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Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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Joanne Limburg

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“Girls are not meant to think like this. So they say. They never ask us what we actually do think- certainly not without telling us first what it is we should be thinking. And if we are not thinking what they have said we should then they say our thinking is wrong. If we tell them (men) what we think, they correct our thoughts. Thoughts leave our brains, exit via our mouths, hang in the air. ready to be shot down by their artillery all day long! We say we think a thing and they (men) ignore it or they (still men) say we just don't fully understand it. Then they expect silence. Or an apology. If neither is forthcoming, they look away. Perhaps they walk out a door. They rewrite the words that come out our mouths by teaching us to edit them inside our brains. No?”

“Certaines femmes ne savent pas vraiment pourquoi elles ont des enfants, elles suivent la norme ; d'autres les désirent impétueusement, et si le moindre obstacle se présente, elles font appel à toutes les possibilités médicales pour pallier à leur infécondité. D'autres encore, sans problèmes de fertilité, revendiquent de ne pas enfanter. Et alors ? Nous ne sommes pas un troupeau de femelles animales programmées pour procréer sans réfléchir, chacune d'entre nous est libre de choisir de vivre selon sa trajectoire personnelle, ses désirs, ses gènes, son inconscient. Ce qui était impossible hier est devenu une réalité.”

“I nodded sagely, pretended to be making some sort of useful observation of the white surfaces and clear tubes and gray machines that I lacked the doctorates to comprehend, and thought about dualism. Good and evil. Man and woman. All forces and powers and principalities equal and opposite. The notion that we live in a universe with that kind of comforting, obvious ledger. That is the kind of thinking that makes people believe that the moon controls menstrual cycles, that vaginas are magic, when all they really are is blood and tissue and, in the instance of one particularly ugly case that I drink to forget about, teeth. They're impressively versatile and under the right circumstances a lot of fun, but no more or less miraculous than your twenty-ninth vertebra.”

“However, as children learn the lessons of darkness and light, we also seek out the light and become fearful of the dark. Our well-meaning parents lit up our rooms with candles or nightlights to withhold the darkness instead of walking us outside into the evening tide to take in the wonder of the stars that we would never see if it was perpetual light, which reaffirmed that we need to fear and therefore banish the night. Similarly, we are taught to shun the darkness inside of us too. Our undesirable, ‘too much’ emotions like anger or sadness are banished to the ‘time-out’ chair or spanked out of us in the favour of more acceptable ‘Pollyanna’ cheeriness. Our mysterious, scary, weird, hard to understand, and fears are locked behind the high walls of our societal and religious beliefs.”

“I was bathed in the beauty of my wholeness, tears flowed freely down my cheeks. I heard the words, ‘Dear wandering soul, return to yourself with gratitude and love.”

“Because female intellect is weaker than men.” Said the elderly scholar. “Says who, sir?” “It is written in the hymns.” “May I ask, who wrote those hymns?”Asked the girl. “The hymns were written by our forefathers.” Said the elderly scholar. “By forefathers you mean, our male ancestors?” Asked the girl, again.”