Reflecting on the pronouns I gave my wedding party (“Gender is stupid and you’re all stupid for having one.”) and come to realize my gender is a lot closer to Bride than it is to Girl
Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.
Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.” (A decision which still has not been reversed)
Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.
Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors and parents left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.
Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.
Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”
Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.
autistic anger issues are So Much. i have my temper more under control now in that i rly dont yell/lash out anymore but i do regularly boil inside with incandescent uncontainable rage over something inconsequential and then it evaporates in the span of ten minutes. incomparable
Me, reading discourse on the internet: woah, this is JUST like dandelions and amaranth and oaks and pawpaw trees
The one thing Darwin was most terribly wrong about has done so much damage.
Darwin believed competition was the main driver of evolution. Now, many scientists are revolutionizing the field with evidence that no, evolution is equally, if not more, driven by a vast web of cooperation.
But people still think about society in a competition-based way.
A woman using the word “partner” to describe her boyfriend somehow “takes away” from gay people??? A cishet guy wearing a dress is somehow bad for transgender people???
Don’t y'all know that the most tough and resilient plants thriving in a hostile environment make it possible for the other ones to survive?…
…Anyway this is why I don’t shave my legs. Disaster species (autistic who is completely oblivious and indifferent to all social judgement and critique) taking hold in hostile environment (misogynistic society) preparing that environment to support a wide variety of species (many other women who would want to stop shaving but don’t want to feel judged and alone)
now i want there to be a comic that’s a panorama of a teeming forest with giant trees and mosses and lichens everywhere, the ground is covered in loads of fancy orchids and berries and flowers and the understory is packed with blossoming and fruiting shrubs, there are multicolored birds everywhere and deer browsing in a little meadow full of sunbeams where wildflowers and vines are going wild
Up toward the lower corner two flowers are having a conversation: “We didn’t have any of this stuff back when I was young …orchids that can’t even sprout in the first place without the mycorrhizal network!…flowers that can only be pollinated by one specific rare bee…I just think it’s getting a little out of control…there are even plants down there in the bog claiming to be carnivorous! Plants that don’t even want to have chlorophyll anymore…We’re photosynthetic autotrophs! That’s a biological fact!…Don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous? Sixty years ago you never heard about anything like that…The weeds that came here after this place was logged wouldn’t have approved of it…”
Some guy: People like you would have never been accepted when we lived in THE WILDERNESS.
The wilderness: *literally interconnected by a vast symbiotic network that distributes resources among the plant community, gets steadily more diverse and supports more fragile species with more specific needs as it matures, everything is interdependent, a huge variety of weird organisms that wouldn’t survive in a more hostile environment indicates a thriving ecosystem*
