the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities as they were in the experiences of autistic people, but it wasn’t happening, they kept asking why, I couldn’t explain, but I felt that out of loyalty to the people who have made a place for me in their lives in a way others haven’t, I needed to say “You’re overlooking people with valuable perspectives.”

And I know that’s way off on a tangent from the OP.  But somehow this ‘geek phenotype’ thing reminded me of one of many different ‘phenotypes’ that are read in supposedly-opposite ways (’genius’ and ‘retarded’ are ideas most people refuse to combine) based on identical behavior in shifting contexts.  Which led me to my own experiences being read both ways, and once read one way people refuse to read you the opposite way, most of the time.  I find both ways dehumanizing and inaccurate.

If there’s a ‘geek phenotype’, there are… other things, too. Whatever I am, overlaps heavily with some autistic people but not others, like the geek thing, and also overlaps with a lot of nonautistic but usually neurodivergent people, including often people with certain kinds of epilepsy, certain kinds of intellectual disabilities, and certain things that don’t have official classifications as of the moment.  I can’t really describe it I just know it when I see it.  And for whatever reason we seem to inspire very polarized ideas in other people, and we also seem to be unable to fit into any of the common categories people create, not just a little unable to fit but a lot.  Like functioning labels apply to nobody, really, but for us we completely break the concept to pieces in a very visible and unavoidable manner, and that invites hostility and suspicion from people invested in the categories existing.  Some people try to shove us into one or another but when we don’t fit we get blamed.  And sometimes we try to shove ourselves into one or the other but it never works no matter how hard we try, and the not-working is unavoidable it’s not something we can avoid confronting for long at all.  (Like, some people it takes work to say why they don’t fit, we just flagrantly don’t fit in ways that become obvious quickly if not instantly.)

Anyway, I hope the OP doesn’t mind a zillion tangents like this, these things are just where my mind went.