#and we shouldn't have to define ourselves by our suffering ANYWAY

[liminalweirdo]

I didn't want to continue the other post but I think that connecting transness/dysphora (Not all trans people experience dysphoria and that's okay!) and autism/disability (not all autistic people are disabled and that's okay!) is... not great.

One is, according to many autistic people, simply not right. Autism is a developmental disorder, it's a disability.

Being trans, with or without dysphoria, is fundamentally different from a disorder. Saying "you're born with the autism neurotype, but your disabilities make you have clinical DSM V ASD" is not the same as saying "you're born queer and your gender influences your transness." It has this untone (accidentally or not) of "if you remove dysphoria the trans person is happy/better so if you remove disability the autistic person is happy/better" and this directly feeds into the incorrect idea that disabled lives are somehow Less Than.

Like yes autistic people slip through the cracks of diagnosis all the time and that desperately needs to change, but the autism community has never required a diagnosis to welcome people into the community. You don't need to show your disability/diagnosis papers, that's not what's happening.

Of course we should be listening to autistic experiences outside of our own, and we should be open-minded to people who feel differently to us, but I just think that using trans-centered words (transmed) and translating them to autism words (autimed) is a dangerous step, and not just because language and politics centering trans people is so inflammatory right now.

We can't create a community where someone sees the word 'disabled' on an autism blog and equates that autistic person to a transmed person just because they call themselves disabled.

Once we start using words like 'terf' or 'autimed' in our community we're already dividing ourselves in irreparable ways.

Also there's a danger in using trans terminology to talk about autistic stuff because they aren't the same. I know there's a big overlap between autistic people and trans people, but that doesn't mean transness and autism are the same/should use similar terms.

Disability =/= bad in the same way that dysphoria = bad

For one, autism is a developmental disorder/disability. Whether someone wants to call themselves disabled or not, that's what autism is defined as, AND most of the autism community agrees. We can't forget that queer people used to be called mentally ill (incorrect, not backed by science, and queer people did not agree that it was true). So equating autism with transness in some ways puts queer people right back in that box of "disabled, mentally ill" where those terms really mean "mentally deficient," and are used by non-queers against queer people to prevent them from being able to make their own decisions.

(disclaimer: Obviously this does happen to some autistic people. Some autistic people are unjustly stripped of their autonomy and abused by the people who are supposed to take care of them, but that has less to do with a fault in autism itself and everything to do with the people who are abusing them. The fault is in the abuser, not the autistic person.)

Autistic people who use the term disabled are not the same as trans(med) people who say you need to experience dysphoria/go to therapy/be depressed to be properly trans. Transness and autism are different things, and we probably shouldn't use trans-centered words like autimed to describe people in our community, autism and transness simply do not function the same way.

Disability is going to feel different and more/less disabling to every autistic person no matter your autism levels, your verbality, etc. Like, we need to make sure to respect one another. No one is less autistic or more autistic than anyone else. Autistic people don't suffer more/less because of diagnosis/levels/(dis)abilities, it's going to be unique to all of us.

Anyway, I think we should continue to keep the channels of communication open, because if we don't take care of each other, other people are going to do it for us, and they might do it in ways that harm us. Nothing about us without us etc.

[serialreblogger]

begging y'all to stop reblogging posts about the queer community that are clearly written by transphobes/exclusionists

[ineffectualdemon]

You're LGBTQ+ status isn't defined by how much abuse you suffer.

Like you're not less queer if your family supports you

No, the moment that proves you're part the alphabet mafia (as they refer to it on tiktok) is sitting with a bunch of straight and cis people and listening to them talk about who they find attractive or traditional gender stuff or whatever and you are just sat there like

Then they turn to you so you can talk about your opinion on straight people/cisgendered stuff and that makes you internally panic because either you haven't realised you're queer but don't know what to say OR you have realised but you don't know these people well enough to talk to them about it so inside you're just:

But outwardly you keep your cool and you think you manage to convincingly lie way out of the moment but in actuality you're just:

And you shouldn't get away with it but you do because straight and cis gendered people are bad at noticing us

Anyway that's an experience anyone who is LGBTQ+ has experienced at least once. Including our Ace, Aro, and Nonbinary pals who definitely had conversations about sexuality and gender that made them go

So no more defining ourselves by trauma

We are defined by awkward lunch table encounters

*this is obviously a joke post but ace and aro and enby people are part of the queer community and that's not something I will debate