happy autism acceptance month, asperger’s is still an ableist and useless term
[ID: a Simpson’s character gesturing towards a sign that reads, “Don’t Forget: Asperger was a eugenicist Nazi that sent autistic children to their deaths.” End of ID]
It’s okay if you didn’t know! We’re a severely misrepresented community and many autistic people themselves are uninformed about a lot of things about our own community.
It’s just really important to be receptive about things that our fellow autistics say are harmful towards autistic people. Please listen.
DNI if you still use/defend the term Asperger’s. It’s okay if you didn’t know until you saw this post, but please stop using it. Just say autism. It’s not a bad word.
Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.
This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.
I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.
After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.”
If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity.
I remember reading somewhere once “we should be speaking of equity instead of equality” and that is a principle that applies here me thinks
I will reblog this every time it shows up on my dash, because, frankly, the world cannot get enough reminders.
One of the more rage-inducing things neurotypicals do is spend years drilling it into you to pay attention to what’s being implied instead of only what’s stated, but if you start to develop that skill and use it to point out when they’re being subtly shitty to you, they react like you’re just making shit up to slander them, doesn’t matter how thoughtfully you explain how you got to that conclusion, doesn’t matter how much benefit of the doubt you give them, the only response they will ever give is “but I did not say those literal exact words so obviously I could not have meant or been thinking anything like that. Stop putting words in my mouth”
They THOUGHT they wanted me to read between the lines and understand what they weren’t saying, but then they realized that what they actually wanted was for me for to simply behave in the ways they expected without having to communicate those expectations to me.
Understanding leads to opinion having, and they never like it when I have opinions on How They Do Things.
