Neurotypical Social Skills

Don’t worry Bro , Black Tumblr got you and your Sister.✊🏿

Hello! My name is Fitz and I am an anthropology student at Chapman University. I’m researching the actually autistic hashtag as well as the online autistic self-advocacy movement for an ethnographic project in school and I am trying to interview as many people as I can about their experiences with online autistic communities, their relationship to mainstream discourse about autism (including autism $peaks), and anything else they deem important for me to know. 

Participation is entirely voluntary and is completely anonymous. If you or anyone you know is able to help me out, please let me know! The interviews are short and can be done in either a speaking or text-based format. I will be conducting interviews throughout the month of April, and I’m happy to accommodate for time zone differences, communication difficulties, and shorter attention spans. 

I know that academics don’t have the best reputation in the autistic and disability communities but I promise to bring a unique perspective to this study-I am a disabled student who fully believes in the slogan “nothing about us without us”. I think that disabled and autistic communities should be able to speak for themselves in research, which is why I am prioritizing interviews over quantitative data collection or multiple choice surveys.

Hi y’all, Mod Lia here. Wow, waking up this morning was interesting!

First of all, the yellow flags are an April Fool’s joke. All in good fun!

As for the less fun part of what I woke up to…

Listen, y’all. All of you know that I’m a very polite, nice person who never snarks anyone out ever. Which is why I’m definitely not going to call awesomlyautistic, the person who had the audacity to steal Mod Rowlf’s flag design and then act like a total jerk about it and make a trigger joke, a giant pissbaby who can’t hear the word “no” without flying into a rage a la Disney World Mom…

No, but seriously. While I sincerely appreciate our followers’ support earlier today in shutting them down, I ask that nobody go after them any further. Just block them and move on, and get FIRED UP for tomorrow. We only have a few ninja designs and fan names, so keep those ideas coming! Oh, and keep reblogging “YOU hate Autism Speaks,” as we are SO CLOSE to our 50k goal!

We love you all so very much and appreciate your support.

One of my classmates and I are doing some research on people’s opinions of vaccines. If you live in the United States, it would mean a lot to me if you were to take this very brief, completely confidential/anonymous survey.

We’ve gotten to a point where “it needs work” is a euphemism for “it’s bad,” and I think that that was kind of inevitable. We’re conditioned from birth to focus on success, to get things right, and the quicker we get it right, the better we are. If something needs work, it’s inadequate, and an extra step must be taken for it to be acceptable—an extra step that ideally shouldn’t be taken.

But like, where is that empirically true? Success on the first try is incredibly rare, and as one of the brightest minds of the 21st century once said, “Just because something works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.” As times change, as we change, we’re constantly making things better.

Which brings me to “needing revision.” In writing, revision is an integral part of the process. It is the community-wide acknowledgement that no first attempt is perfect. Revision is what writers do to ensure that their work is effective, that it makes sense, that it’s organized neatly and will communicate the writer’s message as best as possible. And every single good writer does it. Whether it’s a formal revision/peer-review/workshopping process in a professional or academic setting, or beta-readers in fanfic, good writers know that if they want their work to be good, it needs to be done over, and that’s why I think we should move towards talking about revision in everyday life.

i will not be a kitten in the rain surrounded by thunder lightning in my eyes

i am sunshine my heart casts my skin in gold and sparkles over the ocean

i am the water dancing in the light and the stars that guard it in the night

you—you are a thunderstorm wild and free crashing against the rocks adding water to the sea

perhaps that’s it perhaps you add to me

the sun is but a sphere of fire and as i glow with light, i burn with ire

i would lose myself in you the storm to my sun the rain to my sea i would, if i thought you could love me

I’m so sick of being told “you have a mental/ developmental disability. You probably are just confused you’re a girl, you always have been…”

Hi friends! I’ve realized that I actually really like original writing almost as much as I like writing fanfic, and also that I need money, so I started a Patreon! One of my poems is already up and available to everyone, so if you read that poem and like it and feel like supporting me, please consider joining my Patreon!

There is also a link to my Discord server on the Patreon page, and patrons get a special role in the server as well.

Specifically, this part.

Sorry that I missed the time sensitive part. Unfortunately I was in the middle of a very difficult three month long move and wasn’t really answering asks at the time.

But this is important questions so I am going to answer it.

The answer is both yes… and no.

Legally there is nothing keeping autistics from transitioning, however there are some doctors and healthcare professionals that will not do it for anyone that has certain diagnoses. In that regard yes, that could keep a person from transitioning.

However! There is absolutely nothing that requires a person tell any healthcare professional that they are autistic. In the US no one, doctors treating you, have the legal right to health information that you do not explicitly allow them to have either by telling them yourself or by giving them the medical records.

We have a law called HIPAA which prevents healthcare professionals from giving out your medical records without your explicit written consent. Even if the professional that diagnosed the autism felt that someone should not transition they would not be able to talk about with another professional in a way that identifies who the autistic is.

And oh gosh HIPAA is a big deal. Even the tiniest HIPAA violations will get people fired without question, and that applies to everyone from the people answering phones to the most skilled neurosurgeon.

The only legal way to get that information without your consent is with a court order and it is a pretty high bar when it comes to HIPAA.

The catch here is that when it comes to minors unless the minor is emancipated then it is the legal guardian of the minor who gets to decide if and when to share that health information.

As a general rule though, if you don’t tell them, they won’t know, and given some of the biases involved I tell therapists when I am teaching them that until they clean their own house and get rid of old ideas about autism that I will actively tell autistics to not share that they are autistic until they are well along the process of transition.

As for escaping abusive situations that is a complicated issue that goes back to HIPAA. Again, unless you tell someone, they won’t know. In the case of guardians they could use that information in court try and claim that an autistic requires support, but in doing so they have to prove the autistic actually needs that support and that they can provide it. The standards for that vary state by state and it can get pretty complicated depending on where you are.