Ada Hoffmann

Today’s question is from Eve Prime:

Could you recommend any works that you think do a good job of conveying to NT people the inner lives of people on the spectrum? Ideally a short-story collection/anthology, since there are so many possible ways to experience life and autism.

Answer: Yes!

If you want a full set of my opinions on various works then you should click here and look at the “Recommended” section.

But that’s a boring answer. I don’t know of a single short-story collection/anthology that meets this need. (I’ve heard very good things about “Loud Hands: Autustic People Speaking” but I haven’t actually read it yet and it’s not fiction.)

If I was putting together such an anthology myself, then…

Well, no. If I was putting together such an anthology myself then I’d be running around soliciting people for new work, ferreting out people who have written good things in the past, and trying frantically to figure out a way to ensure that all the intersectionality and different experiences on the spectrum were covered without resorting to some kind of quota system. It would be a big job. It would result in a lot of stuff going into the anthology that doesn’t exist yet, or at least hasn’t existed where I can find it.

But in the absence of that, if I were to put together a mini-anthology of stuff I’ve read that expresses different aspects of the life experiences and inner perspectives of different autistic characters, then the first draft of the table of contents might look something like this.

(Can I put my stories in the table of contents? I would utterly totally not do this if I were making a real anthology, but if we’re just talking about stuff to read, I think I am going to sneak a couple in. You can totally ignore those ones if you feel this is gauche.)

• Emily Page Ballou, “The Real Girl” and “The Imaginary Girl” [poetry: childhood, expectations, conformity]
• Ada Hoffmann, “You Have to Follow the Rules” [fiction: childhood, special interests, being talked over]
• Meda Kahn, “That’s Entertainment” [fiction: institutionalization, being laughed at]
• Nicole Cipri, “A Silly Love Story” [fiction: college, romance]
• Lucas Scheelk, “Dear Allistic, Love, Autistic” [prose poetry: romance and relationships]
• Cynthia Kim, “Echolalia and Scripting: Straddling the Border of Functional Language” [personal essay: communication, speech, relationships]
• Tina Gower, “Twelve Seconds” [fiction: jobs, effects of conformity training in adults]
• Ada Hoffmann, “Turning to Stone” [poetry: sensory overload]
• S.R. Salas, “On Being an Empath” [personal essay: empathy and social cognition]
• Luna Lindsey, “Meltdown in Freezer Three” [fiction: animism/personification, non-verbal thinking styles]
• Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone, “Seep” [poetry: suppression of stims and natural movement]
• Meda Kahn, “Difference of Opinion” [fiction: very intense ableism and responses to it, forced medical procedures, being an adult and falling in love when very visibly disabled/nonspeaking, also I love this story]
• E, “Undercover Autistic” [personal essay: navigating the world of passing and disclosure]
• Luna Lindsey, “Touch of Tides” [fiction: jobs, research, and workplace interactions from a more outwardly successful character’s perspective]

You’ll notice that I’ve supplemented the fiction list with a few essays and blog posts available online when there was an issue I wanted to include but didn’t have a good story or poem for. And there are many more blogs and essays I could have added. If you’re paying close attention you’ll also notice that this list is not very intersectional. If you look back in my autism news posts you’ll find articles about autism and race, gender (although my list is mostly female anyway so that should give you a start on that issue), sexual orientation, and other differences. You’ll also find many good articles on what it’s like to be autistic and go through specific challenging experiences such as grief, depression, burnout, bullying, intensive ABA and childhood abuse – as well as things like parenthood, religion, and being an activist. I didn’t add all of these things to the list simply because then the number of articles on the list would have ended up overwhelming everything else, and that’s not what you asked for! But they are worth reading!

What do you guys think of this list? Do you have more story and poetry recommendations? Share ’em in the comments! If they are new to me, I might even end up reviewing them later!

Today’s question is by Andi C Buchanan:

This is a bit my pet topic at the moment, so I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts: is it useful/helpful/important/problematic to diagnose fictional characters as autistic where the author has not signified them as such (and particularly in works written before such diagnoses/labels/identities existed), and how does this tie in with discussion of the validity of self versus professional diagnosis?

This is a question where the answer seemed obvious to me at first (YES OF COURSE you can diagnose fictional characters), but I’m struggling with how to express it.

Some thoughts:

• It is important to be able to identify with people in the media who are like you in some way, especially if it’s a socially stigmatized way and the character is a positive representation
• Some authors write characters that are marked as autistic, but write them in really problematic or insulting ways
• Some authors write characters that are marked as autistic and are sort of okay, but are full of the medical model and strongly othered or stereotyped
• Some authors write characters that are cool, and behave a lot like the way an autistic person would behave in real life
• Some authors write characters that are cool, and behave a little bit according to autistic stereotypes, and a little bit not, and are likely not an accurate representation, but are cool enough and just close enough to being autistic that many autistic readers really strongly want to identify with them (I think this is what is going on with Sherlock fandom, for instance)
• Sometimes these authors with cool characters mark the character as autistic, and sometimes they don’t
• If we say that we can’t armchair diagnose people, we are effectively saying that autistic people are allowed to identify with the really problematic, medical-model characters, but not with the cool characters who act a lot like good autism representation but happen not to be explicitly marked that way
• That seems obviously wrong to me

Also:

• There are various reasons why an author might write an autistic-seeming character but not mark them as autistic
• The author might strongly believe that the character is not supposed to be autistic
• The author might be trying to write about a related neurotype which is not quite autism but very similar
• The author might not know enough about autism to know that their character seems autistic
• The author might be afraid of getting into big discussions of disability politics, and might think that the only way to avoid these is to avoid explicitly marking the character
• The author might be afraid of not selling as many books (or getting as many ratings, or whatever) if they start explicitly talking about autism
• There are lots of other reasons
• Just because a character is not marked as autistic does not necessarily mean that diagnosing them is a violation of what the author intended
• On TV there are also characters who are created by more than one person – for instance, written by a team of writers and then brought to life by an actor
• The different people involved in creating a character might have different opinions about whether the character is autistic
• (This is part of what’s going on with Sheldon Cooper, for instance)
• So there isn’t even necessarily one single author with one single intent that readers must adhere to

And:

• People in fandom have “headcanon” and infer things or even just make things up about their favourite characters all the time
• Even if it blatantly contradicts what the author intended
• If you think headcanon is okay but head-diagnosis is not, then you have a double standard
• Because a fan diagnosis is really just headcanon about what a character’s neurotype might be
• The only reason to object to fan diagnosis but not headcanon is if you think disability is somehow sacred and special and can only ever be talked about by experts lest we Get Something Wrong
• But for a lot of us, disability is just a part of life
• And experts are sometimes wrong, especially if they are stuck in the medical model
• Autism experts do and say a lot of hurtful things (#notallautismexperts but a lot of them do this) and are not always aware of the full lived experience of the people they study – which is why we have so much self-diagnosis and so many people slipping through the diagnosis cracks in the first place
• Given their track record in real life, I don’t see any reason to let such experts dictate what we can and can’t have in our headcanon

This is not to say that headcanon can’t be problematic. Like if someone has a terrible stereotype in their head and diagnoses people according to the terrible stereotype even if they act nothing like how a real autistic person would act. But I think that when problems like that happen, they are best dealt with individually by the rest of fandom, not by some pronouncement that you Shouldn’t Diagnose Fictional People Ever.

I also think that the benefit of us getting to decide for ourselves what characters we identify with outweighs the cost of any problematic headcanons that might get thrown around too.

So that’s what I am thinking, in general.

(January is now half over, but if you’re late to the party, you can still pick a January blogging topic here!)

Today’s question is a second one from Joyousmenma93:

examples of infantilizing disabled people and the evils of doing so.

Whee! The ideas behind this topic are actually ideas that interest me a great deal.

Since I was just talking about narratives in my last post, it might help to think of infantilization as a narrative. The narrative is called Disabled People Are Children, or more precisely, “disabled adults are still basically children, and should be treated that way.”

To understand why so many people think this way, we need to do a little bit of Developmental Psychology.

From birth to adulthood, most people grow, and part of this growth is learning skills. In any given culture, there is a specific set of skills – intellectual, physical, practical, emotional, social – that almost every abled person learns. And most abled people will learn these skills at about the same rate. For example, there is a certain age at which most babies learn to crawl and then walk.

People developed the concept of IQ by essentially measuring a person’s skills and comparing them to the skills of other people their age. People who had learned more than average for their age had a higher IQ, and people who had learned less than average had a lower one.

Psychologists noticed that some people were behind average for their age in many different skills at once. So they started talking about “mental age”. For example, if someone was answering IQ questions in the way that an average eight-year-old would, psychologists would say they had a “mental age” of eight, even if they were actually six or twelve or some other age.

There is a very, very limited sense in which talking about people in these terms can be useful. For example, if someone reads about as well as an average 10-year-old, and you have important information to write down for them, you’d want to make sure that it is written in a way that an average 10-year-old could understand. As long as ages are only benchmarks of particular skills and nothing else – not value judgements, not statements of the person’s true essence, etc – they can be a useful shorthand for talking about these skills.

In fact, we have a cultural understanding that sometimes people don’t act exactly as we’d expect for their age, and that this can be okay. We use phrases like “He’s young at heart” or “She has an old soul” to say that someone acts in a way we don’t associate with their real age.

The problem with all this, though, is when we start thinking that people with the mental skills of children are actually children. Because in real life, a child is not just a mini person whose skills happen to be less developed. A child is a person who has to be cared for and controlled by others.

As adults, we have to keep children safe, even if that means sometimes doing things that they don’t like. We decide what they should be learning in school, what they should be eating, where and when they can play and whom they can and can’t play with. We decide what it is and isn’t appropriate for them to watch or read. We try to hide information from them about how the world works. When they are sick, we talk to doctors about how they are feeling and make the appropriate medical decisions. It’s possible to make these decisions in a bad or abusive way, but even a good parent has to make them a lot of the time, especially with a young child.

It’s acceptable in our culture (although I wish it wasn’t) to talk to children in a condescending, sing-song voice, to ignore their stated wishes, and to make all sorts of decisions for their own good regardless of how they feel about it.

But it’s not appropriate to treat an adult this way – even if they are a disabled adult. A disabled adult may not have a very high IQ, or they may need help with certain things that abled grown-ups don’t need help with, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to make decisions for them in the way we would do for a child.

And when people believe that Disabled People Are Children, they do exactly that.

Here is a very lurid example. It’s not okay for children to have sex. Having sex with a child is a terrible crime. So sometimes, when people believe that Disabled People Are Children, they try to stop disabled people from having sex – even when the disabled people are grown-ups who can clearly communicate that they would like to. This has bad consequences, like people in institutions being forcibly separated from the people they fall in love with, or even forcibly sterilized. Disabled people often aren’t given sex education when their abled peers are, because the people caring for them think it’s too icky and too “mature”, and then this results in the disabled people not knowing how to have sex safely when they want to, and not knowing how to recognize and report sexual abuse.

This is not okay. It’s also not okay for people to talk over disabled adults, ignore their stated wishes, make their medical and living decisions for them, stop them from reading or seeing or saying things that might be “inappropriate”, or control their lives in countless other ways. Yet people do these things, all the time, because they believe that Disabled People Are Children and that they have to be cared for as one would for a child.

People who have survived this sort of behaviour are often really, really sensitive about being referred to as children. Even if you talk about their age in a way that would be ok for most abled people – like calling them “young at heart” – some people will be really upset by this, because it’s too close to home, and too many people have hurt them by genuinely treating them like children.

Not everyone who is disabled has been through this specific set of experiences. I haven’t, and so I don’t really mind when people point out things I do that are a little bit childish, or ways in which I seem young. But I’m pretty lucky not to have had those experiences.

Moreover, when you’re writing a story, you have to think not just about who will be upset, but about what narratives you are reinforcing. If you describe disabled characters in a way that could make people think they are really more like children than adults, then you are in danger of reinforcing the Disabled People Are Children narrative.

Ways of doing this include:

• Directly describing your disabled characters as childish, or as “like children”
• Describing your disabled characters in ways that are usually only used for children, like by calling them little and cute a lot
• Uncritically using concepts like “mental age” that are used to reinforce the Disabled People Are Children narrative in real life
• Showing abled characters treating your disabled characters like children, and not clearly showing why this isn’t okay
• Drawing excessive attention to childlike, youthful, or immature mannerisms in a disabled character
• Drawing excessive attention to childlike interests and behaviours, such as playing with toys, and not also showing that the disabled person has grown-up interests, too. (It’s okay for grown-ups to play with toys! And abled grown-ups can do this too! But if it is written carelessly with a disabled character, it can be used as a shorthand for the character being “really a child”, and that’s not okay. If you don’t understand the distinction here, you might want to steer clear of it for now.)
• Assuming that a disabled character can’t understand their situation well enough to make their own decisions

All of these things can be considered infantilization, and they’re not good ideas.

The bottom line is that disabled grown-ups are grown-ups, and they should be treated that way. If you’re not giving them every bit as much respect as you would give an abled grown-up, you’re probably doing it wrong.