#identity language

I know I'm not going to change your mind and that's fine. You can literally just block me if I bother you that much.

The term femboy has a long history of being used against feminine men, drag queens, intersex people, and especially trans women.

Because it is also a way a lot of real people identify i don't think it can be simplified into only a slur. There are probably hundreds and thousands of people who identify as both a cisgender man and a femboy. I think a lot of the hatred I get for using the same language to describe myself is because I am a trans man, I think that if I was a cis man I wouldn't get so many people complaining about what words I use for myself.

Day 27: Identity Language 

When I got my diagnosis, I also got a lot of “don’t let this define you, don’t let it limit you” reactions. EUGH. Autism isn’t something I can control having. I don’t “let” it do anything. It’s me. I am it. Every part of my personality, every part of my brain is autistic. There’s no “neurotypical Lise” that’s just hiding in here under all this autism. It’s autism all the way down, folks! /lh

I need to preface this by saying two things: one, I have never been considered a special needs student by my school. Two, I live in an area that is just. so. socially. conservative.

I don’t think that, with the way disability is approached by abled people right now, the term “special needs” is inaccurate. Disabled people have needs that are outside what is considered acceptable range by abled people. The nicest way of referring to them is “special needs”. It implies there is care and consideration and respect going into accommodations for those needs.

However. It does other (other as a verb) disabled people. Places anything outside what NTAB people need in a separate category, makes it “logical” that we have to pay more, fight harder, work harder, suffer more to have our needs accommodated, because they’re “special”, so they can’t just be taken in stride. And that’s not fair to us.

In my area, it’s still a struggle to get people not to use the R-slur (or other offensive terms like “cr*ppl*d”, “cr*zy”, “sl*w”, “d*mb” to mean nonverbal, etc) in passing. Sometimes they use it as an insult, sometimes they genuinely think that’s an OK way to refer to disabled people. “Special needs” is... a little lower on the list of language problems to tackle.

Okay, let me give you a link with a really nice explanation first: 

http://autisticadvocacy.org/home/about-asan/identity-first-language/

The absolute majority of autistic people (aka, the only people whose opinions actually matter on this subject) overwhelmingly prefer identity-first language, i.e. ‘autistic person’. The few people I’ve met who are sticklers for PFL are either parents, who are often misguided/whose opinions are trumped by autistics themselves, or are autistics who have been systematically programmed to hate themselves in the same way that LGBT+ kids with homophobic parents might hate themselves.

The gist of this whole thing is that autism has never been, is not, and will never be a separate entity from the autistic person. Just like your eye colour or hair colour or skin colour are not some separate evil thing that takes you hostage, neither is being autistic. They’re all genetic traits.

For me personally, I like to imagine autism as my eyes, or some sort of lens on my eyes that I was born with. Everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, perceive, imagine, dream of, want, need, etc. is viewed through the permanent, fixed, unchanging, omnipresent lens of autism. My entire identity and humanity, to me, is based on the fact that I am autistic. Trying to separate that from me is like ripping my eyes out or my skin off.

When’s the last time you heard someone remind you that it was person with blackness or person with femaleness? You can’t treat those traits or take them away. You can’t do that to autism, either, try as some people might.