“You’re always dealing with a stereotype. There’s the superhuman trope and the vulnerable trope – the benefit scrounger, someone who takes, doesn’t offer anything to society because they’re so incapable. And if you’re trying to be the superhuman, you don’t want to look as if you’re leaning on anyone, because people will think, which one are you? It’s really hard to embody both. But the gap between the tropes is where we want to live.”
“The people who are trying to be on our side have reduced us to a mere calculation”
Source: I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir
“medical knowledges tend to express bodies in terms of what they can’t do, and media representations often value bodies in ways that overlook their uniqueness”
Source: Deleuze and Masculinity
“You can tell a lot about what a culture considers deformed by looking at its villains. They're more likely to be disabled in some way, but also more likely to be dark, old, fat, or fey.”
Source: Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology
“Of course, when Iris was gone, Mom barely seemed to care until the final hours before evacuation.
Maybe it'll be the same for me: Denise will be fine. Oh, she'll be back.
It makes me want to laugh when I realize how wrong I am. Of course it won't be the same. I'm not Iris. It'll be: Denise? Denise is gone? Oh, god, no. How long for? She can't be out there by herself. She might've gotten lost. She's—then, confidentially, with that look of hers—she's autistic. What if she...”
Source: On the Edge of Gone
“My call to action goes well beyond asking you to pressure your recruiting team to hire a couple of token employees. That's easy and you've been doing that for years.
My call to action is that you dig deeper and place focus on making the work environment sustainable for the minorities you introduce to your team. I'm challenging you to refrain from the habitual practice of listening only to the jaded opinions of people that you are more familiar with.
Consider that, although you may be under the impression that your employees have strong ethics, morals and values, there is a possibility that they mat not be telling you the entire truth when speaking about the performance or demeanor of minorities.
Furthermore, I challenge you to accept that racism, ageism, ableism, classism, sizeism, homophobia, etc., are real and shaping the semblance of your organization.
Accepting that fact does not mean that people you work with and trust are bad people. It simply means that many of them are naïve, fearful, and more comfortable with pointing fingers at the innocent than they are with facing and addressing their own unconscious and damaging biases.”
Source: Confessions From Your Token Black Colleague: True Stories & Candid Conversations About Equity & Inclusion In The Workplace
“This body is a scrounger if it needs the state, a faker if it holds down a job.”
“The last time Els and I spoke, she'd reprimanded me over shouting at Michelle. Now she's all kindness. What changed her mind? My being autistic, or my almost dying?”
Source: On the Edge of Gone
“You'd have to ask Leyla if you want to know more. She's a psychologist. One of a dozen on board. We don't just want our passengers to survive—we want them to be OK. We're dealing with a lot of trauma. So if you ever need to talk..."
"I'll pass."
"Bad experiences?"
"Sort of."
"What happened?"
I shrug. "It took a long time to diagnose me."
"From what I understand, autistic girls often don't run into trouble until a later age."
I bark out a laugh. Oh, I ran into trouble, all right. I barely said a word between the ages of four and six. I hit three of my preschool and grade school teachers. In a class photo taken when I was seven, my face is covered in scratches from when I latched onto a particularly bad stim. Therapists and teachers labelled me as bipolar, as psychotic, as having oppositional defiant disorder, as intellectually disabled, and as just straight-up difficult, the same way Els did. One said all I needed was structure and a gluten-free diet.
When I was nine, a therapist suggested I might be autistic, at which point I had already started to learn what set me off and how to mimic people; within two years, I was coping well enough to almost-but-not-quite blend in with my classmates. It's funny when people like Els have no idea anything is off about me, given that my parents spend half my childhood worrying I'd end up institutionalized.
At the time, I thought the diagnosis was delayed because I was bad at being autistic, just like I was bad at everything else; it took me years to realize that since I wasn't only Black, but a Black girl, it's like the DSM shrank to a handful of options, and many psychologists were loath to even consider them.”
Source: On the Edge of Gone
“Ableism is discrimination against people with disabilities. It is the harboring of beliefs that devalue and limit the potential of people with physical, intellectual, or mental disorders and disabilities. For instance, people might believe that autistic people will never be an asset to society, and that they need to be “fixed” or “cured".”
Source: Connecting With The Autism Spectrum: How To Talk, How To Listen, And Why You Shouldn’t Call It High-Functioning