Disability and feminism: one person’s experience

First of all, a housekeeping note: This post is filed under “Random.” Why? There isn’t a category even remotely related to disability rights. This, in a very comprehensive and well-populated category system that has room for such pressing issues of intersectionality like “Hungover Feminist Weekly Report.” Fix this. (Editors Note: There is now a disability rights category available for Community Posts)

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Now then. I am a feminist, and I have a disability (Asperger’s syndrome, for those who are wondering. Yes, it is diagnosed. Those who would like to tell me about how this isn’t a real disability and/or how I am just using it as an excuse can kindly go fuck themselves.) I believe these two things are related. Here’s how.

First of all, I would not wish my disability on my worst enemy. I want to stress this. This is not a fuzzy, happy post about how my disability has helped me see things in a new light. People without it really can’t grasp how bored and how lonely it makes you, and how pointless it makes your life. It’s spending days talking to no one, counting hours and trying to eke out a few spare jolts of dopamine; it’s feeling like a mushroom growing in some forgotten corner, whose only contribution to the world is a carbon footprint. It’s walking around town and seeing tens of thousands of people and knowing that, deep down, you’re not like them at all, could never relate to them, and none of it was your choice. 

But it does other things, too. When you grow up without friends, you grow up without being inducted into a lot of our society’s gender roles. I never got the script that said “Hi, you’re a woman, and you just got interpellated! Now you have to love scrapbooking, watching Grey’s Anatomy, reading Cosmo and baking cookies with pretty pink ribbons for your man, who will be provided for you if you do exactly what we say and don’t pay any attention to those who don’t.” This isn’t to say that I don’t have any of this residue on me — you’d have to be completely cut off from all contact with anybody, ever, starting from birth — but it’s a lot of distance.

And when you have distance from something, it’s easier to examine it, to study it, to be dispassionate. I wasn’t given the script. All my knowledge about social interactions is put together from observations. It’ll never be quite complete. It’s like trying to cobble together a house with Legos and spray paint when all the others on the block are mansions. I’ll always, to a degree, be “faking it.” I can’t be myself. Society has not granted me this luxury: this is ableism. But I digress again.

Distance from something makes it easier to examine it. It’s why I’m a feminist. Looking on at social interactions from the outside, it’s obvious just how prevalent all these cruelties are. (It’s a deliberate choice of word, as all of the following are based on a cruel and mean-spirited premise.) It’s obvious how much of social interaction is based on misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism–  really, hatred and mockery of anyone at all different. And the cruel irony of it all is that, the more visibility these issues receive, the more they become grist for the mill. It’s how it works: people with privilege treat everyone else as their personal jokes.

I’m not immune to this at all. I’m still privileged, being heterosexual (despite the very real prospect of never being able to have a relationship) and middle-class and cisgender and able-bodied, among other things. And therein lies the problem. People who want to help people with Asperger’s often talk about learning social skills, learning the social script, the missing puzzle pieces, whatever. Well, privilege is part of the script, and abusing privilege. So every day, on top of having to go out and fight with my odd voice and my near-desperation, I have this massive fucking chunk of cognitive dissonance to deal with. And I put my beliefs on hold. I don’t call out sexism, partly because nobody would listen to me, partly because I am part of the problem. I am doing evil. And every day, as I learn more of the script, it gets worse.

This is my piece. Please don’t yell at me for it.