The Small World of Words

Neuroskeptic posted recently about this online project called "The Small World of Words," which is an effort to create the largest word-association database ever by having lots of people complete this interactive exercise.

They show you fourteen words, one at a time, and you type in the first three words that come to your mind in the three empty fields below the prompt-word. 

If nothing comes to your mind, you're supposed to type "no response." I had one word where that happened (the word was "grief", and instead of seeing an image I could describe, or a color, or hearing the word echo and mutate into various sound-alikes, I actually felt an attenuated version of grief itself), so I entered that into all three fields.

They do want everyone taking the test to be a fluent English speaker, but other than that there are no restrictions. And you can be from anywhere, and you don't have to be a native speaker --- just fluent.

Probably, if your English is good enough for you to be reading this blog, you can participate in this study.

My Favorite Thing!

(Spoiler alert: the subject of this post is not actually my favorite thing.)

I just discovered a blogger I find interesting; her name is Gretchen Koch* and she has a Ph. D.  in the cognitive science of religion. She mostly writes about that.

One of the things she writes about when she's not writing about the psychological underpinnings of religion and ethics, though, is feminism. A while back she wrote a pretty decent, thoughtful, well-argued post on objectification (a much-discussed topic, on which she managed the not-inconsiderable feat of adding something new).

That post drew the predictable ire from the knuckle-dragging community, but it took a really bizarre form:

After noticing a number of hits here that came from [sexist douchebag]'s blog, I returned to see that he had written a follow-up post which talked about my post. Want to guess what it said? I'll make it a multiple-choice question:

A. You know what? I am actually reading too much into this, and should go with the simplest explanation rather than making other men's attraction all about my particular ideological agenda.

B. You know what? I don't think I was given a fair shake -- there are actually differences in the appearance of feminists vs. non- or anti-feminists, and while I didn't go to much trouble to articulate these or why they should exist, that's a factor that should be taken into account here.

C. You know what? It's really weird that I didn't make a distinction between "attractive" and "attractive to me," since I can only speak for myself and since (as with everybody, whether they admit it or not) my own perception of what I consider attractive is shaped by my ideological convictions.

D. You know what? Gretchen's ugly. And probably autistic.

I'll give you a moment to think before answering. 

Done? Yeah, I didn't think it would take long. The answer is ... D!

Yes, it's my favorite rhetorical tactic in the world, Disagreeing by Diagnosing!

The argument assertion in the post she links (which I don't recommend reading, unless you've got a few dozen extra brain cells you won't miss) is that all feminists, and all male anti-feminists calling themselves "men's rights activists" (read this blog if you are unfamiliar with the genus), are autistic.

Here is normally where I would spell out what the writer is arguing, how he or she is using autism as a metaphor, and what the implications of that metaphor are, but it's not being used as a metaphor in this instance. He's just saying "all feminists are autistic," and that the only reason they are feminists is because they are so bad at social interaction that they have become completely alienated from men, and from society in general.

I was actually really conflicted about posting this, because it's a really stupid instance of Disagreeing by Diagnosing, and there isn't actually much to pick apart and criticize in it, but I've developed a collector's mentality about this fallacy, so I feel compelled to post about every instance of it that I hear about. 

The quality of the blog may suffer as a result of this compulsion, but gosh darn it, at least you'll know just how widespread this fallacy is!  

*Presumably not related to Charles and David Koch, though if she were I probably wouldn't hold it against her.

Two Quick Links about Why the Fight over Evolution Matters

So, apparently Kevin Drum, a political commentator I don't read but who is apparently somewhat well-known, has written an article for Mother Jones declaring the fight over how whether biology is taught in public schools an irrelevant sideshow. 


I was nonplussed by this. Obviously, it's not the most important issue in the world --- it doesn't pose an existential threat the way climate change, peak oil/peak everything, overpopulation and hunger do, and it doesn't have the dire social consequences (or moral urgency) of, say, restricting access to contraception, the mass incarceration of people of color and poor people, increasing economic inequality or the deliberate demolition of the welfare state --- but I still felt like it had some importance that went beyond mere cultural border-policing*.


Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon and PZ Myers at Pharyngula both responded to Drum's article, and each of them made points that rang true for me, and helped explain why his statement bothered me.


Amanda:

I have to admit, I'm boggled at Kevin Drum's reaction to the news that nearly half of Americans are young Earth creationists ... . He completely misreads the situation and frankly does so in a way that I personally felt thrown under the bus.

... 

Kevin takes it as a given that fights over what's taught in high school are strictly about symbolism and have no real importance. I suspect that's a much easier view to take if you're the beneficiary of a good public school in a blue area or lucky enough to have gone through or been able to put your own kids through private school. For someone who went to a rural high school in Texas, the notion that high school doesn't matter strikes me as ridiculous in the extreme. 

The reason conservatives target high schools (and junior high schools and elementary schools) isn't because they're playing for peanuts. On the contrary, conservatives understand something liberals don't, which is that if you get people while they're young, you usually have them for life. This is also, incidentally, why conservatives pay more attention to pop culture than liberals. Liberals are great people --- I'm one of them! --- but  we have a tendency towards preening individualism and therefore discount the importance of things like what's in the classroom and what's on TV because we personally feel we're iconoclasts who aren't affected by it. Which can, in this case, cause us to neglect to remember that in fact this is the air that most people breathe, and the quality of that air matters. 

I also had strong feelings of no you're wrong when I read the paragraph in Drum's article where he dismisses "a 10th grade understanding of evolution" as something so piddling as to be dispensed with entirely, so much does it pale in comparison to the understanding of evolution one gets (presumably) in college, or in books on evolutionary biology. PZ, along with a slew of other biology professors in his comments and at Mother Jones, takes him to task for this; they write that, no, actually, they have noticed a change in how readily their students grasp what they have to teach. Almost as if high school curricula were geared toward preparing the students for college ... 


Anyway, what felt unfair to me was his assumption that, if people needed the knowledge, they could always pick it up elsewhere. This made me angry, because for many people there is no "elsewhere," or at least not one that is immediately accessible without guidance. 


(Who has tried to teach themselves a completely novel subject by checking out books on it from the library? Isn't it hard to figure out which books will be the ones you need? Technical books are often overly specific and assume you've already got a grounding in the subject, and are interested in exploring a particular question within it, and books for laypeople might not be thorough enough, and also might not be trustworthy). 


As for college, well, not everyone goes there, most of the people who go there will never encounter evolution in the classroom --- I didn't, and I majored in a biological science! --- and, again, college professors have enough to do without having to burn up lecture time with remedial material and correcting misinformation. Plus, not all colleges are created equal; some 


To top it off, what you know before college helps determine where you go, whether you go at all, and what you study! College is expensive, and for many prospective students (I know I felt this way when I was applying to colleges) the size of the scholarship you can get makes the decision for you. Scholarships for merit, as opposed to need (and there will always be more people who can't really afford college than there are people officially deemed too poor to afford college on their own), depend on how one performs on standardized tests. And what does standardized test performance depend on? What you learned in high school.


There's more: as Amanda also points out, what you're exposed to in high school shapes your interests and aspirations:

[M]y high school biology course didn't teach evolution. Without evolution, biology actually doesn't make sense, and instead it's just an anatomy class. ... I had no idea how fascinating biology actually was until I was an adult, and long past any chance of starting on that as a career path. Not that I think I would, but you can easily see someone like me making that choice as a young woman, but not really being able to because I was never offered that option in a realistic sense to begin with. 

(As someone who did study biology, and who loves Amanda's writing about science- and skepticism-related topics as much as I do her feminist writing, I can see it. Her interest in the subject is obvious, as is her commitment to find out what's true and how we know it's true. While she won't --- can't --- go into the kind of technical details I sometimes do here, her grasp of general, foundational principles is firm enough that I can easily forget she does not possess a biology degree herself.)


To shift to another aspect of why Drum's assessment is so horribly, horribly wrong, I quote PZ:

[T]his is going to be the century of dependence on the sciences. Climate change is going to hit us all; environmental crises are going to rise up all over the place; we're going to face shortages of energy and fresh water; emerging diseases will be a major concern; new biomedical technologies will cause cultural shocks; the whole world is going to change. Most people, I agree, will not be doing the research that leads to changes, and most of these problems will require political and social changes to correct, but how are you going to convince people to, for instance, change their fuel consumption habits when they're in complete denial of basic facts? How can you expect people to appreciate the importance of ecology and global interactions when you tell them that evolution doesn't matter? How will you get them to make rational decisions to control pandemics when they can't comprehend probability, epidemiology, and viral/bacterial evolution on even the most basic level? 

Most importantly, though, this utilitarian attitude that all that matters is what people can directly use in their day-to-day life is a denial of the Enlightenment and principles on which our country was founded. It's a rejection of the liberal idea that human beings should be well-rounded and informed individuals --- the informed citizenry that should be the foundation of a democracy. We can't expect everyone to be biologists or poets or political scientists, but we should expect that one outcome of a public education is an appreciation of the breadth of human endeavor, and at least a smattering of the fundamentals of a wide range of subjects, sufficient that, to make it practical again, students can make informed career decisions and understand a basic argument from evidence from an expert. We lack that now. And to wave away a simple but essential starting fact about our existence as unimportant is deeply offensive.     

I would add to his first paragraph that you don't have to wait for some futuristic nightmare scenario for these things to affect people's lives. Disease-causing bacteria are already becoming resistant to a whole lot of the antibiotics we use to fight them; lots and lots of species have disappeared or are disappearing; sensitive ecosystems are already being stressed, some to the breaking point by human activity, and humans are already failing to see why they should care***.

The picture he paints in that first paragraph has already come to pass, in the way that the proverbial camel is already in the tent, he just needs to take a few steps forward before it becomes obvious to everyone.

I would also add something else that I think denying evolution does: it makes it easier to think of humans as separate from, and above, the natural world and all those other animals. It allows us to think that what we do to it, to them, will never get back to us. 

(You don't have to deny evolution to get to that mindset, though: I see it arising just as readily from the erroneous view of evolution as a teleological process of development from simple to complex organisms, with humans sitting triumphantly at the apex. I've posted before about my annoyance with this picture of evolution.)

*This is what Andrew Sullivan, another famous political commentator whom I know to be obtuse, thanks to driftglass, an obscure political blogger who is quite acute**, has called belief in creationism a "cultural signifier" that describes the group membership of the believer rather than what that person actually believes about reality. That whole line of reasoning makes me queasy, but even if he is right that no one actually believes the Earth is six thousand years old and every animal species living on it was molded from clay and animated with the breath of a god, if that is what they decide shall be taught to children as fact, in place of the full history of life on Earth (as much of it as we know, anyway) and an explanation of how life on Earth has changed as Earth itself has changed, then those children grow up with a much poorer understanding of the world around them. An idea can have consequences in the real world whether people truly believe it or not; all they need to is act as if they believe it. Also, Andrew Sullivan is dumb.

**Hee. I made a geometry pun.

***This is not, at all, meant to be an exhaustive list, or even a primer on any of those subjects. I just put a recent news/research story in every link to make the point that, yes, this stuff is happening, and it's not just one or two isolated incidents. 

So, Feministe has a pretty interesting post (responding to this article in the New York Times) about family dinner conversations, and how they shape a person's rhetorical style.


Here's how Jill describes her family's dinnertime ritual:

Even when I go home, still, a sit-down dinner and a long discussion is non-negotiable. The TV gets turned off. We don't answer the phone. There are no cell phones allowed at the table. There isn't a structured conversation --- we just talk. And since I come from a family of political junkies, the conversation inevitably turns to politics; since I also come from a family of people who like to push boundaries and challenge each other, the conversation inevitably turns into an argument. No one yells --- we aren't a yelling family --- but voices get raised and sarcasm gets thrown around and even though we're all lefty liberals we get deep into it.

And then we clean up and we watch some CNN and we all move on with our lives. It never occurred to me that dinner-time arguments over, say, farming subsidies or the proper legal treatment of child molesters could create lasting wounds or ongoing anger. Which is maybe why it's taken me years to figure out that, in the blogosphere, you can't come at someone hard in a comment section and expect that they understand you're challenging them because you respect them and find their views interesting, and that they will respond to your challenges and heated critiques with the same, and you'll both walk away still liking each other and not thinking about it much beyond, "Well that was an interesting discussion." Most people just think you're a flame-throwing asshole. I blame my parents.

One person, in comments, mentioned how they felt like the absence of any dinnertime conversation (or, really, any conversation at all beyond the most perfunctory) while they were growing up deprived them of the chance to develop any kind of rhetorical or conversational skills.


My own experiences are like Jill's in a lot of ways: my family, too, sits down for a home-cooked meal and unstructured conversation every night, and does not really consider any subject to be taboo. Certainly not politics, which is discussed frequently. But we don't argue like Jill's family does; we're more conflict-averse, we're not very emotionally expressive (indeed, we tend to be uncomfortable with strong emotions), and, for me at least, argument is not a style of discussion that I am very good at. My mind works slowly, taking time to unfold and absorb every aspect and ramification of whatever I have just been told (besides the fact that I don't think in words and need to "translate" something into the pictorial/abstract colors-and-shapes milieu of my thoughts, and auditory-processing issues mean it takes me longer to decode spoken language than written language, so in conversation I have a particularly long lag time between hearing and understanding), and any thoughts I might have in response to whatever I've just been told also take time to form themselves. I am thus in the position of not yet knowing what I think when it is time for me to speak. I may not even know what you've just said by the time you're done saying it and waiting for me to respond. 


To accommodate this, I tend to treat discussion less as a contest between ideas than as a process of discovering what each person's ideas are. 


Because I have often found that people's ideas are interconnected in unpredictable ways (including my own), just stating what one thinks about something isn't always enough. Sometimes if you say one thing, the person you're talking to proceeds as if you had said that thing, and a whole bunch of other things you haven't said and aren't sure you even understand. I have also made these assumptions about other people, thinking that I had found a word or phrase to express a bundle of concepts and then finding that, in the other person's lexicon, that word didn't come with all the connotations it carried in my head. So I try and identify the premises I am starting from, and the premises that I and my interlocutor hold in common. From there, I will try to explain how I get to whatever proposition we're debating from those premises, and will also listen to my friend (I can pretty much only do this with friends) draw me a similar map of his or her reasoning.


What Jill's post got me to realize is that this style of conversation, which it has taken me years to develop, might not solely be an accommodation of my cognitive and communicative quirks. It might also be something I have carried with me from childhood, modeled somewhat on the kind of dinnertime conversations my family has.


(Obviously, it couldn't be an exact copy of my family's conversational style, or I wouldn't have had to develop it, but I do feel that what I have jerry-rigged together for myself probably has roots in how my family communicates. It's an adapted version, but I am starting to see some shared features).


Anyway, if you were going to describe my family in terms of what kind of people they are (like Jill describes her family as political junkies), you'd probably call us science nerds. As much as we talk about politics, it's not the thing we talk about most. Most of our dinnertime conversation is of a technical nature, drawing on whatever field each of us is trained in (electromagnetics, chemistry, biology, medicine). Because we are not all trained in the same things, we often have to include a lot of background information leading up to whatever it is we want to discuss. (When my siblings and I were children, this was almost always our dad explaining something about electromagnetics, but now that I have my own body of knowledge and experience, I will sometimes find myself holding forth about chemistry or biochemistry). So my family tends to explain rather than argue, because many of the things we talk about require explanation before they can be discussed in any depth. 


I think now that habit, as much as my needing to slow conversations down and check repeatedly to make sure everyone is on the same page, has predisposed me to prefer a collaborative, expository conversational style to an adversarial, argumentative one, and to feel myself disadvantaged when I do find myself in the middle of an actual debate.     

Link Roundup: What I've Been Reading

I'm working on a post that has surprised me with how long it's taken to write; it's a researchy post, but it's only dealing with one article, and the experiment that article describes is a fairly simple one. I thought I'd be able to knock it off in a day or two, but instead I find I keep having to provide more and more background information about the methods the researchers used, and the enzyme they're studying, and the physiological processes that enzyme participates in.

(This experience has led me to reflect on the particular nature of the language used in the "Methods" sections of biomedical research articles; it's clear as day if you know what they're talking about, but it's a sort of shorthand, with as much precise meaning as possible crammed into the smallest possible space, which makes it all but impenetrable to someone not versed in those techniques. I think I might have to post about that, too ...)

Anyway, while I've been working on that I've also been reading blogs, and this is what's impressed me recently:

s. e. smith has written an indispensable post at Tiger Beatdown about Hillary Adams, the brave and resourceful young woman with cerebral palsy who filmed her abusive father (who is, horrifyingly, a family court judge) beating her back when she lived with him, and has just recently posted the footage on YouTube. s. e.'s post focuses on the elevated rates of abuse children with disabilities face, and cultural factors that allow that abuse to go on, even when people know it's going on.

Kassiane guest-posted at The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism about how important it is for caregivers to take "no" seriously and respect their charges' boundaries, physical and otherwise.

This blog post by the Dean of Health Sciences at Queen's University in Ontario mentions a paper given at a conference by recent sociology Ph.D. Elise Paradis about the use of the word "epidemic" to describe chronic, non-infectious diseases and conditions, particularly obesity. Paradis considers ways in which this terminology is misleading and stigmatizes obese people. The paper doesn't seem to be in print anywhere, but it looks like it will be soon.

Emily at The Biology Files has a list of things that have been proposed as causes or risk factors for autism. It's droll, and seeing them all side by side (even just the ones that are actively under consideration today, leaving out the ones that have been debunked) makes you marvel that there are still some people who are not autistic.

For My New Reader

I just had someone contact me on Etsy to tell me they loved the blog, and to ask for suggestions on further reading.

I rattled off a few of my favorite bloggers, but also suggested to the person that they check out various aggregator sites (and, I'd like to add, blog carnivals) to look around and see what most appeals to them there.

So, here you go, Olin.

Blog Aggregator Sites
Autism Blogs Directory (mostly personal blogs by autistic people or parents of autistic children)
AutismBlog.org
Autismo
The Autism Hub (not as big as it used to be, but still going)
wrtAUTISM (has a lot of research-oriented blogs)

Blog Carnivals
Autistics Speaking Day
Blog Against Disablism Day (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006)

Also, if any of you have any ideas for blogs, websites etc. that you consider Essential Reading, feel free to mention it in comments!

Autistic Artist: Justin Canha

An article in the New York Times from a few weeks ago profiled a young man named Justin Canha, who is a very interesting person. He loves to draw, and would like to be an animator or illustrator one day.

The article was about his struggles to find a job and live independently, and the "transition to adulthood" program* that is helping him to do that, but it also mentioned his art, and included a link to his website, where you can see a whole lot of his work, which includes charcoal and pastel drawings, comic strips and Flash animations.

I really like his "Carnivorous Plants" series; they look eerie and alien, but are beautifully colored. The drawings look representational and abstract at the same time, which is an effect I find mesmerizing.

Here are a few of my favorites:

*One thing that stood out to me, reading the article, was how intensively micromanaged his life seems to be! I notice this a lot about the lives of autistic people younger than I am, who have had behavioral therapy throughout their childhoods. I don't doubt that it's helping him learn to navigate the world, and I'm sure graduates of such programs end up better equipped for it than I am (maybe - one blogger has described behavioral therapy as taking away her ability to make decisions on her own, without "rules" to go by), but damn, if that were my life, with someone telling me how to spend every minute of every day, and getting on my case if I wanted to engage in "activities not directly related to finding a job"? I'd be a walking powder keg of fury. I don't respond well to control. I suspect that a large part of the reason I don't have a huge anger problem today is that I am used to having my boundaries respected; I don't feel like I have to explode and destroy things in order to be heard.

Terrorist Attacks in Norway

There's just been a terrible eruption of political violence in Norway: in the capital, Oslo, a car bomb exploded outside the office building that housed the prime minster's office, and also near other Norwegian government buildings, including its finance ministry, oil minostry and Supreme Court. Shortly after the bomb exploded, a man dressed as a police officer and armed with automatic weapons appeared on the island of Utoya, in a lake near Oslo, where an offshoot of the Norwegian Labor Party holds a summer camp for teenagers and young adults interested in politics, coaxed the campers to come toward him, and shot them as they came. He killed at least 84 people on the island, and is believed also to have planted the bomb in Oslo, which killed seven people and injured about ten.

A suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, has surrendered to the police and is being investigated. He was a fundamentalist Christian, interested in right-wing politics and hated Muslims, and he was also a member of Norway's far-right, anti-immigrant Progress Party, at one point being chairman of his local party. He had bought six tons of synthetic fertilizer ten weeks prior to these events, ostensibly for use on his farm.

A survivor of the attack on the island, Prableen Kaur, who is the head of the Worker's Youth League of her district in Oslo, has written a blog post describing her ordeal. The post has been translated into English and republished several places around the Web, including the UK's Daily Telegraph website.

I don't know if I have any Norwegian readers, but if I do, I hope you're all safe, and that everyone you know is safe. My deepest sympathies are with you; we in the U.S. are no strangers to terrorism, foreign or domestic, and we wouldn't wish it on anyone.

"Zero Degrees of Empathy" Link Roundup

I'm holding off until I've actually read Zero Degrees of Empathy (or, for the edition I'm most likely to get my hands on, The Science of Evil), but there are plenty of other people writing interesting things about it:

Lili Marlene, who lives in Australia and writes skeptically about psychology on her blog, Incorrect Pleasures, has written several posts about her thoughts on the book as she's been reading it.

Here they are in chronological order:
Just a little bit reductionist don't you think?
A very horrible story that can't be ignored
Mathematician's test score does not add up
A quick word or two regarding the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and the Austrian study
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, empathy expert
Is this guy for real? Baron-Cohen's latest book is a real urban legend!

Indigo Jo has written a double review of Zero Degrees of Empathy and an earlier book on E-S Theory, The Essential Difference. (And Lisa Harney at Questioning Transphobia has enlarged on it; the comment thread on her post is also worth reading).

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg has a very detailed post about empathy; she has also started a web-anthology of essays addressing myths about autistic people and our capacity for empathy.

On Tumblr (a platform which continues to confuse me, but which is apparently really popular), Emily posted at F*** Yeah Autism Spectrum: So I read the first chapter of Simon Baron-Cohen's new book

Guest Blogging

I wrote a guest post about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's book Herland for Her Circle Ezine, a website about women, writing and art.

The post is an expansion on one paragraph in this old post I wrote juxtaposing Herland with Marilyn French's book The Women's Room*.

I expanded this paragraph into a longer essay on how masculinity and femininity are portayed in Herland, which is as complementary performances that distort human nature and interactions between the sexes, and which each depend on the other to work. (Particularly, I look at the character of Terry, and how his brand of brash, overbearing hypermasculinity works against him in the all-woman, but not particularly "feminine," society of Herland.)

Here's the link, if you want to go read it!

*Here are a couple of essays on the same blog that deal with that book; there's also another essay on Gilman, this one about The Yellow Wallpaper.

Link Roundup

Here's a bunch of stuff I've read that I think my readers --- or, at least, various subsets of my readers --- might like:

Neuroskeptic on the murky relationship between genes and mental illness

A couple of posts --- one from Peter Daou and the other from David Roberts, writing for Grist --- on climate-change denialism

Environmentalist Bill McKibben (author of Deep Economy and Eaarth) writing for the Guardian's Comment Is Free about Barack Obama's environmental policies

Leah Jane at her new blog, nominatissima, on children's rights, why she doesn't see a conflict between being pro-choice and also pro-disability rights, and two posts on sex and romance for autistic people

Amanda Baggs (whose blog has also moved) on animal consciousness

Urocyon on eating disorders, food, gaslighting, colonialism (including a four-part series deconstructing the concept of race based on skin color and a link to this post at Womanist Musings), and how learning about her disabilities has helped her stop thinking of herself as incompetent and weak

Finally, on a blog I just discovered called Sasha Said, two posts on rape, a post on "Poverty in America and the Emerging Slave Class," and a wonderful, eye-opening post on "What Children Learn When They Don't Learn About Patriarchy" --- how children learn to account for male dominance of society when they're being told that men and women have equal rights.

What a Coincidence

I just wrote a post about people's attitudes toward vaccination --- particularly the extent to which people worry about vaccines causing autism, and whether that worry leads them to skip recommended shots --- and now I see that Sarah was also moved to write something vaccine-related.

From her Tumblr*:

Pro-vaccine advocacy is not the same as advocating for the rights of autistic people or being anti-ableism. Pro-vaccine advocacy can sometimes repeat the same pernicious, ableist myths about autistic people which are so embedded in the anti-vaccine movement.

She's absolutely 100% right; where the anti-vaccine activists' rhetoric implies that it's better for one's child --- and other people's children, for that matter --- to contract potentially life-threatening, vaccine-preventable diseases than to be autistic, the pro-vaccine camp usually responds with "Nobody wants to have an autistic child, autism is a terrible tragedy and we should hurry up and find a cure, but ..."

It's a conciliatory tactic, meant to convey empathy for the clearly-distraught parents who blame vaccines for their children's disability. And that's good, as far as it goes; everyone deserves to be treated respectfully, and to have their feelings acknowledged and respected when they're debating emotionally-charged subjects.

A discourse that rests on the premise that autistic people should not exist isn't one that respects autistic people. It also implies that there are no autistic people participating in, or watching, the debate, and that's just not true. We're here, we have a personal stake in these issues; we deserve to be equal participants in the public discourse around autism.

*I can link to the post itself, but currently if I do that you're not able to read it --- other text overlaps with it. This is one of the many reasons Tumblr fails to appeal to me.

Graphical Humor

Andrea linked to this post on Indexed, a blog whose entries consist of graphs and Venn diagrams making various weird/funny/trenchant comparisons between different categories of things.

I'm not going to reproduce any of the images here --- that would be taking pageviews away from Jessica Hagy, who draws them and who appears to make money from her website, so for her a pageview is more akin to someone walking into a shop she owns, rather than just a way to gauge how many people read her, as they are to me --- but I will link to some of the ones I liked the best:
Please sir, I want some more.
Covens & convents.
We'll just get a new one.
Nothing is for everybody.
A little something for the pagans.

The whole concept of the site reminds me a lot of this old strip from xkcd ...

Wheelchair Dancer on Gender and Disability in Everyday Interactions

One of the posts highlighed in today's Recommended Reading post on FWD/Forward was this little gem from Wheelchair Dancer, describing a conversation she overheard.

It was between a man and a woman, about the rules of bridge. The man is explaining something very authoritatively, to which the woman, for the most part, listens passively, occasionally asking questions which the man cannot always answer. It becomes apparent that he's just as new to the game as she is --- he's just assumed the role of The Authority in this conversation, even though he's no more an authority on bridge than she is.

As far as the negative power relation between men and women goes, this conversation, sadly, would not stand out were it not for the way in which the woman responds to the answers she gets.

For every thing she doesn't understand right off the bat or simply gets wrong, she claims a disability. So far, she has memory issues, is dyslexic, is losing her mind, is "slow ...". As I listen to her, I suppose that any or all of these things could be true. ... Nonetheless, as the stream of different disabilities continues, I begin to wonder if claims of disability function as a cushion between the painful abruptness of her partner and her desire to do better and earn his acceptance. In other words, the woman may be disabled in all those ways, but in the context of the conversation, disability also serves as an excuse/reason for her "stupidity" in the face of her partner's "brilliance."

Wheelchair Dancer doesn't think it's an accident that the woman's (apparent) disability functions like this --- to diminish her presence, shrink her further and further into the background --- she sees this uncomprehending silence, this unquestioning acceptance of the man's greater expertise, this constant deprecation of her own understanding, as part of the way the woman has chosen to "do disability":

She does disability in the old way, a way in which the value of our diverse minds and bodies is not acknowledged. Her disability is a weakness that separates her from an actively feminist goal of being an equal partner in the conversation and the game.

Rather than stop the conversation and ask the man to go slower, repeat something, or rephrase or elaborate on something until she feels she understands what he's trying to say and can either agree with it or challenge it, she stays quiet, unwilling or unable to ask him to adjust his manner of speaking to her needs. She's shrinking herself, subordinating herself to him, taking part in the conversation either on his terms and at his pace or not at all.

A commenter pointed out that, from the way Wheelchair Dancer described him, the male half of this duo could very well have some communication impairments of his own --- on the "sending" rather than the "receiving" end.

I think they might be right, because there are elements of Wheelchair Dancer's description of the man's conversational and interpersonal style --- his rigidity, his lack of eye contact, the apparent effort with which he speaks --- that are in fact features of a disability I have, which does interfere with my ability to communicate via speech.

But even if that's true, and the man, too, has some communication impairment that's making him have to work very hard even to put his thoughts into words at all --- let alone rearranging and streamlining those words so that they are intelligible to the woman, who seems to have receptive language difficulties --- the man would still be using his disability to silence the woman, to shut her out of equal participation in the discussion.

By dominating the conversation, by taking on the role of The Authority, he's still saying that, whatever impairments he may have, he's the one setting the terms for this interaction.

Also, even if they both have disabilities affecting their ability to communicate, she's the only one who ever references them --- and she only references her own disabilities, and that in a self-deprecating way, not in a way that indicates she's asking the man to accommodate her. Whether the man has a disability of his own or not, he's set himself up as the standard against which she has to measure herself. Does she understand his sentences? If she doesn't, there must be something wrong with her, because they're totally clear to him!

So, still working under this assumption that both participants in this conversation have language difficulties (receptive or expressive), we find that both partners have different ways of "doing" disability, and --- surprise! --- both of them involve the woman shutting up and retreating into the background.

Fun With Gender Genie

Over at Left Brain/Right Brain, the bloggers and commenters are having fun with J.B. Handley's assertion (at Age of Autism) that LB/RB blogger Sullivan is really Bonnie Offit (wife of Autism's False Prophets author Paul Offit) wearing the cyberspace equivalent of a fake beard.

In this post from yesterday, Kevin Leitch (the primary LB/RB blogger apart from Sullivan) ran samples of both J.B. Handley's and Sullivan's writing through a web-based gender-guessing algorithm called Gender Genie, which prompted many of the commenters to submit some posts of their own for gender analysis.

I thought I would join in the fun myself, but then I had the idea to compare my results by category of post --- is Gender Genie more likely to think me female if I write about some things than if I write about others? --- and realized that reproducing those results would take up a lot more space than a typical blog comment.

So I'm posting it here.

My hypothesis: the more technical posts will be judged male most of the time. Autobiographical posts, literary posts, and probably feminist posts will be judged female most of the time.

Posts about research articles:
"Through a (Brain) Scanner, Darkly" - 1557 words
Female Score: 1004; Male Score: 2112
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Who's That in the Mirror? Autism and the Developing Sense of Self" - 2091 words
Female Score: 3093; Male Score: 3036
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"These Are Not the Eternal Verities of Biology - Part II" - 831 words
Female Score: 884; Male Score: 1374
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Fever Dreams: Autism Research and the Changeling Myth" - 1010 words
Female Score: 1311; Male Score: 1520
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Thoughts on the 'Extreme-Male-Brain' Theory of Autism" - 921 words
Female Score: 682; Male Score: 1467
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Autism, Alexithymia, and Empathy" - 1673 words*
Female Score: 1524; Male Score: 2132
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Say What?!" - 1061 words
Female Score: 997; Male Score: 1771
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"I Wanna Be Sedated" - 2518 words
Female Score: 2895; Male Score: 3922
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Autism and Genetics: It's Complicated" - 1526 words
Female Score: 1657; Male Score: 2295
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

Average scores for this type of post: 1485 female; 2181 male
Average post length in this category: 1465 words

Posts about my life:
"Doubly Deviant: On Being Queer and Autistic" - 2497 words
Female Score: 3343; Male Score: 2881
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"An Act of Shameless Emotional Exhibitionism" - 1025 words
Female Score: 1841; Male Score: 857
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Gender Variance in Autism: How Much of It Is Just Sensory?" - 1100 words
Female Score: 1317; Male Score: 1647
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Brief Experiment in Communal Living" - 1129 words
Female Score: 1488; Male Score: 1462
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Addendum" - 716 words
Female Score: 709; Male Score: 958
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Employment Issues in Autism: Finding and Holding a Job" - 792 words
Female Score: 1122; Male Score: 968
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"What's It Like to Be You?" - 677 words
Female Score: 660; Male Score: 1040
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Bringing the Doctor-Patient Relationship Into the Bedroom"** - 991 words
Female Score: 1642; Male Score: 1581
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

Average scores for this type of post: 1515 female; 1424 male
Average post length in this category: 1116 words

Book reviews/literary criticism:
"Totally Unexpected Gender and Disability Awesomeness from Larry Niven" - 1500 words
Female Score: 1844; Male Score: 2266
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"In or Out? Using Spatial Metaphors to Describe Autism" - 2459 words
Female Score: 1936; Male Score: 3877
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Flash-Flood of Feminist Fiction" - 2299 words
Female Score: 2242; Male Score: 3720
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"More about Jude the Obscure" - 1423 words
Female Score: 1980; Male Score: 1956
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Autism in the Not-Too-Distant Future: Thoughts on Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark" - 641 words
Female Score: 658; Male Score: 934
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Metaphor at the Expense of Characterization: Autism in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake" - 1166 words
Female Score: 1310; Male Score: 1360
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Comparing Feminist Dystopias" - 1005 words
Female Score: 1053; Male Score: 1417
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

Average scores for this type of post: 1575 female; 2219 male
Average post length in this category: 1499 words

Posts about feminism:
"Oh No, an Analogy!" - 678 words
Female Score: 537; Male Score: 1145
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"But What About the (Aspie) Men??!" - 1504 words
Female Score: 2464; Male Score: 2675
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Bit More on Reproductive Choice" - 1234 words
Female Score: 1167; Male Score: 1439
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Disability Rights and Bodily Autonomy" - 694 words
Female Score: 1216; Male Score: 842
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Violence Against Disabled Women" - 1660 words
Female Score: 2610; Male Score: 2365
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Where Neurodiversity Meets Feminist Theory (Part III)" - 607 words***
Female Score: 1021; Male Score: 1121
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"On Patriarchal Medicine: The Intersection of Feminist Critique and Anti-Vaccine Crackpottery" - 588 words
Female Score: 695; Male Score: 1078
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

Average scores for this type of post: 1241 female; 1363 male
Average post length in this category: 995 words

Other political/philosophical posts:
"Human Diversity and the Surveillance State" - 606 words
Female Score: 663; Male Score: 860
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"More Focus on Compliance: An Addendum to My Last Post" - 518 words
Female Score: 646; Male Score: 840
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"A Tale of Two Epidemics" - 677 words
Female Score: 949; Male Score: 1269
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"Employment Issues in Autism: Trends" - 770 words
Female Score: 800; Male Score: 1172
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... male!

"New Concept: Context Disorders" - 465 words
Female Score: 857; Male Score: 808
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

"Is Bullying a Feature of Our Culture, or a Bug?" - 663 words
Female Score: 1155; Male Score: 1144
Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is ... female!

Average scores for this type of post: 845 female; 1016 male
Average post length in this category: 617 words

While I've tried to pick posts that are either free of quotations entirely, or have a fairly high proportion of my writing to other people's writing (this ruled out some of the research-article posts that I'm quite proud of, and would otherwise submit as representative of my writing), or were purged of overly long quoted passages, the samples I gave were still not 100% written in my voice. Especially the literary and science-related posts: if you're writing about another piece of writing, whether it's a book or a research article, you're probably going to have to quote it at some point.

I can't tell the extent to which this has biased the gender classification of my posts; with the research-article posts, I'd expect the gender of the lead author not to have much of an effect since research articles are written in such a uniform, dry, trying-to-be-objective style. With the book posts, it turns out all but one of them are judged to be written by someone of the opposite gender of the author whose book I'm reviewing. (The lone exception is the post on Larry Niven's The Integral Trees, which Gender Genie determines was written by a man).

(Also lumped in with those book posts is a more generic literary-type post about the use of spatial metaphors to describe autism; in it, I cite and quote from an article by the philosopher Ian Hacking. The Genie also decided that post was written by a man, but it had a pretty high ratio of my writing to Hacking's writing that I'm less likely to think quoting from him biased that reading than I am to think my liberally quoting Larry Niven's book might've biased the gender-determination of that post).

Something I expected, since I noticed that all of the pronouns seem to read as "feminine" words to Gender Genie, was that my autobiographical posts would tend to be classed as female-written. This turned out to be the case: of the eight posts I chose to run through the program, five came out female and three came out male.

Both my posts about feminism, and my posts about political, philosophical or cultural topics in general were overwhelmingly judged male. I separated out feminism from the other political/theoretical writing to see if Gender Genie seemed to consider content at all; I guess it doesn't.

For the most part, it does seem to think I'm a man, though.

*There is a lengthy quotation near the end of that post that I omitted from the text I sent through Gender Genie, so this figure falls a bit short of the actual length of the post.

**This post could just as easily be considered a literary or feminist post: it's a comparison of a dynamic I observe in my (heterosexual) romantic relationship to similar dynamics in books --- F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper --- bookended with a little bit of feminist history/theory. So it has all three elements; I just figured the autobiographical element was most prominent.

***Again, excluding a fairly long quotation.

"What Is High Functioning?" Tumblr

Someone (I think it was Amanda Forest Vivian, but I'm not sure) started a Tumblr for the purpose of providing highly specific answers to that question --- what is "high functioning"?

People are encouraged to submit anecdotes about people with developmental disabilities being labeled "high functioning," and what specific thing they think led the person to label them that way.

Some specific examples of things that get people sorted into the "high-functioning" category:

• Asking what it means to "exchange a look"
• Initiating a conversation with another student in a college dining hall
• Requesting a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich in lieu of whatever food they've just been given

(There are also some less-concrete examples of "high-functioning" stuff like being able to speak fluently, carry on a conversation, not having a "routine" and being "independent.")

Anyone can submit a post; they just have to click the "Submit" link in the sidebar and type in the text of their post, a title, and their name and email address.

I love the idea around this Tumblr blog --- to have one place where people can share all the different things "high-functioning" has been used to mean --- and would submit an anecdote or two of my own if my autobiographical memory weren't only slightly better than Wolverine's. (I know that I've been called "high-functioning" fairly often --- at least once in the context of, "isn't she too high-functioning to be here (at a camp for autistic children)?" --- but cannot remember the details of any of these instances. So I don't think there's anything I could contribute that would be of value to this project, which is too bad).

Doubly Deviant: On Being Queer and Autistic

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a very long, rambly autobiographical post about being bisexual and being autistic: it compares my experiences coming to terms with both of these facts (always knowing about the autism, vs. having to figure out the sexual orientation; and also, doubting the possibility that I could *have* a sexual orientation because I thought autistic people didn't date or have sex, or even want to do either of those things) with those of Amanda Forest Vivian, who is a lesbian, and autistic, and has written about those things at some length at her own blog. I also discuss the ways being autistic has complicated being gay for me --- besides my initial difficulty realizing that what I felt about girls was, in fact, sexual desire, there was also a profound isolation from the larger Gay Community, which I never felt like I could (or would want to) join.
______________________________________________

Amanda Forest Vivian has a post from a while ago about this --- being gay (Amanda uses "same-sex attracted", to encompass lesbian, gay, bi-*, poly- and pansexual folk, and also people who don't really fit into any category but "queer"), but also being different in another way (like having a developmental disability) that might make it harder to navigate an LGBTQ** an LGB social scene.

Here's her description of coming out in high school ---

When I was in high school, someone who wasn't my friend said this to my (secret, closeted) friend, who then told me: "Everyone could see that something was different about Amanda, and then when they found out she was gay, they had an answer."

When I was in high school, the word dyke or lesbian was a way to easily quantify all the things about me that didn't seem right. When I was in high school I felt very alone.

When I was in ninth and tenth grade, I actually brought all this on myself by not denying that I was gay or bisexual, and presenting in a masculine way. I felt this was an important thing to do because other kids needed to see that queer people were just regular people. The problem with this idea is, in hindsight, obvious: I am not a regular person. Being openly queer in a heteronormative environment is a noble thing to do, but maybe not if you have anxiety about pretty much everything and have trouble talking to people.

A lot of my coming-out process happened when I was on a lot of medication and overwhelmed by the relationships I was in. By the time I was in eleventh grade, I was more able to clearly see what was going on, and I knew that I'd made a mistake by not being closeted. My school was very small, and some people were genuinely afraid to be friends with me in case someone said they were having sex with me, and I wasn't a person who could charm my way out of this stigma. But my school wasn't violently homophobic and I feel like a more normal person could have made a difference. It would have to be a person who fit in every way, except one.

--- which reminded me a lot of these much older posts by elmindreda and one of the other Amandas whose writing I love, Amanda Baggs, which postulate something called the "difference slot."

elmindreda:

[M]any of [the people I spend my time with nowadays], even though they seem superficially informed about basic disability issues, seem to believe in the difference slot.

The basic idea is that each and every person has their difference, and it should be respected. Note the singular form, however. When they learn of my autism, which is usually the first major difference to come up in conversation, they seem to think "oh, so that's her difference". They then proceed to fill in my difference slot in their mental table, and everything is as it should be.

Or so they think.

Then, a little while later, I happen to mention some other thing that makes me different from most other people, and their belief system collides head-on with reality. Usually, it's another one of my disabilities that triggers it. This is when they almost invariably go "..." for a while, only to finish with "you have that too?" In other words, "your difference slot is already filled, and you can't have another one."

Amanda (Baggs):

What I'm writing about is similar [to elmindreda's idea of the "difference slot"], but perhaps from a different angle. A phenomenon I've seen over and over again runs something more like, "Please violate only one stereotype at a time."

This can apply even if you have only one "difference" (be that autism, physical disability, whatever).

If you have several differences, of course, the problem becomes exponentially harder to deal with.

What Amanda Forest Vivian is describing --- being in a very normative environment (hetero- and otherwise) and trying to figure out, and come to terms with, how you deviate from those deeply-entrenched norms (which you do in multiple ways that you either cannot yet identify or are struggling to identify) --- sounds a lot like what elmindreda describes: the first difference you name to other people defines you, and explains Everything That's Weird About You, and people resist learning that there's more to the story than that One Thing That Explains Everything.

When you're very young, that first difference you name might not actually be the difference that's most relevant to your day-to-day life, either, but may simply be the first difference you know how to name. This is especially relevant to people whose differences are either a) internal or invisible, something you have to find out about yourself rather than something that's always been generally known about you or b) disabilities that affect your ability to put things into words, or even recognize all the ways in which you differ from most people. (Cultural differences might also factor into (b) --- if you come from a culture that does not discriminate between X sorts of people and Y sorts of people, and you immigrate into a culture that does, you may find that you don't even know whether you're X or Y, and that makes it difficult for you to navigate a social setting in which lots of important stuff hinges on whether you're X or Y.)

I had almost the opposite experience from Amanda's --- my first difference was my autism, which has been generally known about, and accommodated, and I've been able, to varying degrees, to talk about, for as far back as I can remember. As long as I remember being able to think in terms of "me" and "you" and "them" (which for me happened rather later than for most people, I suspect), I knew that I had a thing called autism which meant I was different from most people. As I grew older, I came to understand how I was different, and to be able to tell other people about it, but I always knew that I was different.

I had a very elastic understanding of this difference of mine, probably because I learned I was autistic before I could have any real idea what "autistic" meant, so I pretty much equated it with "whatever I am," adding on "whatever [other autistic person I meet] is, too".

(I had always had plenty of contact with other autistic children, both older and younger, and I also always had books written by autistic people about their lives on hand, so I never really fell into the "autism is *ONLY* what I experience" trap that some autistic people fall into --- it seems to be the flip side of the "impostor syndrome" that many later-diagnosed autistics have).

So, for me, being queer was the late-manifesting difference that made it harder to quickly and easily account for everything odd about me, and accordingly I had tons of self-doubt when I first started wondering if maybe I was gay.

My relative lack of interest in boys (had one crush in middle school, on a long-haired androgynous-looking boy) as I was going through puberty didn't tell me anything --- after all, I was autistic! By this time, I had come to understand a bit of what "autistic" meant, and one of those things --- communicated mostly by my mom's not thinking it a priority to educate me about sex and relationships --- was that I might never have sexual feelings, or act on them if I did. This was a boon in some ways: I was never assumed to be straight, exactly, and it was never taken for granted that I would marry by age twenty- or thirty-whatever and have x number of children. I was allowed to develop sexually at my own pace, and in my own direction, rather than feeling like I had to fit a mold. But, at the same time, since I wasn't assumed to be a sexual being, I felt like I couldn't really be sure that the things I was feeling were sexual feelings. So maybe I *did* expect to fit a mold, but that mold was asexuality rather than monogamous, married heterosexuality.

Accordingly, I waited to come out until I had clear, unmistakable evidence that I was gay: a really intense, serious crush on a female friend of mine who was bisexual and "out" about it.

Once I was absolutely certain I felt "that way," however, I thought nothing of telling people so if it came up in conversation. (I never lied, or tried to hide it from anybody, but then neither did I feel like I had to go around telling everyone I knew that I was now a lesbian. Either they'd find out sooner or later, or they didn't need to know).

It did surprise me, though, when in my last year of college I ran into a girl who'd been in my high-school graduating class --- whom I hadn't really known all that well; we went to a huge high school and knew each other by sight and by name, but never talked much and weren't friends --- and she told me that she, and a whole group of other people I didn't know or didn't know very well, apparently thought I was probably a lesbian. This surprised me because, as I mentioned, I was only really "out" to my friends --- the people I talked to enough that it eventually came up --- and I had figured I was more or less invisible to the rest of the school. So apparently I differed from whatever my high-school culture considered a "normal girl" enough, and in enough of the right ways, that people would think I must be a lesbian without ever having heard me say it. Either that, or they noticed me sticking around the girl I loved like I was actually glued to her side, and figured I must be on rather more than just "friendly" terms with her*** ...

I was also not the only lesbian, gay or bisexual person at my high school, either, so I had none of the anxiety that Amanda describes about being the Queer Model Citizen who shows everybody that queer people are people just like everybody else. If people needed that lesson, there were lots of people at my school who were better qualified (i.e., more charismatic, more involved, more flamboyantly out) than I was and more eager to do it besides.

Here, from later in the post, is the part of Amanda's story that most closely matched my own:

Even though my school is ssa-positive, most of the people at my school are straight just like most of the people in the world. I have enough friends that I never feel lonely, but I don't belong to a group of friends (partly because I don't like groups), and I know very few ssa people because I don't have stereotypical queer interests.

A few years ago I posted on a lesbian advice forum saying I was depressed and stressed because I wanted to believe I would someday get married and have kids, but that I had never been in a relationship and didn't think I ever would be. People responded telling me that if I was on a date with a girl, I shouldn't tell her I wanted to have kids, because she would think I was creepy. One person went to my livejournal, saw where I went to school, and told me that my school wasn't anyplace to complain about and that I should "stop whining." She provided a list of various social groups and activities that would help me to meet "dykes," including eating in a co-op (which would mean being organized enough to eat at the same time every day, taking up a lot of executive function cooking and cleaning, and constantly interacting with a large group of people I didn't know).

While there are a few differences --- I don't want kids, and I never got depressingly counterproductive advice because I never thought to ask for advice in the first place --- this sort of inability to find other queer women even on a campus with a burgeoning, vibrant queer culture (well, for Kansas anyway --- I went to KU, which, while it might look straitlaced and boring to someone from California, does have a fair amount of gay-themed student activities) is exactly what I experienced at college, too.

I wasn't closeted, and I wasn't isolated in general --- I just needed to socialize on my own terms, one on one with people I met in classes or in the dorms (or, sometimes, at the gym, which was my other main on-campus haunt), which might eventually lead to me joining a group of friends, rather than trying to meet people at huge gatherings of strangers (like a party or student club; I've never been much of a "joiner" because of my tendency to fade into the background and not enjoy myself at group events), so this ruled out my meeting other lesbian and bisexual women through formal channels, like the campus Queers & Allies club or gay-oriented parties and bars. Unfortunately, the informal, one-on-one processes I used to make friends --- and which worked really well in that regard --- never linked me up with any queer women. So I went through college knowing that lesbian and bisexual women were around, but I just wasn't meeting them.

Rather than belong to a lesbian or queer community, I just existed as a lesbian. (I didn't know I was bisexual until later in college). What I had growing up as an autistic person --- personal acquaintance with a number of other autistic children, access to autistic adults' life stories --- I did not have when I was coming out as a lesbian. I knew I liked women, but never met anyone who might reciprocate those feelings.

What compounded my isolation was my total lack of anything resembling gaydar. I really do have the inability to "read" faces, body language, tones of voice etc. that has become a stereotypical characteristic of autism, so I need to be literally told 1) that a given person is gay or bisexual or 2) that a person is attracted to me. I neither flirt nor perceive flirting in another person, which might well have told an unknown number of interested lesbians that I wouldn't welcome their attentions.

So when Amanda says this ---

I used to have a political problem with the way other ssa people behaved. Whenever I thought about it I got so upset I didn't know what to do. The way I saw it, there were two kinds of ssa people:

1. "gay" people (such as people involved in the HRC) who were very normal and wanted to have normal jobs and normal families. They didn't think much about trans people, non-homosexual sexual minorities, or anyone who wasn't normal.

2. "queer" people (such as a lot of people at my school) who were very into not being normal, playing rugby, performance art, co-ops, and so on. Many of them identified as trans but didn't seem to realize that some trans people actually take hormones and get surgery and are poor, and are not students at a liberal arts college who change their pronouns every week.
...
I felt weird because I wanted to get married but I wasn't normal and I felt like "gay" people wanted to help normal people get married and "queer" people were anti-marriage so neither one included me.

--- I nod because the feeling of not belonging, of not finding what one is looking for in a group, is familiar to me, even if the actual dynamics of gay-identified versus queer-identified groups fall far outside my own experience, which is of near-total**** isolation from other women attracted to women, whatever their chosen label or subculture*****.

*According to Genderbitch, it's actually possible to be bisexual (attracted to people belonging to either of two sexes) without one of the categories you're attracted to being the same as your own. When you consider a broader spectrum than just cis men and cis women --- one that includes trans men, trans women, non-binary trans people, intersex people and people in whatever other sex-and-gender categories there might be --- a bisexual person might be attracted to people in any two of these categories. So not every bisexual person necessarily fits under Amanda's "same-sex-attracted" umbrella, but I do (having so far only been attracted to cis women and cis men) and this post is about Amanda's (who is a cis lesbian) experience and mine.

**Edited to reflect a lesbian trans woman and an aspie's criticism in comments that, since I am talking about cis lesbian/bisexual stuff, I shouldn't use "LGBTQ" because it implies an inclusion of trans people that isn't in the post.

***I wasn't, as a matter of fact. I was in love with her, and told her so repeatedly, but she didn't love me. At least, not in a romantic way. We did come to be pretty good friends, though, even after high school!

****I did meet one other lesbian at college, whom I found nice, and attractive, and would certainly have befriended and quite likely have dated if we had ever met again. We just ran into each other one day, outside the dining hall, started talking, and kept talking for a long time eating lunch together. Then we went our separate ways and never bumped into each other again. She played rugby, and tried to interest me in joining, but I was unsure about how much extra time I could spare for practices --- I always took really heavy courseloads, tried to keep my GPA pretty high, and spent one to two hours in the gym every day. I figured if I did much more, I'd feel like I was stretched too thin. So, while I had good reasons for not wanting to add another commitment, I still feel sad about missing that particular opportunity. :(

*****Had I managed to fall in with the Queer Culture Amanda describes, I would probably have found it a more comfortable fit than she did, since the kind of alternative family structures she says they liked to try to create are just the sort of thing I'm looking for: I need kind of a lot of support, day to day, and don't think any one person could be everything I need and also have a life of hir own. So a poly family actually looks really good to me, and indeed my last relationship did somewhat resemble this.