Nico

It’s that time of year again- the time of year where we gear up for April, aka “Autism Awareness Month”. As in the past couple of years, Cafe Press has people vote on which charities/organizations they will donate to. They started doing this poll as Autistics and our allies protested their previous approach- to just donate to Autism Speaks. 

ASAN (the Autistic Self Advocacy Network) is the only organization on the poll run by and for Autistics. The others range from “meh” to espousing bad science, eugenic ideas, or both. 

POLL ENDS ON MARCH 8TH. THIS IS URGENT.

You may vote for one Organization to receive half of the donations. The organization with the most votes and the runner up will each receive half. Donations come from 10% of the sales of items using a specified tag. 

NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US!!!

New blog post for my blog! 

Content: ableism, internalized ableism, mention of hospitalization and depression, mention of denials of reproductive justice to people with disabilities. 

When I was 20, I did not love myself. I was tired. I had been in and out of hospitals, been under the care of providers hopeful that a pill would fix my brain. I had been told repeatedly that there was something “wrong” with me. That there were somethings it wasn’t “right” for me to do.

girljanitor:

and sociopathic asshats like Lisa Wade who feel the PRESSING FEMINIST ISSUE is sticking up for mothers who murder their disabled children

NOT DISABLED WOMEN, WHO IF THEY MAKE IT TO ADULTHOOD WITHOUT BEING MURDERED, ENDURE A RATE OF VIOLENCE, RAPE, AND ABUSE THAT IS FUCKING UNREAL.

70%-83% of developmentally disabled women have been, are, or will be raped.

Countless women with disabilities have been, are or will be forcibly sterilized in order to conceal evidence of their current or future rape. INCLUDING SMALL CHILDREN.

Countless women with disabilities are pressured to abort their pregnancies or given misinformation about their ability to have children.

Countless women have been denied basic accessibility tools in order to report their abuse or rape.

Women with disabilities who live in institutions are up to ten times more likely to be abused than women without disabilities.

Shit like this is why Linda Cornelison, a 19-year old woman, was tortured to death by medical staff at the Judge Rotenburg Center, receiving more than 57 applications of “aversives” in the last four hours preceding her death from a perforated ulcer,  such as bruising muscle pinches and ammonia pellets broken directly under her nose. NO ONE WAS HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR HER DEATH.

This misplaced “sympathy” is why children like 3-year-old Amelia Rivera are denied lifesaving organ transplants and doctors fell comfortable telling their parents their lives aren’t worth saving.

“FEMINISTS” LIKE THESE ARE MORE CONCERNED ABOUT SYMPATHY FOR WENDY GARLAND’S MURDERERS THAN HER. More concerned about the two women who let her die covered in her own filth in a room over 100 degrees, where she lay bedridden and without medical attention for more than two years.

The media is more concerned about DOMESTIC ABUSER’S STRESS LEVEL then the fact that they’re BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR WIVES.

When 87% of women with severe disabilities are beaten by their partners, they are told they should “just leave”.

When young disabled women are burned to death by their mother, Lisa Wade asks, but what about that poor murderer???

And THE FUCKING MEDIA LOVES stories like this one that tell a sympathetic tale of a “poor mother” who drowned her disabled 4-year-old daughter in the bathtub, who has been released and plans to have more children, and has been ruled “not a threat” to children.

Laura Cummings, raped and tortured to death by her mother and other family members, and Lisa Wade would like us to sympathize with these “poor mothers”.

Zahra Baker, a disabled 10-year-old girl, was raped, murdered, dismembered and fed to wild animals, and Elisa Baker, her stepmother, was sentenced to 15-18 years for second degree murder…SHE FACES MORE TIME ON UNRELATED DRUG CHARGES THAN SHE DOES FOR THE MURDER. Her father received a 30-day suspended sentence for unrelated misdemeanors.

Betty Ann Gagnon, 48, lived most of her life on her own until she was beaten to death by her family after spending the previous FIVE YEARS IN A CHICKEN WIRE CAGE AND TENT SMEARED WITH HER OWN FECES. HER FAMILY WAS *NOT* CHARGED WITH MURDER.

THESE ARE NOT ISOLATED EVENTS.

THIS IS SYSTEMATIC VIOLENCE IN A WORLD THAT TELLS PEOPLE IT’S A-OK TO TORTURE, RAPE, AND MURDER DISABLED WOMEN AND ACTIVELY FACILITATES THEIR ABUSE, RAPE, AND MURDER.

“FEMINISTS” WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT PRO-CHOICE WORKS BOTH WAYS

WHERE OPENLY EUGENICIST “FEMINISTS” LIKE THESE ARE HAPPY TO TELL ME I SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED BECAUSE I’M A BURDEN TO WOMEN WHO “COUNT” AS WOMEN.

I AM SILENCED AND SPOKEN OVER

WHY WOULD I SUPPORT A MOVEMENT THAT WOULD BE GLAD TO SEE ME DEAD?

Amazing response.

casketscratcher:

The one tiny piece of light in this big stinking ableist mess is this article, and how much I can relate to it.

When I- and others who are autistic, have Mental Health Disabilities, or both — talk back with truth, we are denied. When we talk about how having xyz diagnosis doesn’t mean we will do stuff, when we point out that we aren’t mass murderers, we are shut down. When we talk about how yes, mental health reform is important but that it shouldn’t come out of stigma, coercion  and false equivalence, we are told that we are calling other scary kids lost causes. When we point out that we don’t have enough information, we are dismissed. When we disclose, we are called too close to the issue. Even when our mothers join us.

In reality, only 5% — or 1 in 20 — of those in jail for violent offenses entered jail with a diagnosable condition. The other 95% did not present as diagnosable on entry. Most of those with diagnosable conditions are there on non-violent and drug offenses, including a number of which are a symptom of a lack of supports rather than their conditions themselves. Some estimates place the rate of Mental Illness at 50% of the inmate population, and yet only a very small percentage are there for violent crimes.

In reality, these impressions of us make us targets of crimes. People with “Serious Mental Illnesses” are more than twice as likely to be a victim of a violent crime. We are targeted for sexual assault, particularly if we are or are seen as women. We are likely to feel stuck in abusive relationships, or to have people use our diagnostic status as justification for abuse. And that is just the violent crimes — we are astronomically more likely to be victims of personal theft, and 4 times more likely to be victims of property theft.

<3 I’m glad it helps. 

(also you seem really cool and like Thor and Loki and stuff going from your tumblr. Which I think is awesome. Yep.)

(Source: allies-person)

tee-m-kris:

For those unaware of the Project For Awesome (P4A), P4A is an annual, 48-hour event on YouTube created by John and Hank Green (aka the Vlogbrothers) in which individuals post videos about their favorite charity/non-profit. Users vote on videos they think should be in the top 5 to get an equal share of the total amount of donations raised for the Foundation to Decrease World Suck which was started by John and Hank Green. So far, the total is close to $300,000, and it has only been 12 hours.

ASAN is currently ranked 25th. I can’t do this alone. I need your help. ASAN needs your help. This will not only give ASAN a huge donation, but it will help bring ASAN into the mainstream and into the consciousness of people not associated with Autistic people in any way.

sherlocksflataffect:

tw: victim blaming

My…adventures in often falling on the wrong side of the who to fear divide when profiling who is dangerous and scary and going to commit a senseless act of violence.

______Text of post below

Yet another mass killing. Yet another tragedy. It is terrible. It is horrible. It is wrong.

People are scared.

People are looking for a group to be scared of.

Ladies, gentlemen, other august personages, I am the monster you are afraid of. For my entire life I have been. The reasoning changes, but I always come down on the wrong side of the line. I am always who the media, the talking heads, the papers, now the blogs, who the people you listen to tell me to fear.

And this makes being me terrifying. It makes being me unsafe.

First, it was being an abused child from what they call a broken home. Abused children commit all sorts of violence, you see. We are dangerous and unpredictable because we grew up with violence and that is all we know. We are ticking time bombs, we have no empathy, our dysfunctional unstable home lives have made us fragile at best, cold blooded killers at worst.

So isolate us. Keep your children away from us. Warn every one that we are dangerous because of what our families are like. Make sure that everyone knows that we-not our abusers, but we-are the scariest thing on the block.

Do you remember all the news reports and such emphasizing the terribility of home lives of serial killers and mass murderers during these time periods? I do. I do in great detail-because I remember relating. And I remember staying up nights horrified that they were a glimpse into the only future open to me. I was 9 years old and scared shitless that my only career option was as a mass killer-because the media had everyone convinced that’s what happens to children with childhoods like mine.

And because the other adults around me made it very clear that I was the scariest thing on the block.

I was isolated. I was alone.

Then that went out of vogue.

For about 10 minutes I was safe.

Then another terrible tragedy happened, and they found a new scapegoat, and I was in an even more precarious position than before: the new problem was children and teens who were bullied.

I have been able to write about my parents. I have not been able to write about the bullying I experienced without being too triggered to function. It was that bad. Again, I was dangerous.

Again, people were telling their nice, ‘normal’ children to stay away from the bullied children. Isolating us-making us further targets. And making us more alone. Warning everyone that we were dangerous, the scariest thing on the block again-this time I was scary not just because of my family, but because I got locked into lockers by my peers. We are dangerous and unpredictable because we didn’t have the skills and characteristics to not be at the bottom of the pecking order of middle school.

So obviously the answer was to isolate us more lest we ‘snap’, to fear us and let bullies to their thing, rather than to do anything about bullying. We are damaged, terrifying, violent, dangerous, irredeemable. We are the middle school monsters of your nightmares.

Again, I was the middle school monsters of my own nightmares, too. Literal nightmares, I’m talking. Still everything around me was telling me that because of things outside my control I was destined to go out in a blaze of violence and take as many people as I could with me. That was the career path being offered to me. Never mind that I knew (and still know) exactly nothing about weapons more volatile than bows and arrows, never mind that I am reluctant to physically defend myself, much less be the aggressor, this is what life had to offer me.

Because I was a target, because I was different, I was still what everyone feared. Everyone was telling you to fear me. No one even thought about the bullied kids seeing these news reports. They just knew about you normal folks, and that you needed to be safe from people like me. They couldn’t tell you a single thing about the mass killers except that they were in this one category-so, literally, they told you a single thing-and that single thing was what made them dangerous.

It made me dangerous.

Isolate me. Make me alone. Fear me. Abuse me some more. Make me more dangerous. It doesn’t matter, I am unsafe no matter what you do. The news-all the news-says so.

And now. Now I am 30 years old.

I am still literally losing sleep, wondering if or when that transformation is supposed to happen. I know logically it will not happen. I know I have no interest in hurting anyone. I know the statistics on who actually commits this sort of violence. I know my history is not going to magically impart a knowledge of guns or explosives or a desire to hurt a large number of people. My anger and hurt do not manifest that way, they never have, and that is not going to change.

But now autism is the scapegoat du jour. Now every time someone does something violent, they are speculated to be autistic. And, just as some killers who were speculated to have crappy home lives actually did, just as the Columbine killers actually were bullied, there is a possibility that there will be a mass shooter who is Autistic.

But that does not make all of us dangerous. The immediate speculation makes my blood run cold.

It brings bile to my throat and a panic to my chest.

Have we learned nothing? Have the bullied children and abused children and medicated children and other scapegoats who have done no violence learned nothing? Passing the hot potato is a relief, but it is wrong.

Passing the blame down to another group without power hurts people.

They will be isolated. They will be alone. They will be hurt.

I do not want another child, a single other child, to be hurt by their peers for being ‘dangerous’. I do not want a single other child to be thought a ‘ticking timebomb’ by the adults in their life. They treat you with fear and they treat you with loathing when they are afraid of you.

I do not want another kid loathed because the media decided to pin the blame on their brain. I do not want another child being isolated, gossip about why to steer clear spread through whispers and subtle finger pointing.

NO.

I do not want another child to have nightmares like I did-like I still do-of being some sort of sleeper agent who has no other career path because of self fulfilling prophesies. I cannot even explain what this fear is like, and the fewer people who understand it, the better.

This has got to stop.

It’s to late to stop for my sake. The damage was done by the time we got to “bullied kids are dangerous”. But it is not too late to stop for the sake of today’s autistic children.

New blog post on my blog. 

Content note: ableism, stigmatization of Autistics and other PWDs, the Sandy Hook shooting

That comment starts with a declaration: I was one of those scary kids.

It’s not some great proud thing to say. It’s a truth, a truth that when I reveal it makes people behave differently. Admitting that you were a “scary kid” means that people heighten their bar of behavior for you even more than a simple disability disclosure does. 

yesthattoo:

It’s on the ASAN blog. (I wrote it for them!)

woot!

I’m frustrated with myself. A part of me spends time berating myself, reminding me that I can and do write fairly well some times so I ought to be able to churn something serviceable out when I want or need to. It’s more than writer’s block- I get that too sometimes. I have all the ideas there, but the brain fog has been interfering with my ability to put them into the text box coherently.

I know where the fog comes from- it’s my fibro and arthritis pain mixing with my neurology. But I also know where the frustration and the self doubt comes from too. I’m not the only one struggling with that one.

It’s been a long, postless summer on my part. But the brain fog cleared just long enough to churn out something last night. Admittedly, the time since my last post shows, but still.