Coda

The writings, then, about the origins of autism by Silberman, Sheffer, and Czech, are not crow funerals—though an autistics' reading group working through them together, would be.

Me, with autistic followers, posting serially about autism's origins ... not quite a crow funeral.

Placing those posts in one spot, where autistics can find them?

A slow, casual, come-as-you-are crow funeral:

@crowfun

#CrowFuneral #ActuallyAutistic #Autism #NazisConstructedAutism

The Starry Night thread is now a single-visit crow funeral at @crowfun.

Crow funeral? Harm reduction:

Reducing what's unsaid, unseen, and taboo in our pervasive allistixplaining-as-a-service social economy.

@actuallyautistic @autisticadvocacy

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism #ActuallyAutistic #CrowFuneral

Afterword

Cultures carry themselves in stories told and shared, in real time, over and over.

Which autistics do. We tell and share the small stories (500 characters, 280 characters) that onboard stray kin and support those already here.

That vital, restorative mutual aid, explaining ourselves to ourselves as autistic individuals, only took on momentum maybe 10, at most, 30 years ago. Day-to-day, it's the most important thing online autistics do.

As a people though, as a population, as 1/30 or more of The World (motto: Define or Be Defined), we've created nothing comparable in the way of engaging, compelling, big-picture narrative explanations with which to define ourselves.

That, anyway, was the chasm that yawned up in front of me before I decided to put Starry Night online.

It's an origins narrative for modern autism. We need more of these. For pre-modern autism as well. The tales that endure the longest do so because they embody poetic truths. We need autism stories that do that.

Without such stories in circulation we can wind up practicing autistic mutual aid while sealed inside a wholly allistixplained world.

That way lies anguish and confusion.

So that's what I'm promoting here. Not just Starry Night, but Big-Picture Autism itself.

-

@actuallyautistic @autisticadvocacy

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism #ActuallyAutistic

How'd we, specifically, get here, as @MightBeAutistic described at the beginning of this thread? Where we're swimming in poisonous ableism, yet trying to fix the autistics instead?

Nazis designated Autistic Kids™ as things, then took their resulting uncanny valley responses to those children as self-justification.

Then we, as WWII victors, betrayed those kids by adopting the Nazi perspective, and projecting our own lack of empathy onto those children.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

Y | Surely There Are Worse Crimes

As words, "dehumanizing" and “objectification" are eleven syllables together. Mouthfuls.

In certain quarters people like to quote a wise old soul known to have said all that in words of two syllables or less:

"Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things."

Should a pious skeptic insist that surely there are worse crimes, the crisp reply is,

“Yes. And they starts with thinking about people as things.”

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

A stare—an openly displayed Uncanny Valley response to an autistic person—is a dominance display, a public objectification.

Even shunning or shying away accomplishes a private objectification. Actively, a quiet assertion of superior privilege. Passively, a coddling of one's own discomfort in the presence of difference, of ... divergence, as we say.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

W | Re-Enactments of the Original

Autism social media, I've noticed, does not lack for posts containing snippy sarcasm for autistics and their parents to share with people who stare in public.

With reason.

Those stares are ghostly echoes, public re-enactments of the original Sorting Hat rituals in Vienna.

A thrill, no? Even unknowingly, to stare the stare of a man (a very religious man), whose gaze once held the power of life and death over such children.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

To this day, | remember that email as a breathless phone call.

The sense of elation and achievement radiated by the words on my screen has never seemed like it could have come silently.

A tidal shift. Both an undoing, and a doing. A re-membering.

A little over a decade later now actual autistics are lobbying once again against Asperger's Sorting Hat, which is promoting "profoundly autistic" as a new designation.

A dis-membering, if adopted.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

V | Un-divided

A friend in the autistic self-advocate community sent me an email hours after the final subcommittee decision to subsume the Aspergers diagnosis into the autism diagnosis for the DSM-V.

The community had been working quietly with the subcommittee to encourage this decision, and my friend had been in the room when the vote was taken. It would not be published for another year yet, but it was a done deal.

They'd done away with Aspergers.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

In the long view, however much society’s view of autism is still colored by genocidal values, we are not the Sorted-by-Ableists Tribe.

We are the oldest and largest secret society the world has ever known. And for better or worse as global temperatures rise, we are the fire-bringers.*

*again, not explained here; you can figure it out though

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

U | Re-Membering

It's crucial that we re-member ourselves, because there have been and (if Greta Thunberg has her way) there will be ages and birth signs other than The Sorting Hat.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

Them's the breaks.

It's also one reason it's crucial for autistics to re- member ourselves, to re-establish ties not only with our members lost to Nazi eugenics and its heirs (cough, Autism Speaks), but with those from past centuries, and before, from our neolithic and paleolithic ancestors.

Call it pre-modern autism.

To remember, at any rate, how we've been here all along.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

It's also one reason it's crucial for autistics to re- member ourselves, to re-establish ties not only with our members lost to Nazi eugenics and its heirs (cough, Autism Speaks), but with those from past centuries, and before, from our neolithic and paleolithic ancestors.

Call it pre-modern autism.

To remember, at any rate, how we've been here all along.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

T | Them's The Breaks

Speaking of places where the light is better?

With a well-staffed clinic in Kingston, "autistics" coulda maybe got Sunny Jamaica for the Fatherland.

Then again clinics are for sick people.

How about New Zealand, where the Māori word for autism means "in one's own time and space"?

But instead—the fault in our stars, dear reader, not in ourselves—we arrived at the Dawning of the Age of the Sorting Hat.

In Nazi-annexed Austria.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

Offered here as a reminder that what designated autistics as residents of the Uncanny Valley comes from an inconveniently dark place, one where no one—save Silberman, Sheffer, and Czech—has yet gone looking.

Nor will that designation, that objectification, be undone by any breakthrough, however brilliant, in the biological or medical sciences.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

S| The Light's Better Under Genetics

You likely know that story, aka the Streetlight Effect, of the drunk searching under the lamppost for a key he'd dropped while trying his door lock.

"So why aren't you looking over by your door?"

"The light's better under this lamppost."

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

“Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation and prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts we’ve created to protect us.” ~ Alexander Leon

Quote swiped from @DZGrizzle. The point made applies to queerness in general (cf. "neuroqueer"), not only sexual, gender.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

Or, as all the fully-funded "autism researchers" go questing for The Cause of Autism! and its puzzling "Symptoms," who is instead questioning their assumptions?

Where is the funding for the social anthropologists? The sociologists? The historians? The social and forensic psychologists? The trauma specialists and C-PTSD researchers?

The Nazis at least were forthright about their readiness to eliminate us.

Sparing us smarmy concern over what's "causing" us.

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

R | as all the gallant researchers go questing

Were we to focus research on the damage being done, on harm reduction rather than on the priorities of those still protecting autism's family secret, what then?

Where might that harm present itself in our psyches, in our health, in our affect, in our behavior?

What might be the societal assumptions that continue to inflict this damage?

What institutions in society maintain those assumptions across generations?

#NazisConstructedAutism #Autism

If you're playing along at home with #NazisConstructedAutism, you may have already realized that what I'm doing here is holding a #CrowFuneral for autistics.

If you need a second to Google "crow funeral," I'll wait.

-

Okay. In, say, infosec terms, crow funerals are DFIR reports. Or full vulnerability disclosures, with autistics the primary stakeholders.

Once we get to the end of the alphabet I'll pull all this together in one place with a little more explanation.

#Autism #ActuallyAutistic