Work-in-progress-lesbian

okay lads i spent an irresponsible amount of time making these, please enjoy them

Leather pride flag: 1989

Bear pride flag 1995

Rubber/Latex pride flag 1995

Fellow neurodivergents especially, please listen-- towards the end of this post I describe how some in our community have been using it without knowing what it means.

A fairly common antisemitic dogwhistle used amongst alt-right circles on the internet is being a "noticer," "noticing patterns," "pattern noticer," etc. I've seen this from a couple Tumblr blogs I follow reblogging memes and such that use this term but don't provide any context about what sorts of "things" they may be noticing.

Here's the meme that I saw a blog I'm following reblog last night.

Seems pretty harmless, right? It's a meme with a cute cat.

In alt-right circles, what they are referring to "noticing" is the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world/"noticing" evidence of an imagined globalist (read: Jewish) world order/etc. If you see a meme that uses terms like "noticing patterns" that doesn't elaborate what those supposed patterns are-- just leaves you to fill in the blank yourself-- take a look at the types of things OP might be posting. The alt-right has an idea that it's forbidden to talk about who might be behind the "conspiracies" they talk about (again, the target is frequently Jewish people) so lack of context is often a red flag.

I sent the blog who reblogged this an ask informing them that the meme was a dogwhistle. If you see someone reblog something like this, check what they've been posting. If this seems like an isolated incident, the person probably reblogged it not knowing what the term actually meant. That's why dogwhistles are so effective-- to the average person they look harmless if you don't know what to watch out for!

Let's take a look at how alt-righters use this term.

Here's an alt-right definition of it from Urban Dictionary.

Oh boy, this one gets a bigotry bingo for all the dogwhistles used here. If I miss any, feel free to comment. Here are the ones I found:

-Noseticing: Noticing plus nose, based on the stereotype for Jewish people to have large noses.

-"those who cannot be named"/skirting around saying Jew: again the idea that it's forbidden to talk about who they think is behind their conspiracy theories.

-"world events and agendas": idea that Jewish people have a Globalist agenda etc etc

-Degeneracy: Nazi term to describe the behaviors/people they find undesirable.

-Early life: refers to the section in a person's Wikipedia page. If a person was brought up Jewish, it'll usually say so there.

-Oy vey: a Jewish exclamation of exasperation that Nazis have unfortunately co-opted when talking about Jewish people.

Here's probably the most obviously antisemitic meme I found.

The title and first bullet point include the "noticer" term. This meme also talks about a "group" who controls wealth. Who might the poster be referring to here?

Here's a Twitter account with many similar alt-right terms. Explicitly identifies as a Nazi and ethno-nationalist, etc etc.

A couple other pages. I clicked on them to see if I could find any more examples but the first seemed pretty blank and the second... Well, I don't have a twitter so I couldn't view.

Let's unpack these a little. The first one has "13 outta 52," a statistic used among white supremacists to depict Black people (especially African-Americans) as "savage": 13 referring to the percentage of America that is Black and 52 referring to the alleged percentage of murders in the U.S. that are committed by Black people. "109 countries" refers to the idea that Jewish people have been expelled from 109 countries during history. (Which isn't entirely true. Some "countries" in this count are actually cities, regions, etc.) Some white supremacists may use the number 110 instead to suggest that it should happen again.

The second one has a blurb alleging a global sterilization effort and concerns of fertility. This is likely in connection to pro-natalism for white people. If Nazis want a so-called "Aryan nation," they're going to want white people to populate it, and so they encourage white people to have babies for their cause. Nazi Germany employed this tactic as well, even awarding "Aryan" German women who had four or more children for their contributions to the Nazi cause.

The reason why I'm emphasizing that context matters is that some neurodivergent people have seen this and co-opted it into neurodivergent circles. As a person who is Jewish and autistic, this is pretty alarming to me. I'll show a couple examples from Tumblr:

And

I've left out the URLs of the OPs because I want to give the benefit of the doubt-- they both explicitly refer to being a "pattern noticer" in terms of neurodivergence. And it's easy to see why introducing this term to ND folks would be an easy way to get a dogwhistle passed off as harmless! Since autistic people often have analytical minds, we often make connections that others might not be able to see. But unfortunately, using terms like this only makes it much easier for antisemites to fly under the radar.

That we might all be so lucky as to have never had this experience but I think the evidence from the myriad of comments on this post alone speaks to the prevalence of this phenomenon.

When people with adhd talk about ADHD symptoms and people jump in with "actually, that's a pretty universal experience" it's like... Okay, maybe it is

But not to the degree it happens with ADHD. And it's not caused by ADHD.

Does everybody lose their keys? Yes. Does everybody forget their list before going to the grocery store? Yes.

But the soul crushing degree to which this happens to ADHD people is indescribable. We don't just lose our keys - we keep losing our keys. We are constantly losing our keys. We lose so many hours of our lives looking for lost keys.

We forget our list going to the grocery store so much that dinners are ruined due to a missing ingredient. We either have to go back to the store (losing more time) or find some way to improvise. Sometimes we just give up (because ADHD) and order delivery we can't afford (because we lack impulse control because... ADHD)

Like I just don't think people understand how pervasive these things are and how much it affects our lives. Or when we are able to do things in a neurotypical manner, it takes like 50x the mental energy than it would anyone else. Something that seems simple to a neurotypical person is a fucking mountain when you have ADHD.

Maybe you've forgotten what a date meant... But does it happen to you so much that you've missed countless important things? Does the realization always fill you with absolute fucking soul crushing dread when you cannot conjure up what you're forgetting? Because you know what can happen when you don't remember?

The experience is not universal.

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it: