community
Autism & Accountability
How do we talk about repair, and who’s capable, in 500 characters?
“All autistic people can learn to be accountable for their actions, and to say otherwise is infantalizing and ableist.” Many variations on this theme are making their way through the platforms currently. While on the surface it appears well-meaning and affirming, it’s worth stepping back and considering the claim at face value, and how it…
A Neurodiversity-Affirming Code of Ethics for Online Participation
Articulated as personal responsibility — what I hold myself to, not a standard imposed on others. The online public space serves overlapping, non-competing functions — information exchange, community formation, identity articulation, advocacy, and low-cost contact for people otherwise isolated by geography, access, or circumstance. No single function is the “real” one that the others distract…
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From the Inside Out
A Reading List in the Spirit of Tōjisha-Kenkyū · 当事者研究
Within Tōjisha-kenkyū lies the potential of rearranging the relationship between the tōjisha (the person with lived experience of the condition being studied) and the specialist — in other words, between experienced knowledge and specialized knowledge. . . . The mutual respect from the tōjisha and the specialist for each other’s knowledge, along with the collaborative…
what i brought with me
ever since i was young, i’ve felt like i was from a different culture, and was dropped into this one by a stork. somewhere along the way, i decided to stick by this, and honor the integrity of my original culture, and not get too deep into this dominant culture that i still feel like…
what does autism even mean?
peers, autists, human companions: lend me your cognitive architecture (ears are not enough). what we now call “autism” originally described a way of thinking that its own framers acknowledged that everyone experiences. If “autistic thinking” is something that everyone experiences, where is the line drawn between “everyone” and the autistic person? Is everyone temporarily autistic…
call to action: mutual support for Tammy Zo
Our friend Tammy Zo (Pollard) needs our support. She is homeless, and in grave danger of losing her belongings, many of which are cultural archives and work that she has created herself. The fact that she needs our support is a consequence of our culture’s failure to maintain mutual support networks independent of institutional channels,…
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Normalize casual intimacy.
I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core. The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of…
‘ey, aye
all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us. the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us.…
The Mammoth Hunter
How Making Sense of My Child's Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation
Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet? My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace…