The first six pages of our website are a scrollytellying journey through the rough terrain of lived experience punctuated with spectacular art and music. Made with agony and joy, this is our story of surviving, reframing, and finding like-minded misfits.
- Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People
- An Encyclopedia of Disability and Difference
- Take Them Together: Neurodiversity and Disability Justice (the page you’re reading now)
- Our Umbrella: It Is Time to Celebrate Our Interdependence!
- Reframe Disability and Difference: We’re Going to Rewrite the Narratives
- Happy Flappy: Let’s Bolster Against Stress and Pass Bodily Survival Knowledge Down
Pages in the journey are connected with a “Continue” button at the bottom of each page.
On this page, we get personal, we get feisty, and we get punk rock about it. We celebrate neurodiversity, disability justice, pluralism, weird pride, queer pride, and chosen family while making it clear that:
- We are not okay.
- You are killing us.
We design for and encourage skimming, so skim-scroll on down and see what grabs your attention.
Here’s what is coming up.
Table of Contents
- 🌈♿️ Take Them Together: Neurodiversity and Disability Justice
- ✊ We’re a Feisty Group of Neurodivergent and Disabled People
- 🔨 Ordinary tried to fix me. I was a threat to a page in history.
- 🎸 We’re Punk Rock Canaries
- 🪓 Keep scrolling. We ’bout to change some manners.
- 🫀 We Ain’t Special
- 🆔 We Prefer Identity-First Language
- 🗣️ Language is a place of struggle.
- 🖼️ We reframe, because we’re not broken.
- 🖊️ We’re Going to Rewrite the Narratives
- 💔 We are not okay.
- 💀 You are killing us.
- 😭 We know who they are and what they have done to our people.
- 🔦 We Find Our People
- 🌈🌈 We’re A Double Rainbow All the Way
- 🎨 Behold the Spectrum
- ❤️🔥 We serve our loved people so we can keep on livin’ through the onslaught.
- 🔆 We’re here turning on the light.
- ⏭️ Coming Up on the Next Page
- ☂️ Our Umbrella: It Is Time to Celebrate Our Interdependence!
🌈♿️ Take Them Together: Neurodiversity and Disability Justice
“Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline” is available as open access and on:
What Neurodiversity Means to Me
Neurodiversity, to me, means both a fabulous celebration of all kinds of individual minds, and a serious, holistic acknowledgment of the necessity of diversity in order for society to survive, thrive, and innovate. It means identity, belonging, and community. It means I am not broken, not alone, and neither are my siblings standing with me beneath that huge, multi-colored neurodiversity umbrella: we the autistic, the mad, the weirdly-wired, the queer, the crippled, and the labeled with neurodivergent diagnoses like flowers that glorify our beautiful bodies and minds.
Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline
Neurodiversity is the diversity of human minds, the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.
Neurodiversity is a biological fact. It’s not a perspective, an approach, a belief, a political position, or a paradigm. That’s the neurodiversity paradigm (see below), not neurodiversity itself.
Neurodiversity is not a trait that any individual possesses or can possess. When an individual or group of individuals diverges from the dominant societal standards of “normal” neurocognitive functioning, they don’t “have neurodiversity,” they’re neurodivergent (see below).
NEURODIVERSITY: SOME BASIC TERMS & DEFINITIONS
Neurodiversity is the idea that all brains and connected bodyminds are diverse in how they work – no two brains or nervous systems are the same
Terminology | Critical Disability Studies Collective
“Great minds don’t always think alike.” We already understand the value of biodiversity in a rainforest. The presence of a wide variety of life forms – each with its own distinctive strengths and attributes – increases the robustness and resilience of any living community as a whole, and its ability to adapt to novel conditions. The same is true of any community of human minds, including workplaces, corporations, classrooms and society as a whole. To face the challenges of the future, we’ll need the problem-solving abilities of different types of minds working together.
Steve Silberman recommends the best books on Autism
Neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
Steve Silberman recommends the best books on Autism
AUTISM & THE PATHOLOGY PARADIGM
AUTISM & THE PATHOLOGY PARADIGM
Mind Is an Embodied Phenomenon: Neurodiversity Is About Bodyminds, Not Just Brains
Neurodiversity, simply put, is the diversity among human minds. For 15 years or so after the term was coined, it was common for people to speak of neurodiversity as ‘‘diversity among brains.’’ There still are plenty of people who talk about it that way. I think this is a mistake; it’’s an overly reductionist and essentialist definition that’s decades behind present-day understandings of how human bodyminds work.
Mind is an embodied phenomenon. The mind is encoded in the brain as ever-changing webs of neural connectivity. The brain is part of the body, interconnected with the rest of the body by a vast network of nerves. The activity of the mind and body creates changes in the brain; changes in the brain affect both mind and embodiment. Mind, brain, and embodiment are intricately entwined in a single complex system. We’re not minds riding around in bodies, we’re bodyminds.
A lot of people hear neuro and they think, brain. But the prefix neuro doesn’t mean brain, it means nerve. The neuro in neurodiversity is most usefully understood as a convenient shorthand for the functionality of the whole bodymind and the way the nervous system weaves together cognition and embodiment. So neurodiversity refers to the diversity among minds, or among bodyminds.
Toward a Neuroqueer Future: An Interview with Nick Walker | Autism in Adulthood
So much of my perception of my autistic self is embodied.
As indicated by the title, the first essential term for this book is bodymind. Bodymind is a materialist feminist disability studies concept from Margaret Price that refers to the enmeshment of the mind and body, which are typically understood as interacting and connected, yet distinct entities due to the Cartesian dualism of Western philosophy (“The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain” 270). The term bodymind insists on the inextricability of mind and body and highlights how processes within our being impact one another in such a way that the notion of a physical versus mental process is difficult, if not impossible to clearly discern in most cases (269). Price argues that bodymind cannot be simply a rhetorical stand-in for the phrase “mind and body”; rather, it must do theoretical work as a disability studies term. Bodymind is an essential concept in chapter 3 in my discussion of hyperempathy, a nonrealist disability that is both mental and physical in origin and manifestation. Bodymind generally, however, is an important and theoretically useful term to use in analyzing speculative fiction as the nonrealist possibilities of human and nonhuman subjects, such as the werewolves discussed in chapter 4, often highlight the imbrication of mind and body, sometimes in extreme or explicitly apparent ways that do not exist in our reality.
In addition to the utility of the term bodymind in discussions of speculative fiction, I also use this term because of its theoretical utility in discussions of race and (dis)ability. For example, bodymind is particularly useful in discussing the toll racism takes on people of color. As more research reveals the ways experiences and histories of oppression impact us mentally, physically, and even on a cellular level, the term bodymind can help highlight the relationship of nonphysical experiences of oppression—psychic stress—and overall well-being. While this research is emergent, people of color and women have long challenged their association with pure embodiment and the degradation of the body as unable to produce knowledge through a rejection of the mind/body divide. Bodymind provides, therefore, a politically and theoretically useful term in discussing (dis)ability in black women’s speculative fiction and more.
Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction – Dr. Sami Schalk
“Disability justice” is simply another term for love.
Because I would argue that “disability justice” is simply another term for love. And so is “solidarity,” “access,” and “access intimacy.” I would argue that our work for liberation is simply a practice of love—one of the deepest and most profound there is. And the creation of this space is an act of love.
“Disability Justice” is Simply Another Term for Love | Leaving Evidence
This work is about shifting how we understand access, moving away from the individualized and independence-framed notions of access put forth by the disability rights movement and, instead, working to view access as collective and interdependent.
With disability justice, we want to move away from the “myth of independence,” that everyone can and should be able to do everything on their own. I am not fighting for independence, as much of the disability rights movement rallies behind. I am fighting for an interdependence that embraces need and tells the truth: no one does it on their own and the myth of independence is just that, a myth.
Changing the Framework: Disability Justice | Leaving Evidence
To me, one quality of disability justice culture is that it is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as valuable as a blog post about access hacks—because they’re equally important and interdependent. This book is an example of that both/and.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
The making of disability justice lives in the realm of thinking and talking and knowledge making, in art and sky. But it also lives in how to rent an accessible porta potty for an accessible-except-the-bathroom event space, how to mix coconut oil and aloe to make a fragrance-free hair lotion that works for curly and kinky BIPOC hair, how to learn to care for each other when everyone is sick, tired, crazy, and brilliant. And neither is possible without the other.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Economic justice is disability justice. Every disabled person…
The Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework is intended to be used by all and shared widely as a guide for policy development. Its applicability includes federal policy making in Congress, the White House, and across federal agencies; at the state and local levels; as well as at policy and advocacy organizations that shape policy making. Whether you are an advocate, policymaker, funder, practitioner, or researcher, the goal is to find yourself within the framework and use the values it articulates to bring a disability policy lens to your work.
Every Disabled Person:
- can live free from disability-based discrimination, as well as discrimination based on multiply marginalized and intersecting identities such as race, gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity), immigration status, and religion;
- has accessible, affordable, stable, safe, and quality housing;
- has access to reliable, affordable, and accessible transportation;
- can live independently, with dignity, access to support in the community, and access to culturally and linguistically appropriate care and services at their direction;
- has access to the health care they need, when they need it, and from the providers they want to be served by, including primary and specialist health care, sexual and reproductive health care, dental care, mental health care, medication, telehealth, and emergency care;
- has access to adequate, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food;
- is provided a high-quality, equitable education in an inclusive educational setting, from early childhood to post-secondary education, including an affordable higher education;
- can find and retain equitable employment at competitive wages, in integrated settings, and with appropriate accommodations and paid leave, including access to self-employment and entrepreneurship opportunities;
- has direct, equitable pathways to attain economic security and mobility through building wealth and savings;
- has access to an equitable public benefits system that provides a robust social safety net adequate to ensure a basic, dignified standard of living and free from intrusive barriers to work, savings, and marriage;
- is provided fair and equitable access to and treatment by the American legal system, including through civil, criminal, immigration, and family courts; court fines and fees; and the right to support for legal decision-making and the right to counsel as a reasonable accommodation;
- can engage in civic participation by voting and engaging in the democratic process with appropriate accommodations provided equitably and fairly;
- is centered in emergency and disaster planning, as well as climate change sustainability and other infrastructure discussions, to ensure accessible and inclusive solutions for the future of the United States; and
- has access to and can fully engage with affordable technologies at home, in the community, and at work, including broadband and assistive technologies that keep pace with the rapidly changing technology of the times, while ensuring freedom from surveillance when engaging with such technology.
Source: How to Embed a Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework in Domestic Policy Making
- $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people – Los Angeles Times
- Denver Basic Income Project’s cash has saved lives, homeless participants say
- Thanks to $500 a month of basic income for six months, homelessness reduced by two-thirds
- Providing $7500 each to 50 homeless people resulted in a savings of $8100 per person according to new unconditional cash grant experiment
- Robust COVID Relief Achieved Historic Gains Against Poverty and Hardship, Bolstered Economy | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
“Bread and roses” are what the humans involved in care—the patient and the clinician—want from healthcare.
Over this summer both of us read Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses,1 which she was inspired to write when she discovered that George Orwell had not only written the bleakest and most powerful portrayals of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,2 but had also planted rose bushes, costing him sixpence each from Woolworths. This apparent contradiction between the bleak worldview and the hopeful act of gardening, reminded Solnit of the political slogan “Bread and Roses” which seems to have emerged in the US around 1910 and was used by women campaigning for votes for women and for workers’ rights. Describing the power of the slogan, Solnit wrote:
“Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right. It was equally an argument against the idea that everything that human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions. Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.”
“Bread and roses” are what the humans involved in care—the patient and the clinician—want from healthcare. Bread is sustenance and therefore life; roses are courage and hope, curiosity and joy, and all that makes a life worth living. Bread is biology; roses are biography. Bread is transactional and technocratic; roses are relational. Bread is science; roses are care, kindness and love.
“Bread and roses” can also describe how healthcare can support care. With apologies to those who bake their own loaves, the parallel here is with the industrial production of bread, so that bread represents the bureaucratic processes that make healthcare efficient and safe, preventing waste and error through standardisation, regulation, and training. Baking bread is like the technologies and innovations that make unhurried conversations and continuity of care possible and feasible, that reduce diagnostic errors, and detect and correct harms early and reliably. Attending to the bread makes sure healthcare retains the potential to attend to the object of care, to the bodies and minds, the fears and feelings of individual patients, and to create the conditions for careful and kind care to emerge.
Roses represent what makes life worth living, all that is good in human relationships, and the stories we use to make sense of our desperate situations and of what is possible with treatment. Roses are what gives us comfort in the face of failure, pain, decay, and death, that is, in the face of living. Attending to roses brings the subject of care into sharp relief so that the scars of injustice, racism, inequity, and violence can be made visible alongside the scars of disease. Roses, like careful and kind care,3 speak of hope—our work of planting and creating conditions of light, soil, and water makes it possible that a flower will appear in the future. Just like roses, care cannot be summoned or coaxed, but must emerge from the right conditions.
Responding to the crisis of care | The BMJ
How to respond to this crisis of care?
Here, Orwell himself holds the clue. The discovery that Orwell had planted those roses led Solnit to reassess his novel 1984. Within all the greyness and cruelty and oppression, there is this great truth:
“What mattered were individual relationships, and that a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.”2
All the joy, all the roses of health, even in these dire times, exist within relationships, between patients and professionals, and between healthcare colleagues; and in the sure knowledge that all these helpless gestures have value in themselves.
It turns out that the subversive, almost revolutionary thing to do within contemporary healthcare is to build, quietly and unobtrusively, these crucial relationships. We now know that continuity of care, within a unique dyad of patient and doctor, delays disease and prolongs lives5 and thereby supplies bread, but it does so by simultaneously giving us the roses of joy, trust, curiosity, care, kindness, and solidarity. A life worth living tends to last longer.
In fact, care, like love, is abundant and self-sustaining, a potential of everyone. Trained and celebrated, caring is a demanding human capability that swells with the satisfaction of having opted to run towards the pain, that replenishes with the smile and the gratitude with which we evaluate our effectiveness, that regenerates when the care, and love, returns to care givers when they, invariably, must become care receivers. Care, like roses, gives meaning to living. We must cultivate care.
In fighting our way out of this healthcare crisis, in working for careful and kind care for all, we must follow the suffragettes and demand “bread and roses.”
Responding to the crisis of care | The BMJ
Remember to breathe, Love. For you are alive.
Remember to
breathe, Love.
For you are alive.
--Breathe, You are Alive! by Gaelynn Lea
✊ We’re a Feisty Group of Neurodivergent and Disabled People
The neurodiversity movements needs its shoes off, and fists up.
We have protests to stage, driven by the fuel of our righteous anger. We have speeches to make, written from the soaring pleas of our individual and collective trauma, and our wildest dreams of joy and freedom and love. We have cultural narratives to rewrite because they really do hate us and they really will kill us, and if we’re going to rewrite the narratives, then there’s no reason to hold ourselves back from our most radical and defiant rewritings. We have autistic children who need us to support them as architects of their own liberation against the schools and clinicians and institutions and police and prosecutors who would crush and destroy them.
We’re going to need our anger and our public celebrations of stimming and our complicated, imperfect, messy selves for this long and hard road, because we need all of us, and all of our tactics and strategies, to keep a movement going and ultimately, to win.
Autistic Hoya — A blog by Lydia X. Z. Brown: The neurodiversity movements needs its shoes off, and fists up.
I, Victoria Lin Tanner, am just one of many people who discovered, after a lifetime of struggle, that I am autistic. This book is about my journey of self-discovery. It is also a scream into the cold, black void where no help is to be found for people like me. Autistic children become autistic adults, so why is there no support for us? I am here to shine a glaring spotlight on the ways that society has failed autistic adults. For many of the 5 million+ autistic Americans, and ~75 million worldwide, life would be made far more manageable and frankly, happier, if our struggles were supported in meaningful ways rather than through #autismawareness retweets and puzzle piece merchandise.
We are here, we are angry, and we are only going to get louder.
Autistic adults are not okay.
Autistic Adults Are Not Okay – Victoria Lin Tanner, Autistic Adults Not Okay, Autistic Visibility Project
Autistic Adults Are Not Okay – by Lin Tanner, Victoria
Because every single thing you hate about us, you will hate about yourself. And becoming us is a lot easier than you think it is.
The instant, almost the very instant, you become disabled, you cease to be seen as a reliable narrator of your own story to literally everybody else, except for disabled people.
Every single ableist stereotype that you’ve heard for your entire life that you’ve never evaluated, that will be the lens through which other people see you, including people that know you.
This is one of the many reasons why people need to do anti-ableism work. Because every single thing you hate about us, you will hate about yourself. And becoming us is a lot easier than you think it is.
Imani Barbarin, MAGC | Crutches&Spice
This is what disability advocates have said all along, not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.
This is what disability advocates have said all along, not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.
Tom Scocca’s Medical Mystery: The Year My Body Fell Apart
We are the only minority community that anyone can join at any time.
11 Disability Rights Activists on Where the Fight for Justice Stands | Teen Vogue
Disability always has been and always will be a natural part of the human condition.
Simply a form of human variation, disability is universally present across racial, gender, age and socioeconomic lines. Moreover, disability represents the only minority group that anyone can join at any time and, when all human impairments are taken into account, people with disabilities by far encompass the largest minority group in the United States.
Elements and Essentials of the ADA
They don’t take Disability Studies classes. They don’t socialize with us. They don’t listen to us.
CW: medical trauma, medical ableism
I remember laying there, remembering that this experience I’m having is like the other times that I almost died.
And I can feel my life slipping away.
Is it worth it for me to call out and have someone save me?
That’s how traumatized that I’ve been by being in hospitals and in medical settings.
And I need for doctors and healthcare professionals to understand that many of us are traumatized like that.
It’s not abnormal for people like myself who have chronic illnesses, who have cancer, and have high touch and high interactions with medical professionals, to feel traumatized, to feel, is it worth it for me to go and get help for this experience that I’m having, for the possibility that something major is wrong?
Because for some of us waiting to see is worth the risk of possibly dying.
That’s how much we are no longer emotionally prepared to go to the hospital.
That’s how bad a physical experience it is for some of us.
Tinu Abayomi-Paul – YouTube
During the hospital experience, I dealt with racism, I dealt with sexism.
The first doctor I had was fantastic, but they rotated him out.
And the rest of my experience, I had to fight every single day to be heard and understood and to get better care.
I didn’t have my chronic illnesses properly addressed, I didn’t have any of my neurodiversities taken into consideration at all, nor my comfort.
It was a hellish experience towards the end.
And I finally decided I just need to get out of there.
Tinu Abayomi-Paul – YouTube
Karrie Higgins
Which means THEY actually reduce us to “nothing but our conditions” far more than we do. #MedTwitter But hey, wouldn’t want to tell the good doctors they’re ignorant.
Karrie Higgins
Bodies ride the waves Somebody's gonna have to pay Bodies, living on the shore in their sandcastles Bodies, sea is getting rough and the walls rattle Bodies, come with the tide Nowhere left to hide Bodies Bodies A thousand thoughts ride the waves Can't save nobody, I'm too late Bodies, no one cares about the coming last battle Bodies, wavеs crashing down and the ocean swallows Bodies Whеre you gonna hide the bodies? Bodies Hey-oh-hey-oh
On the shore living in sandcastles No one cares about the coming last battle Sea is getting rough and the walls rattle Waves crashing down and the ocean swallows Bodies Bodies --Bodies by Rabbit Junk
Our movement needs nothing of respectability politics.
Respectability politics didn’t save me then, and they won’t save our community or movement now or in the future either.
Our movement, however, needs nothing of respectability politics. Accepting — conceding, surrendering, submitting to — that will only erode our movement until it crumbles entirely. Respectability politics is what’s gotten us into reliance on foundations and nonprofits, and elected officials and bureaucrats, and policies and programs that only benefit the most privileged and resourced members of our communities at the direct expense of the most marginalized. Radical, militant anger — and radical, militant hope, and radical, wild dreams, and radical, active love — that’s what’ll get us past the death machines of ableism and capitalism and white supremacy and laws and institutions working overtime to kill us.
Autistic Hoya — A blog by Lydia X. Z. Brown: The neurodiversity movements needs its shoes off, and fists up.
I wanna see a feisty group of disabled people around the world…if you don’t respect yourself and if you don’t demand what you believe in for yourself, you’re not gonna get it.
Judith Heumann
The world doesn’t want us around and wants us dead. We live with that reality, so there’s always gonna be, uh, ‘Am I gonna survive? Am I gonna push back? Am I gonna fight to be here?’ that’s always true. So, if you wanna call that anger, I call it kind of drive. You know, you have to be willing to thrive or you’re not going to make it.
Corbett O’Toole
I wanted to be part of the world but I didn’t see anyone like me in it.
Jimmy Lebrecht
This isn’t just a story that disabled children will love; it’s a story about what is possible when we fight for ourselves and each other. It is a story about how tenacity, strength, the power of community, and the willingness to fight for what matters can start a revolution.
ROLLING WARRIOR: THE INCREDIBLE, SOMETIMES AWKWARD, TRUE STORY OF A REBEL GIRL ON WHEELS WHO HELPED SPARK A REVOLUTION
More quotes from the movie “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution”
What we saw at that camp was that our lives could be better. The fact of the matter is that you don’t have anything to strive for if you don’t know that it exists.
Jimmy Lebrecht
I had to try to adapt. I had to fit into this world that wasn’t built for me.
Jimmy Lebrecht
If I have to feel thankful about an accessible bathroom, when am I ever gonna be equal in the community?
Judith Heumann
Watch Crip Camp.
Dear Problem Patients
Dear Problem Patients: An open letter to anyone who’s ever felt dismissed by their doctor – No End In Sight
- We believe you.
- You’re not alone.
- The wellness industry is gaslighting you.
- It’s not your fault.
- You are worthy of compassion.
- Medical bias is real.
- The way we see medicine practiced on television is a fantasy.
- We believe that you have a problem.
- We are angry and grieving too.
- Talking to other people who know what this feels like has changed everything for us.
- It’s okay to feel joy when your body is hurting.
- Feeling joy doesn’t undermine how much you are struggling.
- It’s okay if you haven’t found any joy in your struggle at all.
- Your story doesn’t need a neat and tidy ending.
- Somebody out there is yearning for a story just like yours that is honest about pain or maybe joy and that ends in an uncertain and messy place.
- Your story matters.
- We want to know your story.
- We want to help you find the stories you’ve been yearning for.
🔨 Ordinary tried to fix me. I was a threat to a page in history.
I make the right mistakes
And I say what I mean
Spare me from the mold
“When I was a little girl, I was autistic. And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s therapy.”
It is a human rights violation to continue to ignore and discount the voices of Autistic people about deeply traumatising and harmful “therapies” such as ABA.
CW: behaviorism, quiet hands, ABA, eugenics
The problems associated with ABA run very deep. It is a human rights violation to continue to ignore and discount the voices of Autistic people about deeply traumatising and harmful “therapies” such as ABA.
Jorn Bettin
The underpinnings of that ideology include: a focus only on observable behaviors that can be quantified, a reduction of wholes to parts, the assumption that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement, and the creation of methods for selectively reinforcing whichever behaviors are preferred by the person with the power. Behaviorists ignore, or actively dismiss, subjective experience – the perceptions, needs, values, and complex motives of the human beings who engage in behaviors.
The late Herb Lovett used to say that there are only two problems with “special education” in America: It’s not special and it sure as hell isn’t education. The field continues to be marinated in behaviorist assumptions and practices despite the fact that numerous resources for teachers, therapists, and parents offer alternatives to behavior control. These alternatives are based on a commitment to care and to understand. By “care,” I mean that our relationship with the child is what matters most. He or she is not a passive object to be manipulated but a subject, a center of experience, a person with agency, with needs and rights. And by “understand,” I mean that we have an obligation to look beneath the behavior, in part by imaginatively trying to adopt that person’s point of view, attempting to understand the whys rather than just tabulating the frequency of the whats. As Norm Kunc and Emma Van der Klift urged us in their Credo for Support: “Be still and listen. What you define as inappropriate may be my attempt to communicate with you in the only way I can….[or] the only way I can exert some control over my life….Do not work on me. Work with me.”
Autism and Behaviorism – Alfie Kohn
Simon says smile. Show us your teeth. You’re only as valuable as you are able.
Simon says smile.
Show us your teeth.
You’re only as valuable as you are able.
Simon says it's not time for a bathroom break.
You go when Simon says.
Simon says you're not listening.
People that don’t listen will never be successful.
Simon Says speak only when you are told to speak.
Simon says it’s still not time for a bathroom break and stop asking.
Simon Says that you if can't be silent
how will you hear what Simon is telling you to do.
Silence!
I said be silent.
Simon says be silent.
2016 NPS Finals – House Slam – Ashley Davis & Oompa “Simon Says” – YouTube
- CHAMPS and the Compliance Classroom – Stimpunks Foundation
- Eye Contact and Neurodiversity – Stimpunks Foundation
- Education Access: We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence – Stimpunks Foundation
- Behaviorism – Stimpunks Foundation
- Does Behaviorism Belong in the Classroom? – Stimpunks Foundation
- There Is Little Empirical Basis to Suggest That PBS Is Effective – Stimpunks Foundation
- A Fade to Extinction for Ethically Questionable Approaches That Disregard Neurodiversity – Stimpunks Foundation
- DIY at the Edges: Surviving the Bipartisanship of Behaviorism by Rolling Our Own – Stimpunks Foundation
That’s not earning your token.
- Why I Left ABA | Socially Anxious Advocate
- I Abused Children For A Living – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- I Abused Children And SO DO YOU: A Response To An ABA Apologist – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- Is ABA Really “Dog Training for Children”? A Professional Dog Trainer Weighs In. » NeuroClastic
- I’m an ABA therapist, I’ve noticed a lot of the… – neurowonderful
- I’m sorry, but that’s not earning your token
- ‘Cardgate’ Scandal Uncovers Widespread Disrespect of Autistic People | NOS Magazine
- The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists
- Applied Behaviour Analysis – Personal Reflections
- Read what one autistic adult had to say the day she realised that the therapy she went through as a child was actually ABA.
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy. The only government-funded therapy for autistic children is called Applied Behaviour Analysis, an approach developed in tandem with discredited anti-LGBTQ2S+ practises.
Both gay conversion therapy and ABA were built on behaviourism—the scientific belief that human behaviour is determined by conditioning from our immediate environments, and should be controlled through manipulating those environments. Behaviourist psychology has always seen queer and autistic identities as deviant, and so the pathologies around both were constructed at the same time, and from the same body of research. This is why many autistics today argue that ABA is actually its own form of conversion therapy.
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
“It’s all about policing unruly bodies,” says Negrazis. “Lovaas actively constructed gender and sexual divergence as disabled, which created an inherent disableism in the emergence of queer identities.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
Just like queer and trans people, autistics do not have a disease that needs to be treated. Instead, says Negrazis, “[autistics] need supports to help them identify how trauma has impacted them in their learning, relationships, ability to work and even their self-concept.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
“The psych industry has done so much harm to both [autistic and queer] people,” they say. “The very foundations of psychology and counselling need to be dismantled and rebuilt by queer and autistic people themselves.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
Oh behaviorism! Up yours!
Oh bondage, up yours
Oh bondage, no more
Oh bondage, up yours
Oh bondage, no more
CW: ABA, behaviorism, operant conditioning
This construct
Was built by petty tyrants
This was important because it meant that Darwinists and policy makers, deprived of widespread support for Galtonian eugenics, now saw a new method for normalising populations. But this time it sought to mimic evolutionary pressures in childhood development rather than through control of hereditary traits across generations. In this context, as Harvard historian Rebecca Lemov has detailed, large American philanthropic organisations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, which had previously funded Nazi eugenics, began lavishly funding new behaviouralist research. Most notably, this included the work of Elton Mayo, who sought to ‘adapt industrial workers to their tasks by deradicalizing them through psychological counselling’. This would formalise and update the kinds of scientific management that had been pioneered on slave plantations to manage the psyches of modern workers.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
…mass neurodivergent disablement and constant, widespread anxiety, panic, depression, and mental illness, combined with systemic discrimination of neurodivergent people, is a problem specific to the current historical era. Hegemonic neuronormative domination, in other words, is a key problem of our time.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
This construct
Was built and can be dismantled
🎸 We’re Punk Rock Canaries
“The troublemakers are the caged canaries.” “Their tendency to rebel against authority, was at the heart of what he called “autistic intelligence,” and part of the gift they had to offer society.” “Autistic people are best understood as the agents of a well functioning cultural immune system within human society.“
Because we′re standing in the way of control
We will live our lives
Standing In the Way of Control by Gossip
Autists are like the canary in the coal mine of mainstream society. We are amongst the first who are affected by pathologically hyper-competitive cultures.
What society can learn from autistic culture | Autistic Collaboration
The troublemakers are the caged canaries, children who are more sensitive than their peers to the toxic environment of the classroom that limits their freedom, clips their wings, and mutes their voices. The canaries’ songs warn us of the dangers—dangers to children’s learning and development, to their self-worth, to their physical health and emotional well-being—as the misbehaving children struggle for visibility and voice in an institution that works to ensure their invisibility; as they work to be embraced by their classroom communities but behave in such a way that will ensure their exclusion; as they seek interdependence in a setting where the norms of independence prevail; as they raise their voices louder and louder hoping to be heard, but know they will be silenced.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education Harvard University in Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
Thinking of these troublemaking children as canaries in the mine is not my own idea. I learned it from Thomas, the father of a five-year-old boy who could not and would not comply with the behavioral expectations of his kindergarten teacher.2 Teachers, school administrators, medical doctors, and psychologists all searched for pathology in the mind and body of this child. Their assumption was that the arrangements of school were normal and good, so any child unable to tolerate those arrangements had to be abnormal and bad.
Though the child suffered from a mood disorder, a diagnosable brain illness, Thomas challenged the assumption that the disease made his son inherently broken or bad. Much like the canary’s fragile lungs, this child’s brain leaves him more susceptible to the harms of poison. He’s more sensitive to harm than the average child. Still, the problem is the poison—not the living thing struggling to survive despite breathing it. After all, in clean air, canaries breathe easily.
With this perspective, Thomas drew attention away from his son and instead toward the toxic air of life in schools—the daily harms that less susceptible children can breathe in more readily: being told what to do and exactly how to do it all day; the requirement to sit still for hours on end; the frustration of boring, disconnected, and irrelevant academic tasks; shockingly little time for free play; and few opportunities to build meaningful relationships in community with other children and loving adults. These were the daily realities his son complained about, reacted to in the extreme, and refused to tolerate. Yet they are all too common in the life of schools, invisible because of their everyday normalcy. Thomas’s son made them visible, signaling their danger with his hypersensitive reactions to the harm. He was a miner’s canary, warning us all about threats to freedom that we might not otherwise see.
Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
Hyper-plasticity predisposes us to have strong associative reactions to trauma. Our threat-response learning system is turned to high alert. The flip side of this hyper-plasticity is that we also adapt quickly to environments that are truly safe for our nervous system.
The stereotypes of meltdowns and self-harm in autism come from the fact that we frequently have stress responses to things that others do not perceive as distressing. Because our unique safety needs are not widely understood, growing up with extensive trauma has become our default.
Discovering a Trauma-Informed Positive Autistic Identity
I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir: Kurchak, Sarah: 9781771622462: Amazon.com: Books
Autism is a crucially, vitally, urgently needed human variation—a powerful corrective and counterbalance to the hierarchical, dominance-based mentality currently driving human society and the planet off the rails.
Autistic people are best understood as the agents of a well functioning cultural immune system within human society.
Autists are essential to the future of homo sapiens.
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
The way you're playing canary and they're selling the coal
What can I do but rock, rock and roll?
What can I do but rock and roll?
We sense frequencies you’d never hear or think to pay attention to
And we can tell what’s on its way here, long before the train comes through
A transfiguration’s coming, a turning in the song
For the brutal static order they’ve depended on so long
This train will carry gamblers, it’ll carry us midnight ramblers too
A broken heart’s your ticket so be ready when the train comes through
But it’s the hidden and unspoken that will thunder when the train comes through
But the violent sheet of silence will be shattered when the train comes through
We are the canaries, and we’re punk rock about it.
We’re here to tell you that the air is poisoned.
We’re here to bring the hidden to the front.
We’re here to remind everyone that we have rights.
Hey girlfriend I got a proposition, goes something like this Dare ya to do what you want Dare ya to be who you will Dare ya to cry right out loud "You get so emotional, baby" Double dare ya, double dare ya Double Dare Ya by Bikini Kill
Know Your Rights, These Are Your Rights
We can help you know your rights and advocate for yourself. Here are some general resources and US-specific resources.
Resources – Welcome to the Autistic Community
- The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 – Car Autism Roadmap – https://www.carautismroadmap.org/the-americans-with-disabilities-act-of-1990-ada/
- Job Accommodation Network – https://askjan.org/
- Inclusive Schools Network – https://inclusiveschools.org/
- Wrightslaw Special Education Law and Advocacy – https://www.wrightslaw.com/
- Olmstead Self-Assessment – https://www.olmsteadrights.org/self-helptools/assessment/
- How to Make a Supported Decision-Making Agreement – ACLU – https://www.aclu.org/other/how-make-supported-decision-making-agreement
- National Disability Rights Network – https://www.ndrn.org/about/ndrn-member-agencies/
- Information on the ADA – https://www.ada.gov/
- International Disability Alliance – http://www.internationaldisabilityalliance.org/
- International Disability Rights – Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund – https://dredf.org/legal-advocacy/international-disability-rights/
We have worked together for many years, and we made the disability rights movement. The disability rights movement is when disabled people fight back against ableism. We work to change society to be better for disabled people, and fight for our rights as people with disabilities.
Self-advocacy isn’t just speaking up for yourself. It can also mean speaking up for your whole community. The self-advocacy movement is when we all speak up together. The self-advocacy movement is part of the disability rights movement, where people with intellectual and developmental disabilities fight for our rights.
We still have a long way to go, since disabled people still get treated unfairly. We can’t always choose where we live or what help we get. We don’t always have the right to vote. We might not get to choose how we want to spend our money, or have control over who cares for us. But we are still fighting for our rights.
Welcome to the Autistic Community
- Pacific Alliance on Disability Self-Advocacy (PADSA) Resources
- Welcome to the Autistic Community
- Accessing Home and Community-Based Services: A Guide for Self Advocates
- The Right to Make Choices: International Laws and Decision-Making by People with Disabilities (Easy Read and Families versions)
- Getting and Advocating for Community-Based Housing
- Voting Resources
- AutismAndHealth.org: Primary Care Resources for Adults on the Autism Spectrum and their Primary Care Providers
- SARTAC: Self Advocacy Resource and Technical Assistance Center
- Everybody Communicates: Toolkit for Accessing Communication Assessments, Funding and Accommodations
Via: Resource Library – Autistic Self Advocacy Network
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network seeks to advance the principles of the disability rights movement with regard to autism. ASAN believes that the goal of autism advocacy should be a world in which autistic people enjoy equal access, rights, and opportunities. We work to empower autistic people across the world to take control of our own lives and the future of our common community, and seek to organize the autistic community to ensure our voices are heard in the national conversation about us. Nothing About Us, Without Us!
Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network. Sincerely, Your Autistic Child (p. 6). Beacon Press.
🪓 Keep scrolling. We ’bout to change some manners.
Ordinary tried to fix me
I was a threat to a page in history
Miss me with the treatment, doo-wop bleaching
Straighten my kinky with a new pop legion (That's right)
It's just me and my MPC
Questing out to meet my tribe unique
Keep it funky for the followers eager to speak
The same dialect is on when we greet in the street, fam
Why would my sound be tampered?
Or better yet, watered down and then pampered?
Cater to who, I influence the standard
Check it… we 'bout to change some manners
Talent by Swamburger and Scarlet Monk of Mugs and Pockets
Call on the law I'm fixin' to draw A line between what is and seems And call up a brawl Call 'em up now 'Cause it's about to go pow I'm standing on the threshold Of the ups and the downs
Got a list of demands
Written on the palm of my hands
I ball my fist and you're gonna know where I stand
We're living hand to mouth
Hand to mouth
List of Demands by Saul Williams
Name the systems of power.
Inclusivity involves looking at a space and seeing all the ways it’s set up to benefit those in power. And then redesigning and resetting that space to support, affirm, and amplify marginalized folks.
The lens of power can really help us see what’s going on.
🫀 We Ain’t Special
That study identified, unsurprisingly, that it’s parents & professionals are ones fighting to hang onto ‘special‘ but here’s the thing I honestly don’t get – you are depriving the kid of their membership in a big, welcoming, fantastic, supportive community by doing so. Why?
@mssinenomine
Our needs are human needs, not special needs.
“Special” is the language of patients captive to a disability industrial complex. “We have a medical community that’s found a sickness for every single human difference. DSM keeps growing every single year with new ways to be defective, with new ways to be lessened.” “We have created a system that has you submit yourself, or your child, to patient-hood to access the right to learn differently. The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by a diagnosis.” Identity-first is the language of agents. By replacing “special” with social model language, we can begin the transformation from patient to agent.
“Special” is the language of compliance. Disabled kids “are driven to comply, and comply, and comply. It strips them of agency. It puts them at risk for abuse.” “Prioritize teaching noncompliance and autonomy to your kids. Prioritize agency.” “The most important thing a developmentally disabled child needs to learn is how to say “no.” If they only learn one thing, let it be that.” “It’s of crucial importance that behavior based compliance training not be central to the way we parent, teach, or offer therapy to autistic children. Because of the way it leaves them vulnerable to harm, not only as children, but for the rest of their lives.“
“Special” is the language of forced intimacy.
Forced intimacy is a cornerstone of how ableism functions in an able bodied supremacist world. Disabled people are expected to “strip down” and “show all our cards” metaphorically in order to get the basic access we need in order to survive.
Forced Intimacy: An Ableist Norm | Leaving Evidence
“Special” is the language of abuse. People that are “special” can be tormented and murdered.
- Why I Left ABA | Socially Anxious Advocate
- I Abused Children For A Living – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- I Abused Children And SO DO YOU: A Response To An ABA Apologist – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- I’m an ABA therapist, I’ve noticed a lot of the… – neurowonderful
- I’m sorry, but that’s not earning your token
- ‘Cardgate’ Scandal Uncovers Widespread Disrespect of Autistic People | NOS Magazine
- The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists
- Applied Behaviour Analysis – Personal Reflections
- Read what one autistic adult had to say the day she realised that the therapy she went through as a child was actually ABA.
- Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology
- Autistic Empathy
- The Double Empathy Problem: Developing Empathy and Reciprocity in Neurotypical Adults
- My Thoughts on ABA – Autism Women’s Network
Change our vocabulary, and change our framing. Use the inclusive language of neurodiversity & the social model of disability. Use the power of identity first language to connect disabled kids with an identity and tribe. With identity-first pride and a social model tribe at their backs, kids can better develop voice, agency, and the tools of self-determination.
People forget disability is a term that comes w/ civil rights because it’s codified in statute. “Differently abled” “handicapable” & “special needs” aren’t. It’s also a word WE chose when we named the ADA, not a word chose by nondisabled ppl 2 make them feel better. #saytheword
@RebeccaCokley
The time is now for social model inclusion. Our needs are human needs, not special needs. Language matters.
A disabled person’s right to access public spaces isn’t a special need.
A disabled person’s diet isn’t a special need.
A disabled person’s right to information & communication isn’t a special need.
A disabled person’s accommodation isn’t a special need.
Charis Hill | they/them on Twitter
A child with “special needs” catches the “special bus” to receive “special assistance” in a “special school” from “special education teachers” to prepare them for a “special” future living in a “special home” and working in a “special workshop”.
Does that sound “special” to you?
The word “special” is used to sugar-coat segregation and societal exclusion – and its continued use in our language, education systems, media etc serves to maintain those increasingly antiquated “special” concepts that line the path to a life of exclusion and low expectations.
The logic of the connection between “special needs” and “special [segregated] places” is very strong – it doesn’t need reinforcement – it needs to be broken.
There is another insidious but serious consequence of being labelled (as having or being) “special needs”. The label carries with it the implication that a person with “special needs” can only have their needs met by “special” help or “specially-trained” people – by “specialists”. That implication is particularly powerful and damaging in our mainstream schooling systems – it is a barrier to mainstream schools, administrators and teachers feeling responsible, empowered or skilled to embrace and practice inclusive education in regular classrooms, and accordingly perpetuates attitudinal resistance to realising the human right to inclusive education under Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
In other words, the language of “special needs” leads to, and serves to excuse, a “can’t do” attitude as the default position of many general educators – it effectively deprives inclusive education of its necessary oxygen – a conducive “can do” classroom culture.
“He ain’t special, he’s my brother” – Time to ditch the phrase “special needs” – Starting With Julius
🆔 We Prefer Identity-First Language
Like most self-advocacy, neurodiversity, and disability communities, we prefer identity-first language (IFL), not person-first language (PFL).
- I’m autistic, not a person with autism.
- Autistic is an important part of my identity.
- I’m a disabled person, not a person with disabilities.
- Disabled is an important part of my identity.
You have probably been taught to use PFL despite the overwhelming preference for IFL among Blind, Deaf, Autistic, and Disabled people. We proudly and defiantly use IFL all over our website.
Identity first language is common among neurodivergent and disabled self-advocates. When hanging out in social model, neurodiversity, and self-advocacy communities, identity first is a better default than person first.
Keep in mind that the more culture there is around a disability, and the more that disability changes someone’s fundamental perceptions and interactions with the world, the more likely it is that identity-first language is probably a better bet.
Person-First Language: What It Is, and When Not To Use It » NeuroClastic
Every autistic and disabled person in our community uses identity first language. The words autistic and disabled connect us with an identity, a community, and a culture. They help us advocate for ourselves.
“Disability” and “disabled” are indicators of culture and identity. Thus, “disabled person” is an accepted term.
Person-First Language Doesn’t Always Put the Person First
Expand for infographic: Of the more than 800 self-advocates who completed the survey, 88.6% indicated a preference for identity-first language. There is a clear preference for identity-first language among our audience.
Of the more than 800 self-advocates who completed the survey, 88.6% indicated a preference for identity-first language. When asked to elaborate, they responded with insights such as:
1,000 People Surveyed, Survey Says… | Organization for Autism Research
- “When a publication uses the word ‘autistic’…I feel seen and accepted.”
- “My autism is not an accessory that I can set aside. It is not something external that has latched onto me. It is not an illness or disease I have ‘caught.’ It is a fundamental, inseparable part of me and who I am.”
- “I use them interchangeably sometimes and don’t personally take offense to either. However, with autism, I try to use identity-first because that’s what the neurodivergent community seems to prefer.”
This survey confirmed what OAR had suspected. Times and attitudes have changed considerably in this regard. There is a clear preference for identity-first language among our audience. In response, OAR has decided to adopt identity-first language as its default: moving forward, when referring to autistic people in general, we will use identity-first language.
1,000 People Surveyed, Survey Says… | Organization for Autism Research
🗣️ Language is a place of struggle.
Language is a place of struggle. Language matters. We have a moral imperative to connect with the communities we serve and use the language they prefer. Learn more:
- Identity First Language: Thinking differently requires speaking differently.
- Autism‐Related Language Preferences of English‐Speaking Individuals Across the Globe
- Navigating Autism Acceptance Month and Autism Myths
- Determining a Good Autism Organization
The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, resistance. Language is also a place of struggle.
Often when the radical voice speaks about domination we are speaking to those who dominate. Their presence changes the nature and direction of our words. Language is also a place of struggle. I was just a girl coming slowly into womanhood when I read Adrienne Rich’s words “this is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you.” This language that enabled me to attend graduate school, to write a dissertation, to speak at job interviews carries the scent of oppression. Language is also a place of struggle.
Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks
Language is also a place of struggle. We are wedded in language, have our being in words. Language is also a place of struggle. Dare I speak to oppressed and oppressor in the same voice? Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination — a language that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you. Language is also a place of struggle. The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, resistance. Language is also a place of struggle.
🖼️ We reframe, because we’re not broken.
Redefining Autism Science with Monotropism and the Double Empathy Problem
Monotropism and the Double Empathy Problem are two of the biggest and most important things to happen to autism research. In the previous two issues of the Guide to the NeurodiVerse, “From an Ivory Tower Built on Sand to Open, Participatory, Emancipatory, Activist Research” and “Mental Health and Epistemic Justice“, we tackled some bad trends in autism science. Here, we celebrate two trends that get it right.
Monotropism is a theory of autism developed by autistic people, initially by Dinah Murray and Wenn Lawson.
Welcome – Monotropism
Monotropic minds tend to have their attention pulled more strongly towards a smaller number of interests at any given time, leaving fewer resources for other processes. We argue that this can explain nearly all of the features commonly associated with autism, directly or indirectly. However, you do not need to accept it as a general theory of autism in order for it to be a useful description of common autistic experiences and how to work with them.
The ‘double empathy problem’: Ten years on – Damian Milton, Emine Gurbuz, Betriz Lopez, 2022
These two videos, totaling less than 10 minutes, are wonderful ways to get in touch with modern autism science.
Understanding monotropism and the double empathy problem will help you get things right, instead of wrong, when interacting with autistic people.
If an autistic person is pulled out of monotropic flow too quickly, it causes our sensory systems to disregulate.
This in turn triggers us into emotional dysregulation, and we quickly find ourselves in a state ranging from uncomfortable, to grumpy, to angry, or even triggered into a meltdown or a shutdown.
This reaction is also often classed as challenging behavior when really it is an expression of distress caused by the behavior of those around us.
How you can get things wrong:
An introduction to monotropism – YouTube
- Not preparing for transition
- Too many instructions
- Speaking too quickly
- Not allowing processing time
- Using demanding language
- Using rewards or punishments
- Poor sensory environments
- Poor communication environments
- Making assumptions
- A lack of insightful and informed staff reflection
Autism + environment = outcome. Understanding the sensing and perceptual world of autistic people is central to understanding autism.
I have written elsewhere about what I refer to as ‘the golden equation’ – which is:
Autism + environment = outcome
What this means in an anxiety context is that it is the combination of the child and the environment that causes the outcome (anxiety), not ‘just’ being autistic in and of itself. This is both horribly depressing but also a positive. It’s horribly depressing because it demonstrates just how wrong we are currently getting things, but positive in that there are all sorts of things we can do to change environmental situations to subsequently alleviate the anxiety.
Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children: A Guide for Autistic Wellbeing, Dr Luke Beardon
Understanding the sensing and perceptual world of autistic people is central to understanding autism.
“It’s Not Rocket Science” – NDTi
it is so crucial that all environments to which your child has frequent access are assessed from a sensory perspective so that he has the least risk of anxiety. Very often within the sensory world, what seems so minor to others can be the key in terms of what is causing an issue for your child.
Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children: A Guide for Autistic Wellbeing, Dr Luke Beardon
All these examples show that sensory issues play a massive part in the day-to-day living experiences of your child. It is imperative that this is taken into account in as many environments as possible, in order that anxiety risk is minimized.
Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children: A Guide for Autistic Wellbeing, Dr Luke Beardon
Sensory needs are an absolute necessity to get right if your child is to feel comfortable (literally and figuratively) at school.
Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children: A Guide for Autistic Wellbeing, Dr Luke Beardon
Sensory pleasure (which could be viewed as almost the opposite feeling to anxiety) can be one of the richest, most delightful experiences known to the autistic population – and should be encouraged at any appropriate opportunity.
Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children: A Guide for Autistic Wellbeing, Dr Luke Beardon
Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic people in housing | Local Government Association
If we are serious about enabling thriving in autistic lives, we must be serious about the sensory needs of autistic people, in every setting. The benefits of this extend well beyond the autistic communities; what helps autistic people will often help everyone else as well.
Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic people in housing | Local Government Association
Finally, the involvement of autistic people in reviewing and changing the sensory environment will support the identification of things that are not visible or audible to their neurotypical counterparts. We strongly encourage this wherever possible.
Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic people in housing | Local Government Association
“Small changes that can easily be made to accommodate autism really do add up and can transform a young person’s experience of being in hospital. It really can make all the difference.”
“It’s Not Rocket Science” – NDTi
This report introduces autism viewed as a sensory processing difference. It outlines some of the different sensory challenges commonly caused by physical environments and offers adjustments that would better meet sensory need in inpatient services.
“It’s Not Rocket Science” – NDTi
We have five external senses and three internal senses. All must be processed at the same time and therefore add to the ‘sensory load’.
“It’s Not Rocket Science” – NDTi
Autism is viewed as a sensory processing difference. Information from all of the senses can become overwhelming and can take more time to process. This can cause meltdown or shutdown.
“It’s Not Rocket Science” – NDTi
ADHD (Kinetic Cognitive Style) is not a damaged or defective nervous system. It is a nervous system that works well using its own set of rules.
ADHD or what I prefer to call Kinetic Cognitive Style (KCS) is another good example. (Nick Walker coined this alternative term.) The name ADHD implies that Kinetics like me have a deficit of attention, which could be the case as seen from a certain perspective. On the other hand, a better, more invariantly consistent perspective is that Kinetics distribute their attention differently. New research seems to point out that KCS was present at least as far back as the days in which humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies. In a sense, being a Kinetic in the days that humans were nomads would have been a great advantage. As hunters they would have noticed any changes in their surroundings more easily, and they would have been more active and ready for the hunt. In modern society it is seen as a disorder, but this again is more of a value judgment than a scientific fact.
Bias: From Normalization to Neurodiversity – Neurodivergencia Latina
I’m not a fan of the “ADHD” label because it stands for “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” and the terms “deficit” and “disorder” absolutely reek of the pathology paradigm. I’ve frequently suggested replacing it with the term Kinetic Cognitive Style, or KCS; whether that particular suggestion ever catches on or not, I certainly hope that the ADHD label ends up getting replaced with something less pathologizing.
Toward a Neuroqueer Future: An Interview with Nick Walker | Autism in Adulthood
Almost every one of my patients wants to drop the term Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, because it describes the opposite of what they experience every moment of their lives. It is hard to call something a disorder when it imparts many positives. ADHD is not a damaged or defective nervous system. It is a nervous system that works well using its own set of rules.
Secrets of the ADHD Brain: Why we think, act, and feel the way we do.
First thing and this really is probably the most important thing that defines the syndrome is the cognitive component of ADHD: an interest-based nervous system.
So ADHD is a genetic neurological brain based difficulty with getting engaged as the situation demands.
People with ADHD are able to get engaged and have their performance, their mood, their energy level, determined by the momentary sense of four things:
Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks: RSD, Hyperarousal, More (w/ Dr. William Dodson)
- Interest (Fascination)
- Challenge or Competitiveness
- Novelty (Creativity)
- Urgency (Usually a deadline)
Glickman & Dodd (1998) found that adults with self-reported ADHD scored higher than other adults on self-reported ability to hyper-focus on “urgent tasks”, such as last-minute projects or preparations. Adults in the ADHD group were uniquely able to postpone eating, sleeping and other personal needs and stay absorbed in the “urgent task” for an extended time.
From an evolutionary viewpoint, “hyperfocus” was advantageous, conferring superb hunting skills and a prompt response to predators. Also, hominins have been hunter gatherers throughout 90% of human history from the beginning, before evolutionary changes, fire-making, and countless breakthroughs in stone-age societies.
Hunter versus farmer hypothesis – Wikipedia
The most important feature is that attention is not deficit, it is inconsistent.
“Look back over your entire life; if you have been able to get engaged and stay engaged with literally any task of your life, have you ever found something you couldn’t do?”
A person with ADHD will answer, “No. If I can get started and stay in the flow, I can do anything.
Omnipotential
People with ADHD are omnipotential. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s true. They really can do anything.
Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks: RSD, Hyperarousal, More (w/ Dr. William Dodson)
Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks: RSD, Hyperarousal, More (w/ Dr. William Dodson)
- Performance is usually the only aspect that most people look for.
- Boredom and lack of engagement is almost physically painful to people with an ADHD nervous system.
- When bored, ADHDers are irritable, negativistic, tense,
argumentative, and have no energy to do anything.- ADDers will do almost anything to relieve this dysphoria. Self-medication. Stimulus seeking. “Pick a fight.”
- When engaged, ADHDers are instantly energetic, positive, and social.
- This shifting of mood and energy is often misinterpreted as Bipolar Disorder.
People with ADHD live right now. They have to be personally interested, challenged, and find it novel or urgent right now, this instant, or nothing happens because they can’t get engaged with the task.
Passion. What is it about your life that gives your life meaning purpose? What is it that you’re eager to get up and go do in the morning? Unfortunately, only about one in four people ever discover what that is, but it is probably the most reliable way of staying in the zone that we know of.
Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks: RSD, Hyperarousal, More (w/ Dr. William Dodson)
We have a couple of theme songs for KCS/DREAD/ADHD in our community: Guided by Angels by Amyl and the Sniffers and Monkey Mind by The Bobby Lees.
Guided by angels But they're not heavenly They're on my body And they guide me heavenly The angels guide me heavenly, heavenly Energy, good energy and bad energy I've got plenty of energy It's my currency I spend, protect my energy, currency Guided by Angels by Amyl and the Sniffers
Monkey Mind
It's just my monkey mind
Monkey Mind
It's just my
I take him out, and then I sit him down
I look him in the eye, and say no more
monkeying around
Now you look-y here, you gonna leave me
alone
Cause there's no room here for a little
monkey in my home
Monkey Mind
It's just my monkey mind
Monkey Mind
It's just my
That monkey mind, he likes to eat himself alive
Think he's done, and then he takes another bite
Now see, I gotta learn to be kind
To my monkey mind, cause he'll be with me till I die
Monkey Mind
It's just my monkey mind
Monkey just my
Monkey Mind by The Bobby Lees
You think you know me?
No, you don't know me
Don't fence me in, I wanna be big
I wanna be part of everyone and everything
No fence around me
No, you can't limit me
I'm in-between, your set of rules
Don't even come close to applying to me
Bah! binaries
It's all make believe
I wanna be part of everyone and everything
Dont' Fence Me In by Amyl and the Sniffers
🖊️ We’re Going to Rewrite the Narratives
We have protests to stage, driven by the fuel of our righteous anger. We have speeches to make, written from the soaring pleas of our individual and collective trauma, and our wildest dreams of joy and freedom and love. We have cultural narratives to rewrite because they really do hate us and they really will kill us, and if we’re going to rewrite the narratives, then there’s no reason to hold ourselves back from our most radical and defiant rewritings. We have autistic children who need us to support them as architects of their own liberation against the schools and clinicians and institutions and police and prosecutors who would crush and destroy them.
We’re going to need our anger and our public celebrations of stimming and our complicated, imperfect, messy selves for this long and hard road, because we need all of us, and all of our tactics and strategies, to keep a movement going and ultimately, to win.
Selling yourself short tames the vision How you're depicted can change the sentence Innocent by Swamburger
This is radio clash using aural ammunition
The Clash – This Is Radio Clash Lyrics
This is radio clash can we get that world to listen?
💔 We are not okay.
Art by Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females and Noun
I, Victoria Lin Tanner, am just one of many people who discovered, after a lifetime of struggle, that I am autistic. This book is about my journey of self-discovery. It is also a scream into the cold, black void where no help is to be found for people like me. Autistic children become autistic adults, so why is there no support for us? I am here to shine a glaring spotlight on the ways that society has failed autistic adults. For many of the 5 million+ autistic Americans, and ~75 million worldwide, life would be made far more manageable and frankly, happier, if our struggles were supported in meaningful ways rather than through #autismawareness retweets and puzzle piece merchandise.
Autistic Adults Are Not Okay – Victoria Lin Tanner, Autistic Adults Not Okay, Autistic Visibility Project
Autistic Adults Are Not Okay – by Lin Tanner, Victoria
And they hurt you bad, man
They hurt me too
But I'm not about to sit here and watch as they
Suck the blood from my wound
Suck the blood from my wound
Suck the blood from my wound
Suck the blood from my wound
To them you know we'll always be freaks
To them we'll always be freaks
I toss dimes in the wishing well
And I'm broke cause you took all of me
My tombstone on a grassy hill
It's a matter of fact, all my change goes to hell
💀 You are killing us.
Decreased social standing leads to stigmatized minority groups being exposed to more stressful life situations, with simultaneously fewer resources to cope with these events.
As we come to understand depression in the transgender community more accurately, it’s become clear that the major cause is what’s referred to as “minority stress;” that is, “stressors induced by a hostile, homophobic culture, which often results in a lifetime of harassment, maltreatment, discrimination and victimization.”
When Worlds Collide – Mental Illness Within the Trans Community – Lionheart
Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome is what happens when someone pretends to be something they’re not on an everyday basis. It is exhausting and soul-eating. This greatly contributes to the high level of mental illness in the trans community or autistic burnout in the neurodiverse community.
ysabetwordsmith | Poem: “Type Integrity”
Why are there greater mental health stresses on autistic people from gender-minority groups? To quote from the research paper,
Ann’s Autism Blog: Autism, Transgender and Avoiding Tragedy
(PDF) Extending the Minority Stress Model to Understand Mental Health Problems Experienced by the Autistic Population
It is not hard to see the potential utility for the minority stress model when you pause and take stock of how autistic people are treated in society. The minority stress model captures the some of the complexity of existing while autistic. Autistic people are stereotyped—and the vast majority of stereotypes are negative (Wood and Freeth, 2016). Autistic people face employment discrimination, higher unemployment, and underemployment, as well as experiencing bullying in the workplace (Shattuck et al., 2012; Baldwin et al., 2014). Autistic children are more likely to be excluded from schools (Timpson and Great Britain, 2019). In the United Kingdom (UK), one-third of autistic people have access to neither employment or welfare payments (Redman, 2009), while 12% of Welsh autistic adults report experiencing homelessness (Evans, 2011). Statistics show disproportionate use of force against autistic people and those with learning disability in the UK (Home Office, 2018), while a third to half of all incidents involving the use of excessive force by police involves a disabled person (Perry and Carter-Long, 2016)—experiences which will obviously be further compounded by institutional racism (Holroyd, 2015). Autistic individuals are more likely to experience (poly)victimization, including being four times more likely to experience physical and psychological abuse from adults as children, 27 times more likely to experience teasing, and seven times more likely to experience sexual victimization (Weiss and Fardella, 2018). At the extreme end of the victimization—autistic children are more likely to die to filicide (Lucardie, 2005). Autistic lives are marked by an often-astounding excess stress burden across the life span.
Considering the study by Hirvikoski et al. (2016), I chose to study mental health and minority stress because people like me were (and still are) dying to suicide in their droves. To be clear, wanting a better future for my community is a value, and my work embodied it from the very beginning. I was propelled by values. How can you belong to a community who is actively suffering, and not want to make it better anyway that you can?
I found that exposure to minority stress does predict significantly worse well-being and higher psychological distress in the autistic community (Botha and Frost, 2020), including exposure to victimization and discrimination, everyday discrimination, expectation of rejection, expectation of rejection, outness (disclosure), concealment (masking of autism), internalized stigma, and it explains a large and significant proportion of the variance—in lay-man’s terms—the constant marginalization of autistic people is contributing to high rates of poor mental health. Aside from this, I noticed that despite being normally distributed (and not containing outliers), the mean psychological distress score was above the cut-off for indicating severe psychological distress (Kessler et al., 2003). Between the sadness of these findings and being exposed to all of these disturbing accounts of autism I considered (albeit briefly), giving up on academia all together without pursuing my Ph.D.
Frontiers | Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging: A Critical Reflection on Autism Knowledge Production
Bodies ride the waves
Somebody's gonna have to pay
Bodies, living on the shore in their sandcastles
Bodies, sea is getting rough and the walls rattle
Bodies, come with the tide
Nowhere left to hide
Bodies
Bodies
A thousand thoughts ride the waves
Can't save nobody, I'm too late
Bodies, no one cares about the coming last battle
Bodies, wavеs crashing down and the ocean swallows
Bodies
Whеre you gonna hide the bodies?
Bodies
Hey-oh-hey-oh
On the shore living in sandcastles
No one cares about the coming last battle
Sea is getting rough and the walls rattle
Waves crashing down and the ocean swallows
Bodies
Bodies
Bodies by Rabbit Junk
We’re all burnt out from masking.
“A state of pervasive exhaustion, loss of function, increase in autistic traits, and withdrawal from life that results from continuously expending more resources than one has coping with activities and environments ill-suited to one’s abilities and needs.” In other words, autistic burnout is the result of being asked to continuously do more than one is capable of without sufficient means for recovery.
THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: Autistic Burnout: An Interview With Researcher Dora Raymaker
I’ve experienced several moments of burnout in my life and career. Being something that I neurologically am not is exhausting. Wearing the mask of neurotypicality drains my batteries and melts my spoons. For a long time, for decades, I didn’t fully understand what was going on with me. I didn’t understand the root causes of my cycles of burnout. Finding the Actually Autistic community online woke me to the concept of autistic burnout. When I found the community writing excerpted below, I finally understood an important part of myself. Looking back on my life, I recognized those periods when coping mechanisms had stopped working and crumbled. I recognized my phases and changes as continuous fluid adaptation.
These periods of burnout caused problems at school and work. I would lose executive function and self-care skills. My capacity for sensory and social overload dwindled to near nothing. I avoided speaking and retreated from socializing. I was spent. I couldn’t maintain the facade anymore. I had to stop and pay the price.
I now know myself and my autistic operating system much better. That self-awareness has helped me greatly, but I still must live in a society that does not understand. Being an autistic seen as “high-functioning” means having your identity doubted and questioned. Exhausting efforts to pass and mask are given little credit. They are tossed aside with an “I do that too” and held against us in those moments of meltdown and burnout when we can longer pretend at neurotypicality. The rewards for passing are the familiar ableist tropes of invisible disability and the expectation to keep on passing, forever.
We’re all burnt out from masking.
Deciphering human madness Bombarded with psychology Interrogated by droid vermin Scrutinised by vacant ghouls I'm burnt out from masking You're burnt out from masking They're burnt out from masking We're all burnt out from masking Enduring chaos rites by force Lost in a maze of shifting size Phasing out of time constantly I can't speak in this dimension Cataclysmic thoughts trapping me Crushed under a world of nonsense Decimated by intrusion Spellbound by the death of a dream Burnt Out From Masking by Tommy Concrete
😭 We know who they are and what they have done to our people.
I sing from intelligence. I sing from letting them know that I know who they are and what they have done to my people around the world.
That’s not anger. Anger has its place. Anger has fire, and fire moves things, but I sing from intelligence. I don’t want them to think that I don’t know who they are.
Nina Simone on BBC HARDtalk, 1999
Interrogating Normal: Autism Social Skills Training at the Margins of a Social Fiction
I’ve always thought that I was shaking people up, but now I want to go at it more, and I want to go at it more deliberately, and I want to go at it coldly. I want to shake people up so bad, that when they leave a nightclub where I performed, I just want them to be to pieces.
Nina Simone
One of the most punk angst people in history is Nina Simone.
AFROPUNK: The Movie
She was neurodivergent and did her best work as an activist completely unaware she was bipolar and suffering from PTSD. As such, the disability community should embrace her as a savant in the wider sphere of neurodivergent people who demonstrate talent usually limited to the label autistic savant.
Nina Simone: Black Activist, Bipolar Savant | NOS Magazine
I wish you could know
What it means to be me
Can you see
You’d agree
Everybody
Should be free
(Because if we ain’t, we’re murderers)
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free by Nina Simone
Equity Literacy
With this in mind, my purpose is to argue that when it comes to issues surrounding poverty and economic justice the preparation of teachers must be first and foremost an ideological endeavour, focused on adjusting fundamental understandings not only about educational outcome disparities but also about poverty itself. I will argue that it is only through the cultivation of what I call a structural ideology of poverty and economic justice that teachers become equity literate (Gorski 2013), capable of imagining the sorts of solutions that pose a genuine threat to the existence of class inequity in their classrooms and schools.
Poverty and the ideological imperative: a call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education
The Direct Confrontation Principle: The path to equity requires direct confrontations with inequity—with interpersonal, institutional, cultural and structural racism and other forms of oppression. “Equity” approaches that fail to directly identify and confront inequity play a significant role in sustaining inequity.
Basic Principles for Equity Literacy
The Prioritization Principle: In order to achieve equity we must prioritize the interests of the students and families whose interests historically have not been prioritized. Every policy, practice, and program decision should be considered through the question, “What impact is this going to have on the most marginalized students and families? How are we prioritizing their interests?”
Basic Principles for Equity Literacy
The “Fix Injustice, Not Kids” Principle: Educational outcome disparities are not the result of deficiencies in marginalized communities’ cultures, mindsets, or grittiness, but rather of inequities. Equity initiatives focus, not on “fixing” students and families who are marginalized, but on transforming the conditions that marginalize students and families.
Basic Principles for Equity Literacy
Avoid These Equity Pitfalls:
Equity Pitfalls
- Universal Validation – Not all ideas and perspectives are equitable. We don’t want to validate someone’s racist perspective. Equity is not about universal validation.
- Equity Detours: Addressing Equity Problems with Cultural Solutions – There is no path toward equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.
- Lack of Leadership – The people with the most equity literacy have to be the people with the most power.
- Going at the Pace of the Most Resistant – We are prioritizing the comfort of the people who are most resistant instead of prioritizing the discomfort the most marginalized people in the institution experience.
- Doing What’s Popular Instead of Doing What’s Effective
- Embracing a Deficit Ideology Instead of a Structural Ideology – If your equity initiatives are about fixing marginalized people rather than about addressing the conditions that marginalize people, there’s no way to get to equity.
We are all accountable to the urgent work of building a more just, more equitable world.
There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.
Inequities are primarily power and privilege problems.
Equity requires the redistribution of material, cultural, and social access and opportunity.
You cannot counter structural inequality with good will. You have to structure equality.
We are all accountable to the urgent work of building a more just, more equitable world.
🔦 We Find Our People
Often you don’t realize how lonely and frightened you’ve been the whole time, until you find your people.
Autistic kids need access to autistic communities. They need access to autistic mentors. They need to know that the problems they go through are actually common for many of us! They need to know they are not alone. They need to know that they matter and people care about them. They need to see autistic adults out in the world being accommodated and understood and respected. They need to learn how to understand their own alexithymia and their own emotions. They need to be able to recognize themselves in others. They need to be able to breathe.
AutisticSciencePerson
Until one day… you find a whole world of people who understand.
We were no longer alone.
7 Cool Aspects of Autistic Culture » NeuroClastic
Until one day… you find a whole world of people who understand.
We were no longer alone.
7 Cool Aspects of Autistic Culture » NeuroClastic
Did you ever feel
Like you don't quite belong
Just hold on
And go find your people
Find your people
Opening doors has become my calling
Welcome to this house
All Hail Open Doors by Swamburger and Scarlet Monk of Mugs and Pockets
Welcome to this house.
But no, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I got no other place to go
No, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I got no other place to go
No, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I can't take it anymore
But I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
Runaway by AURORA
Are you awake or are you sleeping?
Are you afraid? We've been waiting for this meeting
We have come here for you, and we're coming in peace
Mothership will take you on higher, higher
This world you live in is not a place for someone like you
Come on, let us take you home
It's time to go, you are infected
Come as you are, don't be scared of us, you'll be protected
(Protected, protected)
I guess you are a different kind of human
I guess you are a different kind of human
Omega hai foleet, Omega hai foleet
There is a flaw in man-made matters
But you are pure, and we have to get you out of here
A Different Kind of Human by AURORA
Don’t be scared; you’re okay. You can come with us, and you’ll be safe.
AURORA on Twitter: “Track number 8: A Different Kind Of Human.”
Chosen families are nonbiological kinship bonds, whether legally recognized or not, deliberately chosen for the purpose of mutual support and love.
According to the SAGE Encyclopedia of Marriage, Family, and Couples Counseling, “chosen families are nonbiological kinship bonds, whether legally recognized or not, deliberately chosen for the purpose of mutual support and love.” The term originated within the LGBTQ community and was used to describe early queer gatherings like the Harlem Drag Balls of the late nineteenth century.
The circumstances surrounding the birth of the first “chosen families”—intense loneliness and isolation faced by those rejected by their biological kin—continue today. Nearly 40 percent of today’s homeless youth identify as queer, and a recent study found that roughly 64 percent of LGBTQ baby boomers have built, and continue to rely on, chosen families.
“Chosen families,” though, can form as a result of any person’s experience with their biological family that leaves needs unmet. Friends who become your family of choice may provide you with a healthier family environment than the one in which you were raised, or their proximity may allow you to rely on them when your biological family isn’t located nearby. A chosen family can be part of a person’s growing network, and can help construct a wide foundation of support that continues to grow with time.
Finding Connection Through “Chosen Family” | Psychology Today
Here’s a heart-strumming rendition of “Chosen Family” from Rina Sawayama (starting at 8:29).
Tell me your story and I'll tell you mine
I'm all ears, take your time, we've got all night
Show me the rivers crossed, the mountains scaled
Show me who made you walk all the way here
Family of choice might seem like a contradiction but your ‘chosen’ family consists of those who accept you for who you are and they want the best for you. They support you in your chosen ventures, help you when you need to make decisions and tell you when you might be going down the wrong track! As in any other family, you might have your differences, but they are always there for you. If you can find yourself among a unit of supporters who love you unconditionally, will offer a place to you that allows you to be yourself, safely and without barriers, you might have found your ‘chosen’ family. This family might not be all in one place.
The Autistic Trans Guide to Life
There is something very special about forming relationships with people who understand and accept you for who you are. You may hear the phrase ‘chosen family’ used by LGBTQIA+ people to describe these relationships – people they have met, formed bonds with, and chosen to have as their family separately to their ‘real’ family.
Queerly Autistic: The Ultimate Guide For LGBTQIA+ Teens On The Spectrum
These types of relationships are especially important to LGBTQIA+ people. There is a long history of us being isolated from our ‘official’ family and friends due to our sexuality and gender, and so the idea of ‘found’ or ‘chosen’ family has a strong emotional meaning in the community. There are still people today whose family react badly to them coming out (as we discussed in the chapter on coming out), so relationships with other people in the LGBTQIA+ community are just as important as they ever were.
Even if your family is accepting and loving, relationships within the community can still be very important. They certainly have been for me.
Queerly Autistic: The Ultimate Guide For LGBTQIA+ Teens On The Spectrum
I will also say this: I have never, not even for one single second, regretted it. I have never regretted doing the right thing or fighting for the health and wholeness of others even when it causes me pain and puts me at significant personal risk. I have lost nothing that I needed, because I had it all inside me. And the people that have now become my precious, chosen family are people I would never have met if I hadn’t been walking this path.
#ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing
“In my phone contacts, I put emojis by their names. I put strawberries next to people who were super loving. I put seedling emojis by folks who taught me things that made me think or grow.”
Within a year of his making these changes in his life, many of Samuel’s “strawberry people” had become members of his found family. They had his back as he worked through therapy for PTSD and eating disorder recovery. The strawberry people even became friends with one another—Samuel writes that they all talk in a single group chat.
Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
🌈🌈 We’re A Double Rainbow All the Way
It’s a double rainbow all the way.
Members of the neurodiversity movement adopt a position of diversity that encompasses a kaleidoscope of identities that intersects with the queer kaleidoscope.
LGBTQI+ people with an Autistic diagnosis have two separate rainbows — and two separate coming out stories.
The impulse to repress transgender people from expressing their true identity is rooted in the same impulse that makes people want to stop Autistic people from flapping.
Autistic individuals can offer novel insights into gender as a social process.
Plenty of autistic people are queer and experience a double portion of discrimination.
Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome is what happens when someone pretends to be something they’re not on an everyday basis.
Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome is what happens when someone pretends to be something they’re not on an everyday basis. It is exhausting and soul-eating. This greatly contributes to the high level of mental illness in the trans community or autistic burnout in the neurodiverse community.
ysabetwordsmith | Poem: “Type Integrity”
A brief thread about why the fates of LGBTQ+ and #ActuallyAutistic people are intertwined (to say nothing of LGBTQ+ autistic people). This right here is Ole Ivar Lovaas, the father of modern-day Applied Behavioral Analysis.
For the first week of #Pride2022: a brief thread about why the fates of LGBTQ+ and #ActuallyAutistic people are intertwined (to say nothing of LGBTQ+ autistic people). This right here is Ole Ivar Lovaas, the father of modern-day Applied Behavioral Analysis. 1/
Lovaas ran a clinic at UCLA, where autistic children were slapped, administered shock therapy. LIFE Magazine profiled his practices in 1965, showing how one girl was taken to a “shock room” when she made little progress.
When children behaved well, they were given food and affection. Children were initially not given regular meals and only spoonfuls of food at first.
Lovaas had an extremely low opinion of his autistic patients. In a 1974 interview, he demeaned autistic people stimming (which we now know is a means of soothing). He also called them “little monsters.”
But Lovaas’s practice did not just end when it came to autistic children. As @stevesilberman wrote in his book #NeuroTribes, he also assisted with UCLA’s Feminine Boy Project, which sought to cure boys of atypical sexuality, including homosexuality.
Lovaas and Rekers’ practices bore stunning similarities to Lovaas’s practices on autistic children. Poor Kirk’s parents were instructed to use poker chips. Blue poker chips were used as a reward to get candy while red chips meant he would be spanked.
CW suicide:
The red poker chips were given when he displayed feminine behavior. The whippings were so unbearable that Kirk’s brother would hide the red chips. Kirk later joined the US Armed forced before he later died from suicide.All the while, Rekers and Lovaas’s research was used to show that conversion therapy worked. Rekers would co-found the Family Research Council, which opposes LGBTQ+ rights. More on Kirk’s tragic end here.
People might wonder why I, a cisgender heterosexual from the suburbs of Southern California, included queer history in a book about autism. THIS is why. The same people who want to stop queer kids from being themselves are the same ones who want to stop me from flapping my hands
Conversely, when I first moved to Washington, the gay community openly embraced me and getting to know gay people helped me shed my own homophobia AND my internalized ableism. It’s why transphobia also bugs me so much.
Eric Michael Garcia on Twitter
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy. The only government-funded therapy for autistic children is called Applied Behaviour Analysis, an approach developed in tandem with discredited anti-LGBTQ2S+ practises.
Both gay conversion therapy and ABA were built on behaviourism—the scientific belief that human behaviour is determined by conditioning from our immediate environments, and should be controlled through manipulating those environments. Behaviourist psychology has always seen queer and autistic identities as deviant, and so the pathologies around both were constructed at the same time, and from the same body of research. This is why many autistics today argue that ABA is actually its own form of conversion therapy.
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
“It’s all about policing unruly bodies,” says Negrazis. “Lovaas actively constructed gender and sexual divergence as disabled, which created an inherent disableism in the emergence of queer identities.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
Just like queer and trans people, autistics do not have a disease that needs to be treated. Instead, says Negrazis, “[autistics] need supports to help them identify how trauma has impacted them in their learning, relationships, ability to work and even their self-concept.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
“The psych industry has done so much harm to both [autistic and queer] people,” they say. “The very foundations of psychology and counselling need to be dismantled and rebuilt by queer and autistic people themselves.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
She is our miscreant
She is our detox
She is our dagger in the dark
She is the knot mess
She is the undressed
She is the boy borne in my heart
While you sit on the fence I will burn in hell
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
In other words…
One Idea Per Line
- Queer and neurodivergent liberation are connected.
- LGBTQI+ individuals with autism have unique experiences.
- Repressing transgender people and stopping autistic individuals from expressing themselves are rooted in the same impulse.
- Autistic individuals can provide insights into gender as a social process.
- Autistic people often face discrimination and double discrimination if they are also queer.
- Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome occurs when someone pretends to be someone they’re not.
- The closet can only hide someone, it doesn’t remove shame.
- The treatment of autism is compared to conversion therapy.
- Applied Behavior Analysis, the government-funded therapy for autistic children, is associated with discredited anti-LGBTQ2S+ practices.
- Neuroqueering, based on the work of Nick Walker and Remi Yergeau, embraces unique neurocognitive abilities and turns everyday behavior into resistance.
- By queering the social world, new possibilities are created for a different future.
- Embrace our weird potentials and be proud of who we are.
One Paragraph Summary
Queer and neurodivergent liberation are closely connected, forming a double rainbow of identities. The neurodiversity movement recognizes neurodivergent traits, such as ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, and Tourette’s Syndrome, as natural variations of cognition, motivations, and behavior. LGBTQIA+ individuals with an Autistic diagnosis face unique challenges and have separate coming out stories. Repressing transgender individuals and stopping Autistic people from stimming are rooted in the same impulse to suppress self-expression. Autistic individuals offer valuable insights into gender as a social process, highlighting its fluidity and multidimensionality. Autistic people who are queer experience discrimination from both communities. Pretending to be something one is not on a daily basis leads to Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome, contributing to mental illness in the trans community and autistic burnout. The history of LGBTQ+ conversion therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis for autism are intertwined, demonstrating the interconnectedness of these marginalized communities. Embracing neuroqueering and queering the social world opens up new possibilities for resistance and collective imagination. It is important to be proud of our weird potentials and embrace ourselves for who we are.
Six Paragraph Summary
Queer and neurodivergent liberation are connected. It’s like seeing a double rainbow.
Members of the neurodiversity movement believe in embracing diversity, including a range of identities that intersect with the queer community. LGBTQI+ individuals who are also Autistic have two separate experiences of coming out. The same impulse to suppress transgender people from expressing their true selves also exists in trying to stop Autistic people from engaging in behaviors like flapping. Autistic individuals can offer unique insights into gender as a social process. Many Autistic people also face discrimination for being queer, which means they experience a double dose of discrimination.
Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome is what happens when someone pretends to be something they’re not every day. It’s important to understand that the closet can only hide someone, it can’t protect them from feeling shame.
The “treatment” of autism is similar to conversion therapy. The only government-funded therapy for autistic children is called Applied Behavior Analysis, which was developed alongside discredited anti-LGBTQ2S+ practices.
In line with a disability justice approach, there’s a positive development called neuroqueering. It focuses on embracing the unique potentials within one’s neurocognitive space and using everyday behavior as a form of resistance. By challenging neuronormativity and queering the social world, we can imagine a different future.
Embrace our unique potentials and be proud of who we are. We’re weird, and that’s something to celebrate. Being weird is just embracing ourselves.
AI Disclosure: The summaries above were created with the help of Elephas AI Assistant.
Left: Lydia Santos (she/they), autistic, epileptic, demigirl lesbian. 26 y/o (if they care)
Right: Maxine Fields (she/her), adhder, bisexual cis woman and Lydia’s girlfriend. 28 y/o (again, if they care)
Art: itsyagerg_zero
Here comes the sun
It's shining right through you
On everyone
It hits so hard with all the colors that there are
You hit so hard with all the colors that there are
Rainbow Shiner by Ex Hex
Embrace our weird potentials. Be proud of what we are. We’re weird, and we’re glad we are. Being weird is just embracing yourself.
Autistic Pride is inconceivable without weird pride, and it’s hard to be proud of any kind of neurodivergence without it. A lot of neurodivergent kids learn early on that they’re ‘weird’. The lucky ones learn to embrace it before they’re forced to internalise the implied shame.
@MxOolong
There is a lot of stigma attached to the concept of weirdness, and a lot of effort is spent chasing some idea of ‘normal’. This is harmful for everyone who’s perceived as weird, and that often includes immigrants, disabled people, queer and trans people and those with minority religious and ethical beliefs. It also includes just about everyone who’s neurodivergent, be they autistic, dyspraxic, dyslexic, ADHD, or otherwise different of brain. Weirdmisia — hatred of the weird — is the enemy of diversity.
I see Weird Pride as a necessary counter to the prevailing negativity about weirdness, so I’m inviting all weirdos and even non-weirdos* to write, talk, tweet and make art about how they’re weird, and why that’s okay.
Weird Pride Day. Weird Pride Day is every 4th of March. | by Ferrous, aka Oolong | Medium
🎨 Behold the Spectrum
Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts.
We are stable parts of the human genome.
If you believe in a Maker, Maker built us in.
Look to Maker and behold the Spectrum!
If you don’t subscribe to a Maker,
Look to Nature and behold the Spectrum!
Spectrums and fractals are all around us and within us.
We are emergent!
How Glorious!
“Understanding the Spectrum” by Rebecca Burgess is a popular re-conceptualization of the autism spectrum from a line to a color wheel. A color wheel better captures our spiky profiles. Thank you, Rebecca, for giving this to the world.
Read the full comic on “Understanding the Spectrum”.
If you are looking to contact me about my “Understanding The Spectrum” comic, please find a print-quality PDF of the comic at this link here. No need to email me to ask for permission to use it, I have always intended for the comic to be completely free to use in whatever you like, be it in presentations or for translating. When you do use it though, please credit me for the image and let me know that you’ve used it, because I love to know that this old comic is still doing much good in the world!
contact | rebecca-burgess
You are not a computer
You are complex and undefined
So why let yourself be limited to binary desires?
To binary identities and binary ideals
Like switching on or switching off
Choosing a bow tie or high heels
But the world tells us (01 01 01 01 01)
No we are not (01 01 01 01 01)
Body or head not (01 01 01 01 01)
Capacity for love not (01 01 01 01 01)
So let it be complicated
And hard to understand
You know they would envy you
If they got their heads out of the sand
So make them uncomfortable
And challenge their ideals
Because those antiquated notions
Are blinding what is real
I am bigger than a hexadecimal
I am bigger than a hexadecimal
I am bigger than a hexadecimal
Binary by The Spook School
Emergent strategy is a way that all of us can begin to see the world in life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us. Many of us have been and are becoming students of these systems of life, wondering if in fact we can unlock some crucial understanding about our own humanity if we pay closer attention to this place we are from, the bodies we are in.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
The ones who need to learn are not those who think and live outside the box of “normality”, but those who are “well adjusted”, and those who don’t yet see the internalised ableism they have absorbed. As Nora Bateson reiterates, ecologies of care are complex living systems that transcend our individual and capabilities and limitations. The collective path that humanity finds itself on is a transdisciplinary, tanscontextual journey of omni-directional learning. We are (re)discovering and (re)learning the sacred language of life.
Life in the compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult | Autistic Collaboration
Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.
But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
What is Emergent Strategy? “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions”—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Octavia wrote novels with young Black women protagonists meeting aliens, surviving apocalypse, evolving into vampires, becoming telepathic networks, time traveling to reckon with slave-owning ancestors. Woven throughout her work are two things: 1) a coherent visionary exploration of humanity and 2) emergent strategies for being better humans.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
I was looking for language and frameworks to use when exploring the kind of leadership Butler’s protagonists practiced, and found them in conversations with ill and Grace about emergence—interdependence, iteration, being in relationship with constantly changing conditions, fractals.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
fractals: the relationship between small and large
A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Rather than narrowing into one path forward, Octavia’s leaders were creating more and more possibilities. Not one perfect path forward, but an abundance of futures, of ways to manage resources together, to be brilliant together.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Fractals are one form of redundancy that has attracted particular attention from scientists. A fractal pattern is one in which the same motif is repeated at differing scales. Picture the frond of a fern, for example: each segment, from the largest at the base of the plant to the tiniest at its tip, is essentially the same shape. Such “self-similar” organization is found not only in plants but also in clouds and flames, sand dunes and mountain ranges, ocean waves and rock formations, the contours of coastlines and the gaps in tree canopies. All these phenomena are structured as forms built of smaller forms built of still smaller forms, an order underlying nature’s apparently casual disarray.
Fractal patterns are much more common in nature than in man-made environments. Moreover, nature’s fractals are of a distinctive kind. Mathematicians rank fractal patterns according to their complexity on a scale from 0 to 3; fractals found in nature tend to fall in a middle range, with a value of between 1.3 and 1.5. Research shows that, when presented with computer-generated fractal patterns, people prefer mid-range fractals to those that are more or less complex. Studies have also demonstrated that looking at these patterns has a soothing effect on the human nervous system; measures of skin conductance reveal a dip in physiological arousal when subjects are shown mid-range fractals. Likewise, people whose brain activity is being recorded with EEG equipment enter a state that researchers call “wakefully relaxed”—simultaneously alert and at ease—when viewing fractals like those found in nature.
There is even evidence that our ability to think clearly and solve problems is enhanced by encounters with these nature-like fractals.
The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul
In other words…
One Idea Per Line
- Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts.
- We are stable parts of the human genome.
- If you believe in a Maker, Maker built us in.
- Look to Maker and behold the Spectrum!
- If you don’t subscribe to a Maker, look to Nature and behold the Spectrum!
- Spectrums and fractals are all around us and within us.
- We are emergent!
- We are not limited to binary desires, identities, and ideals.
- Let it be complicated and hard to understand.
- Make them uncomfortable and challenge their ideals.
- We are bigger than a hexadecimal.
- Emergent strategy helps us see the world as life-code.
- We are (re)discovering and (re)learning the sacred language of life.
- We need to be fractal when speaking of systemic change.
- Emergence is how we change and intentionally grow.
- Small actions and connections create complex systems.
- The health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.
- Octavia Butler’s work explores emergent strategies for being better humans.
- Interdependence means meeting each other’s needs and embracing complexity.
- Fractals are never-ending patterns found in nature.
- Radical ideas spread through conversation and interactions.
- Social movements are fractal and practice what we want to see at a larger scale.
- Octavia’s leaders created possibilities and managed resources together.
- Fractals are common in nature and have a soothing effect on humans.
- Our ability to think clearly and solve problems is enhanced by encounters with nature-like fractals.
- True colors are beautiful, like a rainbow.
- Neurodiversity is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
One Paragraph Summary
Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts and stable parts of the human genome. Whether you believe in a Maker or not, we are a part of the Spectrum. The Spectrum is all around us, represented by spectrums and fractals. It is a glorious and complex concept that captures our diverse and spiky profiles. We are emergent beings, shaped by the systems and patterns of life. We must embrace our complexity and understand that small actions and connections can create complex systems and societies. Octavia Butler’s work explores emergent strategies for being better humans and understanding the interconnectedness of all things. Fractals, which are self-similar patterns repeated at different scales, are found in nature and have a soothing effect on us. Our ability to think clearly and solve problems is enhanced by encounters with these nature-like fractals. The true colors of individuals, their diversity and uniqueness, should be celebrated and embraced. Pluralism and neurodiversity are powerful ideas that can transform toxic cultures into collaborative and inclusive ones.
Five Paragraph Summary
Queer and neurodivergent people are a natural and essential part of human genetics. Whether you believe in a higher power or not, it is clear that we are meant to exist. We can look to nature and see the diverse spectrum of identities and experiences that exist. Spectrums and fractals are all around us, showing us the beauty and complexity of life. We are not limited to binary desires or identities. We are complex and undefined, and we should embrace and celebrate our uniqueness.
Emergent strategy is a way of understanding and navigating the world. It teaches us that small actions and connections can create complex systems and patterns. We can intentionally change and grow to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for. It is about embracing our complexity and understanding that we are interconnected and interdependent. We can learn from the patterns we see in nature, from the micro to the macro level, and apply them to create positive change.
Octavia Butler, a visionary writer, explored emergent strategies in her novels. She showed us that radical ideas can spread through conversation and small interactions. Social movements today are also practicing emergent strategies, creating possibilities and abundance of futures. We should not focus on one perfect path forward, but rather embrace the diversity of ideas and ways to manage resources together.
Fractals are patterns that repeat at different scales, and they are found everywhere in nature. They are a form of redundancy and are more common in natural environments than man-made ones. Looking at fractal patterns has a soothing effect on our nervous system and can enhance our ability to think clearly and solve problems. True colors are beautiful, just like a rainbow. We should not be afraid to let our true colors show.
In summary, queer and neurodivergent people are an integral part of human genetics. We can look to nature and see the diverse spectrum of identities and experiences. Emergent strategy teaches us to embrace our complexity and interdependence. We can learn from the patterns in nature and apply them to create positive change. Fractals are everywhere in nature and have a calming effect on us. We should embrace our true colors and celebrate our uniqueness.
AI Disclosure: The summaries above were created with the help of Elephas AI Assistant.
But I see your true colors
Shining through
I see your true colors
And that's why I love you
So don't be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful
Like a rainbow
From our creed: I know that pluralism is our reality. I know that Neurodiversity is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, and that Neurodiversity friendly forms of collaboration hold the potential to transform pathologically competitive and toxic teams and cultures.
I know
I reframe
I center
I will
❤️🔥 We serve our loved people so we can keep on livin’ through the onslaught.
Look up to the sky, sky, sky Take back your own tonight You'll find more than you see It's time now, now, get ready
This is your time, this is your life and This is your time, this is your life and This is your time, this is your life and This is your time, this is your life and
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Keep On Livin' by Le Tigre
Open arms with open doors
It’s why I’m here to open yoursI got a moment in time
The greatest opening lineYou’re gonna get past
Moment by Swamburger and Scarlet Monk of Mugs and Pockets
You’re gonna get past
You’re gonna get past
Crying, give me some love, give me some love and hold me
Give me some love and hold me tight
Oh, give me some love, give me some love and hold me
Give me some love and hold me tight
I Went Too Far by AURORA
From our creed: I center the marginalized and the different. I center edge cases, because edge cases are stress cases and design is tested at the edges. I center neurodivergent and disabled experience in service to all bodyminds.
I know
I reframe
I center
I will
🔆 We’re here turning on the light.
A rainbow doesn't choose to be a rainbow
It just shines in the sky
To all of you in darkness
We're here turning on the light
Now I stand with you for the world to see
My love, my dreams, and me
My love, my dreams, and me
Rainbow Connections
I know you think I'm not something you're afraid of
'Cause you think that you've seen what I'm made of
Well I am even more than the two of them!
Everything they care about is what I am!
I am their fury, I am their patience
I am a conversation!
I am made o-o-o-o-of
Lo-o-o-o-ove, o-o-o-o-ove
And it's stronger than you
Lo-o-o-o-ove, lo-o-o-o-ove, lo-o-o-o-ove
And it's stronger than you
Lo-o-o-o-ove, lo-o-o-o-ove, lo-o-o-o-ove
And it's stronger than you
Lo-o-o-o-ove, lo-o-o-o-ove, lo-o-o-o-ove
We can take turns taking the reins
Lean on each other when we need some extra strength
We’ll never cave or we’ll never waver
And we’ll always become braver and braver
We’ll dance like nobody’s there
Wе’ll dance without any cares
We’ll talk 'bout problеms we share
We’ll talk 'bout things that ain’t fair
We’ll sing 'bout things we don’t know
We’ll sing to people and show
What it means to be young and growing up
Growing Up by The Linda Lindas
Let love conquer your mind
Warrior, warrior
Just reach out for the light
Warrior, warrior
I am a warrior-ior-ior-ior-ior
Warrior, warrior
I am a warrior-ior-ior-ior-ior
Warrior, warrior of love
Underneath darkened skies
There's a light kept alive
Let love conquer your mind
Warrior, warrior
Just reach out for the light
Warrior, warrior
I am a warrior-ior-ior-ior-ior
Warrior, warrior
I am a warrior-ior-ior-ior-ior
Warrior, warrior of love
Warrior of love
Warrior of love
Warrior by AURORA
Hostility is not the road
The proper basic human code
Chauvinist intolerance is what we loathe
Let's embrace diversity
By first rejecting bigotry
There’s no more room left in society for animosity
We refuse to look away
And ignore issues at bay
We will conquer the hurdles in our way (We are warriors)
(We are warriors)
We won't take shit anymore
A pebble cuts right to the core
All these excuses, what are they for? (We are warriors)
We are warriors
We are warriors
We are warriors
We are warriors
We are warriors
We are warriors
Warriors by Bad Cop/Bad Cop
Don’t be TRAAAAASH (transphobic, racist, ableist, abusive, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic).
- We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.
- We use prosocial principles, restorative practices, transformative justice, and an advice process.
- Don’t be TRAAAAASH (transphobic, racist, ableist, abusive, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic).
- No proselytizing.
- In addition to speaking different languages, we have different neurotypes with different communication styles and norms of sociality. In the case of misunderstanding, assume good intention.
- Tell your truth in such a way that you’re allowing others to tell their truths, too.
- Maintain learner safety and remember what it is like to be a new contributor.
- You can’t just open the door; you have to put out a welcome mat.
- Stimpunks is created by all of us.
- Live your truth.
- Shred some gnar.
Embracing pluralism is good citizenship.
Embracing pluralism is…
A Personal Update and Some Thoughts on Pluralism – Not Your Mission Field
- Genuinely listening with no agenda when others share about their beliefs
- Treating shared values as more important than shared beliefs
- Refraining from proselytizing, incl. for atheism
- Posting messages of inclusion in my place of business
- Baking cakes for everyone who comes to my cake shop
- Leaving healthcare decisions between patients and doctors
- Recognizing the rights of all to refuse participation in any religious activity
- Tempering my free speech by considering whether my speech will do more harm or good
- Participating in interfaith activities and aiding religious minorities who are in harm’s way
- Tolerating those with whom I have substantive differences Seeking the common good first in public life
Embracing pluralism is not…
A Personal Update and Some Thoughts on Pluralism – Not Your Mission Field
- Asking strangers what church they go to
- Aggressively alienating those who do not share my religion or my atheism
- Viewing others as potential converts
- Flying the Christian flag or posting religious content in my place of business
- Agitating for the legal ‘right” not to bake cakes for people I don’t like
- Abusing conscience clauses or the religious ownership of a hospital to deny needed care
- Coercing participation in prayer or demanding sectarian practice in my workplace
- Saying offensive things toward those who do not share my beliefs ‘because I can*
- Offering aid to those who do not share my beliefs on my terms, without concern for their needs
- Tolerating intolerance
- Seeking domination for those who share my beliefs in public life
First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity.
Second, pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference.
Third, pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments.
Fourth, pluralism is based on dialogue.
About | The Pluralism Project
The Evangelical Pluralism Problem and its Media Enablers | Religion Dispatches
Chrissy Stroop
⏭️ Coming Up on the Next Page
- Testimonials
- Testimonial from Educator Ira Socol, Co-Author of “Timeless Learning”
- Testimonial from Human Restoration Project
- Testimonial from Author Kristina Brooke Daniele
- Testimonial from Creator Jesse Mercury
- Testimonial from Artist Kaya Oldaker
- Testimonial from Artist Adriel Jeremiah Wool
- Testimonials from Grantees
- We serve our loved people so we can keep on livin’ through the onslaught.
- ☂️ Our Umbrella: Are You a Stimpunk?
- It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
- Do you know why we have the sunflowers?
- 🫀🧠🖼 We Reframe
- Reframe with Us
☂️ Our Umbrella: It Is Time to Celebrate Our Interdependence!
There’s more to come. Testimonials, celebrations of interdependence, sunflowers, flowerpunks, rainbow dragons, fractals, a rainbow shrimp visualizer, reframing, belonging, and more.
Continue down the rabbit hole with Pandillo, Chelsea’s Randimal.
Up next: “Our Umbrella: It Is Time to Celebrate Our Interdependence!“