Passing, stealth and disability identity

This is a late response to Blogging Against Disablism Day. It’s also a (hopefully not too late) submission for the next Disability Blog Carnival, hosted by Miss Crip Chick, the theme of which is “Disability Identity”. It’s probably not as good a post as it could have been if I had internet access at home at the moment (I’ve been going to internet cafes, cutting and pasting the stuff I've wanted to link to or quote and saving it to a floppy disk, then back home to actually write this… so, sorry if it’s a bit sprawling or disjointed-seeming), but I didn’t want to leave it until too late to submit it for the carnival...

This post was, in part, inspired by Ballastexistenz’s (utterly awesome) post for BADD, “Excuses to be a jerk”, which “passing” isn’t the primary subject of, but in which she does say the following about the subject:

In a person who is passing, there is also often tension between who they’re trying to appear to be, and who they are. It can look like the usual angstiness some people go through; after all, most people hide certain aspects of who they are in order to fit in. But passing as non-autistic is a bigger disconnect than pretending to like bands you really hate, or even than pretending to like people you really can’t stand, or to feel feelings different than the ones you know you have.

Passing can mean, in its most extreme forms of disconnect, having no or close to no understanding of most of the words one is using, most of the interactions one is engaging in, etc.

...

Be aware that when the above happens, the disconnect is on the level of a disabled person passing as non-disabled, not a whiny person who just doesn’t realize how much like everyone else they really are. Yes, there are things all humans have in common. No, that doesn’t solve the severity of depression, disconnect, and alienation that autistic people often experience when passing, particularly when the person they’re passing as (or being passed off as by others, since passing can be entirely in other people’s heads, too) understands things they don’t. It’s a lot closer to a deaf person passing for hearing (while entirely missing at least 80% of conversations as a result), or a blind person trying to drive a car without crashing it or letting on that they’re blind, or a person from one culture being thrown into a totally alien culture (where nobody’s ever even heard of one’s own culture) with no preparation and trying to pass as comprehending, than a person with certain abilities trying to pretend they are similar to someone with roughly the same set of abilities but a different personality. Not that that’s easy either, but there’s an order of magnitude or two here that needs to not be missed.

Of course, not all autistic people are in a situation where passing is possible, whether due to their own abilities, the expectations of those around them, or both. And passing has gradations, too. It’s not like there are those who pass and those who don’t pass. It’s more like there are those who pass to different degrees, as different things, and in different situations. Passing can also be wholly unintentional and unnoticed, but I’ll get into that later.

(There is so, so much else in that post that I identify with more strongly and deeply than I could put into words right now, and, in fact, huge sections of it perfectly describe me, but that would be spinning off well outside the subject of this post. Suffice to say that it’s one of the best pieces of writing about autism that I've ever read.)

The first place I encountered the term “passing” was in African-American historical literature (which was one of my perseverations during my teens), referring to light-skinned (but categorised as “black” under the segregationist laws of the time, and also culturally “black”) mixed-race people who passed as white in order to get all the social benefits that that status gave them in an openly racist society and legal system. (The main protagonists of such novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were very often a young man or woman who passed as white and whose relationship with a white partner turned to tragedy when their “true” ethnicity was revealed.) The place I most often encounter it (and the related notion of “stealth”) now is in the online trans* community (there are very good posts about the subject by many trans* bloggers, including Questioning Transphobia, No Designation, Galling Galla and plenty of others), where there often seems to be a divide between those who do “pass” and those who don’t, with calls for solidarity and attempts to transcend that divide often frustrated.

While it’s not talked about so much, I believe the same is very often true in the disabled community. Nicola at the BBC Ouch blog recently posted about “hierarchies of impairment” and division between different impairment groups; I have often found that one big division, even if not necessarily talked about in those terms, is between those who have “passing privilege” and those who don’t.

One particularly striking example of this is in this article at the Disabled and Proud website (I believe this article has also been published in Ragged Edge magazine, but couldn’t find it there at first look), in which the author describes her experience at an ADAPT conference:

As we waited for the elevator at the San Francisco Muni station the morning of October 21, my friend, Laura, and I could barely contain our excitement. After a long journey from Chicago, we finally made it to San Francisco for our first national ADAPT action. Even though we had both been actively involved in Chicago ADAPT, and in the activities of the National Disabled Students Union, we couldn't wait to experience the "coming home" feeling that many people talk about after attending their first national ADAPT action. It was a typical foggy day in San Francisco, the type of day that makes it very difficult for someone with an immune system disability - like myself - to climb stairs, so Laura and I decided to wait for the elevator. As we were waiting, a voice from behind us said, "You know, you ABs should really take the stairs and leave the elevator for those of us who need and deserve it." After signing this message to Laura, who is Deaf, she and I turned around and found ourselves face to face with a white, middle-aged man in a wheelchair. "We have a new name for you ABs," a young woman in a chair beside him said to us. "We call you Walkie-Talkies." These were the welcoming words that greeted us when we arrived at our first national ADAPT action. Needless to say, the "coming home" experience for us was less than welcoming.

Technically, Laura and I are "walkies." But we are also young women who openly and proudly identify as people with disabilities - young, disabled women who experience disability discrimination in the wider society on a daily basis. When the discrimination comes from within your own community though, it hurts… it hurts really bad. It takes a lot for someone with a non-apparent disability to get to a place where they openly and proudly identify as disabled. The pressures for us to "pass" and deny our disability - and our community - are tremendous. But to finally get to that place of power and pride and then be called an AB or a "walkie-talkie" by someone who you consider to be your sister or brother is devastating.

I wish I could say that this was an isolated instance of ignorance - which is evident in every community, no matter how "progressive" - but I can't. Nor is this a defining characteristic of ADAPT. This "culture of internal exclusion" that we experienced at the national ADAPT action is something that we deal with all the time within the US disability rights movement as people who are not visibly disabled. Take, for example, the time when I shared an experience on the Berkeley disabled mailing listserv about the person who glue a sign to my car windshield that read, "Mentally Handicapped," only to receive the following response from one of my "brothers" with a disability: "Oh no, it's another one of those 'supposed' invisibly disabled people trying to jump on the disability bandwagon again."

The irony of this is that the disability movement (or at least certain sectors of it) has, deliberately or not, in effect constructed in response to wider society's demand for disabled people to pass as non-disabled, a requirement to pass as disabled - which is rather spectacularly missing the point...

(Thankfully, in DAN, the UK's equivalent to ADAPT, I haven't encountered much of the same attitude, and many of its key members have non-physical or non-visually-obvious impairments. I couldn't really guess as to whether there is a UK/US difference overall in this - certainly both the UK and US disability rights movements had their origins primarily in the struggles of people with obvious physical impairments.)

There is a lot of talk about “visible” and “invisible” impairments, which I find somewhat problematic terminology (see for example Cal Montgomery's article "A Hard Look At Invisible Disability", which puts it better than i could), but still often find myself using; also a popular phrase in the UK seems to be “hidden disability”, which I think is also a bit problematic (although I sometimes describe my own impairment as “hidden, but not very well hidden” ;) ). The trouble with the terms “invisible” and “hidden”, IMO, is that they suggest that the impairments in question are not noticeable at all, whereas the reality usually is that they might not be noticed or recognised by most people, but, by definition, an impairment is noticeable in the area that a person is impaired in (I have difficulty seeing how it could meaningfully be an impairment otherwise). (There's also the risk of confusion between "visibly impaired"/"visible impairment" and "visually impaired"/"visual impairment".) Therefore, I think that the terminology of "passing", as originated in the context of racial segregation in the US and South Africa, and repurposed and elaborated by the queer and trans* movements, is a more useful set of terms in which to talk about the issue...

The problem with “passing” and “stealth”, when it comes to liberation movements, is that it’s essentially an individualistic way of seeking one’s own safety, freedom or place in society by moving out of an oppressed or marginalized group, which inevitably compromises one’s ability to fight for the rights of that whole group. It also implicitly upholds the idea that that group does not deserve equal rights, by saying “the best way to get equal rights is to appear not to be a member of a minority” – rather than demanding equal rights without compromise. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that every person who uses “stealth” is working against the liberation of their minority group, or that they, as individuals, are to blame – it can be very legitimately motivated by personal safety, or the person may genuinely be trying to live as if disability, or gender identity, or whatever, didn’t matter – there is a good discussion in the comments here and here about stealth and trans* identity.)

The awkward thing about passing, when you do have a radical commitment to a minority group as a political identity, is it can actually be counterproductive personally, and that it can be very difficult to explain why you don't actually want to. (I remember posting about this over a year ago at the BBC Ouch message board, and encountering incredulity from several "non-passing" disabled people that I could envy the visibility of their impairments.) I have had responses from disabled people in the street to whom I have tried to hand out leaflets about disability rights campaigns that suggested they viewed me, as someone not obviously disabled at first glance, as a non-disabled "do-gooder" handing out propaganda for some charity or "cure"/"healing"-oriented organisation. (As an attempt to counter that, I have attempted to appear "more disabled" by trying to exaggerate my subtler autistic traits (including many of the things talked about in Ballastexistenz's post) to a level of fairly-obvious visibility, but then felt like a "pretender" or "fraud" or doing so.)

(This also serves to highlight the same problem from the other side - the disabled people to whom I hand leaflets about organisations of disabled people are those who I can tell are disabled, and in fact I have fairly often considered giving a leaflet to someone who looked possibly disabled, due to subtler factors such as slightly unusual movement or facial expressions, then decided against it because of the possible embarrassment of getting the response "but I'm not disabled", possibly accompanied by righteous indignation at having been perceived as such. I don't quite know how to outreach to disabled people who are not visibly impaired...)

This is one of those situations where I can recognise that it's problematic, but not really think of any solutions. Obviously there are things I could do, such as wear an item of clothing with a slogan like "Disabled and Proud", or something autism-related, on it, but that's not always practical, and, in any case, would probably still result in people responding by refusing to believe that I am disabled, or even just not connecting the slogan directly to me (after all, people wear T-shirts with all kinds of things written on them that don't actually describe themselves - even in the political sphere, you can, for instance, wear a "Free Tibet" or "Free Palestine" T-shirt without being Tibetan or Palestinian). I could attempt to cultivate a "more obviously autistic" style of moving, dressing or speaking, but that would seem just as "fake" and counterproductive as trying to move, dress or speak more like a neurotypical person, and just as against the entire goal of both the neurodiversity movement and the social model of disability - disabled people (and non-disabled people, for that matter), being accepted as the people they/we are, and society changing to fit us, rather than the other way round.

I do kind of think that people involved in disability activism, particularly in membership organisations of disabled people such as CILs, whose impairments are not obvious do have some sort of responsibility to declare those impairments, though I'm not sure exactly how far that responsibility goes (how much detail is acceptable, for instance) - which, to some extent, arguably goes against the social model principle that impairment isn't what matters in defining disability. I think, however, that this (and the "don't talk about impairment" attitude it engenders, in which for instance it's almost taboo to ask someone what their impairment is, being automatically seen as "medical model") is one of the weaknesses of the most simplistic form of the social model, and that "bringing impairment back in" to the social model is necessary - I've touched on this before here (near the bottom of the post), and am planning to return to it in more detail, but the work of feminist disability theorists such as Jenny Morris is, IMO, vital here. The taboo against talking about impairment has led, in some cases in the UK, to non-disabled people infiltrating and taking over disabled people's organisations by claiming to be disabled without disclosing an impairment.

On the other hand, this definitely needs to be approached with caution, as it could easily lead to the kind of hierarchy-impairment situation Nicola describes, in which "invisibly" impaired, but not "visibly" impaired, people have the onus placed on them to justify that they have a "real" disability. (Not to mention that, in a fully social model world, IMO there actually wouldn't be any real dividing line between an impaired and a non-impaired person...)

There are undoubtedly privileges associated with being able to pass as non-disabled (and these are proportional to the extent to which one can pass, as passing isn't a binary state) - and, when having or not having those privileges can have serious, even critical, effects on one's life chances, I don't think it's reasonable to insist that people who have access to them outright reject those privileges. It gets even more difficult when the passing is unintentional, as opposed to deliberate "stealth" - and, of course, there are all sorts of blurry areas between the two. Where is the line between simply not disclosing an impairment because it isn't relevant (for example, on a job application form where the impairment doesn't directly affect any of the tasks in the job), and deliberately deceiving people? (People have been dismissed over this issue.)

The thing is, passing is never complete - if a person could completely pass as non-disabled in every aspect of life, then they wouldn't be disabled. And not only do those who pass in some situations nearly always not pass in other situations, the same person can pass one day, but not the next day, in the same situation, because there is fluctuation in nearly all impairments, even most of those generally perceived as "stable" (Ballastexistenz explains this better and in more detail, too). To quote the title of one trans* activist's blog, "Nobody Passes, Darling". And I haven't even touched on the issue of undiagnosed impairments - with which people can, as I was for the majority of my life, be passing, or even not passing, without having any idea that they are doing so whatsoever.

In a truly liberated world, no one would need to “pass”, because there would be nothing to “pass” as – there would be no privileged group or class that it would benefit anyone to appear to be a member of. Therefore the concept of “stealth” would be irrelevant, because how much a person would choose to disclose about hirself in any area of life would be a free, individual choice. However, I don’t even really know exactly what that world would look like, let alone if there’s much chance of achieving it…

Edit for more relevant links: Trinity has also posted about “passing” for this carnival here, and Tera of Sweet Perdition posted about the problem with the “visible”/”invisible” dichotomy for a recent carnival here…

(I'll post links to the several other awesome blog carnivals I've read recently, when I can get online for long enough to find them all again...)

The swifts are here! [photos]

Staying with my family over the weekend of my and my brother's birthdays, one of the things we did was to go for our customary-when-I-visit walk round one of the local resrvoirs, which is also a bit of a nature reserve, and attracts a lot of species of easily-watchable birds. (Things are... somewhat complicated between me and my family, but one of the "safe" subjects on which we all have at-least-apparently-genuine common ground is nature in general, and wildlife (which in the UK usually pretty much equals bird) watching in particular.) There we saw the first swifts of 2008...

I always get really excited when the swifts arrive - they only come to Britain from Africa when the weather is warm enough for them to tolerate (about a month after the slightly hardier swallows and house martins), and thus they symbolise for me the passing of winter and the return of tolerable-for-me weather, and in a wider sense the return of hope to my life... especially this year, when after having felt truly hopeless for a long time, something like a return of hope looks like it might actually be happening. (The coming of the swifts also usually roughly coincides with my birthday, which makes me idly wonder about things like if it's possible for the time of year you are born to influence the relationship between your emotional cycles and the natural cycles of the year, and whether that might actually explain some of the appeal of (at least Western-style) astrology. In passing, i've also noticed that a *lot* of people in the Green movement seem to be spring births...)

There's also something intensely passionate and poetic about groups of swifts to me - screaming and wheeling effortlessly around the sky like little black scythes, often seeming to ride in on storm winds like the advance guard of some kind of conquering or liberating army in some great cosmic struggle between the Warm (freedom, life, hope) and the Cold (captivity, death, despair). The vanguard of Summer. (I've tried dozens of times to write a haiku about them, as that poetic form is supposed to be focused on the change of seasons, but i can never get the number of syllables right..)

I tried to take a few photos of them, tho with the speed at which they move, their small size and distance, I was pretty much shooting from the hip, and not really expecting to actually get any photos, certainly not any decent ones, so I was pleasantly surprised that a couple of my shots actually had swifts in them - the best (cropped to the extreme top left corner of the original photograph) being this one:




original (actually with 2 swifts in it!):



(some much, much better images of swifts can be seen here...)

(Another odd thing about swifts: they were given the generic name Apus because they were believed at one time to have no feet, and never to land but to spend their whole lives in the air. They do have feet, but they are very small and they have difficulty walking on them, and cannot take off from the ground, so they only land on high objects to nest. They do actually both sleep and have sex while in flight. :o )

Reservoirs tend to be the sort of places where migratory birds gather when they first arrive in the country, a few days before being seen elsewhere, so hopefully in a couple of days I'll see them shrieking and wheeling around the streets of Birmingham. I didn't actually hear them screech yesterday, which meant i didn't quite feel the full excitement that that cry always creates in me. I fully expect to be jumping up and down with the hair on my arms standing on end in joy when i hear it...

Also seen: some prints in the mud of a drained stretch of canal (I think they're probably badger prints, tho i'm not 100% sure), here with house keys for scale:



and a slightly wider scale image, showing a faint 3rd print nearer the bank:



(The weird thing is that the animal seemingly stepped out into the mud with only the 2 feet on the left side of its body...)

and various other birds, including geese:



and, in town the next day, a heron:



This heron seemed totally unafraid of humans - I first saw some other people taking photos of something behind a canal boat that was going past, then the heron landing on the bank behind the boat, with a big fish in its beak (of course, it had swallowed it by the time i could turn my camera on), and itlet me stand and take snaps of it for a good 5 minutes, only flying off when a slightly aggressive-looking swan came too near (although it's blurry, i quite like this pic of it flying off)...





(spot the town from its "iconic" building, if you've ever been there ;) )

I have a whole load of other planned wildlife-photography posts that i never got round to/felt up to doing, going back to last summer/autumn... if anyone appreciates these kind of posts as opposed to (or as well as) the more serious/political ones, i might post some of them over the next month or so...

26

Today... as of about half an hour ago... is the 26th of April, 2008. I was born on the 26th of April, 1982. (The circumstances of my birth were somewhat odd, like most things about me... my mum didn't know she was pregnant with me (despite being as thin as me, which is very thin) until about a month before I was born, which was over a month prematurely - I was born on the day before the day she was due to have her first antenatal class. She didn't think there was a possibility of her being pregnant because a doctor had told her she was infertile (doh). And they had to use forceps to get me out, which i can't help wondering might have been a contributory factor to the autism (although there are clear traits in both sides of the family... but, AFAIK, no one before me with enough or disabling enough traits to merit a diagnosis), as well as to my somewhat small and narrowly proportioned head. And, y'know, the possible links between premature or otherwise unusual births and autism are an area that, AFAIK, hasn't been seriously explored...)

Anyway, this is the only time in my life that my age yesterday was the same as the day of the month yesterday, and my age today is the same as the day of the month today. Which feels like it should have some significance, but i'm not quite sure what.

A year ago, i felt like there should have been some meaningful significance to the quarter-of-a-century figure, 25... some extra layer of "adulthood", or something. Now it just feels depressing that i am now clearly, unequivocally past that figure, and yet no more, in any meaningful sense, of an "adult" than before. Most of the time i still feel like i am in my early teens, and i still catch myself seeing groups of teenagers in the street and thinking of them as "about my age"... then realising i am divided from them by 10 years or more of basically-having-achieved-nothing... at least, in the part of my brain that ranks "maturity" by some kind of "normal" (or should that be "normative"?) progression through life - qualities like confidence, charisma, "life experience", and that undefinable thing called "authority" (not in the political sense, which as an anarchist i know i don't believe in, but in the most basic sense of being worthy of being listened to, deferred to at least in matters primarily concerning one's own life, and given "respect"), which it is expected for people to develop in those years of life, and yet which i am painfully aware that i don't have.

I am 26 and I have probably less relationship experience than the average 16 year old - and the single, desperately passionate and intense yet, in retrospect, shamefully awkward and inept sexual relationship I have had lasted 3 months, and was over 5 years ago - which is 5 years of nothing whatsoever to show for myself, of slowly but inexorably approaching the point of "accepting" that i will never find any kind of relationship, nor be found attractive by anyone, other than that one, never to be repeated fluke.

And yet... while this reads like a highly depressing post (possibly because I am slightly drunk), I am feeling some hope that the next year might be one in which i can make somthing of my life. There are really exciting projects happening which i am a part of - in fact, which several of the other people involved seem to think I am the primary, central person in (which is pretty scary in itself, since i'm really, really not sure at all that that's true). And i am in the middle of moving house, which, while a highly stressful and exhausting experience (not least because of cutting me off from the internet for an uncertain period of time), is getting me out of a situation which i really, really needed to get out of, and putting me into one which, while almost certainly not what i want from life in the long long term, is at least one in which i can (perhaps) have the space to begin to sort out some of the key questions - who and what i really am, what i can contribute to life without losing too much in exchange for it, how much interaction with other people i can "safely" cope with, and if there really is a long term purpose to my life.

(Yes, there are a lot of other stresses, worries and disappointments in my life right now, including a few that have happened in the last few days - such as losing the opportunity to earn £150 in an hour's work by accessibility-testing a website because my computer broke down (I am now posting from the new one which I have been given, currently at my brother's house, but hopefully soon to be installed in my new flat) - which could have enabled me for definite to go to Autscape - however, i also recieved an email today saying that the Autscape organisers want me to run the workshop i proposed to them, with some alterations - which would involve me faclitating a panel discussion, something i have never done before, as well as doing a lot of research into the subject it's about (the relationship between the autistic rights/advocacy movement and the wider disaility movement)... but is pretty cool, if a bit scary... and some other things... but, despite feeling highly overwhelmed overall, i'm still feeling like the positive at least has a good chance of outweighing the negative... and i have stuff to say about the seasons of the year, and just how tied into them my emotions are, but that's for another post...)

Some very valued friends have also recently proven that they genuinely do care about me, and while i could do with a bit more of that, it's enough to give me at least a stick, if not much more of a weapon, to try to fight off the part of me that says "no one could possibly really care about you, and anyone who says they do is clearly just pretending, either out of politeness or some purpose of their own to either explout or make fun out of me"... which, i think, will always be there, to a greater or lesser extent, but, well, at least now has some challengers.

So, to all the real friends i have (not wanting to list, because i feel like that would devalue the individual nature of each friendship - if you are reading this, you know who you are) - i just want to say - you are gorgeous and wonderful, and i love you.

Anyway... this is not the post i intended to write when i started writing it, but it's... something. And i will probably regret posting this in the morning, but... whatever. Somehow or other - certainly not by deliberate design - I have managed to stay alive for 26 years. I will leave it to those, if there are any, who my life affects to judge if that is worth celebrating.

Most Excellent

So, last week i was honoured to be given the Rated E For Excellent award by Last Crazy Horn... and so, I have to pass it on to 10 other bloggers.

This is a somewhat difficult task, because Last Crazy Horn picked Miss Crip Chick, who i was going to pick, and one of the other bloggers she picked picked Sweet Perdition, who i was also going to pick, and then Sweet Perdition picked... most of the other bloggers i was going to pick, namely Abnormaldiversity, Ballastexistenz, Chewing The Fat, The Gimp Parade (who i'm a little worried about actually, as she hasn't posted since March 22nd, which is rare for her), Questioning Transphobia, and Asperger Square 8... so, those i have picked are picked from the set of blogs i read not including that list... listing is strictly alphabetical and does not indicate any sort of order of preference (as if that was even possible between diverse individuals) (also excluded are group blogs or strictly-news blogs, so sorry BBC Ouch and F.R.I.D.A.)...

Andrea's Buzzing About blogs on neurodiversity, education (from both the "educator" and "educatee" standpoints), and the fight against pseudoscience... as well as insects and other creepy creatures. She combines simultaneously impassioned and rational defence of difference with devastating deconstruction of curebies and other nonsense-peddling quacks and hysteria merchants... and she also makes absolutely hilarious Dadaist poetry out of bizarre Google search terms ;)

(She also gave me a blog award back in December, so it's nice to be able to reciprocate the honour)

Emi Koyama's Eminism is more of a website than a blog really, but does contain a blog (even if it isn't posted to often), and needs inclusion simply because of the awesome way that ze interconnects discourses on transsexual, transgender and intersex issues, disability issues, fat acceptance, postcolonial economics, and feminist sex education (among other things i've probably forgotten) into a complete, consistent and fully intersectional radical libertarian approach to embodiment. Cutting edge in every sense.

Larry Arnold aka Laurentius Rex is, AFAIK, the only other autism or disability rights blogger who i've actually met in real, 3-dimensional space. If i live to his age, then i would be very, very satisfied if at his age i am anything like him.

No Designation hasn't been posted to much recently, but is one of the better blogs i've managed to find on queer and/or trans issues that manages to intelligently yet readably write about the distinctions and interactions between gender and sexuality, while arguing for the abolition of all forms of gender- and sexuality-based discrimination, both overt and subtle.

Charles Johnson aka Rad Geek is about the only US-based political blog i can stand to read, and also probably the best defender i know of of the true meaning of libertarianism. There are issues (particularly economic ones) that i disagree with him on, but 90% of the time he writes incredibly powerful and passionate commentary that expresses my views far better than i could. And he's one of the very few non-disabled blogger/activists i can think of who care about disability issues.

Elizabeth McClung's blog Screw Bronze! is one of the most raw, powerful and moving blogs out there, while getting wickedly dark humour out of even the most harrowing of situations... and she writes posts averaging over 100 words every day, even while on an awesome culture-packed trip to Japan. She has made me laugh, she has made me cry, and, generally, she fucking rocks.

Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy blogs on subjects as diverse as BDSM, disability rights and sex-positive feminism, and manages to tie them all together with a passion for freedom and autonomy that is both highly intelligent and very sexy. If only we lived on the same continent... :( I also have to give props to her blog for being on LiveJournal and still looking better than those of many WordPress users ;)

Joel Smith's site This Way Of Life, including the blog NTs Are Weird, is one of many great autism advocacy sites. One of the things he is best at is connecting autism advocacy to the wider disability rights movement, and demolishing hierarchies of "functioning level" or diagnostic label within the autistic community, He's also one of very few Americans who properly understand, and both believe in and practice, the social model of disability, and one of the best at explaining it.

The brilliantly named Autistic Bitch From Hell's blog Whose Planet Is It Anyway? is another passionate, no-bullshit autism advocacy blog. There are things i disagree with her on (such as her support for Barack Obama), but she destroys curebie-ism and other forms of bigotry, and exposes the hypocrisy of much of the so-called "autism awareness movement", with devastating effectiveness...

(This list took me far longer to put together than i thought possible...)

Anyway. You are all Most Excellent. Now go name some other excellent blogs that i haven't yet heard of...

Technical issues prevent update...

I have a shitload of things to blog about, but for several reasons they're going to have to wait for a while...

Firstly, i came back from spending the weekend helping to run a temporary social centre (on which i will, hopefully, eventually report) to find that my hard drive had, apparently, died (first telling me, when trying to boot up, that there was some sort of error on drive C, and then not even getting to that stage, but stopping in the middle of a line of the stuff that briefly flashes up before the Windows loading screen appears). That hard drive contained all the photos I have ever taken with my digital camera (of which i have no backups), a fair amount of downloaded music that i don't have on CD, and several unfinished or nearly-finished blog posts. :(

I'm currently using a temporary computer for internet access, but am also incredibly busy at the moment as i'm in the process of moving house, and will need to get internet set up in the new place, which might be somewhat complicated, as i might not be able to get it in my own name due to financial history. As i have to be out of this house by the end of April (tho i'd prefer sooner), i probably won't have it properly set up until some time in May.

(I am getting a new computer, which my brother has given me, for the new house, but won't actually have it until i've moved in. Still, it's a strange coincidence that my old computer chose to die almost as soon as i was given a new one... i just hope that, when i go to see my brother next weekend (his birthday is the day after mine, the 27th and 26th respectfully), he being the computer expert that he is will be able to recover the data from my old hard drive and transfer it onto the new one... ie, i'm hoping that it's just some Windows files that have been damaged by whatever disk corruption happened, and My Documents is still salvageable...)

Lastcrazyhorn gave me a blog award, which requires me to pass it on to 10 other blogs, which i will do as soon as i manage to get enough time to think of who to pick and why... but a big thankyou for picking me, and i will pass it on when i get the chance to... :)

I'm also thinking about possibly changing the look of my blog - among other things, i'm not happy with how narrow the column of text appears when viewed on larger monitors (which i didn't realise while using my old computer, which has a small, old, crappy one), and a visually impaired friend who uses screen-enlarging software told me she found it hard to read because white text on black "dazzles" her. (I chose the white-on-black template because i had heard that light-on-dark is easier for VI accessibility, but some people on Ouch have complained about the light-on-dark colour scheme there recently, so i presume that that info, wherever it came from, is false...) I'm not sure, however, what i want to change it *to*, so suggestions welcome...

Anyway, i'm off to London tomorrow for what might be the first major disability-themed direct action in the UK for several years... and which, hopefully, i'll be able to report on... and i will be posting "proper" blog posts (a substantial backlog, if i get my data back) as soon as i can...

Autscape

Autscape is a three day conference organised by and for autistic people. There are workshops, leisure activities, social opportunities, and more, all specifically oriented to the needs and preferences of autistic people.

I really, really want to go to this conference. Just about everything about it looks utterly awesome. I really don't know if i will be able to afford £155 (which is the lowest rate, for people on state benefits or similar low incomes), tho...

I almost can't imagine what it would be like to be in an environment in which almost everyone is autistic. While i have met quite a lot of people on the spectrum in my life, and sort-of-know a few other autistic disability activists in the UK (one of whom is apparently one of the people behind this), and of course i "know" lots of autistic people online through blogs and forums, i don't in fact really know (at least not to actually regularly talk to or spend time with) any other autistic people in "real life", and it's a definite hole in my life.

(One of my closest friends, who might possibly also be going to Autscape, and who actually now works for the National Autistic Society, has some autistic/AS-like traits, but probably not enough for an actual diagnosis... although enough for her to "get" me in ways that nearly all neurotypical people don't - i suppose perhaps she fits into that "shadow syndrome" kind of category... or a "Half-Aspie" as i kind of jokingly call her, as her dad was, while undiagnosed, almost certainly an Aspie, but her mum seems to be pretty neurotypical... but she's still far, far more able to fit into the neurotypical world than i am, and i would really love to become closer friends with some other actually, unambiguously autistic people... the majority of the rest of my close friends have physical impairments, but i don't really know how coincidental or otherwise that is - while i definitely seek out disabled people, i don't think i particularly seek out those with physical impairments over those with mental...)

The deadline for submitting proposals for workshops or presentations is the 11th of April, which is this coming Friday... which is really annoying, because i would really love to propose one on the relationship between the (impairment-specific) autism rights movement and the wider (cross-impairment) disability rights movement... but i've got no chance of putting together a proposal by Friday, and in any case i don't know if i'd have the confidence, even in a primarily autistic environment (and i don't even know whether that would increase or decrease my confidence) to do a workshop/presentation myself... plus i'd probably want it to be something like a panel discussion type thing, which would involve others being involved in it as a collaboration... still, they have an email address and a discussion list for "if you are not interested in doing a presentation yourself, but have ideas for workshop or discussion topics", so i might email them...

I don't know whether to go to Autscape would be some sort of massive, emotional "homecoming" experience, or whether in a mostly-autistic environment i would have less communication/understanding problems than in a mostly-neurotypical one, or whether in fact they would remain the same... still, i'm quite unreasonably excited by how awesome, for example, the coloured badges idea is*, and the whole idea of spending a weekend somewhere where i'm the majority neurological type... while i'm not that into impairment-specific identity (i prefer to identify across impairment boundaries in solidarity with all disabled people), i think i still do have that attraction to the idea of being among "my kind", problematic as that concept is...

* I have a really vague idea that this might actually be an adaptation of something that originated from the gay club scene, and had to do with sexual availability... but i'm not sure... i think i remember an event held at my uni for something like HIV awareness called the "Traffic Light Ball" that was based on this idea... anyway, wherever it comes from, it's IMO a brilliant idea, and perfectly repurposed if it was repurposed...

The theme of "Inertia and Action" is one that is particularly appropriate for me right now as well, being all too familiar with the kind of inertia problems that Amanda (of Ballastexistenz) describes one type of very well here, but also believing passionately in the need for action (in all senses of the word!) for disability rights and liberation, as well as all other forms of radical social change...

Would be really interested to hear from anyone who went to Autscape last or a previous year, and what kind of experience they had...

Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy #1

The first Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy is here. Absolutely loads of awesome posts (many of which i know i agree with, a few i know i disagree with, and quite a lot that i need to think a whole lot more about) - i haven't even read through them all yet, but they cover topics like sex work, porn and anti-porn, BDSM, sexual orientation and presumptions about it, transsexuality, and more... there are loads on topics (such as the relationship between radical feminism, sex work, and Marxist concepts of exploitation) that i need to write about, if and when i can get my writing head together enough to do so...

(I'd love to write something bringing disability into it for the second one, if there is going to be a second one...)