Sage Drăculea

Hi everybody!

We’re back with another Saturday Haturday update! New colors of the trans, ace, and nonbinary pride slouchy knit beanies have been added.

Just small amounts of each right now, but we’ll be restocking them as they sell out.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SpacerobotStudio

http://www.spacerobotstudio.com/

we do not consent to having our original posts tagged as DID/OSDD or variations thereof for the following reasons.

we are anti-pathologization and anti-coercion. by taking our experiences, which are not specific to the community of people openly identifying as having a dissociative disorder, and making them about people who openly identify as having a dissociative disorder, you are coercively pathologizing our experiences. please do not do that.

we do not post about experiences specific to people who openly identify as having DID or OSDD. we post about: psychiatric abuse, personal identity, freedom of selves-determination, our inner and outer life, and the joys and struggles of living together as a group of individual souls who happen to share a body. we do not post about dissociation, recovering traumatic body memories, or anything that is only experienced by people who openly identify as having DID or OSDD. 

we do not meet the most important qualification for being diagnosed with a dissociative disorder based on our plurality. we’re going to get way more medical model than we usually do here because it’s the only language that some people will understand. the most important qualification isn’t “formed by trauma” (that isn’t even in the DSM-V) or even that the body has to have experienced trauma (also not in the DSM-V, and trust us, we’ve experienced PLENTY.) the most important qualification for being diagnosed with a dissociative disorder is that the symptoms (and “symptoms”) must cause distress or disruption in activities of daily living. this is not true for us– our plurality has actually mitigated the disruptions in daily living caused by our other various brainweasels. when Cass is having a bad executive function day, for example, Astrid comes to the front and does what Cass can’t find the energy to do. when I’m faced with one of my panic triggers, SV sits with me and distracts me until things are safe again. we literally could not be as functional as we are now if we weren’t plural, it’s the best thing that ever happened to us, and we would appreciate not having it labeled as a disorder.

so does that mean you& don’t want systems who identify with diagnostic labels reblogging your posts?

no. no it doesn’t. some of our best friends in the plural community have identified openly with diagnostic labels, and while we’ve always been critical of their decision to do so, we don’t believe any person or any system should be coerced out of getting that kind of help any more than we believe that any person or any system should be coerced into it. 

all that we ask is that you& don’t apply any words to our experiences that we wouldn’t personally use. tags like plurality, multiplicity, headmates, positivelyplural, etc are right there. please use those tags if you& reblog our original content. 

also it’s worth noting that this only applies to our original content. feel free to reblog our reblogs with any tags you& want, we didn’t write them.

thank you& for your consideration.

https://mj-irl.tumblr.com/post/166638391342/fierceawakening-tatterdemalionamberite

Nope. Not even right. I know there are autistic people who say all of the things in that post, but that is not actually true.

The actual history of the term “special interest” is not that of always being used to oppress autistic people.

The fact is, the term “special interest” is often used by academics and researchers to indicate what they are currently studying the most.

The fact is, when I first began working with autistic children twenty years ago, we called all of this stuff “perseverations.”

The fact is, when I first joined the online autistic community in 2001 (no, I am not autistic but I am likewise not “allistic” so don’t call me that; I am an autistic cousin, or AC) we all called them “perseverations” and nobody was mad at me for saying that I had perseverations or stimmed or anything else like that. And we all thought I was neurotypical until 2005, when I was diagnosed with ADHD.

In the scientific literature, the term that I see a lot is “hyperfixation” in relation to autistic special interests.

And here’s another thing you need to realize: most of the things you say are used to oppress autistic people are things that are used to discriminate against developmentally disabled people in general. Even if they aren’t autistic. They could have FASD, or ADHD, or Down syndrome, or a global developmental delay, or an intellectual disability. All of these groups stim. They all have special interests. They all have similar or overlapping symptoms, behavioural quirks, and so on.

Do not gatekeep and pretend that you aren’t gatekeeping. Words are words. If a term describes your experience, use it. And don’t tell other people that they can’t use a term that accurately describes their experiences. That is gatekeeping. It is unfair.

Privileged people rarely take the voices of marginalized people seriously. Social justices spaces attempt to fix this with rules about how to respond to when marginalized people tell you that you’ve done something wrong. Like most formal descriptions of social skills, the rules don’t quite match reality. This is causing some problems that I think we could fix with a more honest conversation about how to respond to criticism.

The formal social justice rules say something like this:

You should listen to marginalized people.

When a marginalized person calls you out, don’t argue.

Believe them, apologize, and don’t do it again.

When you see others doing what you were called out for doing, call them out.

Those rules are a good approximation of some things, but they don’t actually work. It is impossible to follow them literally, in part because:

Marginalized people are not a monolith. 

Marginalized people have the same range of opinions as privileged people.

When two marginalized people tell you logically incompatible things, it is impossible to act on both sets of instructions.

For instance, some women believe that abortion is a human right foundational human right for women. Some women believe that abortion is murder and an attack on women and girls.

“Listen to women” doesn’t tell you who to believe, what policy to support, or how to talk about abortion. 

For instance, some women believe that religious rules about clothing liberate women from sexual objectification, other women believe that religious rules about clothing sexually objectify women. 

“Listen to women” doesn’t tell you what to believe about modesty rules. 

Narrowing it to “listen to women of minority faiths” doesn’t help, because women disagree about this within every faith.

When “listen to marginalized people” means “adopt a particular position”, marginalized people are treated as rhetorical props rather than real people.

Objectifying marginalized people does not create justice.

Since the rule is literally impossible to follow, no one is actually succeeding at following it. What usually ends up happening when people try is that:

One opinion gets lifted up as “the position of marginalized people” 

Agreeing with that opinion is called “listen to marginalized people”

Disagreeing with that opinion is called “talking over marginalized people”

Marginalized people who disagree with that opinion are called out by privileged people for “talking over marginalized people”.

This results in a lot of fights over who is the true voice of the marginalized people.

We need an approach that is more conducive to real listening and learning.

This version of the rule also leaves us open to sabotage:

There are a lot of people who don’t want us to be able to talk to each other and build effective coalitions.

Some of them are using the language of call-outs to undermine everyone who emerges as an effective progressive leader. 

They say that they are marginalized people, and make up lies about leaders.

Or they say things that are technically true, but taken out of context in deliberately misleading ways.

The rules about shutting up and listening to marginalized people make it very difficult to contradict these lies and distortions. 

(Sometimes they really are members of the marginalized groups they claim to speak for. Sometimes they’re outright lying about who they are).

(For instance, Russian intelligence agents have used social media to pretend to be marginalized Americans and spread lies about Hillary Clinton.)

The formal rule is also easily exploited by abusive people, along these lines:

An abusive person convinces their victim that they are the voice of marginalized people.

The abuser uses the rules about “when people tell you that you’re being oppressive, don’t argue” to control the victim.

Whenever the victim tries to stand up for themself, the abuser tells the victim that they’re being oppressive.

That can be a powerfully effective way to make victims in our communities feel that they have no right to resist abuse. 

This can also prevent victims from getting support in basic ways.

Abusers can send victims into depression spirals by convincing them that everything that brings them pleasure is oppressive and immoral. 

The abuser may also isolate the victim by telling them that it would be oppressive for them to spend time with their friends and family, try to access victim services, or call the police. 

The abuser may also separate the victim from their community and natural allies by spreading baseless rumors about their supposed oppressive behavior. (Or threatening to do so).

When there are rules against questioning call outs, there are also implicit rules against taking the side of a victim when the abuser uses the language of calling out.

Rules that say some people should unconditionally defer to others are always dangerous.

The rule also lacks intersectionality:

No one experiences every form of oppression or every form of privilege.

Call-outs often involve people who are marginalized in different ways. 

Often, both sides in the conflict have a point.

For instance, black men have male privilege and white women have white privilege.

If a white woman calls a black man out for sexism and he responds by calling her out for racism (or vice versa), “listened to marginalized people” isn’t a very helpful rule because they’re both marginalized.

These conversations tend to degenerate into an argument about which form of marginalization is most significant.

This prevents people involved from actually listening to each other.

In conflicts like this, it’s often the case that both sides have a legitimate point. (In ways that are often not immediately obvious.)

We need to be able to work through these conflicts without expecting simplistic rules to resolve them in advance.

This rule also tends to prevent groups centered around one form of marginalized from coming to engage with other forms of marginalization:

For instance, in some spaces, racism and sexism are known to be issues, but ableism is not.

(This can occur in any combination. Eg: There are also spaces that get ableism and sexism but not racism, and spaces that get economic justice and racism but not antisemitism, or any number of other things.)

When disabled people raise the issue of ableism in any context (social justice or otherwise), they’re likely to be shouted down and told that it’s not important.

In social justice spaces, this shouting down is often done in the name of “listening to marginalized people”.

For instance, disabled people may be told ‘you need to listen to marginalized people and de-center your issues’, carrying the implication that ableism is less important than other forms of oppression.

(This happens to *every* marginalized group in some context or other.)

If we want real intersectional solidarity, we need to have space for ongoing conflicts that are not simple to resolve.

There are currently 74 wildfires burning in the western United States, many of them are approaching heavily populated cities such as Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. The La Tuna fire is now officially the brush fire in LA history. Air quality warnings are being issued across the entirety of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. I’m in Portland, about 40 miles out from the nearest wildfire, and it’s raining ash and difficult to breathe due to the haze.

In certain contexts, just about everything a disabled person does will result in someone following them around with a clipboard, taking notes on their behavior, and designing a behavior plan for them.

This is often called ‘listening to what the behavior is communicating’ or ‘keeping in mind that behavior is communication.’

I know that nothing I’ve ever done was intended to communicate ‘please put me on a behavior plan’. If anyone asked me, they would know with certainty that I don’t want them to do anything of the sort.

I’m not alone in this. Very few people would willingly consent to intense data collection of the kind involved in behavior analysis. Far fewer people would willingly consent to the ways in which that data is used to control their behavior. 

A lot of people never get asked. People do these things to them that very few people would willingly consent to — without asking, and without considering consent to be a relevant consideration.

Somehow, an approach that involves ignoring what someone might be thinking gets called ‘listening to what is being communicated’.

That is neither ethical nor logical. Behaviors don’t communicate; people do. If you want to understand what someone is thinking, you have to listen to them in a way that goes beyond what any behavior plan can do.

A lot of things get scheduled on major Jewish holidays, in a way that prevents Jews from being able to participate. This needs to stop. 

If you’re in charge of scheduling things like:

Protests

Conferences

Public school orientations

College orientations

Exam schedules

Field trips

Other important events

Please avoid scheduling on major Jewish holidays. The most important ones to avoid are:

Rosh Hashana

Yom Kippur

The first two nights of Passover 

These holidays are at slightly different times each year, because the Jewish calendar is lunar. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are in the fall, Passover is in the Spring. You can check when they are at hebcal.com, and hebcal.com also has a calendar you can subscribe to that says when the holidays are.

Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are the times at which Jews who don’t go to synagogue at any other time of year go. (In the same way that some Christians only go to church on Easter and Christmas). They are also major family holidays, even for people who are otherwise secular. Yom Kippur is a 25 hour fast (from both food and water) and most people who observe it are pretty wiped out immediately afterwards. 

The first two nights of Passover are when Jewish families hold Passover seders. It’s a major family holiday, even for people who do not consider themselves religious and never go to synagogue at all. Nearly all Jewish families have some sort of seder. 

It is considerate to also avoid scheduling important events that would require travel on the day before and after these major holidays. It is critical to avoid scheduling events on the holidays themselves.

There are other Jewish holidays that will create conflicts for some Jews, but they’re not as important to most Jewish people. 

I’ve noticed that some of you are telling other people with disabilities that they shouldn’t use the term “special interests” to describe their personal experiences.

This is not a good look. It’s especially bad when you’re telling this to @actuallyadhd. A few facts about the blog’s moderator:

-She has AD/HD (duh).

-She has been involved with the autistic advocacy community as an ally and “cousin” for literally decades. (If you don’t know what a cousin is, read up on some of the earlier history. Our community has been around for a while!)

-She volunteers her time to answering questions from people with AD/HD, a population that includes many autistic people.

Yet some have you have chosen to fill her inbox with complaints and mark her as an enemy because she holds the autistic community’s historic position: that the words autistic people use to describe our experiences can be used by everyone. By doing so, autism becomes less stigmatized and medicalized.

We’ve noticed a trend in a whole lot of advocacy stuff lately of people getting really into enforcing borders and boxes around groups. If you fit neatly into the box, good, but if you are on the borders and find anything in common with people in the box or use any of the same words this is supposedly Bad? This is… kind of really horrifying to us and not good advocacy. So many people do not cleanly fit into boxes, and there is so much diversity out there and also commonalities between people that just don’t fit into having strict boxes around groups.

In advocacy/activist space, we’ve gotten really good at noticing and naming oppression. We’ve gotten really good at criticizing the things that people are doing wrong, and demanding change. We’re also good at noticing organizations and people who shouldn’t be supported, and explaining why people shouldn’t support them.

This is important — and it’s not enough. We need to be equally good at noticing and naming things that *are* worth supporting. We need to be equally good at noticing what people are doing well, describing why their approach is good, and finding ways to support it. Calling out isn’t enough. We need to seek out things to lift up.

When we focus exclusively on finding things to call out, we send the implicit message that nothing good anyone is doing is worthy of our attention. But none of the work of building a better world happens by itself. It depends on the people who are putting the effort into doing the work. When we ignore the value of the work people are doing, we both harm those people and the work itself.

The work is hard, exhausting, and vital. It’s also often thankless — because we’re not acknowledging it in the way we need to be. Often, doing activism and advocacy means signing up for a life of being paid less than a living wage (or volunteering your very limited time), having your work ignored, and being noticed by your community only when people are angry at you.

This is particularly common when the work is done by marginalized people. Our culture socializes us to ignore the work that women and other marginalized groups do, except when we find reason to criticize it. This dynamic carries over into activism/advocacy spaces. It’s just as toxic when we do it as when corporations do it.

Literally non-Jewish exclusionists tried to involve themselves in whether or not I, a bisexual non-binary femme, got to become a Jew, and not just that, they tried to fuck up my relationship with the synagogue which provided my trans lesbian daughter with the first place of faith that ever accepted her truly and without conditions. They actively sought to hurt the people that they claim to be trying to ‘protect.’

Another Saturday Haturday update!

Adding some hats with the polyamory pride flag! Also a new trans pride hat in seafoam green.

Just a small update… we’ve been working more hours at our day job and are still adjusting and have been pretty low spoons. Hoping to have some bigger updates when we get our energy back.

The overload interaction necklaces are also back in stock, they were sold out for a bit but we finished a new batch today.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SpacerobotStudio

http://www.spacerobotstudio.com/

The above anon message was sent to me after I contributed to a Tumblr post here. The discussion was about the decision by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to support a controversial right-wing blogger’s right to speak. (If you prefer to get your news from sources, you can read NPR coverage from February 2017 here.) Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said things like “What’s amazing about the First Amendment is it protects us, regardless of our viewpoints, regardless of the causes we hold dear.” (1)

As you can see from the first few comments on the Tumblr post, some people in the social justice community found this stance abhorrent. They explained that the ACLU is tainted by this decision, and that everyone who supports the ACLU (and all of the ACLU’s work) should feel bad. In the notes and discussion, people express their disappointment with the ACLU, adding that they have defended icky people in the past, as well. The message is clear: the ACLU has fucked up in their eyes by defending icky people and is now a Bad Organization, forever.

These people belong to the slash-and-burn school of social justice and online activism - where if an entity fucks up, that entity is tainted forever and can never be forgiven. Anything that the entity does for good is erased, forever, by That Time They Fucked Up. Under this school of thought, the massive amount of work that the ACLU does in defense of American civil rights - that important, life-saving, world-shaking work - is undermined because they have also defended the civil rights of icky people. This is the school of thought that recommends you discard all attachment to something if it has a problematic aspect. This line of thinking is interesting, and I believe it has good intentions somewhere, but I don’t subscribe to it. 

My post addition, and those of others before me, pointed out that a nation’s civil rights must necessarily extend to everyone in the nation. My post addition specifically said that in order for a justice system to work, it must provide equal representation and protection for the accused. The entities that defend the accused are not evil for doing so, even if the accused is literally Satan. They are part of the necessary machinery for ensuring justice. “Everyone deserves equal representation,” was my point. “Try to design a better system [than equal representation].”

Anon, as you can see above, did not like me doing that. Fair enough. 

They wrote “Also “try to design a better system”? We are. Look up prison abolition or even criminal rehabilitation.”

They meant to disarm me with these buzzwords, indicating that “they” - the Truest and Purest Social Justice Clerics - are more knowledgeable about criminals than conservative Elodie, who lives in a cave and supports rights for icky people.

Here’s the thing that I want to point out.

If you belong to the slash-and-burn school of social justice thought, in which you believe that one problematic thing (defending icky people) destroys the entity (ACLU) beyond redemption, so that the entity should no longer receive any good things (our support) ever, and anyone who questions that is an enemy (me), who must be punished (with anon complaints)…

YOU ARE NOT DESIGNING A BETTER SYSTEM,,

YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON TO BE INVOLVED WITH CRIMINAL REHABILITATION.

YOU HAVE LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE MINDSET FOR THAT.

Because if you want to get involved with criminal rehabilitation, you stand a higher-than-ordinary chance of interacting with rightfully-convicted criminals who have done icky things - such as literal and genuine rapists. 

And you are supposed to take those icky people, who have done incredibly problematic things, and you are supposed to direct them towards redemption, and give them good things, and assure them that they can still be a positive member of society who deserves support. And you have to believe in this. 

Even if the criminals hate you, and are constantly lashing out in pain and fear and disgust for you, insulting you and abusing you and berating you. If you want to rehabilitate a criminal and abolish prisons, and build a society where equal representation is not needed because everything is PERFECT AND FAIR, here is what you have to do: if you want to take the people whose actions have placed them outside of society, and bring them back into society - you have to believe that One Bad Act does not define people. That people can learn from past mistakes. You have to stake your life and soul on the fact that people can make incredibly bad decisions, and hurt others irreversibly, and behave in incredibly icky ways - and that they can THEN do enough Good to erase that, or at least balance it. 

If you want to rehabilitate criminals, you have to take people who fuck up and fuck up and fuck up, and say “Well, you still have plenty of value as a human being, and you can absolutely move past this.”

If you want to rehabilitate criminals, you have to offer them the reward: “If you stop fucking up, and put some positive things into society, then you will earn support. You will no longer be an icky person who fucks up. You will be a better person who will deserve every good thing. You have this capacity, and I will help you get there.”

If you want to rehabilitate criminals, then you will be tired sometimes, because some of the people are horrible criminals, and some of them really aren’t, and some are wrongfully accused people, but others are deeply awful people who never had a chance to be anything else. People who abused because they were abused, and people who killed their abuser (a cool motive, but still murder). 

Believe me, criminal rehabilitation will be harder work than simply disliking someone on Tumblr. Things will be so complicated and so hard, and you will feel sympathy for the strangest people, in the most unexpected ways. You’ll be one of the people with dirty hands. And then people will accuse you of being icky because you defend rapists. 

So I think even at the bottom of it, we still need equal representation. And we haven’t escaped that truth, despite the Clever Use of Buzzwords.

But I think that in the social justice community, we could stand to reflect upon this. Does the slash-and-burn principle of eliminating problematic things… actually work? Can we reconcile that ideology with beautiful liberal ideas like criminal rehabilitation and prison reform? Can people be icky, and still deserve every good thing? Or should icky people only have limited access to good things? How should we limit that access, and why?

Can we be redeemed? 

Because I am a sinner, I have to believe we can.

===

(1) It’s worth noting that this is an American cause. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. There are no exclusions in the First Amendment for hate speech.

In the United Kingdom, hate speech is not protected speech, and it is defined more rigorously. Certain expressions of hate are indeed illegal and can be punished. The right-wing blogger’s speech and actions would not receive equal protection in the UK. 

Hi everybody!

We have another Saturday Haturday update! :D

There are 7 new slouchy pride hats up in the shop, including genderqueer pride flag hats, and four different rainbow hats in new colors.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SpacerobotStudio

http://www.spacerobotstudio.com/

“Israel is about as well-governed as you’d expect from a country run by people with PTSD in one of the most volatile regions in the world.” This sentence in your recent post feels uncomfortably close to perpetuating a poor stereotype of both abuse survivors and people with PTSD, or like a joke in poor taste at their expense. I think I get what you meant it’s just, in my opinion, very poorly phrased.

realsocialskills replied:

Agreed. I should have phrased that differently. I haven’t really tried to discuss anything related to Israel on this blog before. I was assuming certain context that I didn’t actually explain. I don’t talk about Israel very much, and when I do, it’s usually in a context in which people know that I’m a rabbi and a disabled disability advocate. (People often also know that I have significantly disabling trauma.) That context matters more than I realized. I’m sorry I wrote it that way, I see what it looked like I meant now that people have pointed it out to me.

One thing that I want to be clear about now: I did not mean that as an insult. Part of what I meant is that trauma makes everything harder, and that it’s a factor in why the situation is so intractable. I absolutely was *not* saying that people with PTSD shouldn’t be in leadership roles. And in any case, in Israel/Palestine, there is no alternative. If you couldn’t have traumatized people in leadership roles, it would be difficult to find anyone to govern. That doesn’t mean that the situation can’t get better — it means that it’s *hard*. 

(This is one of the many reasons why I believe that people who want to help should support efforts that are led by Israelis and/or Palestinians and located primarily in Israel/Palestine.)

Some of the things I’ve most appreciated about spending time in Israel are directly related to how normal trauma is there. PTSD is really a misnomer — the situation in Israel/Palestine is chronically traumatic. In Israel, there’s much more serious conversation about resilience in the face of chronic trauma than I’ve ever found in the US. (I’m saying Israel specifically because I’m directly familiar with Israeli culture and I am not directly familiar with Palestinian culture.)

In the US, the conversation about trauma tends to be “You need to get past what happened and let go of it so you can get on with your life.” In Israel, it’s more like “Whether or not things ever get better, we have to live our lives.” (Pronoun choice deliberate; Israel is much more collectivized than the US, which is a cultural can of worms I’m not going to get into in more detail in this post.)

A lot of populations in the US face chronic traumatization, and there’s very little discussion here about how to deal with that. There’s a tendency to inappropriately apply a *post*-traumatic recovery model along the lines of “You went through something terrible, but you’re safe now. Let’s help you to feel safe.” That model is really inappropriate for people who aren’t safe and aren’t likely to be safe any time soon. We need more things that help people in unsafe situations cope psychologically and build as many good things in their life as they can. 

For example, group homes are not safe places. More generally, disability service provision systems are not safe. They’re safer than they used to be, but the rate of abuse is still very high. It is irresponsible to say “you’re safe now” to someone who is statistically likely to be harmed again in the future. It’s irresponsible to say “People can’t heal until they are safe”, and leave it at that. There are a lot of people who aren’t likely to be safe any time soon, and their lives matter *now*.

Safety is not a prerequisite for growth, and it’s not a prerequisite for having good things in your life. We need to do better for people in unsafe situations. We need more space to say “Being hurt matters, and it’s not the only thing that matters,” and more competence to say “Here are some things that often help.” Safety is important, and we should work for it — and we can’t let that be the only thing we do. (Related: “It gets better” is often worth saying, but it can’t be the end all and be all of how we express “Your life is worth living”.)

This matters in service provision and it also matters in activist community. I think that we need a much broader conversation about resilience. We’re fighting for survival and for critically important rights. We can’t abandon these fights and we also can’t afford to treat victory as a prerequisite for valuing our lives. We have to live. I think a significant part of that is finding ways to strengthen each other, and seeking out every form of growth and resilience available to us.