Did you know this has been a term since way before 2015 when it started being used here on Tumblr (it’s supposed to be an umbrella term you guys it is not specific to non-autistic people, according to the person who coined it).
Did you know that its earlier uses have been solely in regard to autism?
Yup.
I have evidence. When you get to the link, just search the page for “hyper” and you’ll find it pretty dang quickly.
https://learningneverstops.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/big-bang-theorys-sheldon-cooper-aspergers-syndromes-poster-boy/ (comment, 2012)
https://www.mamapedia.com/article/wrong-diagnosis-is-that-possible-for-a-3-yo-toddler-autism-spectrum-pdd-nos (comment, 2010)
http://forums.prohealth.com/forums/index.php?threads%2Fdo-you-ever-sit-in-a-daze.179870%2F (comment, 2007)
https://spectrumshare.com/2012/07/ (blog post, 2012)
http://www.research.utoronto.ca/what-is-autism/ (article, 2010)
And when I do a search specifically for “special interest” ADHD, eliminating Tumblr results and results that include autism, most of the results talk about how professionals who specialize in ADHD… have a special interest in ADHD.
So everyone who says hyperfixation is for ADHD (what even) and special interest is for autism (what even) can go chew on that for a while.
ADDENDUM:
Links about hyperfixation used in contexts other than disability:
http://www.kveller.com/article/five-minutes-with-rebecca-walker/
https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/07/10/facebook-narcissism/
http://www.transformerdc.org/documents/Magrogan_PR_final.pdf
http://www.adrants.com/2008/10/fickle-men-drink-fickle-whisky-and.php
Apparently this needs to make a comeback. Please reblog far and wide, I’m tired of being told I’m not allowed to use my words.
Tag: words
Nah. It’s usually fairly offensive and coming from the sort of people who say things like “the blacks” or call all latinxs “hispanics”. Personally, I’ll only accept it from older trans people since that (and transexual) was what was used during their youth).
(re: “transgendered”)
I don’t know. The events of the last few weeks are starting to make me really feel like I’d much rather have “I support the transgenders! Transgendereds are just people trying to live their lives!” over the sort of people who use absolutely perfect up-to-the-minute gender studies terminology but don’t actually like anyone.
(I mean, not that those are the only two groups, obviously someone can use correct terminology and be supportive and that’s great, but if they’re not willfully misgendering an individual, terminology is like 0.5% of someone’s Trans-Friendliness Score in my book.)
Maybe the difference is whether someone’s just unfamiliar, or whether they’ve been told “transgender is an adjective” and doubled down on “I’ll call you what I want to call you!” But I see the mere-unfamiliarity more often, and I don’t have a problem with that–it means they’re a new supporter, and new supporters are good and valuable to have.
“During their youth”? You mean… within the past ten years?
Look, I after hearing this shit, I smelled bullshit, so I checked the dates and terminology of some of my trans books (as in, by trans creators). And it’s a pretty mixed bag; I see no consensus at all.
Charlie Jane Anders, in The Lazy Crossdresser (from 2002) uses the word ‘transgender’, as does Tristan Crane for self-bio in How Loathsome (2004). But Alicia Goranson’s Supervillainz, from 2006, uses “transman” and “transchick” in the book itself, and both ‘transgender’ and ‘transgendered’ are on the back cover. (If you want to split hairs, Patrick Califia, uses the term “transgendered” in his back cover review, while “transgender” is used on the blurb itself.)
Kate Bornstein in Hello Cruel World uses “transgressively gendered” and “transgender” and that’s also from 2006. But in her earlier book, My Gender Workbook, from 1998, she uses “transgendered.” (Pg. 74, my edition.)
Joey Alison Sayers uses the word ‘transgendered’ for herself in August 2007, in her comic strip Freaking Out the Parents. The Princess comic used the word ‘transgender’ but it seems to have come from later down the line, in 2011. Ditto Take Me There, from the same year, but it mostly “trans.”
As personal experience, when I first started exploring the trans circles online around 2008,
“transgendered” was the polite term, and “transgender” was the one
clueless cis people used. (Because transgender was perceived as a noun or something, while transgendered was perceived as an adjective. I’m not saying this makes sense, but let’s be real, all of this is horseshit anyway.)If you don’t like the word, fine, but let’s not pretend that this was something everyone agreed was offensive long ago, and that this was a term only used by jerks. Ten years ago is not long, and it was being used by the activists on the front lines.
This is some really good context for the whole discussion.
I don’t know how many people remember the whole “trans” vs “trans*” arguments on this hellsite but back in the day, I had a callout post about me because I didn’t use the star on a post and a callout post because I did use the star on a different post circulating at the same time. As in two different callout posts by two different people, created within days of each other, about how transphobic I was, for opposite reasons.
Nah. It’s usually fairly offensive and coming from the sort of people who say things like “the blacks” or call all latinxs “hispanics”. Personally, I’ll only accept it from older trans people since that (and transexual) was what was used during their youth).
(re: “transgendered”)
I don’t know. The events of the last few weeks are starting to make me really feel like I’d much rather have “I support the transgenders! Transgendereds are just people trying to live their lives!” over the sort of people who use absolutely perfect up-to-the-minute gender studies terminology but don’t actually like anyone.
(I mean, not that those are the only two groups, obviously someone can use correct terminology and be supportive and that’s great, but if they’re not willfully misgendering an individual, terminology is like 0.5% of someone’s Trans-Friendliness Score in my book.)
Maybe the difference is whether someone’s just unfamiliar, or whether they’ve been told “transgender is an adjective” and doubled down on “I’ll call you what I want to call you!” But I see the mere-unfamiliarity more often, and I don’t have a problem with that–it means they’re a new supporter, and new supporters are good and valuable to have.
This is how I feel about disability terminology.
I don’t care that much which words people say, if what they mean is that they see disabled people as human and think it’s a problem that others don’t.
Y’all understand that it is literally not possible for gay couples to be heteronormative. A masculine gay man dating a feminine gay man isn’t heteronormative. A butch lesbian dating a femme lesbian isn’t heteronormative. They’re fucking gay. Telling gay people they’re somehow enforcing heteronormativity by being themselves and dating another gay person is nasty and ridiculous.
God I think the problem you nasties have is you all think gay people are by default constantly trying to copy straight people. Like listen, I’m a masculine gay man, I have a bit of a preference for feminine men. A lot of you would say I’m enforcing heteronormativity, or maybe I’m trying to be straight, when in reality I just think feminine men are cute. That’s literally it.
The problem isn’t that i, a masculine man, like feminine men, the problem is the way straight people view gay relationships. Straight people see themselves as the default, so when they see a masculine man dating a feminine man, or a butch lesbian dating a femme lesbian, their first thought is “oh, they’re trying to copy us.” Even if two feminine men date or two butch lesbians date, straight people still look at them and try to find out who’s the “man” and who’s the “woman.”
Gay people aren’t the problem, the problem is the way straight people view our relationships.
This. I don’t like femmes because I’m heteronormative. I like femmes because I’m not.
Also, as a femme bisexual woman, MY PREFERENCE FOR BUTCHES
D O E S N O T
MAKE ME
“BASICALLY STRAIGHT”
“ACTUALLY STRAIGHT”
“PRETENDING TO BE STRAIGHT”
OR ANY OTHER GODDAMN VERSION OF STRAIGHTYeah, that.
Also, thank you for “femme bisexual.” I am so tired of “these are lesbian words, but we didn’t bother to tell you that fifteen years ago for some strange reason”
Our (lesbian and bisexual women) histories are deeply intertwined. Our language is shared. “Bisexual culture” was not a thing for women where I live until the mid 90’s or so (bisexual men were a thing about a decade earlier, but it was a weirdly specific lable for the “heteroflexible” guys who only dated girls but still liked casual gay sex). Prior to that, you were just a lesbian who sometimes put up with men. Definitions have shifted and bisexual culture has emerged as its own thing, but the damn language is the same. We split off from lesbians well after that language was established and used for us. 19 year olds on Tumblr acting like this is somehow not the case and our histories and language have ALWAYS BEEN SEPARATE, and omg you guys, BISEXUALS are OPPRESSING LESBIANS by APPROPRIATING THEIR WOOOOOOOOORRRRRDZZ drive me insane.
Yep. My last ex-gf and I called ourselves a butch-femme couple. We’re both bi. We didn’t say it all the time, and we certainly weren’t going to yell at ourselves… but I still recall precisely no one being bothered by it.
My ex before that was emotionally abusive, and would put me down and “joke” that I wasn’t butch and laugh. She was a lesbian.
Her reasons were always things like “those aren’t men’s clothes” and “you sometimes cry” (yes, she was making me.) Never “you are bi.” And yes, she knew I was bi and said other biphobic things.
“Butches and femmes are lesbians” is RECENT.
a basic dictionary of plain english Leftism
in all seriousness though I do think that we have a general problem of like, Left ideas being great and people generally agreeing with them, but Left terms being something that has long been demonized and even when it hasn’t, it’s been obscured by a century plus of theorization.
in that way frankly it’s like a lot of other struggles- activists have to overcome the hurdle of people not even knowing what they’re talking about, and there’s a struggle for basic vocabulary to express the ideas.
richard wolff is just about the only anticapitalist activist I can think of who actively works to define his terms, and rephrases classical theory into modern, comprehensible language. in the spirit of that, here’s a few subsitutions I’ve found effective in my own conversations.
- don’t say “worker”, say “employee”. not all workers are employees, but in a US context the lion’s share of them are. Similarly, don’t say “capitalist”, say “employer”. "the workers are exploited by their bosses" is a sentence from 1920. “Employers routinely find ways to screw over their employees” is just a basic fact everyone knows.
- you gotta define what capitalism is. most people hear “capitalism” and they think “Free market”. While they’re related as of late, they’re not the same at all. Capital-ism is a system of resource production defined by capital-ists, who are people who own capital. What’s capital? It’s anything that can be used for production. A factory is capital. land is capital. Money generally isn’t capital, unless you’ve invested it
- you also gotta distinguish between the market and capital. The market, on the other hand, is a method of resource exchange. Markets exist independently of capitalism: slave societies used markets to buy and sell slaves and other goods, despite the fact that slavery isn’t capitalism. Slavery has master and slave, not employer and employee.
- you gotta distinguish between capitalists and the merely wealthy. i’ve met a lot of leftists who miss this one for some reason. a heart surgeon might be wealthy but they’re not necessarily a capitalist- they work for their income, and are highly compensated for that work. A landlord, on the other hand, is a capitalist (though not necessarily an employer), because their income comes from land that they own & the rent that they charge the people who live on it.
- you gotta define what socialism and communism are. "the workers own the means of production" is vague and stale. “the employees of a company have just as much of a say in production and profit distribution as the CEOs and the shareholders” is better. Talking about “democratically-run enterprises” is another good way to phrase it.
- you gotta be able to point out real-world examples of socialism. the mondragon corporation is the ur-example of course, but credit unions and food cooperatives are also good examples. there are many, many examples of socialist firms existing and thriving in competition with capitalist ones- all the while, treating both the employees and the communitiies they live in better. (Yes, you can have socialist and capitalist firms existing side-by-side!)
- you gotta find ways to work with terrible definitions of socialism and communism. everyone and their dog has a terrible definition of socialism and communism, including actual governments which call themselves communist. the USSR, for example, called itself communist- but in its case, they considered the government to be a proxy for the people. so by the government owning all of the capital in the country, it was just as good as every individual citizen. in reality of course it was something closer to state capitalism- a handful of government bureaucrats owning and controlling all of the capital.
holy fucking shit THIS
In all seriousness – this is really useful advice. Get to the words that mean what you’re trying to say but don’t have a whole crapton of bad associations. So you can argue the actual point instead of getting distracted.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 