autism questions ask game!!
28. Where have you learnt the most about autism from? What things about autism did you learn that really made an impact on you? Are there any information sources on autism or autistic people that you recommend?
and
29. What support do you desperately need? Are you getting it?
thank you!
28. i came up adjacent to the autistic blogosphere of the late 00's and early 10's, and credit people like Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn Brown, Julia Bascom, Alyssa Hillary Zisk, Rabbi Ruti Regan, and Mel Baggs z'l with helping me to understand the cultural and political stakes of (queer, trans, Mad, racialized, multiply-disabled, traumatized) autistic subjectivity. the autistic activism and media i engaged with dealt seriously with psych abolition/survivorship + queer relationships to embodiment / family / sexuality as integral to autistic experience and community, and came from a multi-disabled activist tradition rather than one that envisioned itself as "autism-specific." I highly recommend people dig into these older sources and learn about, for example, resistance both physical and textual against autism speaks, against the judge rotenberg center, against filicide, etc., because it is vital to understanding the context and stakes of the fights for collective liberation + autonomy we are seeing today.
29. i have difficulty knowing what, exactly, i need, in terms of support, or perhaps more directly, i have difficulty knowing what my life would be like if i had more support available to me. i will be living at home through july and then living (thankfully) by myself again, which is something that is really vital for my thriving socially. at the same time, there are elements of the life i lead - my position as a classroom lecturer, for example - that make certain communicative and sensory demands that i struggle to meet. there is really no accommodation that can fix this short of changing jobs, so it's something i've learned to compensate for in other ways. likewise, i sometimes think about what it would be like to have a medical advocate to support me in appointments where i tend to fawn, dissociate, and silence myself, and thus miss important information that i need to guess at later. is this autism? trauma? both? I don't know. regardless, this is the kind of support i'd love to have in a world where such things were available without paternalism, but ofc i'm not holding my breath.
