Warning: r slurs in the follow ups in the thread.
https://twitter.com/puella_meiberu/status/1708621428327657816
my reactions are as follows: Even if thats true, which it isnt for every autistic person, the reality is right now is that jobs dont have accomodations for neurdivergent thinking so its irrelevant to say that. Like we can push for and advocate for more inclusive workplaces, but its not the reality autsitic people are dealing with rn.
Especially since like, there are jobs that autistic people can do well but most of them are not “entry level” jobs that anyone can get without qualifications. Retail and food service jobs are near impossible for most autistic people and those are the jobs you can get easy. Manual labor jobs arent much better. I’ve worked at an after school program but I only lasted as long as I did because my original boss let me get away with not “running activities” the reality is that even if you’re good with kids like me most jobs with kids have expectaitons that arent just “being good with kids” that arent good for autistic people. Idk about office stuff.
It reminds me of my ex-friend who claimed to be communist but had a lot of reactionairy attitudes. He always told me that if I ever called him on something and told him it was ableist he would take it seriously, and even called out others when they treated me abliestly. But one day when he posted on his Twitter shitting on Spoon Theory I texted him to call him on that and he started ranting all this shit about how you can “always push through” and talking about how his manual labor job cured his depression (and acting like that will be the case for everyone if they just push, and that manual labor is a cure all) and then started accusing me of wasting my life and making excuses and using my disability as a criticism shield. We no longer talk much lol.
i am “high functioning” in the sense that i can communicate effectively and don’t have any comorbid issues, but i am also “disabled” in the sense of getting so deeply burned out by my boss’s incompetence and the reality of living in a capitalist hellscape that i’ve been quasi-vegetative for years and unemployed since july, in the sense that i quit the phd program i was doing because i don’t care to write my dissertation and i don’t think i could tolerate having to behave in accordance with social norms in the vicinity of tech bros. so in conclusion, uh, fuck the person that made this tweet, they fucking suck. under capitalism, it is absolutely disabling to be autistic because the basic resources for survival are doled out on the basis of social whim. the entire take that they have presented is “someone told me that autistic people are lazy actually, and i’ve taken that as license to believe in nazi-tier eugenics and institutional ableism because i’m a psychopath.” that’s a
worthy attitude
Like i said in reply to bartermyth, i can understand where the tweeter is coming from in a pure frustration sense. I agree theyve come to a reactionairy conclusion, but i think its mostly venting and that nd people need to be able to vent sometimes. They encountered a toxic attitude and are lashing out and i sorta get it.
I came across this because of my friend who lives with a boyfriend and is forced to work and hates it.
maybe it’s because i only recently found out that my own social dysfunction was “just” autism, but i can’t imagine thinking that it would be good to have more ableism done to yourself. i want to minecraft people that want to do ableism at me, and the general social violence of capitalism makes me want to scream. it’s taken me until now to even think this could have been written by an autistic person because the sentiment is so deeply degrading to autistic people, not to mention historically without context.
I mean for me the first thing I’d like to point out is that the attitude they are reacting to here IS an ableist attitude to have. So they have had ableism done to them.
ok, yeah, but experiencing the ableism of “we just have to accommodate you better to fix everything” doesn’t make the response of “do more ableism to me please, motivate violence against me actually” any more valid or sane
The way I read it, which admittedly is a charitable reading, was more the “high fuctioning is when they ignore your needs, low functioning is when they ignore your abilities” dichotomy. Sometimes when your needs get ignored so much the grass seems greener. Like I said elsewhere I have at times considered acting out in public in more “Visibly disabled” ways in the hopes of being more accommodated.
puella_meiburu words it very harshly but I think does so out of frustration with the situation.
maybe i’m being uncharitable then, but in the context of what “demonizing autism” would refer to historically, that seems to me to be a very uncritical/privileged thing to express publicly. there have been as many ways of understanding autistic people as there are cultures, but treating it as a mortal curse is to me pretty obviously a capitalist invention that treats autistic people as fundamentally undeserving of good life. i understand being frustrated, but even i’m not categorically this self-hating, and i personally refuse to accept that framing as even remotely valid. i have a lot of problems with the way that visibly disabled autistic people are understood, almost always in exceedingly infantalized ways. so again, the comment comes across to me as aggressively and violently reactionary, and i am repulsed by it.
Yeah I understand that reaction.
i recognize that i’m in a mental space where i’m having a bit of an emotional reaction to that idea as well. i’m self-hating enough that seeing the line of how i might have been treated my whole life if i had a childhood diagnosis, and how hostile i already experience society as being towards me without a medical diagnosis, fucks me up a little. thanks for the good conversation comrade.