Aspie Quiz

So, there is an "Aspie Quiz" here...

After filling in the information they wanted from me (year and month of birth, "biological gender", the answers "No", "Suspect/self-diagnosed" or "Professional diagnosis" for a number of neurological or psychiatric diagnoses, country, ethnic ancestry, whether i grew up in my biological family, and (very approximate) income band of myself and my parents) and answering the quiz as honestly as i could, i got this result:



and the comment "You are very likely an Aspie"...

(i presume that the results and the comment recieved afterwards are not influenced by the diagnostic information submitted beforehand, and that the correlation between people's diagnoses and their scores on the quiz are what is being researched here...)

Someone on a disability forum, who has a physical impairment but, supposedly, not AS, described hirself as "freaked" by how similar hir scores were to mine. I'm still trying to work out whether that's indicative of inter-impairment prejudice or of distrust of the quiz's accuracy... however, i couldn't help responding with the chant from Tod Browning's Freaks:

Gooble gobble, gooble gobble
We accept you, we accept you
Gooble gobble, gooble gobble
One of us, one of us... ;)

The questions of the quiz were something of a mixed bag: the quiz states "Some of the questions in this quiz are phrased so that an Aspie answer is 'yes,' some so that an Aspie answer is 'no.' A few of the questions may be pure research questions that may or may not be connected to autism spectrum." Most were easy enough for me to work out whether the "stereotypical Aspie" answer would be "yes" or "no", although some seemed very random. Quite a few started with "Do others think you are..." or "Do people say (x) about you?", which, although they did refer to things often said or thought about autistic people, is potentially problematic because, essentially, it's evaluating non-autistic people's assumptions about autistic people rather than autistic people themselves.

Some i found interesting or odd:

Are you gracious about criticism, correction and direction?
I couldn't really even work out what "gracious" in this context could mean; therefore, i answered "don't know"...

Do you have difficulties judging distances, height, depth or speed?
This was one where i couldn't work out whether the "Aspie answer" would be yes or no. I'm generally pretty good at judging this kind of stuff, although i've never really tried to judge speed.

Do you dislike it when people stamp their foot in the floor?
Do you enjoy walking on your toes?
Do you enjoy watching rodeo-riders?
Do you feel good in mist or fog?
Do you enjoy digging?
Do you enjoy lying on the ground looking at the sky?
Do you sometimes have an urge to jump over things?
and quite a few other, similar questions about fairly specific physical activities or sensations, that i wasn't really able to identify as autism-related or not... also in a lot of cases things that would be affected quite a lot by whether people have physical impairments, as well as potentially by cultural/upbringing issues (they remind me of the sort of questions that often come up in gender identity quizzes, which seem to me to have more to do with social roles than anything inherent to a person)...

Do you have a poor sense of how much pressure to apply when doing things with your hands?
Again, one i wasn't sure how to answer, or what relevance it had to autism (dyspraxia, quite possibly, but, oddly, dyspraxia wasn't one of the diagnoses in the pre-quiz checklist).

Do you have a habit of repeating your own or others' last words, internally or out loud (echolalia)?
This isn't quite what i understood echolalia to mean - i had thought it meant speaking in memorised/mimicked phrases rather than words chosen spontaneously (rather as parrots are thought to). (I have met at least two people with "low-functioning autism" labels whose only verbal communication was phrases heard and memorised from films/TV programmes... one roughly 12 year old kid used to repeat "Heil Hitler!" (presumably taken from some WWII film) while with his (black) carer, which was... kind of scary, although i don't think he knew what it meant). Wikipedia, however, recognises both "immediate echolalia" (the quiz's definition) and "delayed echolalia" (my definition)... but putting merely (echolalia) after a brief description of immediate echolalia seems, IMO, a bit misleading.

(It's also interesting to note that, by Wikipedia's definition of immediate echolalia, it's something i've often heard neurotypical people do, particularly in public debate/interrogation contexts, without thinking of it as echolalia.)

Are you hypo- or hypersensitive to physical pain, or even enjoy some types of pain?
Hmmm, possible link between AS and masochism? Also interesting in the context of much supposedly "self-injurious" behaviour and its pathologisation...

Do you mistake noises for voices?
I do, but had never thought of that as an AS thing...

Do you tend to look a lot at people you like and little or not at all at people you dislike?
Again, not sure if the "AS" answer is yes or no for this one...

Do you wobble your hand slightly to indicate so-so?
Eh? Again kind of confused by this one - presumably he's refering to a common gesture, either among Aspies or among neurotypicals, but i can't visualise it (or really know what "so-so" means) - then again, the creator of this quiz, Leif Ekblad, is seemingly from Sweden, so it might be a culturally specific (non-UK) thing...

Are you sometimes fearless in situations that can be dangerous?
Are you sometimes afraid in safe situations?
I've often observed that i am afraid of huge numbers of things that nearly everyone isn't afraid of, yet not at all afraid of nearly all the stereotypical "things that everyone is afraid of" (creatures like snakes or spiders, walking alone at night, etc).

Has it been harder for you to make it on your own, than it seems to be for most others of the same age?
That one was a very hard one for me to answer - if you asked me it at 17, the answer would be a resounding "no", as i was living on my own, lying about my age to rent from a landlord, while juggling part-time jobs, blagging the benefit system and doing A-levels at that time, but now that i'm 25, with a first-class degree, but unable to get any sort of job or (often) make ends meet, and probably with less social and relationship experience than most 17 year olds, i'd probably have to say "yes"... but the tense of the question makes it very difficult for me to answer "correctly"...

Do you often don't know where to put your arms?
I found this one amusing in the light of Do you feel an urge to correct people with accurate facts, numbers, spelling, grammar etc., when they get something wrong? ;) (probably due to the person who wrote it most likely having English as a second language, tho)

Another potential problem with the quiz (and something that might make a neurotypical person (with a few mild Aspie-ish traits)'s score very similar to an unquestionably autistic person's) is the answering system, where for each question you have to check the box for either "don't know", "no/never", "a little" or "yes/often". Each person's definition of "a little" or "often" will vary, and people with the same actual frequency of a trait or behaviour might check different boxes according to their interpretation of language, while conversely people with very different actual frequencies might check the same box.

I also don't really understand the labels like "talent" and "hunting" around the edges of the image (or what the spider-web graph actually means, and why that presentation was chosen, rather than, say, a system of percentages)...

However, the thing that i find most suspicious about this research is that an assumption is that "autism" and "Asperger's" are separate diagnoses, and this quiz is specifically aimed at "Aspies", rather than autistic people. The autism/Asperger's distinction, like the "high functioning"/"low functioning" distinction, is one which is based on highly arbitrary criteria, not meaningfully upheld by any evidence, and is most often used within the autism community as a "divide and rule" tactic (often accompanied by some form or other of separatism). Sadly this is very prevalent among online autistic writers, particularly those who want to argue that (their type of) autism is not a "disability" (even articles like this one, while ostensibly about discrediting arbitrary distinctions between "Asperger's" and "autism", still use the "functioning level" concept normatively, and try to marginalise or deny the lived realities of those labelled "low functioning") (and it's also worth noting that those who try to argue that autism "is not necessarily a disability" often have unexamined negative attitudes to disabilities/impairments other than autism, and their choice of language betrays their lack of understanding of the social model of disability).

The site on which the quiz is hosted is also the home of the Neanderthal theory (which seems to use some information gathered from the Aspie quiz), which IMO is scientifically dodgy for several reasons, most notably its assumption that autism is more prevalent in people of European ancestry (while autism diagnosis rates are certainly higher in people of European ancestry, that can just as if not more plausibly be blamed on culturally specific diagnostic criteria and the fact that the concepts of "autism" and "Asperger's" as diagnoses/descriptions, as opposed to the conditions/phenotypes themselves, originate in Western European medical discourse), and also the idea that Homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis was "cold-adapted" and H. s. sapiens "warm-adapted", so therefore "autistic people being more cold-adapted" than non-autistic people" is evidence for autism coming from Neanderthal ancestry, when i'm an autistic person from Western Europe and i'm significantly less "cold-adapted" than any neurotypical person i know - in fact, my build, metabolism and sensory perceptions all point to me being adapted, if anything, to a hot, dry, semi-desert climate... which is the climate H. s. sapiens evolved in (and other things about me, like my unusually gracile skeleton for a male human, are the exact opposite of H. (s.) neanderthalensis)...

It also embraces some of the racist bullshit theories about Africans being on average "less intelligent" and "more sexually active" than Europeans and other races, which have recently been brought back into the limelight by Dr James Watson, but which are (much like the autism/Asperger's distinction, in fact) based pretty much entirely on arbitrarily defined cultural factors and not on any truly scientific evidence (although i think there is a biodiversity/disability-rights based argument that it shouldn't make a difference for true egalitarians if one "race" was in fact "less intelligent" than another... but that's for another post)

(There is significant evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans did interbreed with each other, and i'm willing to accept that, if Neanderthals (or any other archaic human (sub)species) were alive today, then, by H. s. sapiens standards, they almost certainly wouldn't be neurotypical... but that's also for another post...)

The site also has a large link list to other Asperger's/autism sites, several of which (such as Aspies for Freedom) arguably promote functioning-label hierarchies and/or Aspergian separatism (although it also links to plenty of others, such as Ballastexistenz and Laurentius Rex who very explicitly don't).

I get a bit nervous about labelling Aspie sites as "separatist", because it's often more complex than that, and the separatism is often unconscious or not fully explicitly stated (in which there's probably an irony), and it can be a bit of a straw man (rather like the "radical feminists think all penetrative sex is oppression" straw man), but the trouble with straw men is that, once set up, they have a tendency to become "real"... I'm not going to state definitively that i think Lief Ekblad is prejudiced against "non-Aspie" autistics, or that he's a separatist, but i do think there are some rather arbitrary and unsupported distinctions in his research and his theory that can lead to separatism and/or the construction of hierarchies of impairment which contribute to divide and rule tactics.

I think there is (or can be) value in these kinds of research quizzes, both for the person taking the "test" and for the researcher, but i think it's always important to be critical and analytical of both the answers and the questions...

There is no good reason for screwing around with people's biorhythms.

So... why the fuck do "we" ("we" here meaning "our" governments, of course, rather than, y'know, actual, rational-thinking people) insist on putting the clocks back, and doing just that?

Daylight Savings Time Worse Than Previously Thought

In the UK, the clocks went back by an hour on Saturday night (or Sunday morning, depending on your perspective). I don't mind it when the clocks go forward in spring, but it always feels like a particularly cruel slap in the face for me when the clocks go back in autumn - it makes the bad-enough-already effects of living on this bipolar planet even worse, rubbing it into the face of every single seasonally depressive person that winter's coming.

The so-called rationale behind changing the time zone twice a year has never made any sense to me - supposedly "saving" daylight in the summer, when there is more of it anyway, and then taking it away again in the winter, when there is already least of it in most people's waking day? That looks like a particularly cruel application of capitalism's "he that has shall be given more, and he that has not, even what he has will be taken away" philosophy - like deliberately exaggerating a seasonal pattern of change which is already documented to cause depression to not just a minority, but pretty much everyone.

If i was in charge, i would make the clocks go forward in winter, which would, for the vast majority of people in the UK, make winter more bearable - after all, i would estimate that over 90% of people are either asleep or at work at the time of morning when changing the clocks makes a difference, while the vast majority of those people are likely to be awake and not at work in the early evening when they would get daylight if things went the other way - meaning that it would be possible to do things like gardening after work. (I won't even try to critique the concept of the 9-5 working day here, otherwise this post would end up dissertation length...)

However, really, why change the clocks at all? As John J. Miller says:

There is simply no way to "save daylight." People can spin the hands of their clocks like roulette wheels, but come Monday here in Washington, D.C., we're still going to have sunshine for about 12 hours and 45 minutes. The sun can rise at a time of day we call dawn or Howdy Doody Time or whatever — but the stubborn facts of astronomy are at work here and they can't be wished away.

(Oddly, pretty much everything i can find on the net in terms of comment about this issue is American - there seems to be virtually nothing from the UK...)

Changing anything arbitraily causes distress to people, like many autistic people, who find it difficult to adapt to changes in their routines. (As someone who feels a strong need to always know what the time is, i get severely confused and stressed trying to change the time display on my phone, which functions as my watch.) People with other cognitive disabilities are also likely to be confused by the irrational and unnecessary change (potentially leading to them being punished for turning up to work, doctor's appointments, etc at the wrong time). People who need to take medication at regular times, especially if they need assistance to do so but their PAs/staff are employed with contract hours according to the "official" clock, could face potentially highly dangerous consequences - so this is a disability discrimination issue...

Some people say that they prefer to get up when it is light in the morning - for me, it makes absolutely no difference, because it takes me at least 2 hours after waking up to be capable of even noticing, let alone caring about, anything outside of my bedroom curtains. (I often don't even bother opening my curtains at all in the winter - in fact, in winter i would prefer to live in a room without a window...)

Also, the often unexaminedly-stated assertion that changing the time zone somehow benefits farmers is complete bollocks - what time humans decide to call it has absolutely no effect on animals or crops (although, in the case of animals such as dairy cows, the animals themselves are distressed and disrupted by the time change). And all the supposed "energy-saving" benefits that are gained in the summer are necessarily equally lost in the winter or vice versa. The only people in any way connected with farming who could possibly benefit from it are the big businesses with whom, in a capitalist society, farmers are forced to deal with to sell their produce.

Thankfully, there actually is a campaign against changing the time - at least, in the US (whether there is one in the UK i don't know, but if there is i'd like to join it)...

This has kind of got me thinking about how it could be interpreted in the context of the industrial/capitalist concept of work and the work/leisure dichotomy, and how increasing people's available working-for-money time is seen as a valid goal, whereas increasing people's available "leisure" time is not... but i don't really even know where to start researching on that (potentially huge) subject...

Ironically, i thought that one possible good consequence of the clocks going back would be to adjust my current sleeping/waking pattern to something somewhat closer to that of the "standard" working day (alleviating my Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder - hmmm, i wonder how many other disorders i can find out i have from Wikipedia) - but i think the confusion and stress has actually made it worse - today i woke up at 2pm (or 3pm British summer time), the latest by an hour i've woken up so far this year... :(

Tomatoes!

So last week i harvested the first crop of fruit from the tomato plants that i grew from seed this year:



The varieties of tomato i grew were "unregistered" varieties, which means that it's actually illegal to sell them in the EU, simply because they are not on the official EU plant variety register (which of course costs money to put a variety on). In protest against this law, which effectively gives the EU a monopoly over food plant biodiversity, and to preserve such varieties (which are almost always better tasting and more nutritious than "mainstream" fruit and veg varieties), various organisations such as organic gardening centres in the UK (and, i presume, other places in the EU) offer ways to get round the ban, such as "seed exchange" events where seeds are swapped for other seeds or given away free, or membership clubs in which people can pay a yearly membership fee and be able to get X number of seed packets a year "free" (a very similar tactic to that used by legally rented social centres to get round alcohol licensing costs by being "private members' clubs").

I believe it's also possible to get hold of unregistered seed varieties by ordering them from outside the EU (there are quite a few US-based seed catalogue websites which offer payment in UK£ and stock loads of unusual varieties of stuff). Most unregistered varieties are heirloom varieties.

I got these ones from a seed exchange at a weekend of events in Nottingham called "Spring Into Action" (organised by the East Midlands neighbourhood of the Camp for Climate Action) - i believe the seeds originated from Ryton Organic Gardens near Coventry (formerly HDRA... yeah, i love the linguistic resonance with hydra)...

The red ones in the above picture are a variety called "Darby Striped", which actually looked more striped when they were green:



(pic of Darby Striped tomato plant about a month ago)

The pale yellow ones are a variety called "Ivory Egg", which didn't have a description on the packet when i picked them (i actually picked them because of the unusualness of the name). As you can see, they somewhat live up to the name (although again, there are some green ones still on the plant that look more unusual)...



(again taken about a month ago; some of the ones still on the plant and not ripened yet are now quite a lot bigger than the ones in the top photo)

I also grew a couple of plants of a beefsteak variety called "Yellow Brandywine", but those haven't produced much fruit (i think the flowers might have had pollination problems)... in the photos further down of the plants, those are the ones with the "potato-like" leaves.

These tomatoes are from plants that were grown in a polytunnel on a friend's allotment. I also had 6 plants in pots at home, which grew much taller and much bigger leaves than the ones in the polytunnel, but their fruits haven't ripened. As it's now getting too cold for tomatoes to ripen on the plant, i've taken quite a few of the green ones off and put them in bowls on my windowsill with some (bought) ripe tomatoes and bananas (which apparently encourage green tomatoes to ripen):



The process of indoor ripening is supposed to take about 2 weeks, but as you can see a couple of the tomatoes in the window have turned red already, although the rest of them show no indication of changing colour as yet...

I seem to have the same problem every time i try to grow tomatoes - plants which grow huge and very healthy-looking, but take a very long time to flower and fruit, and don't manage to produce much ripe fruit before the weather gets too cold for them. (I think it was made worse this year by the incredibly wet and cloudy summer.)

Here are the plants in my garden, at their healthiest looking:





(at the time those pics were taken, the tallest plant was about 5'6", including the height of the pot - 3 of them ended up reaching over 6')

The ones in the polytunnel, which didn't grow as big (4' approx), but produced bigger fruit:



Some photos of the tomato plants at earlier stages in their development:



Seedlings a couple of days after germination (leek seedlings and part of the leaf of a runner bean plant can also be seen). I germinated about 50 tomato plants, and gave away all but 15 after potting up into the first pots (although i was kind of dismayed to visit one friend i had given some to a couple of months later, when my plants were in 12" pots and had started flowering, to find hers still in the soup/yoghurt pots i first put them in, with no chance of getting flowers or fruit out of them).



One seedling which had 3 "seed leaves" instead of 2. Sadly it didn't grow into a new, 50%-more-productive mutant breed of "threemato" (its mature leaf arrangement was normal; i think it ended up in the polytunnel) ;)



The same plant a couple of weeks later, at the "yoghurt pot" stage

If i grow tomatoes next year, i think i'll have to a) sow the seeds earlier on (March maybe rather than April) and b) pot them up into small pots as soon as they reach the 2-leaf stage, rather than waiting for them to grow in the seed tray (as they just "sat there" in the seed tray at the 2-leaf stage for about a month before i potted them up, then almost immediately started growing). Maybe they inherited some of my executive dysfunction ;)

I've always felt a real connection with plants (i possibly blame Alan Moore's Swamp Thing); growing them from seed to fruit is a real buzz, and the allotment project i'm involved with is probably among the most positive things currently in my life... yeah, i'm a hippy ;)

(The plants have also given me an opportunity to practice my photography...)

Random crazy tomato factoids:

- Tomatoes were once believed to be poisonous, and to be the "apple" from the Garden of Eden.

- According to Wikipedia, the world's biggest tomato tree has a harvest of more than 32,000 tomatoes and a total weight of 1,151.84 pounds :o (Presumably this is a perennial tomato variety, which could have really interesting implications for permaculture...)

- The Soviet regime in Russia (partly influenced by their... unorthodox, ideology-"informed" approach to the theory of evolution) experimented with trying to grow varieties of plant crops that would resist very cold climates. A result of this was the Russian black tomato varieties, one of which was named after Paul Robeson, who was regarded as a hero by the Soviet regime (if they really are cold-resistant, maybe i should try to get hold of some of those for next year...)

This is what happens to disabled people in hospitals in this country

Words fail me.

What the fuck is this, Soviet Russia?

A gender quiz that actually gets me sort of right :o

"Should you be MALE or FEMALE?"

You scored as a Neither
You think neither like a man nor like a woman. What you are you may decide for yourself. Most people will consider you strange, alien, weird or funny. You are probably quite interesting.
Neither
68%
Male
46%
Female
43%
Either
39%

Some of the questions are kind of... odd, though. You like to sit on the left rather than the right side of a cinema / bus / etc. - how the hell does which side you sit on relate to your gender identity? Surely it depends on the configuration of the individual bus, cinema or whatever, and on all sorts of very small-scale individual preferences? You find it easiest to read maps by turning them into the direction you are going - i guess that's based on the stereotype of women being unable top read maps, but i can't really see its actual relevance. You are good at imitating Animal voices - wtf?

And then there were the ones which i am fairly sure i picked the "male" answers for, only not because i am male but because i am autistic, and there is the bizarrely prevalent (and IMO utterly scientifically unsupported) idea that autistic people have somehow "ultra-male" brains, leading to stereotypically "autistic" traits overlapping with stereotypically "male" traits - eg Your best friend is your computer, When you think of people coming to see you you feel sick, and You hate talking to strangers but don't have any friends either (I actually laughed out loud at that one... I have a dark sense of humour)...

Then there is the brilliant You agree with the concept of hierachy (sic) - so, one or other of the genders are natural anarchists? I'd love to know which one they think it is...

You think this quiz is quite superfluous amused me, tho... i guess that might have been one of the key ones to answer "Agree" to in order to get rated "Neither"... ;)

Neithers of the world disunite ;)

Money money money, it's the root of all evil

Right now i'm feeling despairing because i seem to be trapped in a situation of poverty that i can't find any way out of...

I am living on Jobseeker's Allowance (a total of £59 per week, paid every 2 weeks) and about £33 a week housing benefit. That £33 is supposed to cover my rent, but in fact it only covers approximately 2/3 of it - my rent is £208.33 (a third of the rent for the house, £650) per month, which comes out to approximately £50 per week - which is very cheap for the area i'm living in, and is the same amount of money i was paying for the (roughly equivalent quality) accommodation i was living in in 1999. The reason the council assessed the amount of HB i was to get as £33 is because they assessed the "market rent value" of the house (without actually sending a rent officer to visit the house) as £450. There is absolutely no way that anyone would be able to find a privately rented house of comparable size to this one in this area for £450 - in 4 months of looking, the cheapest house we found was £625 (which had a lot of disadvantages compared to this one at £650). I had to blag a fake job reference from a friend of a friend's company to get past the estate agent's credit checks, because of the absolute unwillingness of any estate agent in the area to take clients on housing benefit.

Total income of £92 per week minus approx £50 per week rent leaves me with round about £40 per week for all of my living costs. I can and have lived on that amount relatively easily before, but i seem to be having trouble now. I think at least in part it's because over the spring and summer of this year i went to quite a few demonstrations, activist gatherings and events such as Climate Camp, all of which cost money for travel, plus fairly regular (maybe every 2 weeks) visits to a friend who lives a £6.50 train journey away (I have managed to jump the train a few times, but after the cumulative psychological effects of threats of arrest and violence from ticket inspectors i don't really feel willing to do that any more, except on the particular trains which i know don't have inspectors, which is only the last train at night, which as the single train fare is almost as much as the return doesn't help me much). Last month i was stupid enough to buy a couple of books from Amazon, which i think, together with the cumulative impact of the travel costs, was probably what tipped me over from having just enough to pay my rent to not having enough, meaning i had to owe my housemate until next benefit day...

I thought that, as my benefits happen to get paid at roughly the same time fortnightly, and there were 3 "giro" days in October, that this month i would be OK - but somehow i'm not, and i'm either going to have to borrow money from somewhere (and i don't know where, because i have pretty much exhausted all the friends i could possibly borrow money off - i already owe about £800 to various friends, £400 of which is to one person who i've owed since 2004, and probably something in the region of a couple of grand to my parents, although i haven't really kept track of that, and don't know whether they'll ever really ask for it back) or do the same again - but if i do the same again, i'll never be able to get back on track with the monthly money cycle, because there's just no possibility at all of me saving the £80 or so necessary in a month.

I don't exactly want to be unemployed - i guess i've just pretty much despaired of finding a job. In smaller towns i've lived in, i was able to get... not quite continuous, but regular-enough-to-pay-the-bills temp work, and while it was mind-numbingly alienating, exhausting and generally horrible work (sweeping the floors of factories or stacking rusty metal on pallets, for example), i could at least afford my living costs. Since moving to Birmingham just over a year ago (a move partly motivated by thinking work might be easier to find in a big city), i've attempted to register with temp agencies, but had no work offers whatsoever.

I've applied for "permanent" jobs which i felt myself to be amply qualified for, but had no replies whatsoever, even when the employer advertised the "Two Ticks" scheme (under which any applicant with a disability who meets the qualifications for the job is supposed to be guaranteed an interview). Other jobs, which i am reasonably confident i would be able to actually do, have "person specifications" worded in such a way (usually referring to neurotypical social skills, which would not actually be regarded as essential for the job in any open-minded approach to logic) that it would be impossible for me to truthfully answer the questions on the application forms in such a way as to meet the specification.

I won't even go into details on the scheme "for getting disabled people into employment" which the council led me to believe was an alternative route into a job to application/interview, by doing a short unpaid work placement, but actually turned out to be an unpaid work placement doing the boring bits of someone else's work, just for the sake of it (suffice to say i didn't take up the offer)...

And, of course, there are all my anarchist, feminist and ecological critiques of the nature of "work" under capitalism, which i could probably write a dissertation on if i had the concentration and access to all the books i would need to reference...

There's nothing additional i can get under the benefit system either. Unlike a friend who has just been put on it, i seem to have managed to avoid the Employment Zones programme (possibly by virtue of having a Disability Employment Advisor), but the nature of my disability is such that i have pretty much no chance of getting Disability Living Allowance (DLA), because that gets awarded depending on how much assistance you "need" (or, more accurately, are assessed as "needing" by someone with often no real understanding of your actual needs), and, well, with my impairment there isn't really anything that anyone could be paid to "assist" me with. There would be no point in me going on Incapacity Benefit because for me, as someone who hasn't worked enough to build up National Insurance contributions, it would be on exactly the same rate as JSA. After attempting to appeal against not getting my full rent awarded in Housing Benefit, i was given a "discretionary" payment to make it up for 3 months, but only for 3 months because that would apparently give me time to "bargain with my landlord or find a cheaper place" - the first of which bears no relationship to anything resembling reality whatsoever, and as for the second, the likelihood of finding anywhere cheaper is slim to none, and moving would be an upheaval that, right now, i just wouldn't be able to face again...

What i've been saying i really want to do with my life for about the past 2 years is to go to Leeds University to do the MA in Disability Studies, followed if possible with a PhD (probably focusing on disability, labour and employment - a radical deconstruction possibly involving what "work" would look like in my utopian post-capitalist society). I have the academic qualifications to get there (a first class degree, undeserved in my own opinion though that might have been, in Politics with International Studies from the University of Warwick), but no way that i know of to get the funding. (I have been procrastinating for nearly a year over actually contacting the Centre for Disability Studies and asking what funding possibilities might be available...)

Getting back to immediate stuff, I have already got into conflicts with my housemates (which can only get worse over the winter) over having the heating on when "we" (read: me) can't afford the gas bills, when my sensory sensitivities (which i've sort of told my housemates about, but not fully, because i'm not "out" to them about my impairment) mean that i find it utterly unbearable, to the point of feeling suicidal, if the temperature goes below my comfort level (and i would be perfectly willing to pay the whole heating bill by myself, if i could safford it)...

I really, really want to go to the Anarchist Bookfair in London this weekend (both because of the actual books and because several people who i've lost touch with but would really like to get back in touch with are very likely to be there), but can't afford even the train fare.

I got an email from a fellow crip activist a few days ago replying to my question as to whether she was going to the upcoming DAN gathering, saying that, because her DLA had been reduced (resulting in her losing housing benefit), she can't afford to leave her house for anything that doesn't pay travel expenses until February. (I'm trying to sort out a lift for her from the fellow activist i'm getting driven down by.) Why the fuck do we have to live like this?

The cruel irony is that the disability movement doesn't have the resources to organise to campaign against such enforced poverty, because most of us are living in poverty... and then there's the vexed question of how to integrate an anarchist desire for a world with neither states nor money, with having to be supported by the welfare state...

This post doesn't really have a conclusion, unfortunately. I might be able to sort my life out if it did...

Some thoughts on feminism and transsexuality

I just found this post written by Amananta of Screaming Into The Void called "Radical Feminism and the Transgendered, or, how to write a post that will infuriate everyone". I was going to comment on it, but it's over a year old and Amananta seems to have closed comments on her blog, so, as i've been meaning to get my thoughts into a coherent form on a lot of this stuff for a while, i'm responding to it in this blog instead...

Amananta is a radical feminist whose partner is (or was at the time of writing) a transwoman, which is in itself pretty fucking sound, given the transphobia found in far too much radical feminism... and she says exactly the same thing about transphobic people-who-call-themselves-feminists in reference to her partner that i do in reference to my transwoman best friend, which is instant respect from me :)

However, there's some stuff in her post that i think needs a response/clarification...

Amananta writes:

But in other ways, many transgendered people fall prey to patriarchal ideas and attitudes, just as many non-transgendered people do. FTMs in particular seem so anxious to identify themselves as men that they sometimes throw out sexist stereotypes or behave in a very anti-feminist way, perhaps in order to prove they are “one of the boys”. I have seen the very good point made that of course FTMs have “gender dysphoria” - and so do almost all other women, because our culture, as a whole, hates and reviles women and femininity. What woman doesn’t hate being female for at least part of her life? Where is the line between really feeling you should have been born a man and wishing you had the privileges accorded to men in our society?

First sentence - very true, indeed arguably inevitably so. Second sentence - not true of any of the FTMs i've encountered, although admittedly i've only really encountered FTMs in fairly "liberated" (or at least allegedly so) online communities, where gender stuff tends to get pretty radically deconstructed (even if "mainstream" assumptions about disability don't... but that's another topic, one i don't really have the strength to write about, and indeed am actively avoiding by writing about this, right now). Rest of the paragraph - also a lot of truth there.

However - what it neglects is embodiment. Transsexuals don't just have a problem with the gender roles society forces them from childhood to live in (I have, and always have had, a pretty fucking profound problem with the male gender role that i'm "supposed", because of my embodiment, to live in - but i'm not a transsexual) - they have a problem with the actual body they are living in. They actually have something analogous to the chemical-imbalance type of clinical depression [which, i hope i don't need to say but probably do, is emphatically not a model that can be extended to cover all depression, but which genuinely does occur in a small percentage of cases - i'm going to return to this in another post], but the chemical imbalance is directly caused by having the "wrong" sex hormones, produced by the "wrong" set of genitals - and i have seen that depression, which in my friend's case was lifelong and suicidal, "cured" almost instantly (and permanently, with no negative side effects), along with several physical problems, simply by taking "replacement" hormones.

I do not think these things [dichotomous gender role stuff] alone are at the root of transgenderism. But I think in some cases, these cultural attitudes have pushed people into surgery and other medical treatments because behaviors outside of the strictly gender normative are seen as, literally “sick”.

True, definitely - my trans friend believes very strongly that there are some people who transition for reasons other than actual hormonal/physiological gender dysphoria, and who probably "shouldn't" have transitioned physically. As a libertarian, however, i believe that those people, even if not "truly" transsexual, have the inalienable right to do to their own bodies whatever they like. However, in a society where there were no differentiated gender roles (which is (one aspect of) my ideal society), those people probably wouldn't feel the need to transition physically, whereas those who are "truly" transsexual, because of physical or hormonal factors, still would...

Since MTFs do not want to be male, they would like to imagine they can just toss male prvilege away along with their unwanted boy’s clothing.

The way i see this, they didn't really have it to start with. If you're traumatised to the point of near-constant suicidal feelings (and i'm not saying every MTF transsexual feels/felt this - but those who i know did) just by being something, then i can't really see how you can meaningfully derive "privilege" from it. There are some sort-of-advantages that i can see MTFs deriving from it (or rather from not having been subjected to some of the really nasty aspects of the brainwashing involved in being raised as a girl in Western culture), but i don't know if "privilege" is the right word for them, especially considering all the "anti-privileges" that they are weighed up against...

Furthermore, if you are a transgendered woman, no matter how badly you may want it, unless you were incredibly lucky you were not raised as a girl in this society. There are some experiences you will never have, and there are some things that will never quite match up between your experiences and those of girls who were raised as girls. I understand well this is a sore point for many transwomen, who feel they have missed out greatly on something very special, and maybe they have - but the fact remains that they did not have these experiences and many of the bonds between women who are born women are based on the assumption of shared experiences.

This is kind of the same point - as an example of the sort-of-advantages, the transwomen i know are very nearly the only women i know who don't have and have never had any kind of eating disorders, and who feel able to eat what (and as much as) they like without feeling guilt or worrying about "being fat". But my obvious response to this paragraph is - while i know where transwomen are coming from when they say they wish they were raised as girls, through the parallels i see with my own experience, as an undiagnosed autistic child, of being raised as if i was a kind of person i wasn't, without any kind of recognition or acceptance for the kind of person i actually was - well, IMO no one should be "raised as a girl", or for that matter "raised as a boy". Individual children should be raised as individual children, and gender should be utterly fucking immaterial in that...

(i'm tempted to misquote Bob Marley misquoting Haile Selassie here - until the shape of a child's genitals is no more significant than the colour of its eyes, there is war...)

I think some radical feminists need to quit the obnoxious practice of deliberately being hurtful by refusing to call transwomen “she” in order to prove their point, and try to respect the ways on which transwomen were born men but have voluntarily given up a lot of male privilege in choosing to take the path they have taken.

(If i ever met Janice Raymond, i would take great pleasure in referring to her with male pronouns, and calling "him" Raymond as if it were "his" first name... ;) )

For the reasons outlined above, i don't think "voluntarily given up... male privilege" is an accurate description. You might as well say that, by getting an Asperger's diagnosis at the age of 22, I "voluntarily gave up neurotypical privilege". Impairment (and IMO gender dysphoria is an impairment, or at least an aspect of embodiment and therefore in the same sort of class of entities as an impairment) isn't something chosen...

(of course this kind of relates back to the issues about chosen vs non-chosen aspects of self in my previous post about sexual orientation - within my moral framework, it really doesn't matter whether it's chosen or not... but in this "privilege" context, it seems to matter, if not to me then at least to a lot of people...)

I think some fabulous conversations about gender and society could take place between radical feminists and transwomen... Please - a little respect, a little listening. I don’t think this train is completely derailed as of yet. Divisiness hurts both of these movements, whereas together we can make a powerful indictment of the strict gender roles imposed on us by society.

Absolutely agreed on this one...

I'm going to invite Amananta (if i can find a way to message her) to respond to this response to her... i think there are a lot of parallels here with a lot of other issues, including (the one that instantly comes to mind) the social model of disability and its (alleged) disregarding of impairment, and the feminist response to that by such feminist disability theorists as Jenny Morris and Micheline Mason... but once again, one post has led me to about a dozen others that need to split off from it...

Feminists have more fun... maybe

Feminists have more satisfying relationships, apparently (found via Screaming Into The Void)

so, maybe there is some hope... ;)

(well, that's if you believe men can/are allowed to be feminists and if you believe heterosexual relationships are compatible with feminism... both of which are so contested that i really don't know which side i stand on them...)

Sex: not just about penetration (no, not even for heterosexuals)

This article says what i've been saying (to anyone who will listen) about sex for ages. Choice quotes:

News flash to all women, and men too. Penetration is not the Gold Standard (to use a much overused and overvalued phrase). It is not the sine qua of human sexuality, whether it is female sexuality, male sexuality or same-sex sexuality.

...

We rarely hear or read about men who are comfortable with sexuality and intimacy which does not rely on the erect penis. Men who are not particularly interested in sex, women who are very interested in sex and actively purse casual sexual encounters, couples who choose to include vaginal penetration sparingly or not at all. These beliefs and practices all can and often do incur personal risk of censure and punishment for those women and men. But such representations of different ways of enacting gendered sexuality are rarely given positive media space. Instead we continue to read about heterosexuality and particularly female sexuality as one which must always accommodate the penis.

(but read the whole thing, it puts its argument far better and more succinctly than i'd be capable of...)

As a "man" (tho i question that label, but more on that in a subsequent post) who actually doesn't particularly enjoy penetration, i love to come across [no pun intended] articles like this, because they basically affirm my existence (or at least, in one aspect of my life)...

Despite fitting (at the crudest, most simplistic possible level) into the category "heterosexual man", my sexuality is actually very, very far from the presumed norm for het male sexuality - in particular, it isn't centred around my penis. (What it is most probably centred around is the vulva of a hypothetical partner, which makes involuntary celibacy particularly frustrating for me, because there isn't really any workable "substitute" when sexuality is "other-centred" rather than "me-centred"...)

I can take or leave penetration (well, to be honest, with the one partner i have had, it didn't really "work" for either of us, although that probably had something to do with the impairment-related particularities of her body and the fact that we only tried the "standard" missionary-position penetration - looking back, i can think of other positions that might have worked better for us), i really don't like having my dick sucked, and i was (and still am) too disgusted by the idea of putting any part of my body into an anus to ever try it, but i really, really enjoy(ed) finger/vulva play and (especially) cunnilingus.

Of course, in mainstream culture that isn't really recognised as a possible, let alone desirable, male sexuality - talking about it leads only to jokey labels such as "lesbian in a man's body" (which, actually, might have some truth - but again more on that in a subsequent post) or to accusations about "being in denial", self-hatred, "needing to find the right woman", etc. Many men (in particular, tho also some women) seemingly don't want to believe in, or even feel threatened by the possible existence of, a man whose sexuality isn't penis-centred - it almost seems like some people's whole worlds would collapse if i told them that i would, in all likelihood, be completely happy with a relationship consisting (in sex-act terms) purely of fingering and cunnilingus, and with no penetration whatsoever. Such "abnormality", according to some, needs to be pathologised, given an "origin story" of sexual abuse or some other kind of trauma (the ever-awesome Trinity recently posted about similar assumptions being commonly made about BDSM here - it's really annoying that commenting on her blog is limited to people with Livejournals).

Of course, as Trinity seems to agree with me in thinking, IMO it actually doesn't matter whether any aspect of sexuality originates from trauma or not, as i argued in a previous post. But in my case, there really isn't any serious sexual trauma that i could possibly pinpoint as the cause of my deviation from "normal" het-male preferences, so i have to conclude that, well, that's just the way my brain's wired up. Not surprisingly, finding out about and getting diagnosed with AS helped me accept this, as well as several other gender/sexuality aspects of me, much more easily as part of my overall neurodiversity...

I think there is a possible link to BDSM (this bit's a bit hard to explain, so apologies if it doesn't make sense). I kind of identify with the term "submissive" (in its sexual context), but i'm not sure if what it means for me is quite the same as what it means in typical BDSM terms. For me what it means is that my sexuality is not centred around seeking pleasure, but around wanting to give another person pleasure (hence why seeing a prostitute or "escort" really wouldn't work for me to relieve sexual frustration - i would be on completely the "wrong end" of the transaction) - my biggest possible turn-on is getting someone else turned on. Mixed up with this is a strong, even if not completely intellectually justified, belief on an ethical level that the only ethically acceptable het sex is female-initiated, and an absolute horror of "being served" by anyone (in any context, not just a sexual one) - if there is to be a dichotomy of master/servant, i don't mind being the servant, but definitely don't want to be, or even think about being, the "master".



(image is a Hindu icon of Kali dancing triumphantly on the prostrate body of Shiva, which represents the tantric ideal of hetero relationships (ie F/m) believed in by Kali devotees)

I also kind of like the idea of being penetrated by a woman - using a dildo/strap-on/whatever - which some consider to be a kind of BDSM-ish idea, altho again i've never had the chance to try it...

A female friend once told me that she was embarrassed about "being a virgin" - despite the fact that she had had 2 serious sexual relationships with men, both involving plenty of tongue and finger action, just not penetration. (One was, in fact, with a man who had an actual "phobia" of pentration, at least according to the pathologising way his doctor viewed it - another example of a male who is/was "heterosexual", but not conforming to presumed norms of het-male sexuality.) I told her that, in my opinion, she wasn't a virgin - she had had sex, just not that one particular type of sex, and by that logic all lesbians (who had never "experimented" with men) would be virgins.

Following the link from the above article, i found Scarleteen - an utterly awesome "feminist sex education" website, which deconstructs precisely that idea of "virginity" here (as well as in many other great articles), and read through a huge chunk of it. I'm always really grateful, somehow, to find such websites, because they really seem to somehow affirm my existence as someone with a more "subtly" non-normative sexuality, and reassure me that there are other people in the world who see through the all-too-prevalent patriarchal/heteronormative view of sex and sexuality as the bullshit it is. Then, just as i was thinking that, i decided to search the site for "disability", and found this article - which reveals that at least one of the authors of the site is an Aspie! Awesomeness level going right off the scale...

I would desperately like to change the "mainstream" (at least here in the UK) attitude that sex = penetration. Britain has one of the worst rates in the developed world for unplanned pregnancies and for STDs, for which the state of sex education is (IMO, to at least some degree rightly) blamed, but the debate about all seems to be between the abstinence-is-best position and the proponents of various different forms of contraception (and all rooted in a pretty much exclusively heterosexual framework - ie, one which assumes, or seems to assume, heterosexuality is the only kind of sexuality that exists). I am absolutely convinced that the best possible tactic against unplanned pregnancies and (many, if not all) STDs is active promotion of non-penetrative forms of sex - but that is somehow unthinkable for most educators, because that would be teaching young people that sex is not just about reproduction, but about pleasure...

There also desperately needs to be something (tho i'm at a loss as to precisely what) done to change the prevailing ideology among young people in the Uk that penis-centred sex is the only valid kind of sex. Young men see fellatio as desirable, and describe it in terms which are, if not explicitly then very heavily implicitly, about making women submit to them, but see cunnilingus as disgusting, even "immoral". Dancehall and hip-hop artists call men who go down on women "bowcats" and call for their beating, shooting and burning alongside homosexuals. I would really, really love to see a youth culture in which penetration is disparaged as "uncool" and going down on a woman (which i see as probably the greatest privilege a man can be given), or, better yet, making a woman come is the thing young men brag about. In this patriarchal culture i don't have much hope for that to happen, tho...

Dammit, once again i've tried to blog on one topic and ended up touching on, and wanting to branch out into, a load of others... Posts on gender identity and autism, "queerness" (and whether it's possible to be simultaneously "hetero" and "queer"), and where i stand (if there is one place where i stand, which i'm not sure) on the radfem/sex-pos debate... possibly soon come...

Other bloggers on the Katie Thorpe case

If i find more, i will edit to add them...

FRIDA
Miss Crip Chick
Trinity
Wheelchair Dancer
BrownFemiPower
Disability Studies, Temple U
Falling Off My Pedestal
My Beautiful Wickedness
Tiny Cat Pants
Wheelchair Princess
Ryn Tale
Jemma on the Ouch blog
Liz Sayce in the Guardian (see also RebeccaGMCDP's comment, which pretty much articulates everything i wanted to say in the discussion)
Preethi Manuel in the Guardian
Mind The Gap (no direct URL for just that blog post)
Zephyr at Arthritic Young Thing
Andrea's Buzzing About
Big Noise
David at Growing Up With A Disability
The Gimp Parade
Antiprincess

Oh fucking hell, not again.

It was bad enough that it happened once. But now it's happening again - this time to a 15 year old, and this time in the UK.

I still haven't got round to posting my respones to the Ashley X case itself. I ended up as good as leaving Barbelith after trying to articulate the disability rights position on this thread about it, and getting responses such as "I don't think Ashley is a fully human person" (and this on a community which is generally so committed to anti-discrimination on other issues that even getting vocabulary slightly wrong can lead to high-snark mass deconstruction) - feeling so overwhelmed by my need to respond, and by just how personally the horror of this case hit me, as to leave me, ironically, unable to coherently respond. (If anyone reads the thread, i was known on there as "Natty Rajah" at the time, and am currently "Hydra vs Leviathan", in case it isn't obvious).

But still, that was in the USA, and at least part of me thought "that could never happen here"...

Well, it has.

Or rather, will - and this is the crucial thing. Katie Thorpe hasn't been mutilated yet - the surgeons are still "seeking legal approval". There is still the possibility of this being not just condemned, but stopped.

The Disabled People's Movement in the UK needs to get together a response to this, and quickly, while there's still time for this to be prevented. The trouble is, i have no idea how to go about this. Try to dissuade the surgeons? Get human rights lawyers to argue against them? Somehow get Katie away from her parents (since she really deserves to be out of the clutches of "guardians" who want, essentially, to get legal approval to basically sexually abuse her - and hopefully fostered by someone who will love and accept her who she is, and have true understanding about disability)? I don't know. But i know with all my being that action is absolutely imperative...

Katie's parents are trying to justify themselves here - using exactly the same bullshit "reasoning" that Ashley's parents did.

And i don't know what the fuck the Times means by saying "Even some disabled campaigners are critical of them, saying we should focus instead on making society more accommodating to people with disabilities and offer more help to their carers" (emphasis mine)... as if it would somehow be intuitive that "disabled campaigners" would be pro this sort of thing? I don't know who the fuck those "disabled campaigners" are, but they're not any disabled campaigners i've ever met or heard of, and i'd be willing to bet money that they don't exist.

And as for this: "The parents of disabled children, however, point out that such critics are out of touch with the reality of caring for someone with severe disabilities"... for fuck's sake. Out of touch with the reality? How about the reality of being "someone with severe disabilities" (or a disabled person, to use a linguistically sensible phrase)?

Of course there's stuff behind families and "carers" of disabled people feeling burdened, ashamed, etc, to do with the ludicrous financial injustice of them having to subsist on below-unemployment-level benefits instead of getting a fair wage, and disabled people having to rely on family structures for assistance because of inability to get the assistance they (we) have the right to, so in a sense this goes back to Thatcherite economics, and that needs to be recognised. But this is about disabled people having their rights taken away from them, not about non-disabled family members having the right to make decisions about something as fundamental to a person as their bodily integrity, without the person's consent. No financial hardship gives them that right, and nothing, not even the sincere belief that what they are doing is "for her own good", can excuse a parent ordering the mutilation of their child (parallels can be drawn with what routinely happens to intersex or "gender-ambiguous" children here)...

I meant a while back to collate posts by other bloggers on Ashley X. This seems as good a place to do it as any:

Amanda at Ballastexistenz
Thirza at Fit of Pique (possibly now a defunct blog)
David at Growing Up With A Disability
William Peace at Counterpunch
Kate Olsen at The Gimp Parade
Zilari at Processing In Parts (also seemingly no longer active)
a whole load more here...

Edited to add - something really imperative - get Katie a communication aid - give her the chance to say whether she wants this done or not... on BBC Ouch here people are talking about her based on her appearancve of how "out there" she looks - too many people are assumed to be incapable of communication based on appearances, when they simply lack the technology to assist them to communicate... someone give her the chance, even if she doesn't take it...

Disablism and relationships

Last night i had a long phone conversation with a friend who has progressive physical and visual impairments and is in a long-term relationship with a non-disabled partner. The last time i had spoken to her, her partner had mysteriously disappeared for a few days and she was really worried about him. Last night, she called me, we talked about other stuff for a while, kind of skirting around the subject, then i kind of stupidly asked, after she said she was having to delay going back to uni because of inability to find a PA, "couldn't X do PA stuff for you?" (yeah, me and my Aspie mouth)... which led to her telling me all about the reasons for the problems between her and her partner, which basically come down to disablism interfering in the relationship...

Basically, the partner's friends and family are putting pressure on him to dump her (if not explicitly, then implicitly) - asking stuff like "what are you doing with her when you could be with an able-bodied woman?" or "do you want to have to look after her all your life?" - and his behaviour is showing her pretty strong evidence that he feels "ashamed" of her, doesn't want to take her out anywhere because of stuff like the hassle of dealing with accessibility issues and other people's assumptions/prejudices, that it sounds like he's internalising into himself (or maybe always had, unexamined... although it's a little hard to believe he didn't examine them after getting into a relationship with a disabled person)...

Then there's the issue of him wanting to do stuff, both sexually and in other contexts, that he can't do with her because of her impairments, and what she said to me that he basically wants "a walking, non-disabled girlfriend"... leading to her feeling that no matter how hard she tries to be the best partner that she can be, she will never be good enough for him (and until recently she was certain that she wanted lifelong commitment, marriage and children with this guy)...

The thing that really fucks with my head is how impotent i feel because i can't do anything about the situation, despite how strongly i feel for her and want her to be happy and for it to be resolved... this seems like one area in which i really can't think of a way to fight against disablism effectively...

It's also got me thinking about whether crip/non-crip relationships can work, or whether disablism will fuck up every one... there are some that seem to be successful, like Wheelchair Dancer's (she says some very relevant stuff in her post to this situation, just unfortunately not anything that offers a solution for when the non-disabled partner thinks differently), Elizabeth McClung's, and Dave Hingsburger's, but i know from my (pre-diagnosis) relationship with a visibly impaired person how strong the effect of social attitudes to disability can be (even in supposedly "liberated" circles)... it's probably stronger when an impairment is visible than when it's invisible, but i know that i would need someone to have a good understanding both of autism and of the social model of disability for me to feel comfortable having a r/ship with them, which in practice probably means limiting myself to crips as potential partner material (I think there may be an analogy with "political lesbianism", a la the previous post, here)...

I think it's probably relevant that all 3 of those examples are r/ships where the disabled partner acquired their impairment after already having been in the relationship for several years, and also that the latter 2 are queer/same-sex r/ships. As i said in the conversation last night, the whole "normative expectations that crips might not be able to live up to" thing is part of why i think queer theory (and related stuff like polyamory and BDSM) is so relevant to disability... queer theory is all about rejecting the normative assumption that a certain kind of partnership, with certain kinds of sex and certain roles and obligations, is the only "valid" sexual relationship or the norm that everyone needs to aim for in their relationships or compare their r/ships to, and being able/allowed to carve out your own niche, to define (consensually) your own relationships as the kind you want, with the roles and responsibilities (sexual and otherwise) being "user-defined", rather than having to conform to a pre-existing template.

Because that pre-existing template is, by default, a heterosexual one, same-sex r/ships (and ones involving trans people, etc) are already outside of it, and thus arguably freer to reach self-definition without the assumption that template-fitting is necessary. IMO, the same is true of disabled people's sexual relationships, because we may not have the ability or the inclination to have "normal" kinds of sex or to fit "normal" gender-based roles - thus we need to create our own roles and relationships, or else we are doomed to "not feel good enough" or to have our relationships infiltrated and undermined by all of the normative, disablist crap... which goes quite well with the slogan i've heard that "all disabled sexuality is queer sexuality" (something touched on in, but actually not the main focus of, Eli Clare's Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, a fucking awesome book which i'm still planning to write several posts on).

Still, despite my feelings of powerlessness to help, my friend said that she actually appreciated talking to me about the situation, because of my ability to talk "logically" about such things... so maybe some of my AS traits are actually useful in friendship situations...

This post is probably a bit incoherent and there are probably things i was intending to add to it. Oh well, it's late, maybe i'll think of them tomorrow...