SJW and autism

Post Reply New Topic

All is well in the bunker of asexual solitude.

Maybe they were just doing that so they could be found by people searching for both "pansexual" and "bisexual", for example.

Similar to what I said before, so many people say that people adapt certain labels to be "special", but no one provides any evidence that this is their motivation.

http://www.npr.org/2016/11/27/503520811 ... -around-it

Have you seriously never heard of certain neo-nazi named Richard Spencer?

I know he claims to have coined the term, but I'd heard it long before I'd heard of him, and being used to describe ideologies that are not white supremacist.

Oh yeah. Sort of like what they do on ebay to increase the number of people who find their item in their search results.

The trouble is, OkCupid search only has the basics like straight, gay and bi.

^ i read that, and i think about the complaints and comments people have given, about WP's very own lack of gender options besides "male" and "female" (that is, when even those actually worked).

some websites have an option where it is a blank field, where you can write whatever you like. though i wonder how easily abused that might be on here.

We'd crown dozens of new kings, queens and emperors overnight if the option were added to insert your own gender identity and pronouns.

I'm pretty put off by the ego wars that some people seem so engaged to fight for, but I also wonder, why should anyone care how other people identify themselves? That is, in relation to gender and sexuality. There are certain things like having four or five different labels for basically the same thing (agender, gender-neutral, neutrois, etc.), which make things complicated and separate people rather than unite them (which may be the goal after all, if what one is pursuing is to be different from everyone else in order to feel special). Identifying under a gender-related or sexuality-related label outside of the binary norm is not really the issue, is it? Identifying as having a disorder or as being in the spectrum just for the "I feel different" special points is another issue altogether. It's like people saying "OMG I'M SO OCD" just because they have small quirks. To me it just reflects pure ignorance, and attention-seeking, whereas many of the people that identify as outside of the binary gender/sexuality norm may not even make a fuss out of it (i.e. myself).

So is gender nonconforming now considered to be a gender? If a girl want to dress and act boyishly there's nothing wrong with that but the term for that used to be tomboy and it wasn't considered to be a gender.

The way that one dresses and acts does not necessarily reflect the way one feels inside. I'm guessing that gender is a much more abstract thing, and as such may vary beyond the social constructs of "boy" vs. "girl". I don't identify with any gender at all, and that in itself may be considered a gender (agender); to me any type of expectation or norm associated with how my body is shaped / my genitals makes no sense at all. This is also seen in other cultures, where three or more genders are considered standard (see for instance here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender). I do however not know how gender identity works or what's the logic behind it.

In terms of how it personally affects themselves, they shouldn't. That only becomes a issue when we start making rules or legislation about how people should be addressed. However, that doesn't answer your question. What does answer your question is the rest of your post, albeit in something of a roundabout manner:



You clearly understand why you care when the ignorance relates to something that's relevant to you personally (in this case autism). It's not for me to ask whether or not you "should" care, but I recognise that you do. Perhaps you're asking the wrong question. Rather than worrying about what people should and should not do, wouldn't it be more useful to ask why?

Why does it bother some people that there are those who wish to have their personal identity accepted as a minority, with all the rights and privileges that entails?

Why does it bother some people that issues are being presented as indisputable when there is no scientific consensus - or even any firm scientific evidence - especially those people who work or study in a relevant field?

And so on.

You're couching this in terms of "you shouldn't have opinions on x because it doesn't bother me" - though I concede that may not be your intention.

Which answers one (or more) of the multiple why questions. Some of us don't accept that gender should be expanded to include arbitrary alternatives to "male" and "female" that are based purely on the subjective manner in which an individual perceives themselves.

I understand where you're coming from, but that was not really my point. My point is that when it comes to a societal construct such as gender, which is ultimately based on an abstract feeling of identity, it is hard for me to understand why should I care what people identify with; that becomes even more apparent when cross-cultural studies find different standard accepted gender identities in different cultures (thus, we only divide in boy v. girl because that's our cultural standard).

When it comes to something that has to do with mental health, or any other type of health limitation or mental diversity, to me it seems like a different thing altogether. When people superficially identify with a mental disorder (example of "omg I'm so OCD"), what ultimately happens is that the idea around the disorder, limitation, or diversity changes within society. If being on the spectrum is considered as just being a little quirky, the actual limitations that people on the spectrum face are undermined. The same happens with other disorders such as migraine; people use the word migraine as a synonym of headache, and people with migraine may be faced with the everyone has migraines once in a while, not taking into account that migraine is not just headache, but a plethora of other symptoms too. This just reinforces the ignorance around a certain limitation, undermining the impact that it has on people that actually have to live with it.

p.s.: I'm aware I write in a very roundabout manner, sorry about that - I hope that my point comes across, though.

Last edited by Tripodologia on 01 Feb 2017, 6:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

The even more relevant question would be why don't you accept that gender should be expanded beyond the male vs. female binary? If the main worry is about having 2398439 possibilities to choose from when having to indicate gender, that could be solved with male / female / other.

To the extent of "what people identify with", I agree, but I also accept that there are people who have reasonable objections, though they aren't always especially politic when raising them.



Your point comes across pretty clearly, and roundabout isn't necessarily a bad thing!

The same logic might be applied to having a plethora of gender identities. Homosexuals have fought long and hard to gain acceptance for a condition (of being) that, no matter if you believe it's nature, nurture or a little of both, is beyond their means to change. It isn't outside the bounds of reason that a significant percentage of "otherkin", "two-spirit", "pangender" etc are suffering some sort of mental health problem, and that by piggy-backing on the existing "queer" movement they're poisoning the well for, as you put it, people that actually have to live with it.

A lot of these self-labels come across as seeking status that isn't earned, and I think it's reasonable to oppose such, however minimal the impact on oneself.

I do come from the generation where there were girls, boys, tomboys, queers, bi, and Christina Jorgenson. All these identities did seem to come from out of nowhere and it does seem weird to me. It would be easy for me conclude most of it is SJW's redefining language and attention seekers. But nobody in my generation including me had any logical reason to think there were autistics around when we were growing up and because of that people my age often complain that autism and other labels are fad diagnosis around to stroke special snowflakes ego and line the pockets of big Pharma.

Maybe a lot of these identities are being used primarily to stroke egos but maybe like autism these people existed in institutions and with false labels and what seems like an epidemic, a tsunami of labels it is just people getting long overdue recognition or maybe and probably it is a combination of the two. All I can say for certain as a "typical" cis white straight male is I don't know s**t and most of my generation probably should stop butting in.