Rewrites and Cul-de-Sacs

It's a little bit funny when I talk about how what passes for autistic advocacy on Tumblr often operates by openly throwing other neurodivergent people under the bus – critically including other autistic people whose communication needs don't conform with a very specific archetype – and folks come at me assuming that I'm some clueless allistic who's being mean to them for no reason, because Does This Look Like A Blog A Neurotypical Person Would Run.

I have insisted for a long time that while the stereotypes that neurotypical people have about autistic people are awful, they're also predictable: it is a pretty standard set of consistent, wrong beliefs. Nobody, however, believes more bizarre things about autistic people than autistic people. Autistic people are out here reinventing eugenics, Mary Baker Eddy-style Neo-Gnostic Positivism, deterministic teleology, all sorts of things from first principles that are, crucially, also wrong. It's fascinating, if somewhat frustrating. (My usual joke about my one friend's Facebook page is 'Neurotypicals Don't Understand All Autistic People Use Clear Communication' Says Autistic Woman Who Constantly Ghosts Others For Months.)

I'm not sure I'd call the prevalence of eugenicist rhetoric in certain stripes of online autistic advocacy a reinvention, per se; "nerds are literally, materially a more 'highly evolved' clade of humans" is a mind-gremlin that's been clinging to nerd culture since before the Internet was a thing, and certain online spaces seem simply to have absorbed it wholesale.

While true, I think they're familiar enough with eugenics as being a 'problematic' that my use of the term reinvention comes more from their linguistic slight of hand: they're not doing eugenics, they're talking about the superiority of the oppressed, they're doing advocacy. They would never describe what they're doing as eugenics even though that's exactly what it is. Their starting point was well-meaning counter-narratives, that they've ended up reactionary is, to me, the reinvention, or perhaps the unconscious rebranding, even if the underlying principles are, as you say, hardly new.

It's a little bit funny when I talk about how what passes for autistic advocacy on Tumblr often operates by openly throwing other neurodivergent people under the bus – critically including other autistic people whose communication needs don't conform with a very specific archetype – and folks come at me assuming that I'm some clueless allistic who's being mean to them for no reason, because Does This Look Like A Blog A Neurotypical Person Would Run.

I have insisted for a long time that while the stereotypes that neurotypical people have about autistic people are awful, they're also predictable: it is a pretty standard set of consistent, wrong beliefs. Nobody, however, believes more bizarre things about autistic people than autistic people. Autistic people are out here reinventing eugenics, Mary Baker Eddy-style Neo-Gnostic Positivism, deterministic teleology, all sorts of things from first principles that are, crucially, also wrong. It's fascinating, if somewhat frustrating. (My usual joke about my one friend's Facebook page is 'Neurotypicals Don't Understand All Autistic People Use Clear Communication' Says Autistic Woman Who Constantly Ghosts Others For Months.)

What would you do if you were scrolling through recommended tumblr posts and one was from someone you don't know and it was just a picture of your dad captioned "fucking hate this guy" and it had hundreds of notes

reblog it

I did have a friend text me once with a screenshot of TikTok and the question "Is this your dad?" And it was????

Unreliable narrator abruptly realising they've mixed up which narrative thread is the red herring and which is the actual plot and they've been deceiving the audience about the wrong thing the entire time.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Forty Chapters Later: "... oh, damn it."