for Cringetopia users
Also I hope people in here are decent about plurals. r/fakedisordercringe is another one of the "be normal 
" instances
CW
a libs diet fascist cola.
Which still led during the Nazi period to hundreds of thousands of dead: Operation T4 (address was Tiergartenstr. 4). This program was defended by eugenicists in the West. Even after the war.
Don't forget constantly using person-first language when talking about autistic people, using the deprecated and Nazi-collaborationist namesake "Asperger's", and the pick-me autistic people who always chime in on mainstream discussions to validate anti-autistic ableism:
"I have high-functioning Asperger's and I hate it when [autistic people do or request something].
Autism is no excuse for not doing [thing I am capable of but which others may not be capable of].
Personally, I hate other people with autism who don't fit into allistic society as well as I do and it makes me resent people with autism who don't because it makes us all look bad."
*Shudders*
"I have high-functioning Asperger's and I hate it when [autistic people do or request something].
The eternal drive of individuals in oppressed groups to try to prove themselves as worthy and "one of the good ones" to the oppressor
constantly using person-first language when talking about autistic people
can you explain what you mean by this? i'm autistic but i don't really know the controversy about it
Of course.
It's generally accepted that autistic people prefer to be referred to using language that uses the term "autistic person" rather than "person with autism" because the latter is considered to be externalising autism and denying it as being central to the identity and experience of the autistic person.
Just as we wouldn't say "a person with blackness" or "a person with womanhood" or "a person with homosexuality" because that is seen as separating out the core experience of being a black person, a woman, or a gay person so too does the autistic community feel that phrasing it as "person with autism" has the same effect. (Also in the case of a gay person, the way of phrasing it above has implications of pathologising and medicalising the experience, which is what happens a lot for autistic people too and that has historically been to serious detriment to autistic people.)
For me, being autistic, there is no "outside" of autism; it colours who I am, it shapes my relationship to and understanding of the world (and this extends to how I experience myself) so to put autism as external to me is to imply that it's sort of additional somehow and it gives the impression that there's a "real" me beneath the autism, which I personally reject the notion of.
Note that this is just the general consensus here; some people don't care, some people prefer to refer to themselves as "a person with autism" and that's valid. But as a rule I'd say that it's best to refer to autistic people this way around as it's the preferred term.
That being said, I will sometimes say things like "excuse my autism", "this might be my autism acting up", "today the autism won", and "this is just my autism speaking but...", although I do this ironically.
Nice. I'm definitely stealing that idea. What a perfect example of reverse discourse!
This is so helpful, thank you. There has been a movement to change language in academia from things like "a leper" or to "a person who has leprosy" or "a depressed woman" to "a woman who has depression" etc in order to emphasize humanity of the person first and other characteristics second. I appreciate your perspective on that type of wording.
While I agree with what you write, ESL speakers often vary in meaning. The discourse and concept you mentioned is one that is part of learning a language. I do prefer for my diagnosis a person with specific diagnosis instead of diagnosis person, too. But that varies by person. Since the diagnosis is something that is an assigned thing, what is constitutional to me is not quite described by it. Though at the same time I am a queer person more than I am a person with queerness.
You put that so clearly. Person with womanhood really does sound so alienating, so I'll try to modulate my language towards autistic people in the future :)
The word autism to me isn't like "something I have" but rather just a descriptive term about me and my traits. It's like
"That person is nice" = nice person "that person is mean" = mean person "That person is into art" = artistic person
Autism is just a label, an observation made that "hey people with X and Y trait also seem to have A, B, C trait in common". I would be who I am with or without the word existing so putting it as something I "have" rather than am feels odd.
But you're free to use and prefer what you want for yourself.
I have Asperger’s and my “special interest” is gender ideology, which means I spend every waking minute thinking and problem-solving on how to quell this monster. Everything points to exposing the abysmal quality of “scientific evidence” that props up their beliefs. 🧵
Not 100% what you were talking about, but is word for word an unironic tweet I've seen and idk it felt relevant somehow. And down in the replies they make the point that they can't be wrong because of their Asperger's genius powers or whatever
Ugh. This is abysmal.
Autistic people are just as likely to be cranks as anyone else. Perhaps even moreso because the degree of focus it usually requires in order to become a crank is not that common in the allistic population whereas autistic people are much more inclined towards hyperfixations and, thus, they are more likely to become a crank due to this ability to sustain their focus on a singular subject of interest.
We're just as susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect as anyone else.
Just like how clumsily hammering away at the keys of a piano for 10,000 hours will not turn me into a concert pianist, so too is 10,000 hours of hyperfocus on a subject insufficient to turn me into an expert on it. With training and guidance, or in less common circumstances with a keen focus on self-teaching, devoting that amount of time can turn someone into an expert (which is why autistic people tend to be more likely to be a wealth of knowledge in their interests) but unless you've taken account of your biases and for the fact that information needs to be viewed with healthy skepticism and a critical eye then you probably aren't going to end up an expert in a subject, you will likely just end up being a very proficient crank.
Hang on I didn't know about this and i'm in europe, can you explain what this means? Is having a diagnosed mental illness a justification for refusing access to hormones?
Are you really trans? Or is your "dysphoria" just being depressed? Is the kind of thing gatekeeping therapist can throw at you
I see yea, i've heard a lot about that. I'm prepared to fight for it, even if I have to present a very cliché image, but i'm not going to show any doubts or I know it's going to be harder.
Thank you! I'm going to delete my previous message for OPsec reasons I think.
Oh no worries! I didn't do it because of that, you just reminded me that OPsec was probably something I should be careful about ^^
Self diagnosis is valid but also a bunch of people aren't actually self-diagnosing they're just using it to be edgy.
They used to say "as an r-slur" but when that became unacceptable they switched to autistic. A lot of the people saying this stuff don't actually genuinely think they're autistic, they're just assholes.
Which is a problem because our autistic friends struggle to recognise it. And they're a vulnerable group for grooming.
i dont see how that contrast with my original statement.
I'm not disagreeing with you. Just adding that there's an issue here in that we do need to find a way to counter the assholes somehow while also not invalidating our autistic friends.
It's similar to the vulnerability that young eggs (trans people that haven't realised it yet) have to grooming by the far right.
Show
They give them attention in a certain set of specific ways and then pipeline them into right wing online spaces and behaviours through various targeted grooming methods. I use the word grooming here because it's specifically the young teens that are most vulnerable to it and the main core of the people targeted.
I don't know how the issue should be addressed. I'm just highlighting it as an issue. We do need to avoid invalidating self-diagnosis autism but also need to counter the shitheads.
It's ok I understand what you're getting at - trying to think about solutions to the problem while avoiding causing more problems in the process.
I'm somewhat stuck with it. It's easy to see the problem and it's also easy to see how our usual tactics for countering it are insufficient without also hurting actual autistic people. It deserves some longterm thought, perhaps people will eventually start to find some solutions.
If you're an undiagnosed adult, then getting a mental disorder diagnosis will not help you if you are functional/conforming within society. Only if you need disability money because you can't exist in capitalism right does it make sense to seek diagnosis.
"Fake disorder cringe" is actually a subreddit? Wow. I had no idea. That's just fucking awful.
The thing about FDC is that there are certainly people on social media who misunderstand things like autism and are likely diagnosing themselves incorrectly. But there's a reason why pretty much all their focus is on TikTok, it's because they're children! Of course a 12-year-old on tiktok doesn't have a deep understanding of what autism symptoms looks like. And yes that 10 year old probably doesn't have DID when they say they're a Danganronpa character but you know what they do have? An imagination.
At best they're literally making fun of children having fun playing and not perfectly understanding the world and at worst are making fun of children going through serious struggles trying to find an answer for themselves.
And that's not even to mention the FDC very rarely has an understanding of what these disabilities look like either. Like sensory processing issues is well known to have high comorbidity with autism and yet saying you dont like loud noises gets the response of "no one likes them, you're not special". But if no one likes them then why do people go to the movies? Why are concerts a thing?
It's a horrible sub through and through that pretends to be righteous by "correcting misinformation" but in reality is just laughing at and insulting kids.
And they're not just making fun of them, but acting like they can accurately diagnose someone else's mental conditions perfectly from a 30 second tik tok video. They're all perfect armchair psychologists who are never wrong in their assessment that everyone different from them that they don't like is just "faking it."
And that's not even to mention the FDC very rarely has an understanding of what these disabilities look like either. Like sensory processing issues is well known to have high comorbidity with autism and yet saying you dont like loud noises gets the response of "no one likes them, you're not special". But if no one likes them then why do people go to the movies? Why are concerts a thing?
Who wants to bet those same assholes suddenly larp as autistic people with hypersensitivity when the topic of wearing a fucking mask comes up?
Also I hope people in here are decent about plurals
I have some friends who describe themselves as plural. I don't know very much about it, but that's okay. I listen to what people say, keep an open mind, and respond with respect. Other people's experiences of the world are different from mine and are equally important. :)
is there a decent explanation of that somewhere? i've only read that "multiple personalities isn't like how it's depicted in media" because of course it isn't, but then i've only ever encountered internet people presenting themselves as systems acting like that troll that was banned recently or like data in tng season 7's masks.
i understand some of those words but the whole concept is kinda short-circuiting.
thanks for trying, and good luck with that
I have some experience with two people who had DIS/multiple personalities and with the (non-)acceptance of psychiatrists and psychologists. One person might get a borderline disorder instead of DIS. At least Frank Putnam's MPD book has large stretches that are not good or factual or good science (and do sometimes lack patient centering) Edit: Read Huldra's comment about him, they highlight important consequences of his ideas.
I have a couple of theories of, but mostly it doesn't matter so much. What matters is how we want to interact with bodies that we recognize. We do ascribe to them a sense of continuity and permanence which obviously is wrong and yet not seldom useful. We do ascribe to them certain patterns of acceptable or estimated behavior, too. A clearly neurodivergent friend I have gets cut much more slack if he isn't finding the right tone of cultural civility, which is the right thing to do. Other people would get more scold for failing social cues.
What matters in interacting with DIS is that you yourself are still allowed boundaries and it isn't a failure not to get not communicated things. Though it is nice to talk to people as they want to be talked to, even if that varies.
CW:(Ableist murder) https://greyfaction.org/resources/proponents/putnam-frank/ (Also further warning that other text on this site may be critical of DID as a whole, but its still a valuable resource for documenting what some notable figures in the field believe and support.)
Frank Putnam also seems to support "facilitated communication"(various methods where an "assistant" supposedly helps someone communicate when they otherwise couldn't, and interprets those communications) and satanic abuse conspiracy shit, specifically in a case when both of these combined led to the murder of an autistic child.
yeah as far as i'm aware "facilitated communication" is 100% bullshit.
We do ascribe to them a sense of continuity and permanence which obviously is wrong and yet not seldom useful.
i'm not sure how to parse this sentence
You expect that people and their feelings and how you refer to them and how they act is more or less constant. That the Julia you talked to 5 minutes ago is roughly the same as the one you talk to now. That this is true for years, too. It is not true in general, but especially not if DIS people act very different (and not in the way of mania) from one moment to the next.
It is not true in general,
sure it is, at least for acquaintances. we grow and change over time of course, but outside of trauma or radicalization that most people don't go through you're not going to observe those changes without being very close to someone. Trump is the same piece of shit he's always been for 50 years. my parents' neighbors are the same people with the same politics and general demeanor they had going back to my childhood (well, the ones who aren't dead or moved away).
various coworkers, classmates, sports teammates etc never exhibited radical change outside of normative ranges of mood, and my friend who has bpd or whatever kinda just has a wider range. when i've had occasion to bump into people again they're presenting the same way as they always did, give or take two trans people.
i reckon it's precisely the lack of this continuity that makes whatever dis/multiple whatever people seems scary or disturbing to neurotypicals.
you're not going to observe those changes without being very close to someone.
That part doesn't feel right for both plenty neurodivergent and especially people with DIS or alike.
Though I agree that even plenty of neurodivergent are actually having a continuity which makes people feel in control (even if their mood swings are wide).
i meant you're not going to observe NTs changing over time when it's not drastic unless they're close relations. the shifts that present from folks we medicalize as personality disorders are of course expressed more plainly.
Was that person a full on troll? Damn, they said some stuff that helped things click for me with less common gender identities. I'm worried I was duped into believing some harmful bullshit now.
Even if it was a troll, their work is not theirs. You can of course draw a couple of things from it. A bit of multiple / DIS discourse definitely was expressed by it.
the "airplanekin" it mentioned is just the attack helicopter "joke"
Oh, maybe I'm thinking of someone else then, I don't remember that. Was this the "swarmkin" one, or someone else? I think there was someone that kept changing their story every other post, which I'm guessing is the troll.
i think i saw it claimed to be swarmkin at some point but i was pretty checked out after it said it couldn't watch some episode of star trek voyager because it had a... i think the term was "brainmate" based on the character 7 of 9 that was contradicted by the on-screen depiction of jeri ryan's character having a (my terminology) 90s-ass normative gender identity because she was on a 90s tv show.
Ah yep, I remember that discussion.
So my general attitude is more of a "live and let live" with people who claim to be more on the...I think it is "faegender" side of things? And just not worry too much or try to demand they explain themselves or conform to my standards or anything. I'm hoping that's a decent way to treat people and I'm not being too welcoming to wreckers and trolls who want to make fun of the "woke SJWs" or whatever.
yeah idk i don't really understand what people get out of having a specific inscrutable gender label instead of just saying "nonbinary" and not elaborating, or saying something cheeky but intelligible to other people like "my gender can't be expressed in human language". i think putting on the label constitutes an attempt at communicating meaning because that's the entire point of language so i don't think it's demanding to be like "ok and what does that mean?".
i'm sure such people have reasons for how they're choosing to describe themselves and i'd like to understand that, at least, even if it's not possible to understand someone else's gender (and i don't really understand the supposedly well established genders either)
yeah idk i don't really understand what people get out of having a specific inscrutable gender label instead of just saying "nonbinary" and not elaborating, or saying something cheeky but intelligible to other people like "my gender can't be expressed in human language".
The entire point of xenogender labels is that to the people using these, it is a way to make their gender identity legible to them and being able to conceptualize it. It's the very opposite of inscrutable. Even when we view gender as a spectrum between the poles man and woman, there's people who do not find themselves anywhere on that, they are outside of the charted territory of what Western society views as scrutable gender expressions. So they need an approximation of how they feel about and understand the gendered part of their personality, a shorthand for their concept of the self, their body image and their gender performance. Nonbinary is in large parts a catch-all term, and it is one that says what people are not. Saying "i'm not this" does not answer the question "what am i?". I like large, open-ended labels a lot, but i get the need that many people have for microlabels to articulate their experience.
And i'll be honest here, i've met more than one nonbinary person irl where it would have made perfect sense for that elflike being to say "my pronouns are fae / faer". I wouldn't have doubted that one second. I've lurked in communities of people who can best conceptualize themselves as androids or energy beings and none of that seemed anything stranger than the self-image i have on a good dose of LSD - when my mind is able to produce such a state with a few microgramms of ergotamines, i do not find it hard to grasp that some people feel that way all the time even when stone cold sober. Especially when they're nonbinary and present in ways that make people call them a "thing" or an "it" to begin with. A lot of NB folks have had experiences of what they call "being creatured", having their humanity and even their personhood doubted and denied to them. Is it such a stretch that some of them arive at a point where they wonder if they even need to view themselves as a person when just acting naturally means others cannot see them that way anymore?
As a trans person, i understand both that our gender identity can be hard to grasp for outsiders and that we have a right to self-identification, and i also know the transmedicalist history (and in many parts still ongoing present-day status quo) of excluding non-binary people from community support and from access to gender-affirming care. So i'm not going around doubting other people's gender identity or saying their pronouns do not make any sense, and it's honestly kinda sad to see how quickly xenogender people are doubted even in a space like this. DroneRights probably was more than a bit of a troll in that it came off as willfully antagonistic, but i don't think it was trolling us about that it could best understand itself as a de-personalized borg drone.
i meant inscrutable to the rest of us. my experience around people finding solace or self-understanding or whatever in labels comes from "oh that was x all along" and is bundled up in other people before them having some experience of non-normativity and communicating about it. I guess somebody has to be first, but a new label doesn't have any of that context and i'm not sure how or if it carries any information. That doesn't invalidate someone's gender but it means they're not communicating any of the things that you or I do when we say woman or agender or somebody else says nonbinary.
I feel like you don't need a robust understanding of the specifics of "neither" or "something else" to add agender and nonbinary as umbrella to the canonical western reckoning of gender, but trying to establish a new specific one is a different project from what we've done before. It's not doubt it's you've said something that i take at your word has meaning to you but doesn't tell me anything, like explaining colors to someone who has never seen them, except there's no well established physics to draw on. There are surely genders that I don't know what they are but i literally can't think anything about them because i have no referent underlying the words.
as for the psych heavy stuff I was originally asking after a credible explanation and it seems to not be available, and i don't know about all that. Our brains can do all kinds of weird and wonderful things but the way people recall experiences and report them isn't methodologically rigorous so i don't know how i'm supposed to tell the difference between stuff like sleep paralysis hallucinations and things I apparently can't read about anywhere.
Yeah, I suppose if someone does have an unusual gender identity they would expect other people to not understand and ask questions. I don't really understand non-binary gender too well, but as a cis-gendered person, it's basically just because I've never thought about it. It's not something I've ever had to question or examine within myself. I think that is why so many cis people refuse to try to understand people different from them. They've never thought about that stuff, therefore no one else has. Or something, I don't know. I just want to be nice to people.
NB can be a lot of things. I identify that way because I don't feel male or female, at least not fully. Like if there is a gender spectrum from male to female, I sit around the middle but more towards the male side. But it varies a bit.
The xenogender stuff, I admit I don't really get it either. But if someone is sincere about it, I try and trust that it makes sense to them, and it's not my place to judge its validity. As you say, I think the main thing is to be kind to others and let them try and make sense of who they are in their own way, even if it seems incomprehensible or even ridiculous from the outside
I think the common term for "both outside binary gender identities, outside of a gradient between these and outside of just not having a gender" is xenogender. But yeah, just respecting people's pronouns and not prodding them to justify their existence is the appropriate thing to do. See my post below for some more detailed thoughts on the matter, even though it's just a trans woman trying to make sense of this and not a firsthand account.
Thanks for that! It's always good to try and get more perspectives on things, even if it isn't a firsthand account of what it is like, it's still good to empathize with another person, even if we don't fully understand what their inner life is like.
autism has not made my life easier and i would probably choose not to be autistic if that was an option
We need to quarantine all redditors until we can figure out just what is going on.
Alternatively, the wall.
![[CW: ableism being mocked] Autism discussed on Reddit starter pack](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/33085413-9895-4eee-99a8-d679d626ef23.jpeg){kind=link}