I think there is a very common argument about oppression that seems to assume that the only way to stop people from being mean to you because of your axis of marginalization is to stop being visibly marginalized.
Groups I have seen this about: Trans people (“you shouldn’t transition, because then people will harass you on the street and discriminate against you”). Gay people (“if you didn’t flaunt being gay, no one would care”). Gender-non-conforming people (“stop being a flamer and people wouldn’t be mean to you”). Visibly neurodivergent people (“if you don’t get normalizing therapy, you’re going to be bullied”). Fat people (“you should lose weight and then no one will call you a fat pig”).
The important question here is whether privileged people are evil.
For instance, it might be true that, while there are some exceptional non-autistic people who are capable of being tolerant, non-autistic people as a group are simply incapable of responding to normal autistic body language and affect with anything other than ostracism, harassment, and assault. Since non-autistic people are 99% of the population, we must deal with them. In that situation, it is only practical to learn how to conceal the signs of being visibly autistic.
However, in this situation, it would be perfectly reasonable for autistic people to hate non-autistic people. It is wrong to mistreat people because of harmless behavior that doesn’t affect others in any way. It may be that non-autistic people as a group are severely impaired in their ability to behave in an ethical way; people can be impaired in ethical behavior just as they can be impaired in anything else. However, if it is an unchangeable part of your personality that you hurt someone for a harmless trait of theirs, it is entirely unreasonable to expect that person to have fond feelings for you.
In the event that privileged people are evil, it is also important to put resources into separatism and programs of mutual aid. Of course, many autistic people have high support needs, and it would probably be impossible to live apart from non-autistic people entirely. But a space where we can be ourselves is a necessity.
Most of all, in this situation, we must not lie to marginalized people and claim that the flaw is in them. If non-autistic people cannot help but hurt autistic people, then we must be honest with autistic children about this. We must not teach them that their hands should be quiet because loud hands are weird and disgusting and wrong. We must teach them that their hands should be quiet because most people are cruel and mean and will hurt them if they are not.
Alternately, it may be the case that privileged people are not evil. For instance, it may be that non-autistic people, as a group, possess the ability to not bully people for moving their hands in a funny way; it is just that many non-autistic people have never bothered to develop this capacity.
In that case, quieting your hands is a short-term solution. Whether or not non-autistic people have the capability to be nice to visibly autistic people, many of them are, in fact, cruel to visibly autistic people right now. It can make sense to avoid being visibly autistic! I would never tell anyone that they have to go around being mistreated for the sake of the movement. You have to make the decision that makes sense for you within your own personal context.
That said, it must be combined with the long-term solution, which is activism. Non-autistic people must be encouraged– through some combination of social stigma and moral persuasion– to develop the capacity to not bully people, even if those people are knowingly going about being weird in public. This process will probably involve people being visibly autistic, since familiarity tends to make people more accepting.
Personally, I am an optimist. I believe that people who are currently behaving in an oppressive way have, in the vast majority of cases, the capacity to shape up. That’s because of my personal experience. I was taught by my parents to be mean to fat people (for instance, by pointing to fat women in bikinis and saying that no one wants to see that); when I grew older and read writing by fat people, I learned that this was an awful way to behave, and I cut it the fuck out. I think other people who are currently being assholes can learn to behave better too.
This means I strive not to hate members of privileged groups or judge them based on their group membership instead of considering the individual person, and it also means that I tend to have fairly high standards for their behavior. And it means I am very unsympathetic to arguments that treat the behavior of privileged people as a variable it is impossible to change. No one is forcing thin people to be mean to fat people, or cis people to be mean to trans people, or straight people to be mean to gay people. It is a decision by individual people who could have damn well chosen to make a better one. And therefore the blame for the mistreatment of marginalized people is always on the person who’s doing the mistreating.
Thing of Things 
I really, really appreciate this post.
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Autistic people may need to quiet their hands (or practice separatism) even in a world without bullying/harassment, if their mannerisms often irritate others. If 1% of the population habitually whistled and a much larger proportion had misophonia that was triggered by whistling, it would be prudent for the whistlers to change their habits because otherwise many would prefer not to associate with them. It seems plausible that something like that could hold for autistic habits.
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What does and doesn’t annoy people can sometimes change – e.g. if someone feels uncomfortable when seeing two people of the same gender kissing, but then makes a conscious choice to be tolerant, they quite often will eventually stop feeling uncomfortable about it.
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A lot of people are uncomfortable with seeing two people of a different gender kissing*. A lesbian or gay person may be unaware of how often hetero people get disapproving reactions and thus may attribute all disapproval to homophobia, rather than prudishness.
Then if the disapproving person is called out for being homophobic, this person may feel unjustly accused of a very serious offense (also within their own moral system).
Anyway, my point is: when someone judges others for judging them, they can be wrong in multiple ways. If they then deploy strong shaming tactics or even try to get this person punished, the outcome can make the social justice person the biggest bully in the room (and ineffective to create the change they want).
This is probably the SJ-blog where this needs to be said the least, but I still think it’s important to point out that activism to change beliefs should itself be respectful.
* Although they are probably an extremely marginal(ized) group among the visitors to this blog.
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@Aapje
I don’t think I actually disagree with anything you said, but
– within the context of a discussion of negative reactions to marginalized behaviors, clearly Sophia was referring to people who react negatively specifically to same-sex couples
– such people exist
– “is this person/behavior prejudiced” and “what should we do about it” are two separate questions
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@tcheasdfjkl
For activists, they tend to be part of a causal chain. I merely wanted to point out that we all have biases/personal viewpoints that cloud our judgement of why other people do what they do and that these issues should have a major impact on how we act (not just in activism, but in life in general).
Compare it to the legal system. If you ignore the possibility of error in judgement, our legal system appears to protect the accused to an absurd degree. However, if you actually look into the prevalence of errors in judgement by witnesses, the police and judges; these protections for the accused suddenly make a lot of sense.
There is a strong tendency among pretty much all groups that intentionally choose side (in advocacy/politics/etc) to cultivate a biased culture that systematically makes errors in judgement. This is why checks and balances are so important (ranging from free speech to the supreme court).
The above is especially true for groups* that see themselves as strongly oppressed, as this tends to preclude them from seeing the power they have as possibly oppressive to others.
* Think of Trump or Clinton or SJ or MRAs depending on whether you want to be offended at my claim or nod along in agreement 🙂
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For some reason I thought this was going to be more punching discourse.*is relieved*
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Same- I’m guessing Ozy cleverly wrote the title to get that impression.
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No, I had to *rewrite* the title from its original “punching” in order to MINIMIZE that impression. Bleh.
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Poignant and well written. Always a joy to read your posts.
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A third possibility: non-autistic people are capable of being tolerant, but tolerance has a cost (in patience, mental energy, lost concentration, etc.). In that case, it comes down to a trade-off between the cost they pay for that tolerance and the cost autistic people pay to conceal their visible signs, and fairness probably dictates that we allocate that cost proportionally across both groups.
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If not bullying autistic people requires non-autistic people to pay a significant cost in terms of mental energy, that seems to me to be a milder form of the “non-autistic people have an impairment in behaving ethically”, and the same arguments apply.
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Well, one difference is that it leaves the door open for asking them to share the cost, instead of shifting it all onto autistic people.
But, maybe more importantly, I think it illustrates the problem with labeling people as evil because of their impairment. Autistic people have to pay a significant cost to control behaviors that other people find irritating (that is, mildly harmful), but I hope you’d agree that doesn’t make them evil – it just means we have to decide how much of the cost it’s fair for them to shoulder.
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Not bullying us being costly is different from being around autistic behaviors being costly, and different arguments apply. If non-autistics can only refrain from active hostility and abuse with great effort, that would absolutely be a case of “non-autistic people have an impairment in behaving ethically”, and as you said, that would make separatism more attractive. On the other hand, if the problem isn’t compulsory bullying, but something like “our natural hand motions are extremely distracting and/or disconcerting to non-autistics”, that’s not an ethical impairment at all. We don’t consider someone bothered by noise to be immoral; why should matters be any different if the distraction is our body language? As Blacktrance pointed out, people bothering each other is a problem even in the absence of harassment, and it’s in our best interests to learn to associate effectively with non-autistics, even if that means suppressing a part of ourselves. Of course, that turns into a trade off-how much quality of life do we lose by suppressing an autistic behavior, and how much do we gain by potentially fitting in better after doing so? The trade off is likely to vary by individual circumstances, and activism could potentially open the possibility of better trade offs, if people generally become more tolerant. However, I suspect that even if autistic activism wiped out any stigma or deliberate intolerance, learning to fit in better will still have benefits. Your example of learning to avoid fatshaming is actually an excellent illustration of this-the more people learn to treat overweight individuals with kindness and respect, the better. However, even in the absence of any societal or cultural stigma on weight, there would still be reasons to try to achieve and maintain healthy weight (better health, being more attractive to most people if you’re interested in dating them). Likewise, even in the absence of a stigma on autism, we can still benefit from things like improving our emotional communication.
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“non-autistic people as a group are simply incapable of responding to normal autistic body language and affect with anything other than ostracism, harassment, and assault”
Could you give some examples of the harassment and assault just so I understand the issue better?
I’ve worked hard over my life to surround myself with genuinely decent people and I think now that I’ve mostly achieved that goal I live in a bit of a bubble. Even among decent people I can see the ostracism happening, if even unintentionally, because when people feel uncomfortable around someone they naturally and subconsciously just engage with them less and less. Harassment and assault though seem much less likely to happen unintentionally. I’ve witnessed kids being awful bullies to everyone, but I haven’t had any experience in my life with adults that would intentionally harass or assault an autistic person (lucky me).
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“It is wrong to mistreat people because of harmless behavior that doesn’t affect others in any way.”
“Of course, many autistic people have high support needs, and it would probably be impossible to live apart from non-autistic people entirely.”
This was an interesting breakdown in the argument. It doesn’t make much sense to present autistic people as both zero-impact and as in need of significant and costly accommodation. Given that the latter is true, then autism indeed comes at a high cost to others. (So high, in fact, that the autistic community itself could not muster the resources to provide this accommodation in a separatist scenario.)
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I did, in fact, choose my words fairly carefully. I’m not talking about accommodations in this post, I am talking about harassment and bullying of autistic people (and other members of marginalized groups). The hypothetical argument “it is important to pass as non-autistic so that people will know to accommodate your high support needs” does not even make any sense.
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AFAIK that’s not an argument that anybody is making, or that follows from the fact that accommodation has costs. But it you’re talking about the things that might motivate harassment and bullying of a minority community, it seems unproductive to discuss “maybe everyone else is just evil” as a viable option while obscuring the fact that the minority community in question is consuming shared resources at a higher-than-average rate.
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Both these things can be true:
1. Most people are capable of treating those with flaming gay behaviour, autistic tending behaviour and fat women in bikinis better.
2. Flaming gay behaviour, some autistic tending behaviour, and fat women in bikinis are naturally very annoying to a significant number of people and this likely cannot be changed by education and such. Deliberately engaging in behaviour that annoys other people can understandably be taken as somewhat of an aggressive act.
If that’s so, the common sense solution is for likely for most people to be kinder and more understanding of those who flaming gays, autistic people and fat women in bikinis. But the latter should also try to somewhat tone down behaviours that they know are going to annoy people. Where exactly to draw the lines, I do not know.
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I think that “mimic ordinary people” is intended as a temporary solution as the single person can’t change everyone on their own. On the other hand, it looks a lot like defecting in Prisoner’s Dilemma: buying security for yourself while making the number of people like you look less “normal”.
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