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" for 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...)

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...

"Disability is Natural"... or is it?

(now edited to include a link to a relevant Jim Sinclair article, which i had in mind but somehow forgot to link when posting this...)

In a comment on another disability blog someone recently mentioned the website "Disability is Natural", so "naturally" i went to have a look at it...

I had actually seen someone wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Disability is Natural" and the red and green apple logo at 2 different disability events (i believe it was the Liberty Festival in London, either in 2005 or 2006, and the protests against the Welfare Reform Bill at the Labour party conference in Manchester in 2006), but hadn't realised it was a website. At the latter, i think i tried to argue with him about the slogan, but didn't get very far with it...



I see the point that the slogan is trying to make - that disabled people are a natural part of human diversity, and deserve to be accepted and accommodated rather than "cured" or eliminated, and of course I wholeheartedly support that - that's the basic foundation of the social model of disability. But the use of the slogan "Disability is Natural" betrays a clear lack of understanding of what the social model is truly about.

Under the social model, a clear distinction is made between impairment and disability, which the medical system and the individualised models it promotes conflate into one thing. Impairment is a physical or mental difference which prevents a person from being able to carry out daily activities considered "normal" for humans to be able to do - eg. standing/walking, seeing, hearing, feeding oneself, reading and writing, understanding verbal and non-verbal forms of communication as used by most people, etc. Disability is the lack of equality in society caused, not by impairments themselves, but by the failure or refusal of society to accommodate people with impairments - eg. by not making buildings accessible to wheelchair users, not providing information in formats accessible to people with visual or hearing impairments or learning disabilities like dyslexia, not allowing people who need help with personal care to have choice and control over what support they recieve, assuming that everyone "should" be able to understand all forms of communication in the same way, etc.

(It's worth noting that, while impairment is therefore something with a "concrete", outside-of-society existence, and disability something that exists because of and depending on social factors, what is and isn't an impairment is still contested, especially in the neurological area, where the distinctions between, for example, preferring one method of communication over another, and actually being unable to use one form of communication, get kind of blurred - and what constitutes an impairment still depends to some extent on what is considered "normal" for people to be able to do - eg. dyslexia wouldn't have been an impairment for many people in societies without widespread literacy. But this is a tangent...)

Physical and mental diversity is natural. Impairment is natural. But the social model states quite emphatically that disability isn't natural - it's socially constructed, and can be socially deconstructed. (It's also worth noting here that being socially constructed, despite what a lot of people seem to think, doesn't necessarily mean that something "isn't real". It's very real, but it's society and not nature that makes it real.)

Several quotes from the disability history page of the website make it clear that, when the author says "disability", ze actually means "impairment":

From the beginning, mythical perceptions and stereotypical attitudes have portrayed individuals with disabilities as different, aberrant, deficient, incompetent, and more. But like gender and ethnicity, a disability is simply one of many natural characteristics of being human... There have always been people with disabilities and differences in the world, and there always will be.

...

Some people are born with conditions we label as disabilities; others may acquire a disability through an accident or illness; and, if we live long enough, many of us will acquire a disability through the aging process. Disability does not discriminate!

...

But the problem never has been the disability; the problem is (and has always been) society's beliefs about disability. People with disabilities are not broken, and they don't need to be fixed!

Old attitudes and perceptions—not the disability itself—constitute the greatest obstacle facing people with disabilities. This attitudinal barrier may not always be visible to the naked eye, but it rears its ugly head across all environments and results in children and adults with disabilities being socially isolated, physically segregated, and excluded from the mainstream of American society.

Of course, in a social model understanding of the term "disability", "attitudes and perceptions" are "the disability itself"...

(edit: the author is Kathie Snow, who wants quotes to be attributed, and who is the non-disabled parent of a disabled son. I was kind of curious as to whether the author was a disabled person...)

Another article on the site is "People First Language" (note that to read the whole article you have to click another link, which leads to a PDF, so if you don't have Acrobat or equivalent, or if PDFs crash your computer... don't). There's a lot of stuff in the article that i agree with, and its intent is clearly, unambiguously good - but, IMO, the usages it advocates are highly problematic - arguably even more problematic than many of the "offensive" usages they are supposed to replace.

(This and variants of it are also advocated by other disability campaigns and organisations, such as People First, the UK organisation of people with learning disabilities... of which I also have criticisms, some of which are language-related, but i've gone off on enough tangents already...)

Several of the recommended changes in language usage are about particular words, which i don't really want to get into a discussion of in this post, as for every word which has been used to describe a group of people, you can guarantee that there are some people within that group who support "reclaiming" it as a positive identifier, and others within that group who believe that it is inherently offensive, cannot be reclaimed and needs to be removed from the language - but the major change pushed for by advocates of "people first language" is a grammatical one, the replacement of phrases which use the impairment/disability as an adjective ("disabled person") with "person-first" phrases such as "person with a disability", and of the use of "to be" in phrases such as "she is disabled" with "to have" in phrases like "she has a disability".

This, again, while commonly advocated by people who think they are being anti-discrimination and pro-equality, is actually not a social model approach to disability. "Person with a disability" is not simply a more "courteous" or "polite" way of saying the same thing as "disabled person" (and, in any case, it wouldn't matter much to me if it was, as the concept of "politeness" really is pretty much meaningless to me) - it actually has a different meaning.

"A disability", stated as a noun, is a "thing" which a person "has" - simultaneously both belonging to the individual, and not directly relevant to who the person actually is. As has already been said, while impairment belongs to the individual, disability "belongs" to society - but, assuming that "disability" is simply being used to mean "impairment" again, impairment is an intrinsic part of the identity of an individual - so the phrase is incoherent. On the other hand, "disabled", when used to describe a person, is not really an adjective, but an adjectival use of the past tense of a verb ("to disable")- a disabled person is someone who has been disabled by society.

(With regard to individual impairments, i usually would say "person X has CP/muscular dystrophy/Down's/Asperger's/whatever"... but that's mainly because those terms don't really have adjectival forms, and where the adjectival form is commoner - eg "blind", "autistic", "dyslexic" etc - i would use it, because an alternative form such as "person Y has autism" just seems to be... not "natural" English syntax. I wouldn't criticise someone for using it, since their meaning would be clear, but i wouldn't consider the difference to have political meaning...)

(I'm aware that, in the US, it seems that the preferred usage in the disability rights movement, despite its recognition of the social model, is "people with disabilities"... i'm not quite sure why, but i'm guessing it might be by analogy with other phrases more commonly used in the US than in the UK, such as "people of colo(u)r". I'd be interested in any US-based bloggers' thoughts on this...)

EDIT: to include a link to Jim Sinclair's article Why I dislike "person first" language, which puts the social model argument against person-first language better and more clearly than i could...

Some would probably say that this is all just nitpicking, and that it doesn't really matter what form of language is used, as long as meaning is clear... but I'm one of those people who think that language matters, because the terms in which people refer to things shape their understanding of those things, and i think that terms need to have clear definitions, because otherwise people who are on the same side end up saying apparently opposite things, and people whose intent is good end up being dismissed or co-opted because of the unclearness or linguistic incoherence of their arguments.

Has anyone read the "Disability is Natural" book, or seen the video? What was your opinion of it?

Some thoughts on BIID and "transabled" identity...

Trinity recently posted a link to an interview with a man who voluntarily amputated his hand, claiming to have Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID). This post started as a comment to Trinity's post, but, because a) it got ridiculously too long and b) I can't comment directly to her blog because I don't have a LiveJournal, so would have had to email the comment to her, I decided to expand it into a full blog post...

Trinity fairly unambiguously found this unproblematic. While as a libertarian there is obviously absolutely no way I would claim to have the right to condemn it (in the "it shouldn't be allowed" sense), I'm a little more conflicted...

Elizabeth McClung posted back in December on this issue, with some strong criticisms of "wannabes", and in the comments there is some discussion of possible parallels with gender dysphoria, and some discussion of models of disability as well. Lisa describes the "transabled" as "trying to cling to the coattails of "Gender Identity Disorder" to legitimise their own thing, which may or may not be a legitimate thing". Elizabeth also makes the good point that the particular types of impairments that BIID/transabled people want tend not to be things that people are born with, but ones that exist as a result of medical science.

BIID or "wannabes" are often associated or bracketed together with "pretenders" (people who pretend to be disabled, whether as a sexual fetish or not) and "devotees" (those who are sexually attracted to disability in others), but I'm not sure about that - I mean, if "wanting to become X" was the same thing as "finding X sexually attractive", then a heterosexual man would be the same thing as a trans woman, and if "wanting to become X" was the same thing as "liking to pretend to be X", then a trans woman would be the same thing as a transvestite or "female impersonator", and both of those are patently not true...

I suppose Jason's experience could be argued to support the social model, by showing that an impairment in itself isn't necessarily "disabling", and that in fact a person can be more "disabled" without an impairment than with it... but then, if BIID is itself an impairment, it's not so much going from unimpaired to impaired, as "trading" one impairment for another - and I'm not sure whether it's social model to claim that it's the impaired person's own attitude (rather than that of those around them) that determines how disabling the impairment is... it does, however, remind me of the debate over whether it's "against" the social model to regard impairments themselves as negative (which I've touched on elsewhere, i think, but probably need to make the main focus of a post... I'd say it's not, and cite feminist authors whose work focuses on embodiment, but others' positions may vary...)

There's possible relevance here to the effect of the origin of disabled people's impairments (congenital vs. acquired) on how easy it is for them to accept the social model, with people's reactions to something like this - i can see how those who acquired a (very much unwanted) impairment could be angered or disgusted at someone choosing to acquire an impairment, while those with congenital impairments, whose desire is perhaps more likely simply to be accepted for who they are, perhaps more likely to be accepting of it...

Nightingale of Samarkand said in the comments on Trinity's blog: "It doesn't bother me either.

Maybe because I spent all those years thinking about disability long before I was diagnosed with one? Either I had a touch of BIID myself or I just somehow subconsciously knew, from the age of 4?"

This has incredibly close parallels with my own life - I had a perseverative interest in disability from the age of about 12 or so, including fantasising about having various different impairments (I didn't, at the time, grasp the difference between impairment and disability), staring at disabled people in the street, desperately wanting to get to know disabled people, etc. (I got involved in volunteering with some very patronising and medical-model projects in my later teens, mainly because I simply wanted to meet disabled people... although, at the time, I kind of felt like that was somehow an invalid or "creepy" or "wrong" reason, and tried to make up other "justifications"...)

Actually finding out that I was disabled made all that make sense, and massively lessened the guilt and feelings of "creepiness" I had had about it - I could explain it in terms of having always known on a subconscious level that I was both impaired and disabled in the sense of socially excluded (even if neither I nor others around me knew of my impairment), and disabled people really were "my people" - that I could now identify with them in the intense way I did without feeling like I was hijacking or appropriating someone else's identity (although, because of my impairment being invisible and having spent most of my life undiagnosed, I do still quite often feel like that, but I can fight it) - however, BIID/"transabled" clearly doesn't fit me, as it involves wanting/needing to have a particular impairment, whereas for me it was and is all about the social/identity side of disability...

A lot of people don't understand my desire to identify as "disabled", to be "labelled" with what they see as a negative thing, or as "limiting myself" - so in that sense I can sort of identify with someone whose desire was to actually become disabled - but then, I'm still conflicted, because I can understand the desire to have "disabled" as a social identity if you already have an impairment, but I can't quite understand the desire to actually acquire an impairment. Then again, I can't intuitively understand what it is to have an inborn gender identity, and feel the need to change your body to match it, either - but of course I will support and defend that...

There's definitely a really close similarity between Jason's narrative and the narratives of very many transsexual people (particularly those transsexuals who felt gender dysphoria from an early age as a "having the wrong body" thing). Some people in the comment thread to the BMEZine article talked about whether BIID could be regarded as neurological in origin, due to a "faulty" neural map, which would make it arguably part of neurodiversity, and went into the blurry distinction between neurology and psychology, which is also a point of debate among trans* circles - some, if not all, trans* people seem to have a "mismatch" between the body they were born with and their neural map of their genital area.

However, something that does strike me as a definite distinction, even if the neural map theory is true, is that, for transsexuals at least, there's very strong evidence that it's primarily their hormone balance which doesn't "match" with their neurology - and, AFAIK, there is no hormonal effect caused by loss or paralysis of a limb...

One interesting thing i did find is this response to Elizabeth's post by Holly, who is a person with BIID who wants to be blind, and is also physically disabled already, with an undiagnosed but probably neurological condition. I couldn't find anything on her blog directly considering the possibility of there being a link between her BIID and her other impairments, but, interestingly, she mentions here that she actually has some vision loss, of possibly neurological origin - which could be evidence for a "neural map" hypothesis - but, i don't know, I'm obviously not an expert on the physical side of neurology...

Again in the BMEZine comment thread, the webmaster of transabled.org and BIIDInfo.org commented:

FWIW, I have a problem with the concept of BIID related self-injury as an extreme body modification. I think that a major difference is one of “choice”. Arguably, most people into Bodmod have a choice, they do this because they want to, or have a statement to make. Those of us with BIID don’t have a choice. Just like transsexuals don’t have a choice. You can repress it, you can ignore it, you can “dislodge” the need for short periods of time, but it keeps coming back. until you have the impairment you need. Then, you’re finally free to get on with life.

This "choice" thing is also really similar to what can become a very, very heated debate in trans* circles - with those whose gender dysphoria was so total that they truly had no choice (unless "transition or suicide" counts as a choice, which, well, I suppose technically it does, but... that leads to a whole uber-abstract philosophical debate about the meaning of the word "choice", which I haven't got the brain cells for right now) often being extremely harshly opposed to those who say that their transitioning was a (genuine, free) choice (and consider it analogous to other forms of body modification).

(To be honest, while I can kind of semi-intuit how those for whom it wasn't a choice can feel kind of trivialised by those who claim it was a choice, I can't really understand condemnation of those who freely choose to transition - but then, the libertarian ethic of "everyone has a right to do exactly what they choose to do to hirself, as long as it harms no one other than hirself" is so fundamental to my entire belief system and understanding of life that I find it hard to get my head round any argument that doesn't accept that... I wrote a bit about that subject (with relation to sexuality) here)

I don't know whether there are any voluntary amputees or "transabled" people out there who, like some trans* people, do feel that what they did was a choice, and in the same category as other wholly voluntary body modifications. (I did read an article once about a pair of identical twin brothers who had an arm removed from one and sewn onto the other one, described explicitly as an "extreme body modification", and couldn't quite work out whether it was real or a spoof/hoax... unfortunately I can't find the link to it now...)

Someone else in the comments accused voluntary amputees of "insulting those who genuinely "happen" to be amputees" - which I have to admit does somewhat remind me of the arguments used by some transphobic radfems about trans women "insulting" "women-born-women" by claiming to really be women... which is another parallel (in this case between the categories of "disabled people" and "women", i suppose) where I'm not actually sure whether i think it's a real/valid parallel or not...

There's also discussion of the distinction between BIID and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), with the former being seen as potentially parallel to gender dysphoria, but the latter more similar to things like eating disorders (one distinction drawn being that, with BIID, "sufferers" feel "cured" when the desired change to their embodiment is achieved, whereas with BDD people continue to be unhappy with their bodies even after many alterations, suggesting it's more psychological) - oddly, Wikipedia's article on BIID has a "see also" link to BDD, but there isn't a reciprocal link, and only the BDD article discusses similarities to gender dysphoria.

Anyway... bah. Even after all that rambling about it, I'm still not entirely sure what my own feelings are... and this is the second post in a row that started out as a response to a post on someone else's blog that was basically just a link, but has grown into something resembling a uni essay. I'd like to know other crip and/or trans activists' perspectives, tho...

Really good discussion on autism and disability as identity

I'm not going to say loads about this, i'm just posting here with the intention to spread it, in case there's anyone who reads this blog who doesn't read the blogs it's already on (which, to be fair, is probably quite unlikely... but you never know)...

Joel at NTs are Weird wrote this post called "Welcome to the Disability Community", on how many within the autistic self-advocacy community don't fully understand the social model of disability, and thus, in his (and my) opinion erroneously, don't identify as "disabled", seeing that as a negative label when in fact being part of a wider disability community can only benefit the autism acceptance movement.

(This is an attitude i see too often at places like Wrong Planet, and one of the main reasons why i don't post there much any more. I'm possibly going to post a link to these posts there tho, and see what kind of debate it engenders...)

Amanda at Ballastexistenz posted this inspired by Joel's post, and linking (in her original post and in the comment thread) to other autistic writers within a consciously pan-disability movement such as Cal Montgomery (Cal's and Amanda's writings are, IMO, pretty much equally tied as the best disability writing out there... whether the position both of them share as having both neurological and physical impairments has anything to do with that, i'm not sure, but i think both are incredibly good at pointing out not just the interesectionality but the essential unity of different impairments within a social construction of disability).

Amanda's post created (as her posts nearly always do) a discussion thread of extremely high quality comments; i commented, basically to agree with Joel and Amanda and to make a couple of points about language, but there's little i can say about the subject that Joel and/or Amanda haven't said already.

Of course, some autistic bloggers haven't agreed; ABFH posted her response here. I want to post a response to ABFH, but haven't quite worked out exactly how to tackle her points. (I usually agree with ABFH on nearly everything else, the only other major exception being her support for Barak Obama, but that's an issue for an entirely separate post.)

Anyway, this is just a pointer to those posts...

Gender Identity

So, recently some people have linked to me in blog posts while under the impression that i was female-identified... which has led me to try to work out why...

I tend to assume that it's obvious to people that i'm (physically) male, because, well, if you can see and/or hear me "in the flesh" then it is obvious; i'm about 5'11", with a body consisting almost entirely of straight lines and right angles, no breasts, big feet, a bass voice (albeit one that goes up or down a couple of octaves somewhat randomly, but still a clearly male-sounding voice), and prominent facial hair. (I can't find a decent picture of myself to put here, but you can see me in the photos on this post; i'm the one with long dark hair and a beard, in the general style of Aragorn or Faramir in the Lord of the Rings films, or a typical 16th/17th century English Catholic style, such as Guy Fawkes or King Charles I.)

I think my username is part of the reason for the confusion; for those not familiar with the Hindu deity Shiva (who i identify with partly because ze is both "male" and "androgynous" depending on context), a name whose first syllable sounds like the pronoun "she" and which ends in the traditionally-feminine (in European languages) -a probably defaults to female. Also, there are the ecofeminist writer Vandana Shiva (who was also a partial inspiration for the name choice) and the DC Comics character Lady Shiva, who are female (as well as various other people and things with the name Shiva). While i've been mistaken for a woman on a couple of forums where i have used variants of the name Shiva, in most of the places where i've used other usernames (including, oddly, variants of Nataraja, which is one of the epithets of Shiva, and has the same "feminine" ending) i've been assumed to be male long before posting any personal information.

Another possible reason is because the vast majority of outspoken autistic bloggers out there seem to be female (eg. Ballastexistenz, Andrea, Ettina, Bev, ABFH, chaoticidealism, lastcrazyhorn, and plenty of others - Joel and Larry are about the only exceptions i can think of) - which is kind of strange, because the usually-quoted statistics say that autism is much more likely to occur in males than in females. I'm not quite sure what sociological explanation there could be for the predominance of autistic women over autistic men in the blogosphere...

Also i kind of suspect that, because i blog about feminism, i must be female, in some people's minds, because no man could possibly want to talk or write about feminism [/sarcasm]...

The ironic thing is that being thought of as "male" is just as odd to me as being thought of as "female". I don't consider myself to have any sort of "internal" gender identity whatsoever - it always feels like "gender" is simply not a valid category in which to place myself. When i see "gender" as a tick-box category on a form, i feel similarly to if, on a form asking for details of a vehicle, it asked for "miles per gallon" when my vehicle was powered by something completely different (and that can't be measured in gallons), like say solar electricity - i just don't really consider myself to belong to the category of beings that have gender.

I spent quite a few years thinking (on the rare occasions that i thought about gender at all) that "gender identity" was wholly socialised, that the whole concept of identifying as a "man" or a "woman" was something "put into" people by their upbringing and the society around them. Of course, that position led me to be confused about why (the vast majority of) other people seemed to "swallow" it so easily, and i was able to "see through" it, but i filed that in my mind with all the other social conventions that i was confused about being the only person to "see through" (which, of course, my discovry of autism helped explain massively). It fit, however, with the general socialist and feminist worldview which i was developing at that time, and i met a lot of people in those movements at uni who believed roughly the same thing.

Of course, there was one big thing that that belief system completely failed to explain or understand, and that was the existence of trans people. It was a friend's coming out as a trans woman, and the resulting conversations about gender and identity between me and her (which, along with a few other things that happened around the same time, led to it becoming a far, far deeper and more important friendship, and to date my longest-running truly close friendship), which led to me realising that my position was not in fact logical, and that other people - at the very least the subset of trans people who know they are trans from early childhood, and potentially up to and including the vast majority of the population - did have an "internal" gender identity, even if i didn't.

Of course, as well as my former position (no one has "real" gender identity, it's all socially constructed), it's also common to encounter the opposite extreme position (everyone has an internal, binary gender identity, and anyone who thinks ze doesn't is deluded or hasn't self-examined enough). While the former position denies the reality of trans people, the latter position denies the reality of people like me. The minimum real reality seems to me to be that at least some people do have an "innate" or "internal" gender identity, and at least some people don't. What's uncertain to me is the proportion of those categories to each other: some would accept the existence of people like me who don't believe they have an innate gender identity, but claim that we are a small minority, while others would argue that only a small number have "truly" innate gender identity, while perhaps the majority only think they do because of socialisation. I personally suspect that a lot of the socialist-feminists who don't believe that anyone has innate gender identity are actually themselves "neutrals" like me, but haven't encountered (or are blinded by ideology to) the contradictions in believing that everyone is like them/us...

The question of what to label myself in terms of gender identity is an odd one. I'm clearly not trans (although i am an ally), or intersex (as i am, as far as i know, a fully physically "normal" male in terms of genitalia etc). I sometimes use the label "genderqueer" (more so online than in meatspace), but i'm never quite sure exactly what it means to the people i use it in conversation with (as opposed to what it means to me), as it seems to be such an essentially contested term. Then again, arguably it's one of the key things in queer theory that terms to describe identity are necessarily essentially contested, because people have the right to define their own identities, and thus terms can be defined to mean whatever the definer wants them to mean (although, that's possibly straying a bit too far into postmodernism/relativism for me, as well as reminding me a bit of Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty - i think, perhaps speaking from my science-geek side here, that it's important for terms to have a generally understood meaning, and thus accurate uses and inaccurate uses that can be called as inaccurate). Wikipedia has a decent overview of definitions (albeit with a bit of elision between "genderqueer" and "transgender"), and some interesting links.

There's also some good discussion of the term "genderqueer" and gender identity here and here - i particularly like Dw3t-Hthr's concept of "geek" as a gender - something that i strongly suspect a whole lot of gender-variant autistic people would embrace wholeheartedly if it became well-known or popular...

I also strongly suspect that gender variance (including transgender/transsexuality, androgyny, and probably most other variants of genderqueer-ness) is a lot commoner among autistic (or otherwise neurodiverse) people than among the general population. The subject comes up fairly regularly on autism/neurodiversity discussion forums - a quick search of Wrong Planet revealed these notable examples (note that the second one is about atypical perception of autistic people's gender by others), a larger percentage of posters on autism forums openly identify as trans or intersex, by my estimation, than the general population percentage, and my aforementioned transwoman friend (who does read this blog... don't you? It would be nice to get a comment now and again ;) ) knows at least one other "transwoman" who she strongly suspects both of being on the spectrum and of being actually androgyne/"neutral" rather than female in gender identity.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all autistic people are non-normatively gendered, but i do believe that there is probably some sort of link between autism and atypical gender identity. My suspicion is that "group identities" in general (such as ethnicity, class identity, national identity, etc) are less logical and less necessary to autistic people than they are to neurotypical people, and (the social component of) gender identity would be included in that - so, if 2 people both lacked innate gender identity, and one was autistic but the other NT, the autistic person would probably be the more likely to identify as androgynous/agendered/genderqueer, whereas the NT might well still think ze had an innate gender identity due to hir gendered socialisation. (Autistic children are also much more likely to resist gendered socialisation... or, indeed, any kind of socialisation at all ;) )

I think that, possibly, the part of the brain in which gender identity is located (if a single such part exists) might be one of the parts of the brain which is significantly physically different in autistic people, and that it might be linked to issues to do with self-image and proprioception (the Oliver Sacks anecdote about halfway down the Wikipedia article is really interesting, as is the assertion that "Proprioception is permanently impaired in patients who suffer from joint hypermobility or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome" - as the latter have correlative, if not yet proven genetic, links to both autism and gender variance (links between neurodiversity and hypermobility to be the subject of a forthcoming post)...

Trans people, especially those who are "primary" (aware of their transsexuality from early childhood) report proprioception problems where their "body map" is that of a person of their desired physical sex rather than the physical sex they were born with. Depending on the way that correlation goes, it seems kind of logical to me that someone with an overall impairment of proprioception might not have a gender identity in body-identification term, and/or might lack identification with their body altogether. (I have great trouble understanding why body image - things like body shape, weight, facial features, etc - seems to be of such great importance to the majority of people - another thing which i used to believe was entirely a social construct of Western capitalist "civilisation", but which i now (tentatively) understand to have at least some innate component to it.)

There might also be differences in the parts of the brain that are affected by sex hormones (oestrogen, testosterone, etc) in autistic people. A fairly large number of autistic people (certainly a greater percentage than of non-autistic people) are asexual (which is often accompanied by a lack of gender identity, although to what extent that's due to the conflation of gender and sexuality in a heteronormative society is uncertain), and others (including myself) develop conscious sexuality unusually late in life, and are thus asexual for a considerable period during which the majority of their age peers are some sort of sexual. The vast majority (or so it seems) of autistic women i know online (I don't really know any offline) are either lesbian or asexual. "Unusual" forms of sexuality (eg. dislike of normative sex acts and preference for non-normative sex acts, eg. those not involving penetration - see here) are also seemingly commoner among autistic people. Sex hormone levels might possibly even differ, if autism is (as i suspect it to at least sometimes be) part of a wider genetic syndrome affecting more than just neurology - a lot of autistic people seem to have weaker expression of secondary (ie, acquired at puberty or later) sexual dimorphic characteristics than non-autistic people (for example, i am much less hairy and much less muscular than my brother, who is 7 years younger than me, despite photos of us at equivalent pre-puberty ages being hard to tell apart). All these are things that i am not aware of ever having been investigated, except on an informal/anecdotal basis in autism forums...

So, yeah, i dunno. I'd love to see if there ever has been a formal study on gender identity in autistic (or otherwise neurodiverse) people. And i'm still not sure whether i count as "queer", either. A straw poll on how many readers of this blog thought i was female-IDed would also be... amusing... ;) But anyway, as this is almost certainly my last post of 2007, a happy and fruitful new year to all the awesome bloggers out there. The world needs people who keep on questioning all this stuff...

Trans liberation and disability liberation: a necessary alliance

Today is (or, technically, yesterday was, as it's now about 4am here in the UK) Transgender Day of Remembrance, "set aside to memorialise those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice". Several bloggers I read wrote moving and powerful posts about this, which inspired me to write about what I believe to be both a natural and necessary alliance between disability and transgender issues...

One of my closest friends is a trans woman. It was her coming out as trans (at which point in fact we were not particularly close friends), and the ensuing conversations between us about identity (both gender and otherwise), disability (she also has a physical impairment), the psychiatric/mental health system, childhood experiences and other stuff, that led me to seek diagnosis for Asperger's at the age of 22, and ultimately to embrace "disabled" as an identity.

While I would never claim to appropriate her experience, there were levels of, particularly childhood, experience on which I connected more with her than with anyone I had ever known before - conversations which lasted from early afternoon until sunrise the next morning, and which felt like the deepest I had ever had in my life. Essentially, the experience that we both shared was that of having been brought up by (suburban, working-class-but-educated) parents under the assumption that each of us was a "normal boy", when in fact both of us were something else - an experience which is difficult to explain in many ways, because it is just as harmful and destructive as the experience of deliberate abuse, yet those responsible for it were acting not from any kind of malice but from a completely genuine desire to do good.

In fact, this is a defining characteristic of many if not most disabled people's lives (although particularly, specifically so for those whose impairment or other physical or mental "difference" is not diagnosed until adulthood) - false assumptions about who and what we are, resulting in well-meaning treatment that is as harmful as, or even more harmful than, malicious treatment would be. It is an experience that can be survived, even triumphed over, but not without scars - in some cases physically as a result of either "self-harm" or unnecessary and therefore harmful medical treatments, in pretty much all cases metaphorically in the form of reactive depression and PTSD. (Show me either a congenitally disabled person or a trans person who doesn't have PTSD, and I'll show you someone who must have been brought up in Utopia.)

I have seen my friend grow into a beautiful woman, while she has had to see me (in many ways) "regress" or "deteriorate". I have seen her grow into herself, while I am still not sure if I truly have a "self" to grow into. I have seen her dysphoria turned, quite literally, into euphoria by a simple little pill (the only medical-model solution for depression I have ever seen that actually worked, which makes a mockery of some so-called feminists' ideas about transitioning as a form of "self-hate" or "self-mutilation"), while there has been no such easy solution for me. This cannot have been easy for her: yet, through all of it, she has treated me continuously and consistently as a friend and an equal. There is no better definition of a friend, comrade, ally.

I believe that the disability rights/liberation movement and the trans* rights/liberation movement are natural allies, even if many within both of them have never considered that alliance. Both are about acceptance rather than elimination of physical and mental difference. Both are about freedom of choice, the inalienable right of the individual to have self-determination over, and to be regarded as the person with the best knowledge of, hir own brain and body. Both are about the depathologisation of that which the establishment persists in considering pathological. Both intersect with feminism in incredibly exciting ways which can enable feminism (if feminism lets them) to get beyond problems and dichotomies which it has struggled with for generations (see FRIDA and The Transfeminist Manifesto (PDF), and also, for intersections of both movements, the very awesome Emi Koyama). Both are about resistance against a patronising, patriarchal, paternalistic medical establishment which claims to know our bodies and minds better than we know them ourselves. Both are about human biodiversity.

There is considerable overlap, also, in the area of intersex conditions, which can be regarded both as physical impairment (and are often accompanied by, or "comorbid" with, other physical or mental impairments) and as a gender identity issue; Emi Koyama has written (although I haven't read it) a lecture with the awesome title of "Intersex at the Intersection of Queerness & Disability Theories". There is strong evidence that many people labelled "transsexual" may actually have one or more undiagnosed intersex conditions. The routine mutilation, often without their parents' either consent or knowledge, of intersex babies to make them "conform" to one binary gender or the other (which, of course, if the doctors get it wrong, leads to gender dysphoria and thus transsexualism) closely parallels the non-consensual sterilisation and other surgical mutilations of physically and/or mentally disabled children.

The long and sad history of trans* people murdered because of transphobia, and the horrifyingly widespread belief that those murders were justified because of those people's gender identity, is paralleled by the equally long and sad history of disabled people murdered (often under the guise of "mercy killing") by family members, "carers", medical professionals and institutions, and the similarly horrifyingly widespread belief that those killings were justified because of the victims' impairment or disability. Both groups were among the first to be killed (before Jews or any other ethnic minority) in the Holocaust.

This is why I think that it's absolutely awesome that disability bloggers such as Elizabeth McClung and Trinity have blogged about Transgender Day of Remembrance, and that Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia has posted a link to this video by Amanda Baggs. I would absolutely love to see a movement which actively brings together the disability and trans* movements (along with all kinds of other diversity-related movements), as "the human biodiversity movement", but in this lifetime, the disability movement and the trans* movement recognising and appreciating one another as allies is enough. Well, in trying to change the world, there's never really such a thing as "enough", but you know what I mean...

Transfeminist blogger Little Light wrote a truly awesome piece called "the seam of skin and scales", in which she declared "It is time for a feminism of the monstrous". While on an immediate level it's about her own identity and experience as a transsexual feminist, there is a hell of a lot in it that disabled people can equally well relate to. Disabled people too have been treated or regarded as monsters, freaks, subhumans, deviants, abominations, angels, demons, changelings, witches. Her writing sparked off a blog war with certain dogmatic "radical feminist" (IMO, their position is neither) bloggers who accused her of plagiarism (with no realistic case whatsoever).

What this is rooted in is the refusal of certain strands of feminism to accept trans* people's realities, in the same way that some of the "straw man" style critiques of disability rights are based on a refusal to accept disabled people's realities. In both cases, the issue is complicated by some well-meaning defenders of inclusion (consciously or unconsciously) embracing in reality the irrational positions that their respective movements have been stereotyped as holding.

Transphobic "feminists" tend to advance the position that transitioning is a "choice", and one which is harmful to the cause of feminism by "reinforcing feminine stereotypes" and/or "men invading women's spaces" in the case of trans women, or by "deserting womanhood to get male privilege" in the case of trans men. This - apart from having no relationship at all to reality except in the minds of people who have almost certainly never even knowingly spoken to a trans* person - completely ignores trans people's lived realities, of, for example, having known they were girls/boys from as early as they were capable of coherent thought (despite physical "evidence" of the opposite), or of having been continuously depressed to a suicidal extent (without anything other than gender dysphoria for that to be reactive to), along with other symptoms including physical pain, to be near-instantly "cured" on starting gender reassignment treatment. Trans*-ness is attributed solely to socio-political factors and even the possibility of its being the way a person was born is excluded without consideration. (For an example, see Sheila Jeffreys' claims here.)

(This is, of course, like all identity issues a complex and contested area - I have encountered (albeit only online and not in "real life") trans* people who claim that they did "choose" to transition, and did not "always" experience gender dysphoria, and I certainly don't wish to deny their realities. Ultimately, I don't think it matters if someone did choose their gender identity - I wrote about the same issue with regard to sexual orientation here... however, no one has the right to, or honestly can, deny the existence of those whose gender identity is, to them, innate.)

I see similarities here to a "straw man" version of the social model of disability, which is often advanced in order to deny it or reduce it to absurdity - i.e., that the social model supposedly states that impairment does not exist, or does not matter at all, and thus denies the reality of people whose impairments cannot be (fully) compensated for by social change. The earliest originators of the social model, such as Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, shared with Marxists (from whom their critique was largely derived, albeit IMO going beyond Marxism in several crucial ways) and second wave feminists a focus on the sociological sphere and how it, rather than nature, was the source of many forms of oppression and injustice, patriarchy and disablism among them. Thus the early social model theorists did not write much about impairment, because the point of their writing was to take the focus away from impairment; however, there is nowhere that I know of, even in Finkelstein, that they deny its reality. However, this "straw man" causes many people, including disabled people, to reject the social model of disability altogether - much as the transphobia of much second-wave/radical feminism causes many trans* people to reject feminism altogether.

(On a more impairment -specific level, I see something kind of similar in some autism advocates who refuse to see autism as a "disability", or even as an "impairment".)

Disabled feminist writers (eg. Jenny Morris, Carol Thomas, Micheline Mason) have sought to redress this balance by "bringing impairment back in" to the social model, influenced by third-weave* feminist and ecofeminist writing about embodiment - arguing that diversity and difference need to be embraced, not denied, and that impairment as a lived reality inevitably informs our understanding of the world as disabled people, just as disablist oppression does, but that this can be seen as a positive thing, allowing as it does for plurality of experience...

*typo, but so appropriate I decided to leave it in ;)

Just as transphobia does not define transsexualism, so disablism cannot (wholly) define disability-as-identity. Just as even in a world completely free from disablism, impairment would continue to exist, and to affect some people negatively through factors such as pain, communication difficulties which cannot wholly be solved by technology, or shortened lifespan, and some impaired people would need medical interventions (whether drugs, surgery or both) in order to stay alive or have a decent quality of life, even in a feminist utopia where the shape of one's genitals has literally no significance socially, politically, economically or culturally (which would be (one aspect of) my utopia), there would still be people who would need hormone treatments and/or genital surgery to have a bearable life because of the physical condition (presently called gender dysphoria, in a gender-free utopia probably called something else) in which their "brain sex" and physical/hormonal sex do not match. Transsexualism is (like) impairment; transphobia is (like) disability.

Sadly, I am almost certain that there are transphobic disabled people and disablist trans* people, just as there are racist disabled people, homophobic black people, classist feminists, sexist working class people, etc, etc, etc. However, I can't help but dream of a banner of diversity under which all oppressed people can unite as allies in one another's struggles. For this to ever become anything like a reality, seeking out of parallels and interrogation of assumptions held about one group or movement by another is a permanent, ongoing necessity... and, just maybe, an alliance between the trans* liberation movement and the disability liberation movement could be the start of such a reality...

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...

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 anar