Guest post: Recognising the pattern
Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on When did it begin?
For me, it was recognising the pattern of Cluster B abuse from when it happened in my favourite Asperger’s/autism forum, although I didn’t have a name for it until fellow commenters, here and on Facebook, joined the dots for themselves with regard to transactivism, and so educated me.
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It even happened the same way (Cluster B behaviour seems to go by the book):
Firstly:
Someone points out how unfair it is to expect every member to have a full, official diagnosis of Asperger’s [dysphoria]. They request that self-identifying should be enough.
• Reason 1: Official diagnosis is expensive; and difficult and convoluted to obtain.
• Reason 2: A lot of people are just suspecting that they might be on the spectrum [trans] and a support forum is the best place for them to explore their identity, and it would be mean to deprive fellow autists [possibly dysphoric] people of support just because they hadn’t yet found or couldn’t afford the official channels.
Some commenters argued that this would pave the way for non-autistic [non-dysphoric] abusers to pretend to be Aspie [trans], but were shouted down because “Who on Earth would do that?! No-one is going to pretend to be autistic [trans] just to access accommodations!” (It’s not that autistic people lack a theory of mind; it is that experience has taught us that what we first thought – that everyone thinks the same way that we do – is false, and that we cannot actually know what another person is thinking).
Of course, the cautious people (who might have encountered just such Cluster B abusers in their past) were right, because:
Secondly:
People with Cluster B personality disorders start to infiltrate. They have excellent people-reading skills, and know exactly how to present themselves to get other people to see them the way they want to be seen. They recruit ‘flying monkeys’ in back channels/private messages, and start to pile on the people who have recognised the abusive behaviour, framing the accusations in such a way that it makes it seem that the whistle-blowers are the bad guys.
The autism forum imploded, but the abusers (whilst, no doubt, having huge fun at our expense) failed to get the vehicle that they wanted for influencing wider society in their favour. This is probably because autistics (notoriously) are impossible to organise offline. Despite plenty of war-like rhetoric, the autistic lads were never actually going to get together and storm government offices, demanding whatever it was that the agitators wanted. They also misread the public attitude to autistic people – their sympathy is entirely directed to the poor, martyred ‘autism moms’, and there isn’t an ounce of empathy for autistic people ourselves.
The ‘self-diagnosed’ people simply went back to being camouflaged members of normal society, fading into the woodwork until they discovered a new vulnerable group to be their Trojan Horse. Transsexuals.
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Ophelia and the commenters here helped me to see the pattern; the way she was treated at FtB was the catalyst in my leaving that site for good. Discovering that radical feminism has a much better way to deal with dysphoria than blaming the dysphoric person (i.e. get rid of the sex stereotype boxes, don’t mutilate someone to fit into the other box) was a major influence in my deciding that ‘being trans’ actually isn’t what I am, and the totally illogical, quasi-religious ‘arguments’ of the transactivists cemented my peak trans moment.
TL;DR: Peak trans for me was discovering that transactivists are abusers, and that radical feminism has a better answer to dysphoria than saying “You’re trans.”
Amazing convoluted thought processes at FtB. No one there ever accepts religious claims at face value, we must fully examine that piece of toast to see it it is Jesus’s Face or just a pattern, but we are expected to accept all the claims made by people who suddenly decide they are “wimmin”.
I accept that trans people exist, I will fight for their human rights if need be, but it will take more than self assertion for me to accept that they are women, or men, as the case may be.
Eloquent as always tiggerthewing…
tiggerthewing, thanks for that. As someone with OCD, I am continually finding myself confronted by self-diagnosed OCD people (people who merely have a habit or a preference, and it does nothing to drive everything about their life).
Now we are being told that we need to set up our classes to accommodate the self-diagnosed, so they don’t have to reveal their “disability”. We are being told we need to make things available to everyone that used to be accommodations to help people with genuine disabilities get a level playing field. This is so anyone can access this without having to “disclose”. I understand that many disabled people don’t want to disclose – I was forced into a disclosure of my OCD recently, and it sucked…but instead we are giving the people who do not have disabilities access to all the things that helped disabled people get through. This isn’t leveling the playing field, this is giving another advantage to those who do not need it, much like putting male-bodied people into women’s sports.
Thanks Tiggerthewing, probably the most account of all of ours.
Er, hours later I notice that I accidentally a word. I think that was supposed to read “probably the most personally fraught account of all of ours.”
Accidentally…omitted?…a word? Perhaps?
Which is pretty hilarious.
@6: I think you may not be familiar with the slang-ish ellipsis (? I’m sure linguists have a technical term for it) in which the word following “accidentally” is omitted. Thus, “I accidentally the plate” confesses that the plate is now lying in pieces on the floor. And yes, the self-referentiality of omitting “omitted” is delicious.
Ha! No, I wasn’t, and it’s a good one.
Yes! This is exactly what a lot of us were saying about the whole “self-Dx” thing previously, and exactly what happens – people start yelling at you for being evil exclusionary monsters ZOMG can’t you just shut up and let them stomp all over you?! It’s not like you get to have boundaries, no, those are for Real People!
A number of people pointed out that Self-Dx isn’t enough. It’s a reasonable starting point, but you cannot just stop there – you need to find out if you’re actually correct! Self-Dx should lead to formal Dx (ideally) or at least “informal Dx”, where someone who knows what they’re doing says “Yes, you’re obviously Autistic, even though I can’t make the label stick officially on your medical records”. This is a basic element. And pointing out that without some kind of “gatekeeping” the community will be flooded by assholes that hog all the (already-scarce) resources we’ve managed to scrape together over years of work… “But nobody would do that!” – carefully ignoring all the other examples of assholes doing *exactly that* in every other space…
It’s especially an issue for those who claim accommodations of any kind – as has already been noted. Inevitably what happens is that Normies grab everything they can to get “ahead”, meaning that yet again they’re tipping the playing-field in their favour, while stomping all over the people who actually need the accommodations.
This results in accommodations being withdrawn because “people keep cheating” so nobody will have them! It’s too much bother trying to meet all these different “needs”, and half the people don’t really need them anyway, and…
Thanks, Normies!
Interesting, isn’t it, how it’s always the same kind of person? No empathy for anyone other than themselves, no consideration, a massive and unwarranted sense of entitlement, and the tendency to respond with all the subtlety and reasonableness of a volcano when told “No”. Hmm. New diagnostic criteria in development?
Or just same old same old Narcissistic Personality Disorder?
Maybe we need a new DSM category of Entitlement Disorder? We would probably find we are in an epidemic.
Perhaps if there was a label like “Abusive Asshole who Trashes the Lives of Everyone Unfortunate Enough to Encounter Them” Syndrome, people might take the behaviour more seriously. Especially since it’s still hella fashionable to blame the people that these abusive assholes keep targeting, rather than the actual problem.
Narcs and other assorted nightmares looove getting hold of Autistic people to play with – we’re totally ill-equipped to deal with this kind of deliberate, targeted abuse. I’m not suggesting all Autistic people are angels, by any means, but we’re much less likely to devote a substantial amount of time and energy to making someone else’s life a living hell for our own amusement. (That would be a huge waste of time that could otherwise be spent on our Special Interests/current research topics!)
We’re often completely unable to understand the thought process of abusive people. No matter how many books you read, explaining the viewpoint, it’s incredibly difficult to grasp. It’s almost impossible for other people with empathy and consideration to get it as well, because they’d never even *dream* of behaving so horribly.
What would greatly benefit humanity would be a way of getting rid of the Cluster B traits. They’re just a nightmare to deal with for anyone around the problem. But wait! I forgot! Wanting to get rid of all Autistic traits is great (because Warrior Moms are the only experts on Autistic experience!), but wanting to limit the damage that Cluster B behaviour does to everyone around the asshole? ZOMG Ableist! It’s not fair! They’re just special!
Yes, I can’t think how many meetings I’ve been to where I had to listen to yet another speaker telling us it’s our fault if our work place treats us crappy. We shouldn’t “hang around poopy people” (defined very broadly as anyone who thinks the work place treats us crappy). “Letting someone get to you” is your fault. It’s all in how you approach it.
So if someone repeatedly walks up to me and hits me in the face, the broken noses are all my fault because I do insist on going to the place where the asshole hits me in the face, not the fault of the asshole who keeps hitting me (or the police for not removing him from proximity to people he can hit). It’s the same thing that makes women responsible for their own rapes because the dress they were wearing, or the fact that they had enough drinks to impair their judgment, or the fact of being a woman in a place where there are men.