u/GrapplingHooks_

Note: I'm oversimplifying my language for dramatic effect. I'm also playing up my attitudes towards neurotypicals for dramatic effect. I know the rules already indicate that this is a satirical and hyperbolic sub, but I feel the need to have this tone preface just to be extra clear because I know not every post on this sub is actually satirical.

What's become increasingly relevant to me throughout my graduate studies and experiences is that neurotypicals have no idea what the fuck is going on with us. Repeatedly, neurotypicals seem to be insistent that we simply do not have internal worlds despite us constantly telling them that we do. They trust their own observations of us more than our observations of ourselves. The problem with this is that neurotypicals are not us and cannot empathize with us in the ways that matter. Because they suck.

Why is every study about the observed effects of ABA on children and not how children actually feel about going through it and how adults feel about it after the fact? It's because fuck you, that's why. Depression therapies have qualitative and phenomenological research to guide the quantitative shit, anxiety therapies do, PTSD therapies do. Autism therapies (and also personality disorder therapies to be clear) focus almost entirely on therapeutic outcomes filtered through observer bias. Science has moved on in every other area of the therapeutic field, but because we are not people to them we cannot be trusted to have meaningful thoughts.

Neurotypicals think we can't experience empathy, can't have imaginations, can't experience certain emotions as intensely or at all. They think we take things too literally (that would be kleptomaniacs). They are content to generalize and categorize us for the purpose of our eradication. For every autistic person who experiences one of the prior, there is an autistic person who does it in excess. Our diversity is as massive as the ocean is. Our experiences are so paradigmatically divergent that their language can't accommodate us. If they can't put our experiences and behaviors into their words, it doesn't exist to them. But we know it exists. We have been feeling and living it this whole time.

Everything we tell them, they smile and nod and then fucking ignore while pouring money into therapies that drown autistic voices. They have a mountain of data that hinges on the fact that their observations of us at all match up with our actual internal realities. They don't. Oftentimes, they just pick a narrative and run with it. Every few decades some new bullshit theory of autism becomes popular as some grand unifying theory about how we're actually broken because we don't conform to some standard. The cold mother theory? Misogynistic bullshit. The mirror neuron hypothesis? Debunked! Synaptic pruning models? They rely entirely on the idea that the extra connections in autistic brains are "unnecessary" because they think autism is fucking unnecessary to human diversity. When we talk about monotropism or double empathy, they ignore us because those theories do not paint our existence as inherently inferior.

The idea that we can be just as good, even better than them, scares the fuck out of them. Good. It should.

Making this post to discuss a thing that a lot of folks take for granted. This is not exclusively an Anglophone problem, but I experience it most often from Anglophones. When it comes up, it often makes spaces feel inaccessible and unsafe to me as a trans and brown person.

I am a trans person and I am of Indian descent. Growing up, I always believed I strongly identified with my birthname because of how upset I would get over people not putting effort into pronouncing it. My birthname contains consonants literally impossible to pronounce for most English speakers, but I understood that and did not mind that part. The real problem was people not letting themselves be corrected on the vowels in that name, which definitely do exist in almost every dialect of English. Time and time again I would remind people and they would simply not listen. Then, as a teenager, something changed. The "polite" liberal (not always white, but most commonly in my interactions) way to interact with my name was to deprive me of one. They would cite their desire to not want to embarrass themselves or offend me as a reason to not allow me a name. Sure, this name is one I did not identify with, but it was a piece of my ethnolinguistic background I carried with me nonetheless.

Now, as a trans person, I place even greater importance on being named. To be named in society is to be permitted to exist socially. My new name, again, is from my ethnolinguistic background. It is part of me and I will not take on a European name on transition just to be palatable to others. I am met, again, with the refrain of "I am not even gonna try to pronounce that". Denied a name once more. Denied not only my ability to exist in social spaces as myself (a brown person) but also denied my agency as a trans person. To me, a name is only a name when other people call it, otherwise it's just a collection of sounds that makes me personally happy that no one else uses.

Everyone has their own accents and clusters of sounds they can and can't pronounce. I accept that. Many people from non-Anglophonic cultures do get very frustrated in Anglophone countries when their name isn't pronounced with full authentic phonemic reproduction. I think this is not only inconsistent and hypocritical, but often ableist towards those with auditory processing atypicalities and other language-related disabilities. The goal is not perfection or total, 1:1 culturally authentic pronunciation. I want to be socially personed, I want to exist around other people with my own name (or at least an acceptable variant of it in the accents that surround me).

Social communication calls for compassion. Compassion for the limits of authentic pronunciation, yes, but also compassion for the people whose names are denied them.

Some helpful, actionable tips for people with names interacting with people with different accents:
- Try to settle on a close approximation of your name that would work for their accent or other speech needs.
- When correcting the pronunciation (which you are certainly in your rights to do), provide it slowly and "accentized" to the person you're talking to.

Helpful, actionable tips for trying to pronounce names with unfamiliar sounds:
- Try to sound it out or look it up if you came across it while reading.
- For in-person or voice call interactions, ask how to pronounce their name. If they use sounds you literally cannot pronounce, request that they help you find a way to say it that suits your accent or other speaking needs.

"Do this thing. Do that thing. Answer that email. Finish that assignment. Prepare this thing. Cook for yourself. Go out to get groceries. Pay this bill. Pay that subscription. Answer this phone call. Reply to that text. Show empathy to people. Remember to switch tasks. Take care of your health. Get enough sleep. Do all your work. Make time for yourself. Make time for your friends. Reach out to friends and family. Be authentic".

This shit is exhausting.

it is a common urge on the internet to engage in contrarianism to any post that feels implicitly "wrong". this tends to mix with neurodiversity to bad results. neurodiverse populations and multicultural populations are likely to articulate things in different ways. people on the internet tend to, in discussions, already not subscribe to the principle of charity (interpreting something someone says in the most agreeable way), and I'm not saying that this is necessarily incorrect. you don't really owe charitable interpretation to fascists. the least charitable interpretation is often against autistic people to silence autistic voices, used against people of color by white people to silence their voices. what this manifests in online is demands for emotional labor from neurodivergent people, second-language speakers, people who speak non-mainstream dialects of languages, whose quirks of communication such as bluntness, directness, different word and syntax choices lead to people automatically interpreting the post in the least charitable way.

as someone pursuing the cause of liberation, I understand the urge to want to "call out" what you perceive as potentially problematic. however, as a disabled person, this impulse ends up being disproportionately applied to people who do not fit a normative way to communicate and you end up with people policing how someone said something instead of what they actually meant.

it is a common response, again, to double down. to say "you implied it" or "your post implied", but to talk about implicit meanings when someone is trying to clarify and directly telling you what they mean, then doubling down on the misinterpretation only serves to exhaust disabled people and waste our time. kill the cop in you before you engage with anything in this community. and with marginalized communities and people in general. a community where people take the worst possible interpretation of what you say and criticize you for it, forcing you to explain yourself is an ableist community. it feels hostile to exist in such a space.

it's important to note that being marginalized does not make you immune to this impulse. we are all subjects of hierarchy and internalize its communication attitudes. autistic people can be ableist to the ways other autistic people communicate, for example.

there is a tactic used by bad faith actors online known as "sealioning" which consists of misinterpretations and asking questions in a way designed to waste peoples' time and energy. it's hard to tell the difference between this and sealioning in many cases, and oftentimes the difference doesn't matter. they both end up in wasted time and energy needing to re-explain our existences over and over again, stopping us from doing more meaningful things. disabled folks already have less time and energy to devote to building things and this just adds strain and stress. things of this nature kind of fit into multiple rules and so this is an expansion clarification of a moderation consideration as opposed to a rule change.

what I am talking about: policing of the way people communicate based on tone, syntax, phrasing, and treating them as if what they said is incorrect without anything they said actually being wrong.

what I am not talking about: calling out bigoted language, pointing out fascist dogwhistles, pointing out actual inaccuracies that aren't based on misinterpretation or misrepresentation, requesting people make language more accessible.

as a point of moderation, we're gonna be watching out for this, because it makes it less fun to be in spaces online where people aren't checking their policing impulses. I don't want to post something only to have to worry about how people will interpret me in the worst possible way and make me have to overexplain things that I wouldn't have had to if the person on the other end of the screen didn't treat me like I ain't human. you shouldn't have to worry about that either, at least in this space.

We recently removed a comment containing the word. While we agree that carceral behavior in not only queer communities but online and offline communities is a problem, and a rising one at that, the language used to evoke the word "genderQueer" is alienating to genderQueer members of out community. On top of that, it's not exactly conducive to our reclamation of queer identity to be weaponizing a word containing "queer". While those who use the term are correctly pointing to a very carceral mentality that's been growing in queer spaces, it is also pretty conservative to blame that mentality on "youth fragility" as opposed to acknowledging that this behavior is community policing, the problem is not that young people are too sensitive, it's that our oppressive systems train us all to be cops in our communities.

Clarify: When I use the term "carceral", I am referring to the fact that the use of the term "tenderQueer" is a derogatory and problematic way to refer to a real rise in carceral behavior in queer communities. I am not saying that exclusion from a space from using the term is being called carceral, that's just free association, we're not seeking "punishment" here.

We're gonna be removing comments containing that word as a pejorative and potentially banning users on that basis going forward.

Not all forms of hate are equal. Hatred levying the force of oppression is not the same as interpersonal hatred. I don't feel safe in environments that can't recognize that difference, in environments that will ostracize me for antipathy towards my oppressors by framing that as "hatred" and equivocate that with the same hatred my oppressors will often have for me.

We should all agree that neurotypicals aren't subject to neuroableism, that there isn't "neurotypicalphobia" even if individual neurodivergent people can often be rather uncharitable or antagonistic towards neurotypicals. This is the entire premise of the sub! We are evil because we do not pretend to disguise our anger at ableism through respectability. Let's not turn around and hold people marginalized by other systems to a different standard.