The Weekly Infodump, 2023/10/31
Welcome to The Weekly Infodump, which contains a short write-up of whatever is on my mind. You are allowed to share this newsletter with others and I hope you will.
I recently had my annual autism top-up flu shot and COVID booster, and while the physical pain was minimal, the psychological side effects were profound and disorienting.
The closest thing I can compare it to is that time I watched Cats, the 2019 musical disaster based on the 1981 stage musical of the same name, which I have never seen and never want to. That film, like these shots, completely wrecked my sense of scale. (Genuine question: what SIZE are cats? Small? Large? Other? I thought I knew but clearly I do not!)
(observances) October is ADHD Awareness Month, which is a bit like saying it's #LeoSeason: in a sense, isn't it always?
It's also National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and my employer keeps sending out e-mails asking me "DID YOU KNOW...[insert dubious statistic about disabled people]?" and oh honey, yes I do know.
(Did YOU know, NTs at MPOW, that we still haven't created a better alternative to sheltered workshops, which despite being legit terrible are considered by some disabled people to be their best/only option?)
There's a common statistic about autistic people in paid employment – something like 85 or 86 percent of us are unemployed or underemployed? – which is highly suspect but, like all catchy stats, gets trotted out a lot. Which isn't to say we don't struggle with employment (we do!), just that it takes effort to track down what little data there is, and even more effort to evaluate it.
For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example lumps all "persons with a disability" together. A search of PubMed yields a handful of results, which touch on unemployment but don't necessarily focus on it. Similarly, the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute's Policy Impact Project does its National Autism Indicators Reports, but again, employment is sort of a tangential issue.
For about a decade, there was this notion that we could all just use our Savant Brains to learn to code; some of these programs are still floating around, doing the hard but necessary work of creating opportunities for white male software engineers.
These days...well, it's hard to say, but possibly it's making fancy coffee drinks? Every so often a cafe staffed (but not owned or run) by disabled people arrives on the scene with great fanfare and very little transparency regarding "does this pay a living wage?" and perhaps it works for some but it's not a solution for everyone – I can't think of a worse fit for me, personally, than having to make lattes for yuppies.
Now I understand this desire: I, too, would love to find an employment situation free of neurotypicals. Along with "not getting bullied to death," that's basically the Autistic Dream! But, like all dreams, it is, by definition, not real.
This is where I respectfully disagree with Temple Grandin; I don't believe that there is a perfect job, or set of jobs, for the NDs. I believe that real progress can only be made if workplaces are willing to change, and I see very little evidence of that.
(I also don't believe that humans being should be required to join the labor force in order to be treated like human beings by the rest of society, but that's for another newsletter entirely! However, with the understanding that we all have to survive under capitalism (FOR NOW), and that some autistic people (self included!) want and/or need to earn an income, I support making it easier for us to do so.)
(television) Love is Blind is BACK, baby! And this time around, the producers appear to have abandoned the flimsy pretense of the "social experiment" in order to wholeheartedly embrace the Drama. Which I am 100 percent here for.
What can I say, I like it when the NTs terrorize one another instead of us.
(links) No, but seriously, why does NPR hate autistic people?
This piece does all of the things! Paying an allistic reporter, one who has built his career on pathologizing us, for a low-effort summary of a research paper! Conflating autism, a specific neurodevelopmental disability (of complex yet ultimately unknown etiology), with other, unrelated mental health conditions! Gesturing at potential "interventions" and "treatments" as if it isn't really obvious what that means! Not reaching out to even one autistic person for a comment! And, my personal favorite, giving a platform to allistic researchers who believe we are broken!
The research also shows clearly how gene variants could lead to autism or some other neurodevelopmental disorder by disturbing interneurons.
"That would be a disaster" in a developing brain, [Dr. Guo-li] Ming says. "The circuitry would be wrong and the signaling would be wrong, and ultimately the brain functioning would be wrong."'
So there you have it. Once again, "science" has "proven" that we are Wrong People and NPR cannot wait to tell us about it.
What angers me most is not the unexamined ableism – though let me be perfectly clear, unexamined ableism ALWAYS angers me – but the fact that articles like these are such a missed opportunity to make a small dent in the ignorance of society.
Especially since modern media outlets LOVE explainers, and this subject is fertile ground for explaining (for example): the medical model of disability vs. the social model(s) of disability; the ongoing political struggle by generations of self-advocates to partially, probably temporarily, secure our basic rights; or literally any aspect of autistic culture!
If only there were autistic-led organizations from which we could learn!
(good news, everyone!) Is there any? Not from where I'm standing. Oh wait, I know: behold, Las Javelinas, living their best lives!
I won't spoil it, but if this doesn't win a Pulitzer, the award has NO MEANING.
Like golf itself, reading past this point would be pointless. You can go back to what you were doing.