Hewwo

In reality, I think the behavior pattern that we name as "masking" is the natural behavioral and psychological result of being consistently punished for attempting to acknowledge your own reality during formative developmental periods. And I'm not sure that "masking" is a clarifying word to use for this

The "recovering from burnout as a high masking person" post does use this framework, but I think that referring to people whose sense of their own internal reality has been so warped and shattered that they have to completely learn from scratch as "high masking" is just not intuitive and that it communicates what is being discussed... Poorly. I understand that that is the language that is used by the community broadly rn, and I don't object to individual instances of its use, but I do think that we would be better served in these conversations by framing it differently than "masking"

It bugs me! And I think it creates unnecessary friction among communities of people first discovering autism and is susceptible to a weird kind of reverse curb cut effect where unmasking (== "stretching out and de-contorting from the society in which you live into a more comfortable shape") is set aside as something Just For Autistics, as if there aren't lots of groups of people whose existence is policed and shaped and bonsai-trimmed into painfully stunted or twisted shapes. Which, of course there are, and not all of them are groups where a mental health framework is remotely appropriate (e.g. constraints on the acceptable behavior of black people especially in gendered contexts), so why are we framing so much advocacy this way?

hm okay well i am not reading the rest of that ♥️

Would you fill up a gay man's notes with questions about whether his definition of gayness includes the possibility of attraction to nonbinary people? Are we going to start calling gay men queerphobic because the Merriam Webster definition says they are only attracted to men?

Black panther poster. Just as relevant today

I think the fact that by default the onus of learning the other's language to enable communication is always put on the other side is a pretty significant privilege on the cultural front.

Monolingual anglophones are a deeply solipsistic people unable to think about international power dynamics on any level beyond the individual to comprehend that "one guy making the individual choice to learn your language" does not represent the same level of linguistic hegemony and privilege as "millions of people all over the world learning specifically your language because they're expected to be able to speak it as a near-universal requirement for any kind of upward mobility while learning a second language is never expected of you"