“Your imperfections are beautiful!” She-Ra and the power of autistic representation

Princess Entrapta in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

(Warning for spoilers for Seasons One and Two, with vague discussion of events in later seasons.)

Toward the end of the first season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Princess Entrapta is told, possibly for the first time in her life, “You definitely belong here with us.” She reacts with genuine surprise. Then, in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment before she starts monologuing about plot-related science, she smiles. For me, this scene epitomizes why Entrapta is one of the most nuanced, respectfully-written autistic characters I have ever seen on TV.

Entrapta’s autism is clear from her introduction, even though showrunner Noelle Stevenson only confirmed it after the series finished in May 2020. She stims, infodumps, hyperfocuses, and struggles to stay in tune with the people around her. She has unbelievably strong splinter skills in engineering, as well as specific and idiosyncratic needs around food. She is earnest and literal, often missing the complexities of social situations. In a later season, we learn that Entrapta interprets interactions and relationships the same way that she processes everything else: through recorded observations and data analysis.

What makes Entrapta such a great example of autistic representation? There are a number of things. Let’s start with the most important one:

1. Entrapta’s creation was heavily influenced by an autistic member of the creative team.

Noelle Stevenson also confirmed in May 2020 that board artist Sam Szymanski, who is autistic, played a major role in creating Entrapta, including her physical actions and story arcs.

I am far from the first person to state the importance of allowing marginalized people to represent themselves in fiction. Check out the hashtag #OwnVoices for more information on that.

“Stories about autism” have been told by non-autistic people over and over and over again for decades, resulting in a whole spectrum (so to speak) of harmful tropes, from ableist jokes to inspiration porn to pity-parties for non-autistic family members.

If you want to tell a story about an autistic character in an authentic and inclusive way, you need to involve autistic people in its creation. We know what it’s like to live in a world that ostracizes us unless we camouflage ourselves, a world that makes unfair assumptions about what we can and cannot do, a world that sees our uniqueness as a fault and grieves for people forced to interact with us. We understand the experience of autism in a way that non-autistics don’t, and if you put our perspective into your story, you will speak to autistic people in a way that cannot be done without our input.

2. Entrapta lacks many of the stereotypes found in autistic characters.

Entrapta is not your typical autistic character. For starters, she is a woman, designed and often interpreted as a person of color. She shows a huge range of emotions and she genuinely cares about the people around her. She is nothing like the stoic, white, autistic boys that we are accustomed to seeing.

^{Entrapta displays a wide range of emotions throughout the series.}

Entrapta shows an interest in romantic relationships. It is even implied, in a few humor-for-the-adults moments, that she is sexually active. The non-traditional nature of her interests aside (if you know who she’s looking at in that middle picture, you understand), it’s nice to see an autistic character – or a disabled character in general – who is not assumed to be aromantic and/or asexual by default. The real-life autistic and disabled communities contain a range of romantic and sexual orientations, so it’s refreshing to see something new represented.

Characters who get to know Entrapta discover that she is surprisingly self-aware. She wants to help people and she wants to be liked, but she knows that emotional connection is difficult for her in a way that it isn’t for other people. She also knows where her strengths lie and she tries to use them to make up for her interpersonal struggles.

In an interview just before the release of season five (warning for potential spoilers through season four), Noelle Stevenson talked about one of Entrapta’s most unique areas of strength:

(Entrapta) sees humanity in everything. Not just in humanoid or organic creatures, but she sees humanity in robots. She sees humanity in the AI that drives ships. She sees humanity in one clone in a million identical clones and knows their personality and knows who they are and knows how to connect with them… I think she does more than almost any other character in humanizing characters who have never been humanized before by anyone.

Entrapta sees humanity where no one else thinks to look. This strength flies in the face of the all-too-common stereotype that autistic people lack the ability to see humanity in ourselves, more or less in others. In this sense, Entrapta is more skilled at emotional connection than most of the non-autistic characters, which in media is a rare and exciting trait to see.

3. Entrapta’s autistic traits are often an asset.

Although it is not explicitly stated that Entrapta can see humanity in everything because of her autism, her ability to connect with non-humans can certainly be read that way. Entrapta knows what it’s like to have to learn the rules and complexities of interaction that come naturally to other people. As a result, she recognizes this struggle in other characters.

In Season Five, Entrapta teaches a non-human character about the subtle art of producing and interpreting facial expressions. It starts with a quick exchange:

[Name redacted]: You appear to have a facial tic. Is it cause for concern?

Entrapta: Oh, I’m winking. It signals unspoken intent behind my words. In this case, our mutual deception of [redacted]. Now you try.

This type of lesson comes naturally to Entrapta because, similar to the person she’s talking to, she interprets the world through concrete rules and definitions. She knows what works for her, and so she is uniquely qualified to impart these lessons to characters who struggle in the same way that she does.

Entrapta recognizes when characters use unorthodox ways to express appreciation, affection, or any kind of connection, because she does that too. She knows from experience what these characters need to hear: “I see you.” “I like you.” “I appreciate you.” “I want to be your friend.” And folks, this skill changes the direction of the series in a way I never would have predicted.

Entrapta finds humanity in places where no one else thinks to look.

Obviously, there is also the matter of her cartoonishly strong talents in STEM and her interest in robotics, First Ones technology, and space travel. Savant-level genius in science and technology is not a unique feature of autistic characters in fiction. However, Entapta’s skills and passions are vitally important to many of the major plot points in the series. A number of events would have been impossible without her interest, focus, and talents. Although these traits are somewhat cliche for autistic characters, it is worth mentioning how much of the story would not have happened if Entrapta were neurotypical.

4. Interpersonal conflicts with Entrapta are multi-sided.

A few weeks ago I wrote a Twitter thread about a scene in Season Five (spoilers for Episodes One and Two in the thread), when a group of non-autistic characters drastically misinterpret Entrapta’s intentions. Entrapta seems so wrapped up in her interests that other characters assume she doesn’t care about people. This is definitively not the case, as she is in fact using her interests to try to help them, but Entrapta doesn’t realize anything is wrong until it’s almost too late.

Aspects of this scene ring painfully true to me as an autistic person. “Are you all…mad at me?” Entrapta asks, and my heart shatters. I have asked that exact question many times. I know very few autistic people who haven’t.

Entrapta is not completely at fault, which the show makes very clear. Non-autistic characters interpret her actions through a neurotypical perspective, which brings them to the wrong conclusions about her. Yes, previous events inform this particular conflict, but this pattern of communication breakdown appears as early as Season One.

Entrapta’s first episode introduces her as an eccentric and socially awkward genius. She doesn’t fit in with the Princesses, and to them it doesn’t seem like she’s trying. There are moments of escalating conflict culminating in the moment when the Rebellion abandons Entrapta in enemy territory.

In the Princesses’ defense: they have reason to believe she’s dead. In Entrapta’s defense: no one thinks to double-check.

‘They’re not coming back for me.”

If a different member of the Rebellion had been in Entrapta’s position, it’s likely that someone would have gone back for them, even with the evidence that they didn’t survive. But this is Entrapta. This is the Princess who doesn’t fit in. Without her, the Rebellion’s access to technology is limited, but their plans go the way they expect. The Princesses are more comfortable mourning Entrapta’s loss than interacting with her before her “death.”

However you interpret the situation, Entrapta’s perspective is clear. The Rebellion, whose motto until this point is “No Princess Left Behind,” leaves her behind enemy lines. She did not see it coming. She does not know why it happened. Her analysis of the available data indicates that the members of the Rebellion are not her friends. So it is understandable, if not justifiable, why she starts using her talents to support the Horde instead.

This is not to say that Entrapta is faultless (see #7), more that it is easy to understand why she makes the decisions that she does, given the circumstances.

Entrapta’s series-long arc is not about learning how to improve her social behavior and “fit in.” Yes, she makes an effort to express herself more clearly, but any character who wants to earn (or regain) her trust must first accept that her communication style is different from theirs, and sometimes that’s a good thing. Wrongs on both sides need to be addressed. Characters need to accept – even appreciate – Entrapta for who she is. The ones who do this become her closest and truest friends.

I cannot overstate how powerful it is to see an autistic person written with this perspective. Autistic characters, She-Ra tells us, are worth being seen. We are worth the effort. We are not at fault for every conflict, and other people deserve blame when they treat us unfairly. Not every breakdown is entirely ours to fix.

5. People falsely assume that Entrapta does not have empathy.

One of the biggest sources of conflict between Entrapta and other characters is the assumption that she lacks empathy. This misconception hits home with many members of the autistic community, who are often falsely accused of the same thing.

Because we don’t process or respond to emotions or situations in the same way that non-autistic people do, we are often assumed to not know – or worse, not care – how other people are feeling. Entrapta faces this problem from viewers as well as from characters.

Entrapta is mistakenly assumed, by characters and some viewers, to lack empathy.

After Season One aired, I read an otherwise fantastic article about Entrapta describing her as a “truly Chaotic Neutral” person. My only problem (and the reason I’m not linking to it here) is that the author assumed that Entrapta does not care how other people feel, how people view her, or about the harm her experiments cause.

Some of the otherwise sympathetic characters do the same thing, making claims such as, “You don’t care about [name redacted] or any of us. You only care about tech,” and “You don’t consider how your actions affect other people. People who are supposed to be your friends.” They are wrong on both counts. However, if you interpret Entrapta’s actions as if she were neurotypical, you might logically reach the same conclusion. These characters don’t understand that Entrapta doesn’t intuit emotions from indirect cues the way they can, or process or express information in the same way they do.

From the start, the show makes it clear that Entrapta does care about other people. She constantly uses her skills to try to help the people around her, and she genuinely enjoys making people happy. In a heartbreaking moment in Season One, her eyes fill with tears when she realizes the Rebellion has left her behind. Like many autistic people, Entrapta expresses her regard for others in ways that are unexpected, understated, or unusual, which causes non-autistic people – both fictional and non-fictional – to misinterpret her.

There’s a satisfying irony in this, as an autistic viewer who knows the “autistic-people-don’t-have-empathy” stereotype far too well. Entrapta is such an accurately-written autistic character that even non-autistic viewers think she doesn’t have empathy! Entrapta’s story isn’t just about us, it’s also for us.

6. Entrapta’s desire for friendship makes her a target for manipulation.

When discussing Entrapta’s allegiance with the Horde, there are two important considerations to make. First: in the Horde, Entrapta makes genuinely positive connections with people who accept and appreciate her for who she is, something that she did not have in the Rebellion. Second: her eagerness for companionship is taken advantage of, and she is deliberately manipulated into doing harmful things.

Again, none of this is intended to justify or minimize what Entrapta did when she was with the Horde. See #7.

The Horde is the first place where Entrapta interacts with people who like her for her uniqueness, not in spite of it. She forms real, lasting friendships and feels more comfortable with the Horde than she ever did with the Rebellion.

Joining the Horde is arguably the first time Entrapta makes non-robotic friends.

For the first time in Entrapta’s life, people show interest in her as a person, not just because of what she can do for them. People ask about her theories and share their experiments with her; even characters who understand less than a quarter of her work want to spend time with her simply because she is their friend. We are led to believe that Entrapta has never had interactions like this with non-robotic beings before.

Unfortunately, Entrapta’s openness and eagerness to please make her a target for manipulation. One character in particular takes advantage of Entrapta’s sense of betrayal and abandonment, deliberately using her desire for acceptance and appreciation to convince her to work for them. It takes a long time for Entrapta to figure out the difference between people who are genuinely her friends and people who are using her for their own gain. This too aligns with the experiences of autistic people, many of whom find themselves in situations of emotional abuse or manipulation because it is difficult for us to identify when we are being used.

Plenty of problems throughout the series are Entrapta’s fault at least in part. This, the show makes clear, is not among them. Entrapta is allowed to want to have friends, and it is not her fault when other people take advantage of her. We end up with a complicated and nuanced arc about a messy situation, told with a tone of dignity and respect.

7. Entrapta, like neurotypical characters, is allowed to make mistakes and atone for them.

One of the most common criticisms from autistic people is that Entrapta’s autism is used to explain the terrible things she did with the Horde. This is a fair assessment; Entrapta switches sides in part so she can better complete her experiments and inventions using the resources available to her. On several occasions, she watches her inventions wreak havoc on the Rebellion or the planet, too focused on evaluating the results to acknowledge the harm that she’s causing. It takes her a long time to recognize when her experiments go too far. The “autistic mad scientist” trope is not a new or fun stereotype, and Entrapta arguably falls into it for a while.

Entrapta is on the side of science and anyone who will ask about her theories.

Part of what makes Entrapta’s story different is her capacity for redemption, which is one of the central themes of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Characters who acknowledge their mistakes and actively work to fix them deserve to be forgiven, not punished. Princess Entrapta is neither the first nor the last character on the show to have this arc. Her redemption is messy and complicated, with steps forward and backward, making the payoff all the more satisfying.

Beyond finding peace and redemption for herself, Entrapta has the chance to forgive people on both sides of the war who wronged her. In turn, her capacity for forgiveness and understanding gives other characters the opportunity for redemption. As rare as it is to see autistic characters given a story with this much nuance, it is even rarer to see us acknowledged as a source for improvement for other people.

This also means that Entrapta is allowed to not forgive characters who don’t deserve it. “You don’t understand what makes us strong,” she tells someone, in a powerful moment late in the series, “And that’s why you’ll never win.” This line is particularly compelling coming from Entrapta, who has had to work harder for that understanding – to become part of the “us” in her statement – than most of the characters on the show. She has seen humanity where no one else thought to look, she has shown characters that different ways of perceiving and interacting with the world can be strengths, and she has given seemingly irredeemable characters the chance to become better people.

Entrapta, more than anyone else, understands what makes people strong.

Are there flaws? Of course. No single portrayal of autism is going to reflect everyone’s experience, and every story will have aspects that don’t resonate. In particular, the “autistic mad scientist” trope is an understandable dealbreaker for some people. Entrapta’s story is not perfect, but for me she resonates more strongly than almost any other character on television.

Entrapta makes me feel seen and heard and appreciated. She gives people like me permission to be different, permission to be ourselves and to seek out people who appreciate us for who we are, not just what we can do for them or how much we can make ourselves conform. People like her, people like me, are worthy of friendship and love and forgiveness and respect.

All five seasons of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power are currently streaming on Netflix.

Dear Non-Autistics: We need to talk

Once again it’s April, the month when stigma and stereotypes about autism reach peak saturation. I’m going to be completely honest with you: this time around, I’m really tired. I’m tired and I’m angry and I’m sad.

I’m not going to hash out, again, why “Autism Awareness” is so demeaning to autistic people, or why “Autism Acceptance” is such an important alternative. That’s been done already. Go ahead and google those terms if you need to. Or read what I wrote last year.

Then come back, because we need to talk about the way non-autistic people treat autistic people, in April as well as year-round. We need to talk about how, with everything that non-autistics assume about autistic folks, they seem to be missing a few key points about themselves.

(I recognize that not all non-autistic people say or do the things I’m going to talk about here.  If you, a non-autistic person, read any of the following and think: “I don’t do that!” then let me take this opportunity to say thanks and ask you to consider what you are doing to call out this behavior in your fellow non-autistics.  Do you already do that? Great. Again, thanks for showing basic human decency. Now, lets work together to bring more non-autistics into your camp.)

So. 

Hi. 

In the post that I linked above, I described a study in which people were asked to rate autistic and non-autistic people, presented in videos, photographs, or text-only transcriptions, against traits including “awkward” or “approachable” and intents to interact, such as “I would want to be friends with this person.”  Participants rated autistic people less favorably (i.e. more awkward, less approachable, less desirable to be friends with) than they rated non-autistics after viewing short videos, long videos, or photographs.  There was no difference between ratings when people read transcriptions only.  From this, researchers speculated that stigma against autistic people isn’t entirely our fault, that personal biases may also play a role.

In a follow-up study, researchers replicated their results with the additional findings that 1) people tend to rate an autistic person more favorably if they know the person is autistic and 2) ratings are influenced by previous knowledge of autism.

In the most recent follow-up study, researchers demonstrated that variation in how autistic people are rated is explained more by individual differences among raters than it is by autistic traits.  If a non-autistic person was familiar with autism and presented with a low degree of negative stigma, they were more likely to rate an autistic person positively – as long as they knew the person had an autism diagnosis.  People who were unfamiliar with or had a negative stigma of autism tended to rate autistic people more unfavorably if they knew about their diagnoses.  

Together, these three studies indicate that autistic people are not completely at fault for being judged and avoided by non-autistics. Anti-autistic bias plays a significant, often unfounded (look at how those biases disappeared when raters couldn’t see the person!) role.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest autism stereotypes, one at a time. Let’s see if there are any patterns that non-autistic people have been overlooking.

“Autistic people are bad at social interactions.”

This is a big one; if you hold any stigmas about autism, you probably have this one. Autistic people are bulls in delicate little china shops, thrashing around breaking everything and making everyone miserable because we have no idea what is going on or how we’re supposed to behave. Right? Maybe. Maybe not.

The Double Empathy Problem is a theory posited by Damian Milton in 2012, referring to the breakdown that occurs between two people who have fundamentally different ways of perceiving and understanding the world. This is a reciprocal process, meaning neither party is individually at fault. However, non-autistic people are often “wildly inaccurate” when they attempt to interpret the mental and emotional states of autistic people. According to Milton: “Such attempts are often felt as invasive, imposing and threatening by an ‘autistic person’, especially when protestations to the contrary are ignored.” 

Milton later points out that any mismatch in communication between a non-autistic and autistic person is likely to be seen as “more severe” by the former because it is not a frequent occurrence for them.  Autistic people, on the other hand, experience social clashes with non-autistics all the time.

Studies are mixed on how accurate autistic people are at interpreting other autistic people, but first-hand accounts from autistic adults show a tendency to prefer the company of fellow autistics, further suggesting that the perception of social awkwardness is not entirely autistic people’s fault.

UPDATE 4/24/19: A new study from the University of Edinburgh confirms that autistic people 1) share information effectively with other autistic people, 2) enjoy interacting with other autistic people, 3) have a higher rapport with autistic people in a way that is noticeable to people outside the interaction. All of these patterns match the way that non-autistic people interact with other non-autistic people; however they all decrease when there is a mix of autistic and non-autistic people. So, quality of social interaction appears to rely on communication partners having the same neurotype, rather than a specific one.

“Autistic people lack Theory of Mind.”

There’s a video on YouTube that I had the displeasure of watching recently, in which a prominent British psychologist explains that Theory of Mind – the ability to interpret other people’s thoughts and perspectives when they are different from your own – is what separates people from animals, the foundation of what makes us human.

She then goes on to explain, without a hint of irony, that autistic people don’t have Theory of Mind.

The complexities of Theory of Mind (ToM) in autistic people are beyond the scope of what I’m talking about today.  To say that we lack ToM is reductive and untrue, but it’s also not accurate to say that we develop and access it in the same way that non-autistic people do.

That said, saying in an educational video that autistic people are missing a fundamental tenet of humanity shows an significant lack of ToM on her part, either through the assumption that no autistic people will ever see it (false) or that autistic people who do see it won’t care (definitely false).

Also, as I mentioned above, non-autistic people are consistently inaccurate at interpreting the mental states of autistic people. This pattern is hard enough for autistic people who can explain why and how breakdowns happen; for people who lack the communication skills, it can be downright devastating.

For all that non-autistics believe autistic people lack ToM, when it comes to interacting with us, the reverse is often closer to the truth. Some other examples include:

• Not knowing and/or caring why autistic people don’t always follow complex and arbitrary social rules
• Minimizing sensory processing needs 
• Saying, “Everyone’s a little bit autistic”
• Insisting on person-first language even after an autistic person states a preference for being called “autistic”
• Assuming autistic people fall into two camps:
  • People who are unable to make decisions about their lives, express preferences (or non-preferences), or understand anything around them (“low-functioning”)
  • People who don’t really have a disability, and thus need no accommodations or understanding (“high-functioning”)
• Ignoring tips and recommendations for how to communicate with people who have processing difficulties
• Pretty much everything I’m about to say under the next point

“Autistic people have no empathy”

Autistic people see this one a lot. Empathy – the ability to care about other people’s feelings even when they are different from your own – is something we are told we lack. None of the stigmas about autism are particularly fun to listen to, but this one probably hurts the most, especially given the number of autistic people who describe the experience of “hyper-empathy,” which is the literal opposite.

Also, despite insisting that autistic people are the ones who lack empathy, non-autistics have done the following:

(CN: abuse, ableism, ABA, violence, death)

• Written and produced a play about how hard it is to parent an autistic child, complete with jokes at autistic people’s expense and a puppet portraying the autistic character.  Here is a Twitter thread with a detailed summary of the play.  For more information, look up #PuppetGate. 
• Published books, blogs, and videos about how hard their lives are because of their autistic children. Sometimes they film autistic children having meltdowns; other times they give detailed descriptions of how they heroically tortured their autistic child in an effort to cure them.
• Written an article called “The Perks of Bullying” referring specifically to autistic students.
• Bullied autistic students significantly more often than they bully non-autistic students. (You can find a link to that study in the same post that I linked above.)
• Published a video during which a mother described how she almost committed suicide because of her autistic child, but didn’t because her other child was neurotypical.
• Given professional talks with titles or descriptions that explicitly refer to autistic people as being difficult to work with.
• Suggested that autistic people are lying about having meltdowns in order to garner sympathy.
• Said terrible, demeaning things about autistic people who are physically present at the time.
• Said terrible, demeaning things about autistic people online, then acted surprised when autistic people noticed and called them out.
• Made terrible, demeaning jokes about autistic people, then apologized to families and caregivers rather than autistic people themselves.
• Physically and emotionally abused autistic children for a living and called it “treatment.”
• Restrained an autistic student so forcefully that he died.

There are more examples out there, but this is a long list and I’m exhausted. Hopefully you get the idea by now.  

“Autistic people are rigid and inflexible.”

Last year I was having a conversation with a non-autistic person about how when I’m hiking alone I sometimes get so “in the zone” that I don’t think to make eye-contact and say “hi” to a hiker who passes me.

They were appalled. They told me that if anyone did that to them, they would be furious. They told me I should always say hi to strangers while I’m hiking because if I fell and got hurt, I would want them to come back and help me. 

I asked them to clarify – were they saying they would refuse to help an injured person simply because they hadn’t said “hello” beforehand? That it’s reasonable to expect others to do the same? They clarified: that’s exactly what they were saying.

This story probably fits under a couple different headings, but I’m putting it here because it’s an absurd example of the ways that non-autistics rigidly adhere to arbitrary social norms, unilaterally thinking terrible things about people who don’t follow their rules.

In another example of inflexible thinking, non-autistic people frequently have difficulty accepting that I can be autistic and also have valid clinical knowledge and experience. In almost every conversation about autistic people in a clinical space (even spaces that are designed to be progressive and inclusive), if I don’t immediately label myself as “an autistic SLP,” inevitably someone assumes I am one but not the other.

I have started honest, productive conversations with BCBAs about ABA Therapy, only to be abandoned after I reveal I’m autistic.  In fact, a non-autistic clinician once left a conversation about autism and ABA with me, a school-based SLP, in order to privately continue talking to my non-autistic, neither-clinician-nor-educator wife, even though my wife had already stated that she was not qualified to participate in the discussion. It was wild.

There’s also the widely-held assumption that stimming and special interests are always bad (some links to resources in this post) despite studies suggesting that this is not the case.  There’s the near-ubiquitous insistence on eye-contact despite evidence that it is legitimately painful for autistic people.  

Speaking of empirical studies, there’s also the fact that scientists, like the general population, tend to view autistic traits as inherently bad. 

For example, this book that I love called out the double standards in interpretation of neuroimaging studies. Does more blood flow to a certain part of the autistic brain during some tasks? Either that part of the brain is over-active, or autistics have to work harder on that task. Less blood-flow? It’s under-used or under-responsive. Autistic people don’t get to win when non-autistic researchers make all the rules.

Researchers presume deficits in autistic people even with traits that have clear positives. For example, because autistic children are less immediately possessive of new toys or less likely to be influenced into perceiving or reporting incorrect information than non-autistic children are, these traits are interpreted as symptoms of social impairment. I particularly enjoy the moment in the latter study in which the writers point out that “being less susceptible to social influence resulted in the older autistic group performing more accurately than their neurotypical counterparts” as a brief aside in the middle of their discussion about how this finding is a great indicator of autistic people’s social impairments.

There’s a pattern here. Over and over again, non-autistic people assign stigmas to autistic people, which become so forcefully engrained that it causes them to do and say things that fall under the very stereotypes they assign to us. Sometimes it’s funny.  Sometimes it’s hurtful.  It’s always exhausting.

And I’m tired.  I’m really tired.

I’m tired of defending my personhood to people who make all manner of verbal contortions in order to frame me as being in the wrong.

I’m tired of worrying that non-autistic people are going to take away my job, my driver’s license, my right to vote, or my ability to make legal or medical decisions.

I’m tired of having conversations that inevitably descend into repetitions of “no YOU are a bad person.”

I’m tired of spending a portion of my job trying to undo damaging effects of ABA, only to be yelled at when I point out that this is something I have to do.

I’m tired of being pathologized by people who know I’m autistic, and I’m tired of being incited to pathologize autistics by people who assume I’m not. 

I’m tired of being excluded from clinical spaces and discussions unless I hide part of my identity.

I’m tired of being ignored or insulted when I point out that any of these things are happening.

And I’m tired, so tired, of non-autistics displaying the very stereotypes they assign to people like me in order to deny our humanity.

“In a world that doesn’t want queer people to be happy, queer joy is subversive.”

This was the thesis statement of the first panel I attended last weekend at Flame Con, an annual comics convention in New York City for LGBTQ+ people.  This panel “The Subversive Simplicity of Queer Joy” provided a much-needed affirmation that queer people – in fiction and in real life – deserve happiness just as much as cisgender-heterosexual people do, even if most of the world doesn’t want us to have it.

Flame Con is a utopian rainbow bubble full of magic, wonder, inclusion, and uninhibited joy. Flame Con celebrates people’s differences and tells queer people of every race, ethnicity, ability, neurotype, religion, age, and gender: “You are not alone and you deserve to be happy.” Purely by coincidence, the day before the con I also attended an unrelated event celebrating queer love and joy in the real world. For me, these two events could not have come at a better time.

Warning: I’m going to talk about death and violence in fiction.  I will not name names and I will be as vague as I can.

This means I can’t provide links as often as I usually do.  Instead, from time to time I’ll mention a term to research if you want more information. Be warned that you will likely encounter spoilers if you choose to do that.

Again: if you don’t want to read discussions about non-specific queer character death, you’ll want to leave this page now. I understand.

Anyway.

This past weekend, I spent three days in spaces where the idea that queer people deserve happiness was not in dispute. This provided a refreshing change from the past two weeks, as well as the 12-13 years before that, when queer joy has been refuted or rejected with alarming consistency.

Queer characters, despite under-representation in mainstream media especially, are disproportionately killed in fiction.  This pattern includes movies, television shows, books, podcasts, video games, and comics. Even fan-created webseries are not above giving queer characters the axe.

(For more info, look up “Bury Your Gays.”)

This of course means that many queer characters who are still alive at the end of their stories are mourning the death of a significant other.  There is a history to this: In the first half of the 20th century, films and books were prohibited from portraying gay or lesbian characters who did not eventually die or marry a character of a different gender.

(For more info: “Motion Picture Code,” “Lesbian pulp fiction.” I don’t know if there were rules about transgender characters, but I think I can make an educated guess.)

Although those rules aren’t technically in place anymore, the pattern remains. To this day, stories about LGBTQ+ characters disproportionately end in tragedy and grief.

An article in The Guardian in 2013 (linked article contains SPOILERS for several pre-2013 films featuring LGBTQ+ characters) stated:

Whether it’s suicide, AIDS (a particularly maudlin [Actor] performance in [Film] employs both), being beaten to death, state execution, getting shot, or getting raped and then shot, LGBT characters are just not allowed the happy endings that their straight counterparts enjoy. My personal favourite comes from [Film Title With Link to Said Film], in which [Actor] simply drops dead for no reason. Presumably overwhelmed by sheer homosexuality, his heart can no longer keep beating. Beware, non-heterosexuals: Sudden Gay Death Syndrome can strike anywhere.

The first time I saw a romantic relationship between same-gender protagonists on mainstream television, I was in my late teens. I felt drawn to them, fascinated by them for reasons I could not identify. This beautiful couple grew, struggled, and overcame hardships together, and I fell head-over-heels for them before I realized they were like me. This relationship formed one of the first steps of my (very) long journey towards self-understanding.

Then one of them died suddenly and unexpectedly. The other spent the rest of the series in various stage of grief and heartbreak as she gradually overcame the loss. Even though other characters on the same show died before and after this character did, her death in particular ripped me apart for reasons I did not understand at the time. It was not until several years later, when a different show killed off a fan-beloved lesbian character, that I started to find the words to explain why the experience of grieving a queer character was so different from mourning a straight-cisgender one.

The over-representation of LGBTQ+ character death can cause real damage to queer people who are beginning to understand their identity.  Representation in fiction is a powerful tool that can shape the identity and self-worth of its audience, but it is also a dangerous one.  How can it be safe for queer people to own who we are if all that awaits us is tragedy? How can we learn to value ourselves when media is constantly telling us we deserve to die?

Since queer character death is so frequent in fiction, there is a ton of variation in terms of how it is presented and how each incident fits into its respective narrative.  For example, there are contexts where character death is more likely, including war, dystopia, frontiers, and historical or pseudo-historical settings.  In narratives that involve action, violence, and risk, it’s unrealistic to expect all characters to survive.  Even though LGBTQ+ people form a very small percentage of these characters, its neither fair nor practical to ask each one of them to be spared.

Sometimes the death of a character – queer or otherwise – serves the plot in a way that is organic, meaningful to the story, or respectful to the character.  Obviously that judgement call that will vary from person to person, but it’s not productive to pretend that well-written queer character death isn’t possible.  Also – especially with long-running television shows – there are times when a character must be written off because the actor is no longer available to play them.  In these instances, death may be the most reasonable way to make this work with the narrative, rather than performing plot-aerobics to remove that character permanently .

That said, there are several patterns that can make instances of queer character death more problematic than they already are. Frequently, the death of an LGBTQ+ character is directly related to their queerness; examples include AIDS, hate crimes, or suicide.  Many queer characters die minutes after confirming or advancing a romantic relationship and/or sleeping with a character of the same gender. Alternatively, they may be killed off in the same episode or book in which their relationship was confirmed, advanced, or revealed to other characters.  These plot decisions tell the audience that queerness is the reason these characters died.

Queer character death can also feel pointed if the death doesn’t serve the narrative or fit the setting.  Again, this point depends on subjective judgements made by readers or viewers.  Still, when a cis-het character dies in a way that feels incongruous with the story, it may be seen as bad writing or death for shock-value (or one of a number of other problematic tropes).  When it happens to an LGBTQ+ character, it fits into larger pattern which suggests that creators see queer characters as dispensable or don’t know how to write LGBTQ+ stories with happy endings.

This interpretation carries even more weight in stories where only queer characters die, in endings that show most or all cis-het characters still alive while the one, if any, remaining LGBTQ+ character grieves.

Regardless of individual circumstances, the sheer number of queer character deaths in relation to the number of queer characters in fiction is so disproportionate that it sends a message on its own.  In contrast, the underrepresentation of queer stories with happy endings, especially in mainstream media produced by larger corporations, is staggering.

(For more info, check out this infographic about dead lesbian and bisexual women characters on TV. Obvious warning for SPOILERS for a whole bunch of shows released in or before 2016.)

Yes, there are a lot of complicating factors to the “Bury Your Gays” trope.  Almost inevitably, especially in recent years when this trope has been getting more attention from mainstream media, every time a queer character is killed off we have the same conversation.  Each time, we ask if this particular death made sense in this particular instance. No detail is left unturned. There are productive and unproductive arguments from both sides of the question.

The trouble with the “This Time It’s Okay” argument is mainly that it ignores or dismisses the larger context where LGBTQ+ character death keeps happening.  Over and over again, we watch queer characters die. Again and again, we witness the one surviving queer character grieve while the cis-het characters enjoy happy endings.  Even in the best of circumstances, queer character death is problematic simply because it exists in a world that feels that LGBTQ+ characters – and by extension, real people – do not deserve the same joy as their cis-het counterparts.

Here’s a (spoiler-free) quote from the writer who created the infographic listed above [brackets are my additions]:

Stories exist in imaginary worlds but they are consumed in the real world, where, just this week [March 2016], North Carolina passed sweeping and unprecedented anti-LGBT legislation. And where three presidential candidates don’t believe gay people should have the right to get married [update: neither does the current Vice President]. And where a gay person can be fired simply for being gay in most states [still true]. And where LGBT youth homelessness is rampant [yep]. And where LGBT bullying occurs with alarming regularity in schools [definitely still true].

We need hope in stories. We need light in stories. And we need stories to work their magic in the lives of the people who would oppress and persecute us because we’re gay. Stories are fatal to bigotry.

To care about story isn’t to ignore the darkness of the real world; to care about story is to put your hope in something that changes the real world, more than anything else. There’s a reason all religious texts are made up mostly of stories. There’s a reason the same-sex marriage approval rating in the U.S. rose in direct proportion to the number of gay characters on television. Story gets inside us and changes the alchemy of who we are.

And yet, over and over again we have the same conversation. The same points are hashed out time and time again. It’s frustrating and discouraging. It’s exhausting.

Several years ago I came across an award-winning graphic novel in a bookstore. I had heard of it among recommendations for stories centering same-gender romance, so I picked it up. As I was reading the summary and studying the cover art, a feeling of dread washed over me. I had already had the ‘Bury Your Gays’ conversation more times than I could count.  Over and over again I had let myself become invested in LGBTQ+ characters, only to watch their stories end in tragedy. Again and again I had bemoaned queer character death with (mostly queer) people who understood and (mostly non-queer) people who didn’t. At that moment, I realized that it was not worth putting myself through that again, even for the best of stories.

I flipped to the last few pages of the book, and there she was: one of the main characters, standing alone and sad at the other’s grave.

I closed the book, put it down, and walked away. That has been my pattern ever since. Movie/show/book/comic with queer characters in it? Great. Tell me how it ends.  Still ongoing? I’ll wait. A queer character dies? No thanks.  There are occasional exceptions of course, but for the most part I stick to this rule.  Honestly, I’m so grateful that I’ve done this. Yes, it means that my consumption of LGBTQ+ stories is significantly limited, but to me it’s been worthwhile.

For one thing, I haven’t been blindsided by queer character death in over a decade.  On the rare occasions when I do choose to read or watch a story featuring queer character death, I can brace myself for it. Some people may argue that knowing ruins the story, but if the story doesn’t have an emotional impact without a sudden, unpredicted death of an LGBTQ+ character, then to me it’s not worth investing my time or energy.

At the aforementioned Flame Con panel this weekend, one of the panelists talked about the value in reading or watching stories by creators who value queerness. When queer audiences know or trust that all the queer characters are going to survive, we can relax into a story and become emotionally invested in the characters, enjoying the adventures without the feeling of dread that comes with a queer character whose fate is unclear.

So why, after a weekend of constant affirmation of the value of queer joy in fiction and real life, would I write a long post complaining about queer tragedy?

Two weeks ago, ‘Bury Your Gays’ took me by surprise for the first time in almost a decade.  Without knowing it was going to happen, I saw one queer character die and the other grieve, while all of the cis-het characters in the ensemble cast – including at least four different-gender couples – enjoyed happy endings.

And yes, it hurt just as much as it did all those other times.

*(If you’re curious, Google “bury your gays 2018 backlash.” Also, you’re welcome for the amount of time I spent trying to find a search term that wouldn’t give anything away.)

So yes, I’ve spent the past two weeks having conversations that I had witnessed* but not directly engaged in for several years.  In the midst of this emotional hurricane, I’ve rehashed all the same points with people who feel that this specific instance is different, that under these circumstances queer character death is acceptable.  As usual, arguments on both sides range from calm and productive to hurtful and inflammatory.  Nothing about this situation is new.

*(Look up “bury your gays 2016 controversy”)

This. Keeps. Happening. Again and again we have these conversations. Over and over, queer viewers express anger and disappointment and are told we need to calm down.  We try to defend our right to survive and be happy, and we’re told that we’re over-reacting, that our expectations are unreasonable and it’s our fault for letting them get so high.  We point to the number of fictional queer casualties and are told to be grateful that queer characters exist at all.  We point to the demographics of the characters who are allowed to find joy, and we’re told to accept the story for what it is.

In the past decade, I’ve had this conversation more times than I could count, which is nothing on people who haven’t gone out of their way to avoid queer character death as I have. I can only imagine how they’re feeling.  Because I’m tired.  I am so very tired.

Which is why this weekend could not have come at a better time. Apart from one 3-minute incident from which I was able to extricate myself, Flame Con provided an affirming and invigorating experience in which attendees were told, time and time again, that our existences mattered, that our experiences mattered, that we deserve happiness and joy and we are not wrong to be upset when we are denied that.

Unfortunately, asking for that, even creating it, is a subversive act.  People who write queer stories are counteracting decades (almost a century) of media asserting again and again that queer characters can exist but they cannot be happy. A silly rom-com becomes an act of subversion when the main characters are the same gender; a fluffy teenage comedy with a transgender protagonist is a downright insurrection. Creating these stories, and supporting the people who do, is a political act, an inflammatory statement in a world that does not want to see LGBTQ+ people be happy.  But we do it.  We need it. Because queer people deserve joy too.

Autism Acceptance Month Master Post

April is a difficult month to be autistic. Every day we are bombarded with “awareness” campaigns calling us broken or diseased, spreading misinformation and fear, and promoting abusive practices “for our own good.”

But I talked quite a bit about ableism in my previous post.

Autistic self-advocates are taking back the month of April with a movement called “Autism Acceptance month.”  This year, I participated in autism acceptance by making one post to social media every day about the experiences of autistic people. I’ve compiled them all here.  This is a particularly long one, so I’ve separated and labeled each day for easy scroll-and-skim.  Enjoy!

 

DAY 1: What is Autism Acceptance?

According to the creators of Autism Acceptance: “During Autism Acceptance Month, we focus on sharing positive, respectful, and accurate information about autism and autistic people.

Autism Acceptance Month promotes acceptance and celebration of autistic people as family members, friends, classmates, co-workers, and community members making valuable contributions to our world. Autism is a natural variation of the human experience, and we can all create a world which values, includes, and celebrates all kinds of minds.

 

DAY 2: A$ in a nutshell

Because April 1st was a Sunday, April 2nd was the international “Autism Awareness Day” complete with the campaign to “Light it up blue.” At the school where I work, many teachers and paras wore matching blue T-shirts featuring cartoons of stick-figure children happily playing together, brightly-colored puzzle pieces, and a big yellow caption reading “It’s OK to be different!”

Which would be all well and good without A$’s long history of behaving as if the exact opposite were true.

On that day, I was working with a student in a classroom for young children with complex support needs.  Almost all of the students are paired with a para educator throughout the day.  As I was packing up my materials, I heard a para – who happened to be wearing one of those blue shirts – shout “STOP FLAPPING YOUR HANDS” to the 4-year-old student she was working with.  When I stepped around the divider to intervene, I saw the little boy fixing her with a deadpan expression and hand-flapping freely. I spoke to the para as diplomatically as I could, which perhaps wasn’t the best solution because even by the end of our conversation she still had no idea that she’d done anything wrong.

And that is the trouble with Autism Speaks in a nutshell. It’s okay to be different, except in ways that make neurotypical people feel uncomfortable, or worse: less proud of their openness. In those cases, difference is a problem that needs to be eradicated.

(Side note: I do speech therapy with this student, and we sometimes use movement stims to help him understand and retain the language that we target. It’s been really effective, and he loves coming to speech.)

 

DAY 3: Instead of giving money to A$, consider supporting organizations run by autistic people FOR autistic people.

In America, good examples include the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and the Autism Women’s Network (AWN)*. I’m not sure which organizations and/or charities are best in other countries, but feel free to comment if you know any!

*AWN has now changed their name.  See Day 26.

 

DAY 4: Thank you, ProloQuo!

Proloquo2Go is one of the most well-known communication apps for iOS. This app can turn an iPhone or iPad into a communication device, allowing a nonspeaking person to produce language by touching buttons on a screen.

Although a myriad of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) apps exist, Proloquo2Go is one of the biggest and widely viewed as one of the best.* Autistic people, many of whom are nonspeaking, form a large portion of their consumer base.

Unlike other companies that develop adaptive tools for autistic people, Proloquo honors Autism Acceptance month instead of Autism Awareness month.  Not only did they offer a sale with the specific word “Acceptance” (no puzzle pieces to be found!), but they also shared an adorable infographic about autism from the Neurodiversity Library.

Also there are more Neurodivergent Narwhals where that came from.  You’re welcome.

*As a speech therapist with an interest in AAC, I find Proloquo to be comprehensive and easy to navigate, but tougher to customize on-the-fly than other AAC apps. Also very expensive. Just in case you wanted to know.

 

DAY 5: What it feels like to be an autistic person of color in the eyes of the police

“I live in a world that fears my skin color and doesn’t want to understand how my brain works.”

In this article on the Daily Beast, Eric Garcia, an autistic person of color, describes his experience fearing police brutality on multiple fronts.

Hearing cops say they hadn’t meant to shoot the black man, but the autistic one, hit close to home. I feel less secure than white people with autism and less secure than my friends of color who are neurotypical.

It’s not surprising, per se, but it’s frustrating and disappointing.

In a way, the police using an autistic person as an alibi makes sense. A recent white paper released by the Ruderman Family Foundation showed that up to half of all people killed by police are disabled and a medical condition or “mental illness” is used to blame victims for their own deaths. On top of that, 80 percent of all cases involving disability are labeled mental illness.

Definitely worth a read.

 

DAY 6: Follow Friday Part 1. Neurodivergent Rebel

Neurodivergent Rebel has a blog with text posts, video posts, and pages of great merchandise on neurodiversity and autism acceptance. Her posts contain a variety of great insights on being autistic in a neurotypical world that insists on consistently misunderstanding us.  Check out her website, Facebook page, or Twitter handle. I have one of her tote bags, and I like it a lot!

 

DAY 7: Identity-first Language

Why “autistic people” instead of “people with autism?” I posted some links last month, but here are some more that explain the issue, and its importance, clearly and beautifully.

A quote from Identity-First Autistic on why language matters:

Because autism – and by extension autistic people, are demonised every day when our neurology is referred to as a sickness or a disease and we are called a burden and a curse…we believe that a positive change in language is the catalyst to a positive change in our thoughts and actions.

Another from ASAN breaking down the difference between PFL and IFL.

When we say “person with autism,” we say that it is unfortunate and an accident that a person is Autistic. We affirm that the person has value and worth, and that autism is entirely separate from what gives him or her value and worth. In fact, we are saying that autism is detrimental to value and worth as a person, which is why we separate the condition with the word “with” or “has.” Ultimately, what we are saying when we say “person with autism” is that the person would be better off if not Autistic, and that it would have been better if he or she had been born typical. We suppress the individual’s identity as an Autistic person because we are saying that autism is something inherently bad like a disease.

Yet, when we say “Autistic person,” we recognize, affirm, and validate an individual’s identity as an Autistic person. We recognize the value and worth of that individual as an Autistic person — that being Autistic is not a condition absolutely irreconcilable with regarding people as inherently valuable and worth something. We affirm the individual’s potential to grow and mature, to overcome challenges and disability, and to live a meaningful life as an Autistic. Ultimately, we are accepting that the individual is different from non-Autistic people–and that that’s not a tragedy, and we are showing that we are not afraid or ashamed to recognize that difference.

 

DAY 8: ‘All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism’

This is an anthology of short narratives, essays, poetry, and artwork by autistic creators of color, discussing the intersection between autism and race in our white neurotypical world. It’s not easy to find in bookstores, but I did find a local independent seller who was willing to order it, and it is worth it! It’s a very powerful read, enough that I’m needing to go through it slowly with frequent breaks, but I am really enjoying it so far.

Also, Autistic people of color are not given enough of a voice in most spaces, and Autism Acceptance needs to work on fixing that. This is a great way to start.

Read more about the book on its website.  You can also follow two of the editors, Lydia X. Z. Brown and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu on Twitter.

 

DAY 9: Autistic Queer Theory 101

Intersectionality in advocacy doesn’t only mean acknowledging that not all autistic people are white; it also means recognizing that not all autistic people are straight and/or cisgender.  This introductory-level article on the Asperger/Autism Network (AANE) goes into it a bit more.

Because someone is diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition does not mean that person is less capable of determining their own sexual orientation or gender identity. It is more likely that family members or professionals will question their identification with these non-mainstream identities because of the autism profile and out of concern that their loved one will be part of yet another marginalized, vulnerable group.

 

DAY 10: On being an autistic woman

On April 9th of this year, Julia Bascom, the executive director of ASAN, made the keynote speech at a UN event on empowering autistic women and girls. Here is a transcript of her address, with some of my favorite quotes listed below.

As a society, we still see autism as a negative, sad, scary thing. But for autistic women, an autism diagnosis can be a tool for empowerment. It’s an answer and an explanation, it’s a way out of cycles of self-blame and guilt, it’s a passport to an entire community, and if we’re lucky, it’s a connection to the understanding, supports, and services we need in order to truly thrive, sometimes for the first time in our life.

Access to diagnosis, however, is still deeply inequitable. Autistic women and girls are diagnosed much less frequently than autistic boys, and we’re often diagnosed later in life, or after we’ve gone through a roulette-wheel of other labels. One of the most common ways for autistic women to get diagnosed, in fact, is after we bring our own children in for assessment. The diagnostic criteria for autism are normed off of 4-year old white boys in upper-middle class families in the US, so anyone who doesn’t fit in that box has an uphill climb.

It’s really powerful and moving.

It shouldn’t be surprising, but the needs and struggles of autistic women and girls are very similar to the needs and struggles of women and girls broadly. We need our voices to be heard and honored. We need access to education and employment, we need access to the tools that empower everyone to be a part of the world and in charge of our own destinies. We need equal pay, not segregated employment and subminimum wages. We need real education–not 40 hours a week of behavioral modification, not compliance training, not forced normalization…My life, in many ways, looks different from that of other women and girls–but in the essentials, it is exactly the same. I deserve that same endless possibility. I deserve that same support. I deserve to be my own best champion. I deserve to be my own sun, my own moon, my own stars. And none of that depends on how well I can make eye contact or how still I can sit or how fluently I can speak. This is my birthright as a woman. Autism shapes what it might look like, but it doesn’t change a single one of my rights.

 

DAY 11: Allyship 101

The truth is most autistic people are brushed away and passed off when the conversation turns to autism – and the megaphone is usually handed to our loved ones and our medical professionals. We need to have a voice and a say in the autism acceptance movement, and in how we’re treated with respect and dignity.

Interested in being an ally to the autistic community? Check out this article on Everyday Feminism for a list of great ways to start.

An accountable ally wants to amplify our voices and make them heard by a larger audience. An accountable ally wants to make sure spaces are accessible to autistic people. They work to respect and center our needs and wants.

An accountable ally is constantly challenging ableism – both other people’s and their own – because they know we’re all part of a system of oppression.

 

DAY 12: AAC and Voice

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) is a means of communicating without speaking (see Day 6 for an example of one of the biggest developers of iPad-based AAC; for one of the most famous examples of an AAC-user, look up “Stephen Hawking”).  A disproportionately large number of autistic people use AAC to communicate, whether it’s through iPads, picture boards, or something else.  The U.S. Education system is not very good at teaching nonspeaking autistic students, but thanks to the work of people like DJ Savarese, it’s getting better.

AssistiveWare, the company who developed the Proloquo2Go software (See Day 6), wrote a great article on AAC and voice in honor of Autism Acceptance month.

Some AAC users do call #AAC a voice – and you might have seen AssistiveWare using this kind of language too. But nobody can decide for somebody else what their true voice is.  Some people who need AAC don’t have access to it yet. Others can only express a limited range of messages and ideas with their system. Supporting people in these situations to expand their communication is important, but only part of the solution. We also need to work on respecting people for who they are now and learning to listen to the voice they already have.

 

DAY 13: Follow Friday Part 2. ‘Growing Up Aspie’

You can follow this comic writer/artist on Facebook or Twitter.  Most of what he produces are comics, but he does some short videos as well.  I’m a particular fan of “Shame Changer.”

 

 

DAY 14: On Meltdowns and “autism parent” pity-parties

Neurodivergent Rebel wrote a post about parents who post videos to social media of their autistic children having meltdowns.

If you have an autistic or otherwise neurodiverse child, please never EVER do this. These videos create a permanent record of a child without their consent, which could follow them through high school, higher education, and even job applications. Don’t presume your child will never have these opportunities. Don’t assume strangers won’t be able to find these videos, now or in ten years. Don’t pretend to raise “awareness” in order to gain pity for yourself.

Meltdowns are intense, harrowing experiences that make nearly everything impossible. It takes a long time to recover and even longer to rebuild trust in the people who triggered them or made them worse. Do not be those people. Do not tolerate it when your friends or relatives do this to their autistic children.  Do not do this to your autistic child. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are. Just don’t.

 

DAY 15: Simple, everyday things you can do to support your autistic friend/family member/coworker/acquaintance/etc

Credit to Autism Ambassador

 

DAY 16: ‘The Visibly Invisible: Autistic People of Color’

I got it. You had to be tough to be black. There was no crying, no picky eating, none of this I can’t look you in the eye. Humor was a way of toughening yourself up, because the world was going to be tough for us, so if you don’t have a sense of humor now, you had better develop one.

Here’s an article about what it’s like to grow up and exist in our neurotypical society as an autistic woman of color.

Autism is written off not just as a condition affecting white people, but as a behavioral problem, a set of character flaws, stubbornness, and eccentricity bordering on mental illness.

TL;DR: it’s tougher than anyone who is NOT an autistic woman of color can understand.

I have told people  I have autism.  Too many times the reactions are either disbelief or fear.

“There is nothing wrong with you that God can’t fix,” is often the reaction.  Or “I know a little something about that, but you can look me in the eye, unlike my cousin’s child.”  Or worse there is fear.  I feel as if other black people are saying we have failed her, she is not one of us. She is how old and acting like that? Poor girl.

 

DAY 17: Autism and gender diversity

Autistic people are more likely to identify as transgender or non-binary than neurotypical people are. Trans/NB people are more likely to be autistic than cisgender people are. And yet, trans or NB autistic people have to deal with a laundry list of barriers as a result of being both neuro- and gender diverse. Here’s a post with a million references on the topic.

 

DAY 18: Book recs!

Another great way to support autistic people while learning to see the world from a different perspective is to read books by autistic authors.  Here’s a list to get you started.

I particularly recommend:

•  So You Want to Be a Robot by A. Merc Rustad (Science Fiction/Fantasy, Short Stories)
• Ninefox Gambit/The Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee (SF)
• Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde (Young Adult)
• On the Edge of Gone by Connie Duyvis (YA SF)
• Emergence: Labeled Autistic by Temple Grandin (Memoir).

 

DAY 19: We need to talk about ABA

Hoo boy this was a long one.

Applied Behavior Analysis is a therapy technique that has been used to “treat” autism since around the 1970s, with some precursors in institutions in the 1960s. Basic tenets of the practice include interpreting behavior as a functional response to stimuli, teaching complex tasks step-by-step, and trying to “condition” preferred behaviors using systems of reward and punishment.

As an autistic SLP, I  have  a lot to say on this topic, so please bear with me.

The founder of ABA, Ole Ivar Lovaas, was openly ableist,* homophobic, and transphobic (the subject of that linked article killed himself in 2003). Lovaas described the purpose of his treatment as making autistic people act “normal,” and he was also heavily involved in founding gay conversion therapy, which used similar principles.

Initial ABA practices included cattle-prodding autistic children for stimming or having meltdowns. It should be noted that punishment has not been explicitly banned from ABA, although this particular technique is not used as frequently as it used to be (look up “Judge Rotenberg Center” for more information on that).

Examples of current ABA practices:

• “If you don’t walk on your toes, you get to play outside.”
• Denying children necessary sensory support during a meltdown.
• Giving autistic children treats for making eye-contact, sometimes requiring them to sustain it for longer than 5 seconds.

An initial study showed increased risk of PTSD in people who are exposed to ABA therapy. More research is needed for sure, but the preliminary data is definitely alarming.

That being said, I DO think that, applied individually and holistically to each person, ABA has some principles that can work in teaching neurodiverse AND neurotypical children.  Here are some examples of ABA practices that are NOT ableist and/or potentially damaging:

• “Practice identifying letters three times, then you can play.”
• Looking at antecedent patterns to figure out what causes meltdowns, then avoiding triggers.
• Teaching people with communication difficulties to ask for sensory items or breaks (verbally or using AAC), by granting these requests immediately and praising independent communication in whichever form it takes.

More discussion on the topic here, here, and here.

It should be noted that these articles mainly focus on children. Although children are the ones most frequently exposed to ABA therapy, we need to consider the adults who receive it as well. We also need to listen to autistic adults who went through ABA as children and now have symptoms or full-on diagnoses of PTSD as a result.

There are a lot of questions surrounding the ABA debate that I don’t have the answers to. Like many aspects of society, it’s a mess and there’s no easy fix. It’s yet another result of the widespread belief that autistic people are suffering from a medical disorder rather than people who deserve respect for who we are. I think we can change that without obliterating everything that has anything to do with ABA, but it would mean a huge shift in ABA’s purpose and focus. It would require programs to restructure themselves with input from autistic people. It would alienate a LOT of neurotypical people.

I don’t know how to make this happen. I don’t even know the first steps. But we need to talk about it. So here. Thanks for reading this far.

*Some quotes from a book Lovaas published in 1981, entitled ‘The Me Book:’

With responsibility, the developmentally disabled individual takes on dignity and “acquires” certain basic rights as a person. No one has the right to be taken care of, no matter how retarded he is.

You are the boss, you make the decisions. Almost all persons, including the retarded and especially the autistic and emotionally disturbed, want it differently. Sometimes they will become so angry that they act out aggressively against themselves, the furniture, or you…Or they will withdraw and make you feel guilty. They may try to frighten you into quitting. Don’t let them do that because it will hurt them in the long run. They have no right to act bizarrely, many professional opinions notwithstanding…If you work hard for your child, he should be grateful, work hard, and show affection to you in return. You have to teach him that.

Some quotes from an interview Lovaas gave in 1974:

whatever you call them, you have a severely disturbed child with a lot of very bizarre behavior.

They have tantrums, and believe me they are monsters, little monsters.

I just reached over and cracked her one right on the rear. She was a big fat girl so I had an easy target…I felt guilty, but I felt great. Then she hit herself again and I really laid it on her. You see, by then I knew that she could inhibit it, and that she would inhibit it if she knew I would hit her. So I let her know that there was no question in my mind that I was going to kill her if she hit herself once more, and that was pretty much it.

We used electric shock and spanking as punishment. The procedure was simple — we just set up a contingent punishment for self-mutilative behavior…We stay close to them and when they hurt themselves we scream “no” as loud as we can and we look furious and at the same time we shock them.

DAY 20: Follow Friday Part 3. ‘It’s an Autism Thing – I’ll Help You Understand It’

Another person to follow on Facebook and/or Twitter is Emma Dalmayne, who wrote a book entitled “It’s an Autism Thing…I’ll Help You Understand It.”  Unlike the overwhelming majority of resources out there for “autism parents,” this book comes from an autistic parent of neurodiverse children, so she is able to offer valuable advice and insight from multiple perspectives.

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DAY 21: What is stimming and why do autistic people do it?

Stimming, short for self-stimulating behavior, refers to anything that is done solely for sensory input.  Among autistic people, hand-flapping and vocalizing in a non-communicative way are the most widely-known, but stimming can take a variety of forms, and it’s not just autistic people who do it!  Stimming can release tension or excess energy, calm someone who is anxious or agitated, or help them concentrate on a task.

In 2016, The Mighty surveyed autistic people about why they stim and what it feels like.

Unfortunately, not everyone has always seen stimming as natural or necessary. Here’s powerful piece from an autistic blogger on why ‘quiet hands’ – a phrase that ABA practitioners use to stop autistic children from stimming with their hands – is so damaging.  And here’s another one dismantling the concept of ‘socially appropriate’ as it relates to stimming.

Lastly, (I love this one) here’s a journal article  from MUSICulture called “The Musicality of Stimming.”  It talks about music, ethnography, and why letting autistic people experience sensations in their own way is vital to their emotional well-being.  It even comes with cute anecdotes!

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DAY 22: #AskingAutistics

Have a question about autism? Want to learn more from autistic people? Check out the #AskingAutistics hashtag on Twitter. You can read what’s already there or post your own questions. (I strongly suggest you do the former before you do the latter.)  It’s a great way to learn about autism from people who have lived it.

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DAY 23: Making queer spaces autism-friendly 

Ableism gets in the way of my access to the queer community and in turn makes me less proud to be part of that community. While I feel comfortable in autistic spaces, I do not always feel visible and affirmed as a queer, nonbinary person. I am always dividing myself into fractions in order to be socially accepted; I can never show up as my full queer, autistic self.

I do not exist as a fraction, and I cannot extricate my queerness from my autism. Queerness and autism are both marginalized identities that make navigating society difficult; thus, I crave companionship and solidarity in both communities. In order to do this, I need queer spaces that are more accessible to autistic people.

Chrysanthe Tan wrote a great article on the difficulties of finding accessible social spaces as a queer autistic person.  They included a list of great tips for queer people looking to make their spaces more autism-friendly.

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DAY 24: Processing…processing…

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“Processing” is what our brains do with new information.  When someone says something to us, we interpret the words, hold the concepts in our immediate memory, figure out the implications, decide which information needs to be stored for later, and identify an appropriate response.  This is processing. Most of the time, we do it all in a tiny fraction of a second. For autistic people, it can take a bit longer.

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In this article from the National Autistic Society in the UK, several autistic people and parents of autistic people describe what it’s like to interact with a neurotypical world despite processing delays.  They talk about what helps and what really, really doesn’t.  It’s a great read, but I know that I’m linking a million articles in this one post, so here are some highlights:

• Don’t bombard an autistic person (or non-autistic person with processing difficulties) with tons of information at once. That can get frustrating and overwhelming.
• Ask your question or present your information, then wait, even if the person doesn’t respond right away. Your instinct might tell you “they didn’t hear me – I should repeat myself” or “they didn’t understand – I should explain more.” This is likely not true, even counterproductive.  The best thing you can do is wait.
• Don’t follow a question with another question if you haven’t gotten an answer to the first one. “How are you? How have you been? Did you do anything exciting recently? See any good movies?  How about [recent movie]? Did you see that one?” As an autistic person, I can promise that if you do this to me, by the time you reach question 3 or 4, I’m no longer even trying to process what you say.  I’m just planning my exit strategy.
• Prompts or pressure to make decisions quickly can be counterproductive and stressful for people who have processing delays.  In extreme cases, they can cause a shutdown or meltdown. If you need a quick decision, better strategies for an autistic person are to reduce pressure and background noise while providing visual aid for choices. Informing the person of the need for an immediate decision at the time that you present the choices is not going to end well for anyone.
• Be aware that an autistic person may have trouble hearing and understanding you in noisy environments.  Funny story: I used to think I had mild hearing loss, because it’s very difficult for me to understand people in spaces with lots of background noise. I was actually surprised when my hearing test fell within normal limits.  Then I read about and talked to other autistic people (see Day 22), many of whom had experienced the same thing!
• Respect an autistic person’s need to protect themselves from loud noises. For some, noisy environments aren’t just annoying; they’re overwhelming.  Same with sudden, loud, or high-pitched sounds.  The person may need to leave the space or wear sound-suppressors due to auditory sensitivity.
• Big, stressful, or emotional decisions may take days to process. Even non-autistic people sometimes need extra time to make big life decisions such as moving in with a significant other, accepting a job offer, or having children. For a person with processing difficulties, this may apply to any decision that carries weight.

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DAY 25: CDC report on the prevalence of autism

The Centers for Disease Control recently released a report on the prevalence of autism in children in certain areas of the U.S.  According to this report, 1 in 59 eight-year-old children in these communities has a diagnosis of autism (roughly 1.7%). This is an increase from reports conducted in previous years.

In The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network released a statement that addressed some limitations with the CDC’s methodology (examples: small sample size, limiting the survey to children) and positive changes in the data (for example: more girls and children of color are being identified than before).

Among the autistic community, people are mainly relieved that people who were not being diagnosed before are now having access to necessary supports at a younger age, attributing this increase to a better understanding of autism.

In other spaces, media outlets and certain organizations are using this information to promote fear of autism, mostly for the purpose of increased publicity.  I’m not linking to examples here.  They’re easy enough to find if you want to see them.

 

DAY 26: Autistic Women & Non-Binary Nework

The Autism Women’s Network (See Day 3) is officially changing its name to Autistic Women & Non-Binary Network. It’s always great to see advocacy organizations taking steps toward intersectionality and inclusion. Also, I admit, I’m kind of enjoying the trend where organizations that originally established themselves as “for women” redefine themselves as “for everyone except cis men.”

 

DAY 27: Follow Friday part 4. Ada Hoffmann.

Ada Hoffman is an autistic writer, poet, blogger, and book-reviewer who has a lot of fantastic things to say about the portrayal of autism in fiction. Her book recommendations have been extremely helpful to me, and I’m currently on the lookout for HER book, Monsters in My Mind. (No luck so far.) She’s also the one who wrote that mind-blowingly good article about emotional labor and autism. Check out her website and/or her Twitter account.

 

DAY 28: Favorite canon and headcanon autistic characters 

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“Canon” means something is explicitly stated in a book/comic/TV show/movie (e.g. “Commander Spock is half-human, half-vulcan”), and “headcanon” refers to something that fans interpret without actual confirmation from the creators, though there may be evidence to support it (e.g. “Commander Spock is in love with Captain Kirk”).

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The importance of headcanons for people with marginalized identities is an important topic for another time.

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I’ve made a list of my top 10 favorite autistic characters, using a mix of canon and headcanon.

1. Abed Nadir from Community (TV show). He’s far and away my favorite of the bunch. Everyone else is listed in a sort of random order.
2. Denise from On the Edge of Gone by Connie Duyvis (book)
3. Dr. Julian Bashir from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (TV show)
4. Lunella Lafayette from Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (comics)
5. Tesla from “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” (short story)
6. Lisbeth Salander from The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (books)
7. Alternate Astrid from Fringe (TV show)
8. Keith from Voltron: Legendary Defender (cartoon)
9. Maurice Moss from The IT Crowd (TV show)
10. Carlos the Scientist from “Welcome to Night Vale” (podcast)

 

DAY 29: Special Interests

In my favorite writing class in college, we spent a day talking about obsessions, what they were and how they could be an asset to writing. College was really the first time I had the opportunity to see special interests as a source of strength and pride rather than shame. Now as a therapist, I use them with my students all the time, as motivators or topics or teaching tools. Special interests are strengths and we should play to them.  Here’s a whole article on special interests and autism.

 

DAY 30: For more information…

I’ve been throwing a lot of articles and information into the social media abyss this past month. I know that at least a few people found it interesting, and some learned a thing or two. I hope I’ve made a positive difference. Because there are still people out there who are afraid of people like me, who pity our families for “putting up” with us, call on abusive practices to force us to change who we are, and celebrate the prospect of an autism “cure.” And probably worse.

I’m leaving this one last article for the rest of you. It’s a page of links to MORE pages of links with information about autism, advocacy, and disability (even more pages of links can be found under “resources” on the red menu bar). I hope you enjoy it, or at least find it useful in some way.

 

Happy Autism Acceptance month, everyone.

‘Acceptance’ not ‘Awareness:’ Making sure advocacy isn’t ableist

(Image: rainbow infinity symbol representing neurodiversity; credit to Autistic UK)

Quick note: I am going to use identity-first language.  If that bothers you, read this article on the Autistic Self-Advocacy network.  Check out the links at the end if you need more convincing.

I’m sure many of you are aware that April has been designated “Autism Awareness Month,” with “World Autism Awareness Day” set to kick it off this year on Monday, April 2nd.  In just about two weeks, it will be time again for neurotypical (NT) people to show off just how aware and conscientious they are.  The trouble is, autistic people have been voicing serious complaints about this campaign and the organization who runs it for over a decade. Some NT people have listened, and some haven’t.  Still others remain blissfully unaware of the emotional (and sometimes physical) damage that Autism Speaks has inflicted on the very population it has been ostensibly trying to serve.

What many NT people seem to miss is that to most autistic people – such as myself – autism isn’t a disease or a disorder but a different way of perceiving and interacting with the world. From that perspective, autism is yet another misunderstood and marginalized identity in a world that continues to have a very difficult time accepting and accommodating diversity in any of its forms.

On February 20th of this year, a shelter-in-place alert went out at Norwalk High School after a student reported hearing someone slinging a gun in the bathroom.  Although the incident turned out to be a false alarm, school dismissed early that day, leaving the student body scared and confused.  Many students, as a result, took to bullying and harassing an autistic student named Owen Lynch, blaming him for the incident and spreading rumors that he had brought a gun to school.  He hadn’t.  No one had.

Read more about that incident and its fallout here and here.

Lynch happened to be in the bathroom when the alarm was raised, so it was understandable that the police would be overcautious in their response, especially so close on the heels of yet another mass school shooting in America. What is unacceptable, however, is the bullying that Lynch endured as a result of a situation that had nothing to do with him.

Every time a mass shooting happens (all too often these past several years), a small but increasingly loud group of people wonders if there is a connection between autism and people who commit mass murder.  (There isn’t.)  The conversation about guns in America is beyond the scope of this particular post, but the damage that this sort of speculation causes is unforgivable.  Autistic students are already more likely to be bullied than NT students are, and students like Owen Lynch are now facing a false but increasingly widespread belief which will only exacerbate the problem.

The problem these days doesn’t seem to be awareness, but acceptance. It would be difficult to find a person in the United States (and likely elsewhere) who hasn’t heard the term “autism” before, but that doesn’t stop people from perceiving it as a threat, tragedy, disease, or combination of the three.

Even the Schroeder article that I referenced above focuses primarily on the ways that autistic students’ deficits place them at an increased risk for bullying, failing to place responsibility on the NT population for bullying them. Time and time again, we focus on “fixing” autism, rather than accepting it as another form of diversity.  This reinforces the othering of autistic people, which exacerbates our marginalization and isolation, further increasing the likelihood of bullying and perpetuating a cycle it was ostensibly intended to correct.

The focus on the tragedy of autism is a component of the Impairment or Medical Model of disability, which  interprets a disabled person’s experience as the result of their disability and/or medical condition.  Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are disabled because they can’t hear. Wheelchair users are disabled because they can’t walk.  We help these people by “fixing” them, using hearing aids, cochlear implants, surgeries, physical therapy, etc.

In contrast, the Social Model of disability takes into account the way that society places disabled people at a disadvantage. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people have trouble communicating because most of the world uses sound-based language. Wheelchair users have mobility restrictions due to the near-ubiquitous presence of stairs and narrow doorways. The Social Model presents a major shift in how we view disability, placing responsibility on nondisabled people and the larger community instead of exclusively focusing on disabled people as being “broken.”

The Schroeder article spends most of its time discussing autism through the Impairment/Medical model, with very little focus on the ways that individual and systemic bias contribute to bullying. In contrast, a study in 2016 examined first impressions that NT people formed of autistic peers, given varied types and amounts of information. (In this study, ASD refers to ‘Autism Spectrum Disorder,’ and ‘TD’ means ‘typically developing.’) They noted:

observers’ first impressions of individuals with ASD engaging in real-world social behavior were found to be robustly less favorable than those of matched TD controls. These negative first impressions were consistent for both adults and children with ASD, for static as well as dynamic stimuli, for both brief (2–4 s) and longer (10 s) glimpses of social behavior, and did not change with repeated exposure. Further, because these impressions were associated with reduced intentions to socially engage by observers, they may reflect a previously under-recognized contributor to the reduced quantity and quality of social interaction experienced by individuals with ASD

Person-first language aside, this article uses the Social Model to examine the struggles that autistic people experience.  Rather than focusing on the individual deficits that may be causing autistic people to experience isolation, they study the reactions and intentions of NT peers. As a result, they’re able to identify factors that the NT community doesn’t seem to consider. For example, autistic people are largely viewed as having trouble with social interactions, but rarely is it acknowledged that we struggle in part because neurotpyical people avoid interacting with us.

Here’s another important takeaway from that study:

…negative first impressions of adults with ASD occurred only when audio and/or visual information was present, and not when the transcript of their speech content was evaluated (Study 1). This discrepancy suggests that social presentation style rather than the substantive content of social speech drove negative impression formation of individuals with ASD. Supporting this conclusion, a static image was sufficient for generating negative first impressions of those with ASD and including additional information, such as body movement or voice, did not worsen them further. In contrast, first impressions of TD controls improved with the addition of a visual information, suggesting that unlike the ASD group, visual cues helped rather than hurt the impressions they made on observers.

Negative first impressions that NT people form about autistic people have nothing to do with the content of what the latter actually say.  We now have empirical evidence that these judgments are insubstantive. Yet they persist, and this article is one of few to suggest that the fault does not lie with autistic people alone.  We aren’t disabled simply because we have trouble with social interaction, but also because the neurotypical world is conditioned to perceive us in a negative way when we don’t conform to their expectations.

When autistic people do “pass” as neurotypical, by suppressing autistic traits and intentionally adopting NT behavior, it usually requires a concerted effort with an intense emotional cost.  Ada Hoffman wrote a long post about the emotional labor that autistic people perform in order to appear NT in different situations. As she points out:

Any autistic person who “passes”, or tries to pass, is doing a ton of invisible emotional labour by definition. Even people who don’t pass usually do some of this labour so that they will bother people less.

Most of the material in social skills classes for autistic people is geared towards teaching us to do even more of this emotional labour in even more circumstances.

Hoffman also discusses the types of emotional labor that are particularly difficult or easy for autistic people to perform, as well as types of emotional labor that many autistics are performing constantly, which might not seem like work to a NT person.  In a particularly heartbreaking moment, she points out that “Many of the complaints that NTs have about autistic people boil down to the fact that autistic people are not doing enough emotional labour for them.”

So even though autistic people who attempt to pass as neurotypical are constantly performing more emotional labor than our NT peers, NT people still avoid us because our efforts are not enough to make them feel comfortable. Viewed from this angle, it starts to look as though the problem isn’t inherent to autism after all.

This article talks about the problems that autistic women face when they constantly attempt to pass (an habit also known as “masking” or “camouflaging”).

Some of the participants reported that they camouflage in order to connect with friends, find a good job, or meet a romantic partner. “Camouflaging well can land you a lucrative job,” Jennifer says. “It helps you get through social interaction without there being a spotlight on your behavior or a giant letter A on your chest.” Others said they camouflage to avoid punishment, to protect themselves from being shunned or attacked, or simply to be seen as “normal.”

This pattern can be very damaging to mental health.

Nearly everyone makes small adjustments to fit in better or conform to social norms, but camouflaging calls for constant and elaborate effort. It can help women with autism maintain their relationships and careers, but those gains often come at a heavy cost, including physical exhaustion and extreme anxiety.

On the other hand, being open and genuine about one’s autistic identity “comes with its own burdens, such as a stigmatising label and lower expectations for achievement.” Even further: “Many said they have played so many roles to disguise themselves through the years that they have lost sight of their true identity.”

Social interaction is meant to be reciprocal, so I’m not saying it’s unfair to ask autistic people to perform any emotional labor during social interactions.  What I’m saying is that the burden shouldn’t be entirely on us to change who we are in order to make NT people more comfortable.  I say this partly because social interactions tend to be disproportionately exhausting for autistic people, and partially because if NT people are perceiving autistic peers as awkward, unattractive, and unfavorable to talk or hang out with based on still photographs alone (see Study 1 of the Sasson article), then our attempts to camouflage can only take us so far.  At some point, it becomes unfair to view autism through the Impairment/Medical model and place the blame for social breakdown entirely on us.

Which brings me back to Autism Speaks.

For specific reasons why autistic people dislike Autism Speaks (often notated by autistic people as A$), look here, here, here, and here, for starters. Because A$ is the main organization behind “Autism Awareness Month,” “World Autism Awareness Day,” and “Light it up blue,” you can probably infer how the autistic community feels about these campaigns.

I’ll tell you anyway: they’re abelist, fear-mongering crap that make NT people feel good about themselves while simultaneously othering the very population they are pretending to help. But don’t take my word for it.

The Social Model of disability is crucial for understanding autistic people because it forces the conversation to include our input, allowing the autistic community to explain our own needs and perspectives.  As a variety of self-advocacy groups have stated: “Nothing about us without us.”  Meanwhile, A$ and Awareness Month have typically been about autistic people, but almost entirely without us.

The Medical/Impairment model results in trends like Applied Behavior Analysis, the popular but intensely problematic method of intervention which has been linked to increased symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in people who are exposed to it.  The Social Model brings us groups such as the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the Autism Women’s Network, and communities on social media such as the #ActuallyAutistic and #AskingAutistics hashtags on Twitter.

Where the A$ campaigns are largely founded on the Impairment/Medical Model, the Social Model of autism provides the foundation for Autism Acceptance month, an alternative campaign started and run by autistic people.  “In a nutshell,” their description states, “Autism Acceptance Month is about treating autistic people with respect, listening to what we have to say about ourselves, and making us welcome in the world.”

In conclusion, as stated by one of the most well-written fictional characters I’ve ever seen on television (in a show that was, incidentally, written by an autistic person): “That’s what people don’t get, is they need to get me.”

Would you rather be accepting than aware? Would you rather be an advocate and ally than perpetuate this cycle of theatrically-well-meaning ableism? Here are some ideas:

• Check out this list of ideas from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and Autism Acceptance Month
• Read some of  these books by autistic authors.  Alternatively (or in addition), read some of these books by autistic authors.
• Be extra nice to your autistic friend, family member, acquaintance, coworker, etc. We are about to be bombarded for 30 days straight with allegations that we are broken, tragic, burdensome, an epidemic, at fault for being bullied, and (relatively new this year) potentially responsible for America’s gun violence problem.  Ask the autistic person in your life what you can do to help them get through this month. Then (this is key) respect and honor their answer.
• Share any or all of the above resources with the neurotypical people you know who like to perpetuate damaging stigmas about autism, well-intentioned as they may be.
• Enjoy the visual component of activism? Instead of blue and puzzle pieces, go for red and more inclusive, autistic-created symbols such as the rainbow brain or infinity symbol. Searching for “neurodiversity” on websites such as etsy.com and redbubble.com will bring you to a variety of paraphernalia worth looking at, with the added benefit of supporting autistic artists!
• Into social media? Check out the hashtags #AutismAcceptance #AskingAutistics #neurodiversity or #redinstead.  On Twitter, you can actually post questions under #AskingAutistics, and there is a large community of people who will answer you honestly.  (If you are not autistic, please do not use #ActuallyAutistic, as that tag is meant for autistic people.)

Happy Autism Acceptance month!

Love is Love is Not an Excuse

Even when we aren’t marching with Tiki Torches and shouting “JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US,” white people have a natural talent for racial bias.  So natural, in fact, that most of us regularly contribute to discrimination and erasure of people of color (POC) without realizing it.

The LGBTQ+ community is no exception.  In our struggle for rights and acceptance, we have an unfortunate tendency to ignore queer people of color (QPOC). Take, for example, the Stonewall riots: widely seen as a turning point in the struggle for gay rights in America (less so for trans* rights, unfortunately).  These riots, although instigated by trans women of color, launched a movement that benefitted white cisgender gay people disproportionately to the rest of the queer community. The 2015 movie about the Stonewall riots even created a fictional character just so the protagonist could be a cisgender white man instead of the real-life Marsha P. Johnson and/or Silvia Rivera.

We white people have been socialized, through a system of racial oppression, to see ourselves as the “default” and to center ourselves in situations that are not about us.  I am not saying that white queer people (WQP) do not face real difficulties with discrimination and violence, rather that QPOC experience a uniquely difficult struggle as a result of their intersecting marginalized identities.  See this, this, this, this, this, and this article for more information.

When the Pulse shooting happened last year, WQP yet again overlooked the experiences of QPOC as we processed our grief and rage and fear.  I own my contribution to this; I and many of my white queer friends initially failed to acknowledge that the majority of victims were people of color and that Hispanic/Latinx and black communities were hit harder than we were.  It took some reading, a few difficult conversations, and a lot of introspection for me to understand that by claiming the event as “the gay 9/11” and by centering my feelings of victimhood, I was effectively ignoring QPOC.

Which is why today, I want to talk about the comic Love is Love.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Love is Love is a 144-page comic anthology co-published by DC Comics and IDW in December of 2016, in order to raise money for survivors, families, and victims of the Pulse Shooting. It features 1-2 page comics and spreads depicting the rage, grief, fear, and ultimately hope within the LGBTQ+ and ally communities in response to the event.

You might ask what this anthology has to do with QPOC erasure.  Look at the racial diversity represented on the cover! Unfortunately, the cover doesn’t mean much once you realize that white men are over-represented on the list of writers and artists, while people of color are grossly under-represented. In fact, despite 300+ creators contributing to the project, Love is Love features the work of exactly one black woman.  For perspective: two of the Pulse shooting’s 49 victims were black women; three were white men.

At an LGBTQ+ comics convention in Brooklyn, New York, I attended a panel called “Love is Love: One Year Later,” featuring a small group of contributors, half of whom were white men. Marc Andreyko, the project’s originator and main organizer, moderated the panel. He was understandably proud of the anthology’s success; although meant to be a one-time event, Love is Love has gone through several re-printings, distributed more than 100,000 copies, and will soon be released for publication in several foreign countries. Given that 100% of the initial proceeds went to people who were affected by the Pulse shootings – with proceeds of later publications slated to benefit LGBTQ+ charities such as The Trevor Project – this is undeniably a good thing.

Which is likely why Andreyko was so thrown off when the first two questions from the audience called him out on the lack of POC contributors.

The resulting discussion consisted of several familiar justifications, from Andreyko as well as contributor Phil Jimenez (who himself is a QPOC):

• You’re wrong.
• How do you know they were white?
• No seriously, how do you know?
• We used white male contributors because we wanted this project to sell.
• We reached out to as many people as we knew.
• Not everyone we contacted was able to submit something by the deadline.
• We didn’t intentionally exclude people of color.

Andreyko did later walk back a few of these comments, acknowledging the problematic lack of diversity on the contributor list and pledging to do better in future anthologies.  (Side note: apparently a five-year anniversary edition is in the works, and Andreyko promises to include more QPOC creators.)

Not all of these excuses were completely false; the comic publishing industry has been consistently dominated by white men. By limiting the project to people who were well-known, easy for white men within the industry to reach, and/or able to temporarily drop what they were doing to create a contribution without being paid for it, the organizers unconsciously favored white men, whose privilege allows them to be over-represented among people who fit those criteria.

White people who are committed to racial equality need to understand that it is not enough to be “color-blind” or to ignore race as a factor. In projects such as Love is Love, white people in a position of privilege need to actively reach out to people of color, directly counteracting the systemic disadvantages that POC face. We so naturally default to white centrism that anything that does not actively work to include POC unintentionally shuts them out. (And that’s not even considering the issue of tokenism.)

The conversation was not going well until Tee Franklin, the only black woman on the panel (the entire project, in fact) spoke up.  (Jimenez appeared stunned to learn that Franklin was the only black woman contributor.)  Franklin described her experience as the “token black woman” in Love is Love.  She talked about queer black women and girls who had approached her to say that her contribution was the only place where they saw themselves represented. She pointed out that not only do databases of creators of color exist, so do anthologies of their work.  There’s even a database where people can search for queer creators of color.

Andreyko seemed increasingly receptive to what Franklin was saying, and by the end of the discussion he appeared willing to take action to include more queer creators of color in future projects.  My girlfriend and I were visiting Tee Franklin’s display after the panel, and Andreyko actually approached her while we were there.  He looked through one of the anthologies she had mentioned and eventually gave her his contact information so that they could work together on future POC-inclusive projects.  As someone outside the comic publishing industry, I can only hope that positive change comes from this.

A recurring theme at this convention was the importance of diversity, intersectionality, and representation in the media.  Representation matters, I heard time and time again. The Love is Love panel attempted to put that mantra into action, by calling out a project whose representation was lacking. I’m sad that it took almost a year for this issue to be brought to the organizers’ attention, and I’m equally sad that Tee Franklin is receiving backlash for speaking out about it. WQP (and allies) need to start doing better by QPOC, and this is just one of the many ways we can do it.

So what can you do?  Here are a few ideas:

• Watch a video of the panel on Facebook. Show your support for Tee Franklin and other QPOC by liking or sharing it.
• Educate yourself on the struggles that QPOC face. As I’ve said in previous entries, it’s long past time for white people to listen to marginalized voices.
• Include QPOC in your conversations about LGBTQ+ issues.  Do you know how many trans women of color were killed in 2016? 2017? The past 48 hours? Do your friends and family know? Do not let another conversation about the Pulse shooting finish without someone mentioning the queer Latinx and black communities. Keep pushing when your white friends and families try to ignore or dismiss the issue. Be that person.
• Show your support for Tee Franklin on Twitter and/or by pre-ordering her book Bingo Love. I’ve read the preview, and it looks fantastic!
• Support queer creators of color by actively seeking out their projects.  I listed some ideas in a previous entry about prose books by authors of color, and there are plenty of other resources out there for finding books and comics by queer creators of color.
• Let Marc Andreyko know that you hope future projects similar to Love is Love will be more inclusive of queer creators of color.
• Buy and read Love is Love. Yes, it’s problematic, but it’s also a wonderful project for an excellent cause. We can acknowledge its racial bias while enjoying and supporting it for the good that it does.  Just make sure that when you discuss the book, you acknowledge the experience of QPOC and creators who were excluded. Do the work to make your corner of the LGBTQ+ movement inclusive, intersectional, and representative.

Books by people of color: A rec list

In early 2016 I realized that the overwhelming majority of books I had read were written by white authors. It was one of those “duh” moments that formulated my privileged-white-person-becoming-aware-of-pervasive-systemic-racism process.  To some extent, I blame American public schools, the media, and the publishing industry, but the bottom line is that I had neglected to examine all of the ways that white supremacy has seeped into the cracks and seams of my life.  So, I made a resolution to only read books by authors of color for a year.

I highly recommend that other white readers do this: if not a full year of avoiding white authors, then a close examination of the diversity of the authors you’ve read and conscious effort to expand it.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: listening to people of color has never been more important than it is now.

I’ve created a list of some of my favorites.  I did my best to include a variety of genres, but there are definite trends.

Feel free to add your recs if you have any!

Nonfiction – Essays

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

This is a collection of thoughtful, well-written, and occasionally hilarious essays on gender, race, sexuality, body type, higher education, and Scrabble. Anything by Roxane Gay is worth a read (I’m currently reading Difficult Women, which I love so far), and this award-winning bestseller is a fantastic place to start.

Ijeoma Oluo’s articles

Okay, you caught me. Two items on this list aren’t physical books. To my knowledge, Oluo hasn’t published anything off the internet (except for the Badass Feminist Coloring Book, which I discovered while researching her and will be placing on my wish list right…now.) Nonetheless, her writing is too important to exclude, especially now.  I specifically recommend “Welcome to the Anti-Racism Movement” and “When a Woman Deletes a Man’s Comment Online.”

Nonfiction – History

God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis

This one was obviously written for people who either read about history for a living or want to read about history for a living. I am not one of those people. Still, it was worth pushing through the dense material in order to see a perspective on Medieval Europe that we never got in my overwhelmingly-white American public school.

Nonfiction – Memoir

The Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin

Staceyann Chin, a lesbian speaker and activist from Jamaica, describes her childhood, biracial identity, adolescence, coming-out, and emigration to the United States.  Her story is emotional, charming, and powerful, and the audiobook – which she narrates – absolutely blew me away.

Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

This memoir was published long before Obama ran for president, and it beautifully outlines the way that his biracial identity and early activism uncovered complex issues about American race relations.

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching by Mychal Denzel Smith

I think, at a minimum, every American needs to read or listen to this book. Smith uses his life experience to illustrate hard and complicated truths, not just about the experience of black men in America but also the experiences of women, LGBTQ+ people, people with mental illness, and people with multiple marginalizing identities. There’s an audiobook narrated by actor Kevin R. Free, and it is phenomenal.

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

A lawyer in Alabama who started a non-profit organization to provide legal counsel for Death Row prisoners – among a myriad of other things – Stevenson uses tragic and horrifying case examples to highlight the cruelty and racism in the American criminal justice system. This is another book that all Americans – especially white Americans and/or people who feel complacent with our justice system – need to read or listen to. (Stevenson reads the audiobook.)

Fiction – Non-speculative

Trumpet by Jackie Kay

A famous jazz musician dies, and his death reveals to the world that he was transgender in an age when trans* issues were even more poorly-understood than they are today. The book uses alternating points of view between between the late musician’s wife, adult son, and people with varying degrees of involvement in his life in order to weave a tragic and heartwarming story.

Burnt Shadows by Kamala Shamsie

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Kamala Shamsie (see also: In the City by the Sea, Kartography), but this one is my favorite. It follows a survivor of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki as she transitions from houseguest in a British home in Delhi, to refugee in Pakistan, to wife and mother in Karachi, to elderly woman watching New York City struggling to recover after 9/11.  There is love and tragedy and destruction and the sense that everything is endless and cyclical.

(Kamala Shamsie is my former creative writing professor, which is how I found out about her. I wish she were better-known because she is a fantastic writer with important things to say, especially about politics in the Middle East and the USA.)

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Tragic and complex and layered, this series of interconnected anecdotes centers on two Native American families living on a reservation in North Dakota.  The book meanders between time period and point-of-view as aimlessly as many of its characters wander through life.  Several of Erdich’s other books are on my to-read list.

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is a good one for people who like unreliable narrators and hazy, ambiguous non-solutions to mysteries (I’m told that many of Ishiguro’s books are like that, so check him out if that’s your thing).  Slightly creepy, it’s a beautifully written study of mothers and daughters in post-WWII Japan and beyond.

Guapa by Saleem Haddad

A man in an unnamed Arab country narrates the 24 hours of his life after his grandmother discovers him and his boyfriend in bed together.  As he attempts – and fails – to go about a normal day, we see commentary on politics, society (Arab and Western), marginalization, and family secrets, all through the eyes of a traumatized man trying to redefine himself in a world that consistently fails to understand him.

Fiction – Spectulative (Sci Fi/Fantasy/Magical Realism)

Parable of the Sower/Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Anything by Octavia Butler is necessary reading (I read and loved Kindred, and the rest of her books are on my to-read list). She was woke before most white people knew woke was a thing, and she used sci fi/fantasy to illuminate difficult truths about racism, sexism, and classism in America. These two books, about a new religion fighting to emerge in a harsh, dystopian America, are beautiful, tragic, and surprisingly prophetic.  The second book in particular has some frightening parallels to our current political environment.

The Fifth Season/The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

The first two books in what is so far an incomplete series, these novels represent epic fantasy at its finest.  My words can’t do them justice, except to say that Jemisin 110% deserved the Hugo award she earned for the first book.  She is another author with several books on my “to-read” list. The audio books, read by Robin Miles, are also mind-blowingly good.

Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan

Most people know Amy Tan from The Joy Luck Club, though I actually enjoyed this one more. This book fits the “magical realism” genre because the narrator is speaking to us not long after her tragic and sudden death, describing a group tour through China and Myanmar that goes horribly wrong in part because she isn’t alive to lead it. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is also a good real-world-fantasy book.

Infomacracy by Malka Older

In the somewhat-distant future, our political, social, corporate, and globalization systems will have undergone some massive changes. Two parts political thriller, one part biting social commentary, this book (the first in a yet-incomplete series) holds up a funhouse mirror to politics, capitalism, and the information age, showing us a caricature of where we could be headed.

Fiction – Young Adult

Akata Witch by Neddi Okorafor

I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed the Harry Potter series. There is magic, detailed world-building, compelling friendships, and an emphasis on standing up for what you believe in, even when it’s hard, even when it’s terrifying, and even when you have virtually no idea what you’re doing.  (I also enjoyed Lagoon and Binti.)

The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Think Diary of a Wimpy Kid only far more profound and compelling, with an added focus on disability, segregation, poverty, death, and injustice to Indigenous people. At the same time, it somehow manages to be uplifting and occasionally hilarious. I fell head-over-heels for the protagonist and was genuinely upset when the story ended.

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

Another disabled-underdog protagonist with a sharp voice and compelling fish-out-of-water story; simply subtract the illustrations and add alternating points-of-view to create a more comprehensive look at this character’s life.

(If you liked one of the above two books, chances are good that you’ll like the other. Obviously, I highly recommend both.)

Shadowshaper by Daniel Older

This urban fantasy condemns police brutality, white supremacy, cultural appropriation, and gentrification. The magic is fascinating, the world-building complex, the story twisting and mysterious.  The audiobook, narrated by Anika Noni Rose, is phenomenal to the point where I would almost recommend that over the written version.  Her performance adds life and depth to the characters, sweeping you along with every step of the plot.

If You Could be Mine by Sarah Farzian

A teenage girl in Iran is in love with her (female) best friend, in a country where being gay is a crime but being transgender is not. This book uses the forbidden-queer-teenage-love story (see also: Finlater by Shawn Stewart Ruff) to explore issues of sexuality and gender identity in a way that is thoughtful, sad, and surprisingly uplifting at the same time.

Short Stories

Happiness, Like Water by Chinelo Okparanta

A series of moving and beautifully written short stories about Nigerian women of different ages, classes, and sexualities.  I also enjoyed Under the Udala Trees, which is a full-length novel about a gay woman growing up in 60s/70s Nigeria.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

Yet another fantastic author who has produced a bunch of excellent works, Baldwin is particularly focused on the intersection between the black male identity and the queer identity in America.

Karma and Other Stories by Rishi Reddi

I actually read this series of somewhat-interconnected stories a few years ago. Each story depicts Indian American culture in a different way, presenting the different struggles, losses, and successes that Indian people of multiple generations face in America.

The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere by John Chu

This one is actually a single short story, rather than a collection.  It’s available to read for free here at Tor.com, so I’ll let the story speak for itself. Check it out!

Honorable mentions: 

(books and authors I enjoyed but didn’t include because I had to cap this list somewhere)

Nonfiction: A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Non-speculative Fiction: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

Speculative Fiction: Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord, The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino,  The Between by Tananarive Due.

Young Adult: Waters Between by Joseph Bruchac, Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova.

Short Stories: Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan, The Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Other authors to check out: Isabel Allende, John Chu, Toni Morrison, Gene Luen Yang, Malinda Lo, Salman Rushdie.

Authors I haven’t read but I’ve heard good things about from multiple and/or reliable sources: Shamim Sarif, Audre Lourde, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Diaz, Nalo Hopkinson, Gabby Rivera, Zadie Smith, Manil Suri.

SUGGESTIONS FROM OTHER PEOPLE AFTER I POSTED THIS:

• Birth of a Dark Nation by Rashid Darden
• The Moon was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
• This comprehensive list of Science Fiction by black authors

On “Geek Spaces” and the Social Politics of Pokemon Go

Kenney Park, next to Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, is a small but popular space containing a basketball court, a playground, an open plaza, a fountain that people can walk through on hot days, and – recently – four Pokéstops. This plus its proximity to other Pokéstops and gyms has made Kenney Park a popular location among players of the new augmented reality game Pokémon Go.  To the outside observer, this looks like oddly-clumped groups of people staring at their phones and occasionally spouting phrases like “one more Gastly and I can evolve a Gengar” while oblivious toddlers chase their grandparents through the water jets at the center of the plaza.

I want to stress that we – and I do mean we, as I myself have caught more Charmanders in Kenney Park than I have everywhere else combined – have never disrupted the activities of the people who visit these spaces for reasons other than Pokémon Go.  We are not loud, we are not unruly, and we aren’t in anyone’s way.  In every setting I’ve encountered while playing this  game, Pokémon Go players quietly coexist with non-players in these public spaces.

Yet our presence seems to have an effect on some people, and not in a good way.

One night as I was leaving Kenney Park (my battery was low and I needed to recharge), I passed a trio of white 20-somethings on the street corner across from the plaza.  One of them, the only woman, said: “I just feel really uncomfortable right now.” One of the others replied, “I just wanna go in there and knock everyone’s phones out of their hands.”

Had I been a braver person, I would have politely requested that this guy stop being a douche (or worse).  That, however, is not who I am.

One evening in Boston Public Garden,  a young woman and two people who were presumably her parents passed through another popular Pokémon Go spot.  I overheard her say, “Literally everyone here is playing Pokémon right now,” with the same tone and facial expression one would use to complain that no one in the house ever showers. She even held up her hands as if to ensure we kept our distance.

The man who could have been her father made eye-contact with me, so I smiled at him and nodded.  He looked away, uncomfortable, and I returned to my game.

It’s not just people loudly and pointedly voicing their discomfort with our presence.  I have, both individually and as part of a group, received taunts, jokes, and downright harassment by people who for some reason object to us playing Pokémon Go in public spaces.  Comments have ranged from passive aggressive and immature (“Did I run over a Pokémon?  GOOD!”- from a cyclist who looked old enough to be my father) to direct and downright abusive (“Hey ****s! Stop playing ****ing Pokémon Go!” – from a young man in the backseat of a passing car).

These incidents did not surprise me.  I have had geek interests since childhood and am well aware by now of the stigma around geek culture.  It has, however, surprised me to see that Pokémon Go players as a whole appear to be immune to these harassments when they occur. We exchange eye-rolls, laugh to each other, or often don’t react at all.

I once overheard a player describe an incident where a man attempted to throw water balloons at the players gathered in Kenney Park.  According to the story, he made multiple attempts, but the balloons kept hitting the curb instead of the crowd.  Eventually, one player shouted, “Try spinning them!” and every player in the plaza burst out laughing.

I wish I had been there.  Not only because then I could confirm that this incident actually happened, but because it would have been a joy to witness after years of being internally and externally shamed for having geek interests.

(Spinning the Pokéballs, for those who don’t know, is a technique that is used to try to capture Pokémon who are particularly powerful and/or difficult to catch.)

Plenty of people who enjoy Sci Fi, fantasy, or other so-called “geek genres” understand the experience of othering by people who do not share these interests.  We’ve been laughed at, ostracized, and/or openly shamed for years.  For me, high school and college was a slow discovery that other people shared my level of engagement in series such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, even cartoons and comic books.  It was a revelation; I didn’t need to hide who I was anymore because there were people just like me.  I could join geek communities and be proud of myself as a part of them.  This discovery literally changed my life.

Even so, geek culture has typically been relegated to niche spaces such as comic book stores, conventions, and of course the internet.  Geek spaces run wild on the web as fans from all over the world intensively discuss fictional characters and worlds, sharing their own artwork and writing with one another.  Still, these spaces have typically existed separately from the mainstream, and geek culture  has not been integrated into our society as a whole.  For example, it is common to see people in public spaces playing basketball, frisbee, or even baseball.  Less common: public Dungeons and Dragons tournaments.  Tabletop role-playing games are conducted in the back rooms at comic book stores or in players’ apartments.  We revel in who we are, possibly more than we ever have, but we continue to do so quietly, privately.

And then Pokémon Go happened.

Pokemon Go, by nature, directly contradicts the isolationism that has been intrinsic to geek culture for so long.  It forces players to walk around our neighborhoods, encourages us to gather in public places such as Kenney Park or Boston Public Garden. The aim is to get people active and exploring their spaces.  It has succeeded in this, of course, but it has also pushed parts of geek culture into spaces where we have not previously existed so openly. And that is making a lot of people uncomfortable.  We are not disruptive, but we are visible, and that appears to be too much for some people.

Many “non-geek” communities seem to view people with geek interests as being socially-awkward white men who live in our parents’ basements and have never had a girlfriend.  (For the record, as a white woman who does not live with her parents and DOES have a girlfriend, I see this reputation for what it is.) Pokémon Go is directly contradicting that stereotype.  We are all genders.  We are all ages.  We have a range of abilities, and we would have an even wider range if this game were created to be more accessible. We are straight, we are cis, and we are LGBTQIAP+.  We are black, white, Asian, Latinx, indigenous, and multi-racial.  We are single people, couples, families, and friends.  We are nearly everyone.  This diversity is obvious the first time you encounter a gathering of people playing Pokémon Go, and it’s beautiful.

The concept of a diverse group of people publicly enjoying a geek interest is apparently so threatening to the social order that some people – all of whom, as far as I’ve witnessed, have been white men – need to taunt and harass us as if we were all back in middle school.  The brilliant thing is, this time it’s not working.  We see these taunts for what they are and are unfazed.  Empowered by each other, we proudly exist in public spaces that belong to us as much as they belong to the people who neither know or care what a Voltorb is.  Because there are six billion people in this world and if coexistence wasn’t possible, humanity wouldn’t have lasted this long.

I recognize that I am drawing parallels with other marginalized groups, specifically pertaining to race, gender, gender identify, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, religion, and any number of other factors I may have missed. While I would never say that the experience of geek culture is proportional to what these groups have faced – in many cases these situations are literal matters of life and death – but the idea is similar. We have long accepted our marginalization and are now pushing for visibility and acceptance in public spaces, literally and metaphorically. This can feel threatening and upsetting to the people who have occupied those spaces for decades (centuries, even) and are suddenly feeling as though we are somehow infringing on their “rights.”  Hopefully this backlash will fade as these majority groups learn that we are not pushing them off the bench, merely compelling them to make room for us to sit there too.

So yes, I will continue to play my game based on an anime based on a manga based on a game.  I will pause in my attempts to catch that Fearow in order to smile at the small child chasing a butterfly in front of me.  I will carefully step around the water jets in order to access the Pokéstop at the back of the park. I will coexist with people outside of geek culture, proud to be who I am and like what I like. And that guy who believes I simply need to “get a boyfriend,” will someday, I hope, get over it.