Co-editor, "Sincerely, Your Autistic Child," out now from @BeaconPressBks! AEA stage manager of new plays & new musicals. Hiking, X-Files, cats, coffee.
Jun 24 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Here's the thing... a lot of non-autistic social signaling is based around giving maximum opportunity for saving face.
They're mostly, actually, not being oblique or confusing just for fun or to make things hard.
The thing about the double empathy problem is that it does actually go both ways.
Neurotypical/non-disabled people's social communication is based around slightly different sets of perceptions and priorities. It's not the way it is just for no reason.
May 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Was actually talking about this recently as it concerns trans rights.
It's just not true that the more repressive/restrictive position is automatically the older or more "traditional" one.
The role of the rise of Fundamentalism as a coherent movement in the 1920's, and of the Moral Majority, etc., in the 70's...it almost cannot be overestimated how much these movements contributed to the illusion that this is true. But it's not.
Jan 27, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Look, I also resent "Just get all the words right so you don't get yelled at" style activism. And it must suck to work really hard on something you thought was a good thing only to have it eviscerated on Twitter by people who don't know anything about you.
If some of these researchers are not able or willing or interested in developing a baseline familiarity w/ autistic communities, the neurodiversity movement, what some of the primary controversies are, and what reactions have been to certain kinds of research and *why*...
Jan 26, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
With the exception of a couple of notable, standout performances over the past few years, I agree this is a serious lack.
And I will go to my grave defending autistic "coded" characters as important and frequently more whole-heartedly representative of the experiences of older autistic people than, honestly, most of the younger, explicitly identified characters I see these days.
Apr 1, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Happy April.
Almost eight years ago, the @nytimes published this article about "The Kids Who Beat Autism."
I still think about these kids a lot.
nytimes.com/2014/08/03/mag…
They'd be in their 20's now.
I wonder how they are.
I wonder if anyone involved here still thinks that they're actually non-autistic.
Because I was just having an interesting discussion with a special ed teacher about this before I got blocked, and because my old post about telling your kids they're autistic is going around again...
KIDS often don't understand things, because they are kids. They haven't been alive that long. But non-disabled kids are assumed to be capable of gaining in understanding.
Feb 6, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Incidentally, the KF-94 is literally the only mask I can wear without some kind of hack or modification, although it's somewhat more onerous to take on and off, and for some reason it keeps getting caught in my eyelashes...
Cloth masks I have to sew on a metal nose strip. KN-95's have to have a piece of gaff tape over the row of perforations below the nose strip to keep my glasses from fogging.
N95's and the 3M Aura are completely unwearable to me.
Feb 5, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I suspect a lot of it's coming from people wearing masks under a very different set of circumstances than others.
For instance, it's not just going to the grocery store for me. It's not just if I go see a movie or something...
I sometimes have 12-hr workdays, and I have to be in a mask for all of it.
By hour 7 or so, I just hurt.
Mar 22, 2021 • 44 tweets • 8 min read
Okay, so.... I think we've been watching #TheXFiles "My Struggle" episodes wrong.
At least I have been.
The implications are leaving me both more and less frustrated, with MSIV especially. 1/
(This thread should be considered to contain major spoilers for seasons 10 & 11, if you haven't watched those all the way through yet.) 2/
Mar 3, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Okay, trying once again to find something out that I did not manage to find out last year...
In the Midwest, hot cross buns seem to be an Easter thing, and you can pretty much only get them during Holy Week, and you eat them on Easter Sunday...
In NYC, hot cross buns are a Lent thing, and if you wait until Holy Week, or God forbid, Easter, to try to get them, you will not get any.
I kept making this mistake until I figured this out...
Dec 24, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of the time when people say that neurodiversity "excludes" people w/ intellectual disabilities or high support needs or nonspeaking people, what they're really complaining about is that we refuse to exclude those people.
When we say "these are also fine & acceptable ways to be human" they assume we're discounting that some of us have more challenges or higher support needs than others of us do.
No, we're saying "these are also fine & acceptable ways to be human."
Jul 14, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I don't know who needs to hear this.
But wearing a mask is actually really physically difficult for some people. To the point of impossibility for some, while others may be able to acclimate to one over weeks or months or wear one for a limited amount of time.
If wearing a mask is hard for you, if it fucking sucks and you hate it but you're doing it anyway because you understand the evidence and importance, you're not a bad person and you're not making it up or imagining it. I get it.
Aug 19, 2019 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Everybody, listen.
I know you were taught that person-first language ("put the person before the disability") is always correct. I know. You were taught this when you became a teacher or doctor or when you worked with kids with disabilities.
The problem is that you were taught this by people who themselves were isolated and out of touch from disabled communities.
I don't really have the time or brain space to address every misconception and mistake in @Spectrum's hugely controversial article today, but I need to take issue very, very hard w/ the closing quote...
(Thread incoming)
"But he [playwright Alex Oates] has another suggestion: 'My aim and great wish was to help these parents and therefore their children,” he says about the play. 'If there was a way for those autistic voices to turn their outrage into advice for the parents, I’d love that.'" 2/
Feb 7, 2019 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
Okay, so fun story: I did my honors capstone paper in college on East Asian ritual puppetry traditions and their connection to continued social marginalization of puppet theater practitioners.... (1/?)
