Rainbow autism
Yet another idenniny we have to affirm and respect and fight for:
So autism is somehow linked to LGB now? Also TQ+?
How? Why? What is the link?
I started out thinking there was no link, apart from the sweeping “different,” which applies to everyone in some way, but it occurs to me that maybe the link is literalism. Trans ideology is pathologically literal about the fictitious gendered soul, and autism tends toward literalism in general. Could that be the link?
I think the mental process underlying the allegation of linkage might be precisely the reverse: autism is literal minded towards the world (i.e. materialistic); it therefore poses a threat to the subjectively TQ+ element of LGBTQ+ and it is consequently imperative that it be pre-emptively co-opted under the guise of solidarity.
Maybe both at once, since coherence is never a requirement for this ideology.
There is evidence that claims of transgender identity are much higher among autistic people. (One resource that talks a lot about this is Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), but there are many others.)
I find the poster incredibly creepy and wrongheaded. “Autistic identities”? Really? It’s a matter of “I identify as autistic” rather than a doctor providing an evidence-based diagnosis? Someone with a diagnosis of autism is not autistic if they don’t “identify as” autistic?
And “we can’t fight for [this] without fighting for [that]”? Generally not true. It’s perfectly reasonable to focus on one thing, even if other things are related. Throwing everything together risks missing the points where things are different or even in conflict.
And “neuro-affirming”? It’s about being “valid” now?
I too find the poster incredibly creepy and wrongheaded. Horrifyingly so.
The prevalence of autistic kids among those who self-identify as trans is much higher than that in the population at large. Sometimes it seems the entire complex taxonomy of gender identities and rules was created by autistic people; who else could be bothered. As you mentioned here in February, Barnes says, in Time To Think, that the Tavistock ignored evidence that 97.5% of the kids showing up there were autistic, and 35% of them moderately to severely so, versus around 2% in the general population. The Venn Diagram is practically concentric circles.
Growing up autistic – especially if you don’t know it – can be exhausting, alienating, and confusing. A simple answer like Trans comes along and promises everything is magically better if you transition, plus you get this incredible Pokemon-like complexity of definitions and transforms, and you to get to yell at everybody to follow your complex rules, and everybody will clap for you.
The associations representing autistic people and kids have been taken over entirely by TRAs. You can’t go seek community, as an autistic person, without encountering such cheerleading. You can’t run an autistic support group without bowing to them.
This tweet could be read as “I will immediately lose my job working to support autistic people if I’m not also trans-affirming.”
Forced teaming on forced teaming?
This “no x without y” stuff is the same impulse that led to Atheism+, wasn’t it? For some reason, people are unable to give themselves permission to limit the scope of their attention, even contextually. To do so and focus on one thing is cast as opposition to our support for everything else. It’s a mark of callous selfishness. Evoking guilt in the target is the point, accomplished through a mechanism similar to survivor’s guilt or guilt over good fortune.
Jeeezus, I’d forgotten that statistic about the Tavistock.
Nullius, I don’t think so, at least not as I remember it. It wasn’t a “no without” thing but rather a “let’s have a with” thing.
On the other hand, Atheism+ was the brainchild of Jen McCreight, who is now a rabidly exclooosionary trans man and trans activist.
https://twitter.com/jeymccreight/status/1671899182079115267
The forced-teaming of T with medical conditions and disabilities has been going on for quite a while. We’ve seen it most with DSDs (for the obvious reason) and with autism. In the latter case it is certainly at least partly because of autistic people being over-represented in the newer part of the alphabet community, as others have said. I’ve spoken about this to quite a few people with autism and they say there’s a strong sense that autism is completely captured and perhaps now intractably tangled. They feel that autistic people like them, especially children, are targeted because they are more susceptible to the concept of a magic bullet and less likely to change their minds…. and that messages like these are an aggressive and disturbing part of that targeting.
Messages like “no [condition or disability without the alphabet]” are relatively new (the past year or so) but are increasing in frequency and scope. In the last few months I’ve seen it directed at all sorts of conditions and disabilities and most often at disability in general.
This is very obviously an unwelcome ‘queering’ of disability, which is unlikely to have a good outcome for disabled people. Be clear: the claim is not that Gender Dysphoria is a disability or mental illness; that is still a forbidden message. The claim is that, like disabled people, trans (etc) people need certain help in order to live their lives on a somewhat level playing field to everyone else.
I’ll leave you to speculate on what I think about that claim.
The main problem is that so many of the medical condition and disability charities (especially the latter) are 100% captured. A large number of alphabet people have or claim to have disabilities. So it’s proving hard to resist the forced-teaming.
Sites like the revolting Steph’s Place were quick to capitalise on this. I won’t link to it, but the intention is rather clearly and prominently spelled out, there. It says something along the lines of “there will always be transphobia, but you can’t criticise disabled people…”
It’s saying that’s why being trans should be considered a disability, because then nothing trans can be criticised. It’s No Debate 2.0.
Nullius, I agree with Ophelia here. The idea was that Dictionary Atheism, as it was briefly called, is a fine thing, but if we’re going to be campaigning against religions on the grounds that they’re harmful then we really ought to be thinking about the positive social impact that atheism (or at least, letting go of religion) could have.
It was never meant to be exclusionary, it was supposed to be a movement within a movement.
But then everyone lost their minds, of course.
It’s a shame about Jen. And she’s by no means the only early champion of A+ who’s gone to the bad. Rebecca Watson and Greta Christina are the ones who spring most obviously to mind, but there are plenty more.
I vaguely recall having interactions back then in which I defended the proposition that it was okay to have atheism just be atheism, since we have other categories and movements for ethical/legal/scientific/etc. concerns. It feels rather reminiscent of having to defend feminism as a thing for females and letting other groups have their own things. After all, why must we have Y with X if not because X alone is insufficient in some way? If not because not including Y would be (in the case of Atheism+, explicitly morally) deficient?
A random titbit: I asked ChatGPT about the origin of this newfangled sense of “identities” and badgered it until it answered.(GPT likes to pretend it doesn’t have access to information it has access to.) Apparently, this particular sense was rare outside of the academy until 2014.
[…] a comment by Papito on Rainbow […]
Yes, but again, I don’t think Atheism+ was saying it’s not ok for atheism to be just atheism, it was saying let’s be explicit about having a subgroup for progressive types. It’s ok for atheism to be just atheism and it’s ok to have atheist subgroups, no? I have no problem with, say, Feminists Against War or Anti-racism Activists for Peace or Unions for Women’s Rights etc etc etc. It’s the No ___ Without ___ that’s the problem, surely, not ___ for ___,
[…] a comment by latsot on Rainbow […]
Yeah, my recollection is that Atheism+ was a response to complaints that “you’re getting social justice in my atheism! The only requirement for being an atheist is a lack of belief in gods, you can be a libertarian dudebro who thinks sexual harassment laws are a communist plot and still be an atheist.”
Sackbut @3: ” Itâs a matter of âI identify as autisticâ rather than a doctor providing an evidence-based diagnosis? ”
Maybe not quite what you were driving at, but there used to be a ton of people who insisted they had Asperger’s, and that this explained everything about them and their entire lives, because they took a two-minute online quiz. Of course, these tended to be people for whom “I have Asperger’s” meant “I am very very smart, and you must excuse my rudeness and complete lack of social skills.”
I tend not to see that as much now; not sure if that’s a function of where I spend time online, or if it’s become less fashionable (among other things, I understand that the medical community isn’t really using “Asperger’s” any more, and I think the dilettantes don’t find it as appealing to be just part of the autism spectrum).
Sackbut, I don’t know if it is technically “identify as”, but I have met a lot of people who tell me they are autistic, but no doctor told them that. They read something online and ‘discovered’ they are ‘on the spectrum’. If I went just by what is online, I could diagnose myself as autistic, though I am not. My lack of social skills comes from environment, not neuroatypical problems.
I did once diagnose myself as depressed, but then saw a doctor, and he verified that and added a couple more diagnoses; since I used the DSM (whatever number they were on in 1970) and had some training (I was a disability examiner), I probably had a better chance of being right than some random bloke on the internet, but I never gave out my diagnosis until it was given by a doctor, who also told me I was OCD, which made some of my patterns make more sense.
But I have been ‘diagnosed’ by friends as high-functioning autistic. I don’t take them seriously.
@Screechy, Asperger’s Disorder was removed from the DSM (used in the States) in 2013, when the DSM-V came out. As doctors can only bill to defined codes, that meant that all of a sudden nobody in the States had Asperger’s Syndrome anymore. Some people who were previously considered to have Asperger’s were diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and some with other things, like Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder.
Asperger’s Disorder remained in the manual used in Europe (the ICD), until it was removed from ICD-11 in 2022. So nobody there has Asperger’s anymore either, at least as far as billing is concerned. It’s all some variety of ASD, or some related syndrome.
I expect the online quizzes have followed suit.
Papito,
Right, I knew that, but I don’t even really see people self-diagnosing much with ASD. Perhaps because it’s not as appealing to just be on the same spectrum as severely disabled people, as opposed to having your bespoke diagnosis for special smart people. (To be clear, I’m not saying that’s what Asperger’s is/was, just how many lay people seemed to view it.)
Well a big reason the diagnosis was removed was because it established a hierarchy… and yeah, no I’m not anything like the nonverbal morons that can’t even wipe their own arses (who are of course severely disabled by no fault but nature’s as far as anyone can tell)…
The idea that there’s such a thing as autistic rights is laughable, much like trans rights…
Good grief, that’s like saying you can’t like the colour blue without also liking green. You might do one, the other, or both, or neither. Next they’ll be telling Quakers that in order to support peace and prosperity they must also support war.
On the A+ front, it was always my understanding that it was an adjunct to dictionary atheism, not an exclusion of that concept. Then again, those were the days when you were allowed to hold two non-exclusionary thoughts in your head at the same time.