Had a nice chat this afternoon with Boston Children’s Hospital’s inpatient neuroscience folks on autism, the social model of disability, identity first language, and designing for pluralism. The best hospital onboarding I’ve experienced.
Tag: neurodiversity
I updated “Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life” with selections from “Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm – Los Angeles Review of Books” to further emphasize nuance and context.
Neurodiversity is a movement that celebrates difference while remaining deeply nuanced on questions of (medical) facilitation and the necessity of rethinking the concept of accommodation against narratives of cure. The added emphasis on neurology has been necessary in order to challenge existing norms that form the base-line of existence: the “neuro” in neurodiversity has opened up the conversation about the category of neurotypicality and the largely unspoken criteria that support and reinforce the definition of what it means to be human, to be intelligent, to be of value to society. This has been especially necessary for those folks who continue to be excluded from education, social and economic life, who are regarded as less than human, whose modes of relation continue to be deeply misunderstood, and who are cast as burdens to society.
Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that this enhanced perceptual field is an aspect of much autistic experience and something neurotypicals could learn a lot from, not only with regard to perception itself, but also as concerns the complexity of experience.
What is needed are not more categories but more sensitivity to difference and a more acute attunement to qualities of experience.
Source: Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm – Los Angeles Review of Books
Some #StrawBan arguments are calls for mediating rights and accessibility by diagnosis, something familiar to disabled and neurodivergent people.
The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by a diagnosis.
#SuckItAbleism
Every classroom that penalizes students for distributed modes of attention organizes learning according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that sees the moving body as the distracted body is organized according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that teaches predominantly for one mode of perception is organizing its learning according to a norm. Every classroom that knows in advance what knowledge looks and sounds like is working to a norm.
Source: Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm – Los Angeles Review of Books
I added selections from THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: Autism, Transmasculine Identity, and Invisibility to Neurodiversity and Gender Non-conformity, Dysphoria and Fluidity.
The intersection of being both autistic and transgender is more common than one might think. While the dialogue around autism and gender identity is expanding, I have a bit of trouble figuring out where I fit into the whole picture. So, I decided to do my own research, and while this subject is a fairly new field of study, I found some pretty astounding statistics:
In 2014, a U.S. study of 147 children (ages 6 to 18) diagnosed with ASD found that autistic participants were 7.59 times more likely to express gender variance than the comparison groups. Another study, conducted in the UK in 2015, involved 166 parents of teenagers with Gender Dysphoria (63% were assigned female-at-birth.) Based on parents’ report of their children on the Social Responsiveness Scale, the study found that 54% of the teenagers scored in the mild/moderate or severe clinical range for Autism.
The relationship has only begun to be explored in research in recent years, but I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of autistic trans people out there in the world. As someone who very much values human connection and simultaneously struggles with it, I have to say that looking at those figures provided me an amount of comfort. I discovered that there are a lot of people just like me.
Being autistic and being transgender certainly each has their own respective challenges, though one that they share is a lack of societal acceptance due to stigma. Many people still believe that who I am as a transmasculine person is inherently invalid, just like many other people still believe autism is some kind of tragedy that is to be cured. In contrast, I feel very strongly that who I am as a person is heavily dependent on both my trans and autistic identities, and that they are beautiful things.
Source: THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: Autism, Transmasculine Identity, and Invisibility
Society is our user’s manual. We learn how our brains and bodies work by watching those around us. And, when yours works differently, it can feel like you’re broken.
You are not weird. You are not stupid. You do not need to try harder. You are not a failed version of normal. You are different, you are beautiful, and you are not alone.
Welcome to the tribe.
Source: Failing at Normal: An ADHD Success Story | Jessica McCabe | TEDxBratislava – YouTube
A history of the twentieth century from autistic perspective is very relevant to trends in education, ed-tech, and the Republican body politic. Give NeuroTribes a read.
A great read on learning styles and cognitive imperialism. So much of the stuff I read on learning styles is out-of-touch with neurodiversity and social model communities, but this gets it.
I’ve spent my whole life being told that non-autistic people are so brilliant and intuitive when it comes to social issues. Like many autistic people, though, I haven’t always felt like I’ve seen much empathy, compassion, or understanding. And the evidence is starting to suggest that we’re not wrong about the level of judgment and stereotyping we face.
Source: I’m autistic. I just turned 36 — the average age when people like me die. – Vox
I updated “Neurodiversity in the SpEd Classroom” with selections from “This Video Demonstrates What It’s Like to Be an Autistic Adult Who Isn’t Being Heard | The Autism Site Blog” and a video embed of “Rethinking Autism: Autism Support Group – YouTube”.
More children than ever before are being diagnosed with autism. But what about the adults? Some of these individuals have never been diagnosed but have always known they were a bit “different.” Others were diagnosed but did not have the same degree of societal acceptance or the same number of resources available to help them cope with a neurotypical world.
Now this group of adults is the demographic that best understands what people with autism need, whether or not they know how to articulate it in a way the rest of society is able to grasp. But what these men and women have to say about autism is important. These people need to be heard!
The video below encourages adults with autism to get involved in the discussion and asks others to be cognizant of the needs of people with autism and invite them into the conversation. The neurotypical community needs adults with autism to lend their voices and experiences to help make the future brighter for the next generation!
Check out this powerful video!
I also embedded a couple tweets. See this thread for reactions to the video from #ActuallyAutistic folks:
This captures my sentiment:
rnbn 