Unfortunately I don’t have the energy to put together some info for the mega this week, hopefully I can pull together something for next week though. As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
That’s nice. I hope to find cool people like that again.
Gender isn’t real. My theory is that when we autists reflect on the idea our bottom up processing makes it easy to experience that emptiness, whereas NTs will project their social standards and absorbed ideas as truth. Nothing is bad about not caring about your presentation and such, but if you find that the patriarchal mold has constrained you and trying other things makes you happier then that’s great too.
Good luck.
I’m basically a gender abolitionist but I hesitate to say that even in disabled spaces. I mentioned as much in one of the many weekly “I don’t feel like my assigned gender” posts on /r/autism and someone got all spicy saying “here we go with patriarchy bad again” and I just didn’t have the energy for it lol. They were trying to defend gender from the perspective of feminism activism, but like if the patriarchy didn’t exist, social constructs like gender wouldn’t exist, therefore, we wouldn’t have a need for activism in the way it exists currently. Basically gender is a tool by the patriarchy to arbitrarily assign oppression to certain classes in society and now I can’t paint my fingernails pink without chuds side-eyeing me lol.
But that’s all to say I don’t really wanna minimize our comrades who are on their own gender journeys. I just want people to be allowed to be happy as the people they are. I just think I’m sometimes kinda “girly” feeling but I donno what that means.
I think we’re on the same page but I just want to gently remind you that for some people, gender is really really important. Like, critical to their survival and something they have fought upstream against society for over many years of suffering and hardship.
I’m enbie and to me, on a personal level, gender is genuinely unimportant to my own identity but when I talk about the abolition of gender I try to frame it in terms of something like abolishing enforced gender or abolishing gender norms because I don’t want to unintentionally signal to anyone, least of all to certain trans comrades, that I’m coming to steal their gender from them. All I want is for gender to be optional and based on exactly how the individual feels at that particular moment; you can look how you want, you can act how you prefer, and you can be the gender(s) that you feel and none of these things have to “align” and anybody who tries to tell you that you aren’t permitted to do something/that you have to do something/that you’re doing it wrong can go straight to hell because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they’re gonna get their dental record abolished.
I get how it feels because for myself, my experience of my own gender is summed up by one big fucking meh. But I can’t univeralise my own experience of being gender’s distant acquaintance and I absolutely do not want to replace gender normativity with agender normativity since that’s just gonna be the same shit, different texture for plenty of people, especially trans people, for whom gender really does matter. I’m coming for the normativity; I’m not coming for your gender.
but like if the patriarchy didn’t exist, social constructs like gender wouldn’t exist
I don’t want to get into the weeds on the ontology of the social construct of gender here however one thing that’s important to me is drawing upon Foucault’s concept of reverse discourse, especially to do with the term queer; without cishet-normativity, the label queer would not exist. However the original discourse of the label has been subverted and it has been thoroughly reclaimed as a symbol of pride, of unity, and ultimately of power across the queer community. With this in mind, I think the reclamation of the term queer has been even more radical than it would have been if we simply managed to abolish its use from our culture.
So, for the people who are engaging in a parallel sort of reclamation of gender on a personal level, because for most/all of their upbringing they had faced a constant barrage of proscriptive gender norms from all angles, they bore down against that great and terrible dragon of gender normativity whose scales glittered with the accretion of a thousand years’ of gender normative values—each scale being inscribed with a gendered “Thou shalt!”—and they managed to fucking slay that dragon with a resounding and triumphant “I am!”… I have to ask myself, are these not the people who embody the very same spirit of revolutionary reclamation that I described above?
In my opinion, if you slay that dragon then you get to do whatever you want with the dragon’s spoils. You are the hero in this story; I’m not going to deny you the glory that is by rights yours.
I’m enbie so gender is genuinely unimportant
Is a minor point, but it reads (to me) like enby = gender is unimportant
but I just want to gently remind you that for some people, gender is really really important.
Absolutely. That’s why I don’t want to step on the toes of people who are in that camp. Their gender identity is as important to me as it is to them. Something that stuck out with that gender accelerationist manifesto is that just because we may strive for gender abolition, doesn’t mean gender identity will go away, it just means it will not longer be a tool to be used by the ruling class(of course ideally the ruling class will be gone) in order to put us in arbitrary boxes. My genderness is gonna be completely different to the next person’s genderness. I don’t wanna seem like I’m coming as if I’m saying someone’s else’s genderness is pointless or anything. Apologies to anyone that might have read it that way.
I’m enbie and to me, on a personal level, gender is genuinely unimportant to my own identity but when I talk about the abolition of gender I try to frame it in terms of something like abolishing enforced gender or abolishing gender norms because I don’t want to unintentionally signal to anyone, least of all to certain trans comrades, that I’m coming to steal their gender from them. All I want is for gender to be optional and based on exactly how the individual feels at that particular moment; you can look how you want, you can act how you prefer, and you can be the gender(s) that you feel and none of these things have to “align” and anybody who tries to tell you that you aren’t permitted to do something/that you have to do something/that you’re doing it wrong can go straight to hell because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they’re gonna get their dental record abolished.
Ok it does sound we are on the same page :)
because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they’re gonna get their dental record abolished.
I have Foucault on my list to read but it probably won’t be for a year or 2 because of how backlogged I am but now I’m eager. And you dragon analogy is powerful. I guess at the end of the day, just because my genderness isn’t that important to me(I’m probably 60% AGAB and 40% meh, for comparison) doesn’t mean others’ gender identity should be invalidated.
Fascinating. I feel compelled to espouse my abolitionist views whenever someone makes it sound like they’re seeking a solid place of belonging on an arbitrary spectrum. I’m conscious of our large diversity, but sometimes I forget how many autists are libs. I’d probably end up arguing with those types, but yeah they are can be well intentioned.
To draw a parallel from my special interest: as the Buddha knows most linguistic truths are relative he does not tell everyone there is self or no self. It depends on the person what will be fruitful for their own path. He is wise and knows which relative truth will yield a more functional and productive perspective for those inquiring, and tells them such.
I read this last night and was having a hard time coming up with a worthy reply lol. I think my hesitation about being an abolitionist about anything is from pushback I’ve gotten online. I mentioned one time on /r/latestagecapitalism that I was a money abolitionist and people just weren’t having it. Bizarre behavior from a sub that was supposed to be “ran by commies” but in the end I marked it up to libs being on there wanting a reformed government instead, and people that just haven’t read any theory. I might have to be more in your face about it to others. I have close friends that are on various paths to the left that probably wouldn’t bat an eye if I said I’m a gender abolitionist.
I’m mostly an armchair philosopher and it’s somewhat a special interest of mine but more so with how it functions as a foundation to socialism. But I did take a side street into phenomenology and existentialism this summer. With that said, you Buddha line actually weighs quite a bit on some stuff I’ve been thinking about. Probably not in the Buddhist sense but I’ve had a really weird relationship with “the self” and I think “ego” because I mostly just feel like a thing in a human suit and I didn’t realize that was a thing until I started seeing it get brought up in autism spaces online. It almost feels like there is a conflict between what I am physically and what I am mentally. I’m not spiritual or anything but I just don’t know what that conflict is.
I guess this turned into more of a ramble. I’m so confused lol.
