aesmael

That so many of the comments to this article seem to be suggesting that if only gender roles were less rigidly enforced, trans people would have the good grace to cease existing.

Fortunately, not true. I hope those people will realise this. At least the comments seem to improve further down the page.

Also very annoyed with comments indicating the commenter was dissatisfied with eir assigned gender role yet is not trans, phrased in a manner suggestive that ey believes ey was fortunate eir parents did not send em to a therapist and get em diagnosed trans, pushed into transsexuality. Mostly, because this suggests a disturbing attitude that being transsexual is something pushed on people who do not conform to assigned gender roles in order to make them over into something which fits their behaviour. It doesn't work that way, and trans people nearly always have to push to get what they want from the medical establishment - it is not forced on them - and it is unfortunately not unusual for medical professionals to torment their patients with arbitrary hoops and waiting periods more extreme than officially required.

I would find it laughable if this idea were not so pervasive, with so much social force behind it, but since this is such a common feminist criticism of the existence of trans people, I find it disturbing instead. It is not, nor should it ever be, about people being forced into something they do not wish. The issue is bodily and behavioural autonomy, and although they may seem to be, I do not think comments like this are helpful on this subject.

As a note to people who may not be aware of this, what Zucker does with the children brought to him seems to me very akin to one of the major (the major?) standard 'treatments' designed to render autistic children more normal.

Current Mood: full
Current Music: nomusic

transgender a poster made this request: "I wanted to open a discussion about all the things from childhood to adolescence that speaks to your gender not fitting into the concept of your birth sex."

This was my response:

When I was younger I used to read lots of books about astronomy and dinosaurs, trains, chemistry, biology and physics texts and sharks. I would keep rings and fake gems I found on the ground and believe them magic. At one point I asked for a necklace like the ones my sisters had, and I wore it until I had to stop. My favourite shows as a child were things like Star Trek and Transformers. I used to spend hours drawing atoms and molecules, or tracing identifying images of sharks and linnean diagrams of relation. In primary school I was given a ken doll, maybe what I asked for, so I could use it to play with my best friend in high school. We used to play with her doll in the bushes at school, pretending she (the doll) lived in the trees of a dense jungle with inspiration taken from Tarzan. I played a lot with toy transformers and dino-riders and thunderbirds and had no problem including action or 'off time'. When I was younger there were toy soldiers too, although with all my toys they were mostly references for the action happening in my imagination. For very many years I slept under a pile of plush toys who I regarded as friends and protectors, and share consciousness.

Most of my friends were girls. We would talk about writing and environmentalism and Star Trek and Judge Dredd and our various invented ideas and shared mini-culture. I conducted minor experiments in cryogenics and tried to adapt The Hobbit into a play without really understanding how that would work.

In high school I had little interest in most sports because they were distractions from reading and writing and also I did not know how they worked. I did play sports when I was younger, though, and only stopped when they became more competitive and physical than I wanted to be.

Although most of my friends have historically been girls I also hung out with a predominantly male group through much of high school, which later merged with a mostly-female group we had a close association with. The vast majority of men and women have always been puzzles to me and I do not understand much of their behaviour in other than an academic sense. I tended to be shunned by either unless they wanted someone to champion their side with trivia or reasoning.

In high school again I spent most of my time reading, now fantasy and science fiction since the available non-fiction had stopped telling me anything new. Apart from that, I mostly wrote my own stories. On one occasion I got up in the middle of the night because I suddenly needed to randomly generate (via dice and grid) a galaxy to use as a setting for something. Another time there was a mis-started attempt at a 'choose your own adventure' story. I shied away from horror stories and had an aversion to handling venomous arthropods. I played a lot of video games, especially strategy or first-person shooter types, and especially when I could share them with fun company. I once tried to make a pen-and-paper strategy game and even convinced someone to play it for an afternoon.

Sometimes I would look at other students and use them as a reference to imagine how my body would look if it had developed differently, or I would lie awake at night wishing for my body to change. I would wish I could change my body to suit what sex or appearance I wished to present at the time. I used to hate seeing my reflection, though later I appreciated it more. Growing up, I was often criticised by my mother that my mannerisms would give people 'inappropriate' ideas about my sexual orientation. Eventually I found out there was such a thing as HRT and nearly immediately set out to get myself on it.

I do not think anything in my past speaks to a gender not fitting any birth sex that might have been mine except the desire to alter this body.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: nomusic

When I was younger I would question people about their positions and beliefs, asking them to justify, provide sources and motives. Frequently annoyed, upset, angry. More than once pushed people to tears when I would not relent in questioning them.

Eventually I realised from observation how much this sort of questioning hurt people, never mind that it was also unproductive. I worked to stop hurting people in this way. For a long time after my diagnosis I blamed such behaviour on having Asperger's Syndrome and believed myself innately clueless and hurtful. I felt fundamentally flawed for having hurt people in that and similar ways.

[The past tense was used above, but doing so is only partially truthful. More so with time.]

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Berserk outtakes, disc 4

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

I remember when I was younger, being clumsy, clueless and spaced out. The sort of child who would blunder into a situation and have little awareness of what was going on while still in its midst. I felt I was left out of explanations and plans everyone else was clued into and could only look around in confusion when situations unexpectedly changed, listlessly attempting to mimic those around me in hope of finding footing.

One thing I came out of that with was a belief I have zero fashion sense or ability to coordinate colours. I still find myself frequently unaware of what to do, how to do, when and in what order, so these days I ask. I think I used to believe I had to work everything out myself, that if I were as smart as everyone told me, I would be able to do that. At some point this changed and was replaced with the belief that ~~intelligent~~ sensible, responsible and humane behaviour included admitting error and ignorance, and seeking help. So I ask questions.

Maybe I always did ask but do not recall. Maybe I have carried through my life the appearance, and perhaps the fact, of helplessness. Maybe it is consequently natural for people to assume I could not know what I am doing or be aware of my situation and the decisions I make, and to believe that my life should be ordered according to the democratic input of others. Yeah, maybe I look like I need people to tell me how to live.

I still am often clueless and stumbling my way through life. I have long believed myself basically incompetent at living. And I am afraid of confidence, because when I am confident and when I relax my hold on myself is when I blunder most and cause hurt or ruin. However I do not want my autonomy to belong to others. Even if I seek input I do not wish to turn over the decision itself. And I do not wish to believe I need this.

That seems a bit ironic.

Current Mood: nervous
Current Music: The Secret Machines - Flying

Google Reader Shared Items

Thank You Thursdays: Your (Notice I Didn't Say Female) Brain [via gentle_gamer. Comments to the post made me warier of this video. Did she have that brain cut in half to illustrate her point? Am pretty sure most brains I have seen are in a single piece unless cut. Much of her described experience of having a stroke is not unfamiliar to me, if to a greater degree. Not, I stress, identical, but apparently similar to something which can be accessible to me. If I were to release certain brakes, if I could remember how. I have a lot of hostility to the frame in which she presents her thesis, despite finding much recognition or even agreement in the details.

I dislike the way people jumped on ropty's comment ("Non-gendered? Dividing the world into two parts, one is linear, unemotional, calculating and the other about feeling, emotions, timeless oneness. Gee, that sounds rather gendered to me.") because this is a thing which is done, this is a way in which brain functioning is presented and those traits are very gendered in this society. Also that my readings of other writings on neurobiology suggest this is a highly oversimplified perspective on human brain hemisphere functioning, though as this was a talk for a lay audience that may have been deliberate. And it still seems to me her described experiences are very 'on point' even if I am not so fond of her presentation of them.

I wonder if making such experience accessible at will would have the effect on the world Dr Taylor describes.]
Video: Blaser tournament unwisely fits Japanese robots with lasers -- PEW PEW [via soltice. If we intercut this with some footage of people we could make a movie of it.]
New Hubble Images Reveal Plethora of Interacting Galaxies [via soltice. Pretty!]
Young feminists just want to "go wild and pole dance" [via gentle_gamer.]
How To Sing Like A Planet [via gentle_gamer. Wherever there be medium and motion, music. The article makes me angry, with it's talk of 'merely' as if scientific explanation of such magnificent happenings cannot be also magnificent, wondrous or beautiful themselves. I lost a lot of esteem for the writer's prior musings when I read that part.]
Atheism is a condom for your mind [via soltice. The part I disagree with is the phrasing suggestive that removing religious belief is a part and precursor to mental hygiene and health -- I would place taking care of the mind first, and if that leads to the removal of religion then so be it. Someone eventually said so too.]
Equality Through Intimidation? The Houston HRC Dinner Protest [via gentle_gamer.]
Comical Surroundings [via soltice. This is interesting but I think I would not like my furniture to be displaying always the same images and words. After so many repetitions reading, wearying.]
Modular, shape-shifting robots get right back up to creep you out [via soltice. Shiny! Still a ways to go before they are as capable as the version seen in Terminator 2 though.]
Australia to Remove Antigay Discrimination From 100 Laws [via soltice. An improvement, but not enough.]
Maintaining Moore's law with new memristor circuits [via soltice. Fascinating (a thing said when {in this case} interested but uneducated in a subject).]

Scienceblogs

Vaccination doesn't cause autism volume what-are-we-up-to-now? [And yet we see how well the continued lack of evidence substantiating a connection is received. *sigh*]

Current Mood: sleepy

Tonight is the sort of night in which I feel tremendous optimism and capability. So far doing a good job of not letting that trick me into overloading on things to do and thus stalling (like an engine).

So tonight we are reading the book my mother has on Asperger's Syndrome, to see what her information source is telling her: The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome by Tony Attwood, ISBN 184310495.

Getting furious at the back cover is perhaps not the best start:

'Tony Attwood explores in depth the complexity of the mysterious group of clinical pictures known collectively as Asperger's syndrome, part of the wider autistic spectrum. He describes all the puzzling and fascinating aspects of these conditions and brings them vividly to life with illustrations from personal histories. He has achieved a real empathic understanding of children and adults whose basic problem is a biologically based lack of empathy with others. The book is to be highly recommended.'
- Lorna Wing

This is just wrong. I am capable of empathy, as are many other people I know, and a frequent complaint I see is that this is a false stereotype, when it is actually expressing empathy and communicating in ways others understand which is often difficult, or understanding the signals others are giving - as well as the lack of empathy shown by those who are supposedly innately superior to us in that area. This suggests the author has NOT achieved an empathic understanding because if he did he would realise this.

I showed it to my sister and she agreed, as well as picking up on and being outraged by the dehumanising term 'clinical pictures', speaking of persons with Asperger's syndrome as if they are not persons but puzzles.

Still, calming down, I told myself this person is not necessarily accurately representing the contents of the book, and perhaps the author did not see this quote or did not have control over what promotional quotes went on to the book.

This cannot be the book she mentioned having had when I was first diagnosed, since it was first published in 2006. I asked her about that and we could not find the old book. It seems likely it was lent to someone who has not returned it. While looking for it I mentioned my objections to that promotional quote and got told (paraphrased from several repetitions) "That is because you have a very mild case, other people have it much worse and do not have empathy." When I pointed out that some other people do not experience empathy either, she said "But those are sick, messed up people". Uh, thanks.

I am very inclined to be hostile to this book and what it contains, as some of its contents have been used directly as justification for denying portions of my identity.

The Preface is interesting, particularly the notes about the conditions in which Hans Asperger published his paper (Nazi-occupied Austria) - the statement that "education will 'render harmless the dangers which are in a child's genetic disposition'" make sense in the context of trying to prevent the sterilisation and murder of people, but I wonder, if true, what influence this might have had on subsequent developments after context was lost. Perhaps not much. Re-education to normalise people seems the standard sort of response and if Asperger had not advocated it originally I am confident others would have soon after.

What also interests me about the preface is what is meant when Attwood talks of the importance of learning to identify Asperger's in very young children so they can benefit from early intervention. What is the intended outcome of these interventions and what is their intended benefit (and to who)? Managing sensory perception issues is one mentioned later and seems like something which would be very useful.

I am more ambivalent about "We also need to develop and evaluate programs to encourage friendship and relationship skills, the management of emotions and the constructive application of special interests." Could go either way, and those can be useful, but I am wary because they could also be used for the purpose of shaping people into what they are not and do not want to be - I see those skills as useful to have when wanted, but developing them should not be used as an excuse to erase the original person in the name of making em 'acceptable'.

At this point I wonder if I should be so critical. After all, I am so often told how 'high functioning' I am and how mild my case is, so what right have I to object to what may not apply to me if it applies to others, especially since I clearly cannot really understand what is going on? But I am not for denying people choices and options for their own lives, but opposed to requiring people to be 'fixed' to meet the standards of others when they may not wish to. And I am trying to restrict what I say to my own experiences and observations, and if I have misrepresented something, hoping that I would accept correction with good grace.

The rest of the preface seems decent though. Not really a place for going into depth.

Current Music: Delerium - Enchanted (feat. Kristy Thirsk)

Things I want to do:
Write
Learn Chinese
Learn programming
Improve mathematical skills
Read (books, fiction and non-)
Read (webcomics)
Play games
Watch stuff I want to watch
Learn to play keyboard instruments

Things I feel obligated to do:
Read flist, respond as much as I am able
Reading of on-line materials

Those lists are probably quite incomplete. There is a lot of overlap too, such as RSS feeds and webcomics I want to read, but for which this desire translates into a sense of obligation and taking on more than my capacity, so that there is no time left for me to do anything else.

I think one part of creating such a state of affairs is finding out how much time I should be setting aside for the things I want to do if I want to make them worthwhile. I doubt any of those would seem worthwhile to me at, frex, five minutes per week.

Disorganisation, poor use of time is a reason I have not been doing things I want to / think are important to do. It may take an hour or two to catch up on people's journals each evening but that still leaves plenty in which I do not do other things. Often I take to refreshing the page every half hour or so, casting a gradually wider net of subscribed things from which to pull reading material. An aimless sort of state. Does not help that posts of any length tend to take hours in composition. I seem to be a very slow writer. A very easily distractible one.

So it is not a lack of time, at least in that I do appear to have time available for many or most of the things I want to do. I just find myself not knowing how to choose between some as options and daunted by the prospect of attempting others. In an attempt to make this easier I intend to determine how much time is required for the especially skill- and learning-based activities. Maybe I can make a spinny wheel thing for the others.

Am getting anxious typing this, the previous paragraph especially. Feeling as if skin too tight and wanting to scream frustrated, to think of trying to make a choice between activities and actually doing them.

The other part of this (assuming there are only two) is getting away from these feelings of obligation about activities I do not necessarily wish to be pursuing at the time, this feeling that I must keep up with and read everything I subscribe to and not even cull that selection so long as I possess the capacity to make pretension of reading it. 'Read LiveJournal' is not what I wish my default activity to be. More than that I am wanting to be able to easily move on to other activities or even go to those first.

This is hard, akin to fingernails on chalkboard (akin, not the same). May just have to accept pain as a consequence of doing what I want until I become accustomed to it. Much of this is due to slipping into the easy. I tend to be engaged in other settling activities when I open my browser, such as eating something I do not want to get on the keys, and so settle on flist as something to keep myself occupied while doing this. But that tends to lead to reading the rest too, and once I have done that I am well settled into a passive mode. It becomes difficult to shift out of that into actively doing something. Even other sorts of reading are stressful to switch to because of the way I have things (mentally) set up.

Catching up still seems useful to me. I do in fact want to read what other people have posted on their journals and to respond if I have responses to offer. However, it does not seem to do me any good to be where I start. I think it would be more useful for me to check first my email (as something which may actually require timely attending to), responses to my own posts (included in email), and subscribe to notifications to any posts I may want to follow (again, covered by email) so that I do not have to scroll through the page to find them and consequently am less likely to slip into reading the whole thing. Then, move on to the doing of other activities with the reading of the 'friends page' later in the evening.

This still runs the risk of being 'caught', by friends chatting or links or something catching the eye. Less, though. Maybe even easier to slip away from. Friends, of course, are not something to avoid normally, but hopefully would be understanding if I were doing also something else. Tonight I was excited by the prospect of finishing this reading early and being relatively obligation-free for the evening, yet indecision and stress at the prospect of choosing has led to my doing none of the things I thought I might. Also to writing this.

I think having some sort of framework to operate in would help me with this. Once I know what the various things I want to do will require in terms of time invested I can arrange to have that time available and an awareness of it. I think this level of structure would actually help me to be more flexible once I have named and measured bits of time to rearrange. More clearly seeing what is being traded off against what and where.

And of course there is homework to be fit in and hopefully later employment.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Pet Shop Boys - A Red Letter Day

Listening again to the episode of Are We Alone listed with this post. The guest speaking now is William Crossman. He is talking about his belief that talking computers will replace reading and writing by 2050.

His claim as I understand it is that verbal and oral communication will be facilitated by computers such that there is no need for being able to read or to write, and the population overall will become functionally illiterate. This, he is advocating as literacy being superseded, and humans as a naturally oral computer, not issuing a warning of the dangers ahead.

I think this is it and that I have conveyed what is going on but... the show is still playing and it is really difficult for me to think or to focus. Which brings me to the point of this post: no, please no. Although Crossman indicated several times that signing would be something these computers could handle, so that deaf people would be able to participate, and although he talks about making communication and access easier for people with disabilities who are not well able to write or read, the elimination of text from society would make things much harder for me and probably for a great many other people.

There is a reason I tend to skip podcasts when they come on in my playlists and, increasingly, songs with words. Verbal communication tends to shut me down. Hearing voice very often has a nearly paralytic effect on me as processing it often takes away my ability to do anything else and I tend not to be able to ignore it enough to be able to function. Speech too can be difficult for me, taking a long time to find and to say words, especially if I am under any stress. Unless I am so stressed I begin babbling and not making sense.

Text, reading and writing, are far easier for me. I tend to lose words as soon as I hear them; often I retain the sense of it but often also I need to ask people to repeat themselves one or a few times. It is not rare for voices to be unpleasant or painful to hear, though generally I can block out this fact. In text I tend to be more fluent in conversation, or better able to pick up again if something has happened and I lost focus, because the words are right there for me to read again and respond to.

Auditory and verbal difficulties are I believe common among people on the autism spectrum. Most of the time I pass for neurotypical and manage fine, but the impression I have is that I am about as verbal as it gets. The world Crossman envisions would severely hamper my ability to communicate and access information, but many others would be worse off.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Seth Shostak - AWA: You Talkin' to Me? August 20 2007

Your Aspie score: 157 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 52 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

Quiz comes from here. For the edification of anyone else who tries posting this one: you will have to copy the text yourself if you want people to see it.

These results came out differently to last time I tried this one. I think this set better represents my current sense of things. Still the same annoying and confusingly worded question about 'biological gender' before you can take it, and some heterosexism in the questions themselves.

( Previous results behind cut )

It does seem to have changed. The graph has different labels (I still do not know what 'hunting' refers to) and some of the questions seemed to be new.

I would like to see more people who have not been diagnosed or do not consider themselves to have autism spectrum traits to try this quiz as I have seen very few such results and I am curious.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: NESS - Skeptics Guide #112

( We slice and dice the text, click to make uncut )

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Kalinka - Russian Red Army Choir

This list of traits characteristic of Asperger's Syndrome was taken from this post and sorted into those I think apply to me, those I think do not, and those which I really do not know if yes or no, with personal notes added in brackets. The list appears to have been compiled from these three sites, although I do not know how this was done.

( List is long, so you click )

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Iko Iko - Captain Jack

This is a comment I made in reply to a post of

gentle_gamer's. It happened because I was having difficulty writing the reply I originally wanted to make and started thinking about why. This was hard too, but at least I knew roughly what I was trying to say.

"It is a mess in here. Someone needs to do some cleaning."

I have been struggling to write a reply to this post. Trying to put together words to say something. Doing this, something which might be a realisation happened.

Possibly I am not as good at talking - communicating - as I think I am. It is very difficult for me to say things directly. Gaps in typing this for apparently unnecessary reasons, to tap on the keyboard or look around or retreat inside for various lengths of time, often when the next thing to type is known or is classed as 'should not be difficult to find'. The previous sentence is not what I was trying to say, although it is reflective of it[1].

What I mean is, attempting to communicate directly with someone is very difficult for me. Most of the time I spin words together, poetic flights and allusions which hopefully carry implicitly what I mean, although since so often they are misunderstood this is doubted. The possible realisation is that much of my communication is pulled from a sort of library which is then assembled in a way which seeks to approach or reference the intention behind my communication but does not often match it. So I do this, which is like the 'classic' idea of aspie-type people compositing speech from television, radio, etc., albeit in a non-standard way and trying to... not do it, to speak in a direct manner, is far more difficult. Often that fails and I end up talking about what I want to say, instead ("I want to say how wonderful the colours in this painting are" vs. "The colours in this painting are wonderful").

This comment is another example, in which successive iterations of a communication attempt are made and refined. I hope this comment will be understandable to people but I cannot really tell; I am not actually sure I am typing English words rather than some other arrangement of letters (but I think I am).

At some point in the past I think you told me I was speaking too fast for you to follow well. If I were doing this I would be very slow indeed, but it would be nice for that to not be a problem.

I want to write about this and place considerations of it and other aspie/autie type things on my journal, but do not know how. Perhaps reposting this comment will help.

[1]as something allusive of what I am trying to say but not actually holding that meaning. The previous sentence was postponed due to being considered nonsensical in original context.

I think this is not always true*, but I think it is also true far more often than I have been realising.

*'true' here meaning something like 'an accurate description of my functioning'

Found via Ballastexistenz: I Am Joe's Functioning Label.

This post is about labelling people on the autism spectrum according to ability to function and the ways in which this can be harmful to the person so labelled. Specifically it is about people labelled as "high functioning" whose difficulties are dismissed or attributed to personal failings and considered not at all to do with autism.

It does not speak about people labelled "low functioning" but this comment succinctly summarises what I sought to add on that matter in this post:

"And then there's its equally evil twin, the "low functioning" label, which ensures that any and all abilities are ignored."

I would not attempt to speak any further on that matter because I do not know. It does seem to me that these labels are based mostly on ability to communicate via socially predominate channels.

There was more I intended to say, personally related, but that would get repetitive with another post I am trying to write. Hopefully it will suffice to say that, so far as labels and diagnoses go, I think they cease to be useful when adherence to them obscures the subject of the label.

Current Mood: stressed

I should be asleep. I should not be posting but not long ago I read something which has left me rather agitated and I need to scream somewhere. Here has been chosen.

( Cut )

Current Mood: distressed

    So, right now I am feeling rather lousy. Not because I have not written 'enough' words (do not know yet) but because I was writing a scene from a certain character's perspective and I became suddenly convinced she was coming across as autistic. Do I have to say there is nothing wrong with an autistic viewpoint character? I should not. The problem is that this was not my intention and yet it is what I wrote and it stirs in me fear that I cannot write convincingly from another perspective.
    It might be that I have discovered something new about the character and it might be that I need to rewrite this scene and it might be that no one else will notice such a thing and I only did because she struck a certain level of 'like me'. And maybe that itself is reason enough to rewrite. Whatever the answer it is unlikely I will make any deliberate alteration to her because I am not interested in telling this story without her.
    Never mind that. This is about me setting out to write an outing with friends and giving them only cursory attention, concentrating instead on technical aspects of a work of art. It is an established part of her personality to keep friend's discussions private and to be fascinated by such things, yet if she were otherwise I may not have been able to write this scene at all. I suspect my difficulty with conversation was one of the motivating factors for her tendency not to report on it.
    I feel confident saying dialogue is where my writing most falls down. Most of my best (judged by me) pieces avoid conversation as much as possible. I really feel as if I do not understand how people relate to each other in ordinary conversation and when I try you get sarcastic, snarky venom such as in the one part of my Epic Fantasy I have posted so far.
    What I am afraid of is being unable to understand communication between other people well enough to write it with skill. If I am restricted to being able to write characters who are 'like me' I am severely restricted in what I can do as a writer.
    At least I know I need to work especially on dialogue. Perhaps it will even lead to a better understanding of people overall. I am tempted to attempt a play as a work focused highly dialogue, although perhaps someone more knowledgeable will tell me plays are distorted too and not the place to look to learn speech. And if I did, do I go in blind or attempt to learn the form first? I think it would be more fun to not know what I am doing at first and discover later what should have been done.
    I wonder how much implication I could get away with to keep the sets as simple and manageable as possible?

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Enya - If I Could Be Where You Are

Here are a couple of links to posts about... I was going to call it hypocrisy but instead I will say 'ways in which autistic people are excluded from being considered professional sources on their own functioning'. I am still not happy with it, but that is the best phrasing you are going to get out of me tonight.

First
Second

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Vivaldi - Chicago Chamber Orchestra - Henry Seville - Summer (Concerto No.2 in G Minor)

Joseph|Natural Variation - Autism Blog asks Is Homosexuality Really That Different To Autism? This post takes a quick look at the history of gay rights activism and the pathologising language used to describe it in the middle of last century and implies that the public perception of autism could similarly be changed. See also here and here.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Sussanna Clarke reads from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

"Your Aspie score: 121 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 79 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie"

Test is here: http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php

Incidentally, the term 'aspie' provokes in me hostility. It sounds to me like a word for a pet and I expect people can see why such an association from the mouths of strangers would repulse me. I try not to bristle when people use this term to describe themselves

I also happen to think this quiz was composed by a neurotypical person. Many of the questions were worded in such a way as to be unclear in ways I think a person who had that experience would not, In other cases, even though I thought I understood the intent of the question, it was worded such that I found it difficult to answer.

Oh, and they misspelled 'sex' repeatedly in the preliminary questions.

I have no intention of participating in the study this is related to.

And I just realised it is probably relevant that I am disinterestedly ignoring the social gathering visible three metres in front of me through a glass door.

Glarfed from one

pecunium

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Que Sera, Sera - Doris Day [Daydreaming]/Both Sides Now - Joni Mitchell

( Enclosed: brains, hands, eyes )

Current Mood: curious

For most of us, "cure" sounds exactly like "kill the person you are, but animate your body with some alien force." For most of us "prevention" sounds exactly like "genocide".

These pages I would like to show do not all describe me. Some of them seem to, to a degree of vague familiarity. Especially the earlier ones. I still would like to share them.

Being talked around rather than to

Walking While Autistic
Autistic Superpowers: Invisibility [This of all is most familiar to me]
Bridging the Gaps: An Inside-Out View if Autism

If anyone gets here through the Channel 4 segment

And People Still Fail to Get It, Again and Again
That Conference Presentation I Won't Make (But Want To)
To the Kit Weintraubs of the World
Why I Am Angry
You Have It So Good
A Reply to the Initiator of the Hear Their Silence Rally [Quote comes from here]
Input needed now (archived) [... this one included for completeness, since I am outside context]

Reading a lot of the later ones makes me feel I must have been misdiagnosed. *shrug*

Current Mood: blank
Current Music: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - [Sun Herald Classic Carols Collection]

Profile

aesmael

May 2022

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Abstractia by chiming
Theme: Abyss by chiming

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated 2025-07-30 15:48

Entries tagged with autism

Disappointed, not surprised

Retrospect?

True story

At least a veto?

(no subject)

Reading

Want/Oblige

Text-free

Answering again

May or may not also be in the posession of flynnacatri

Lists are fun and can be shared with the whole family

Whispers of another world, words which might have been

A matter of labelling

I should be asleep

Sharing emotions is healthy, yes?

(no subject)

Two Things: B

Oh look, a quiz! Everyone try it and take the results seriously.

She's not there

I don't know how to frame this