The whole way I thought about being #neurodivergent changed when I realized that neurotypical didn't mean normal or healthy, and wasn't the baseline from which other, inferior neurotypes diverged. It's just another neurotype that happens to be the most common one, so it dominates and almost always gets its way. As a queer person who grew up in straight society, it was easy for me to understand that one type being more common means nothing about it being better than another. Start from there, and it's easier to see our differences as just differences, instead of seeing differences as deficits or impairments. #ActuallyAutistic

Seeing that some villains are trying to take the T out of LGBT so trans people get erased and ignored. You know that the word "queer" is right there and it includes all of us perverts and freaks, right? We tried hard to get queer to happen, but the straight folk didn't like it so they call us LGBT, like we're simply a list of approved aberrations. And a lot of us queer folk have submitted to this linguistic oppression. I am sad every time I hear a queer person say "LGBT" or "LGBTQIA+" or whatever, because that's accepting the oppressor's language for us. Queer is a good word because it includes everyone who isn't part of the sexual majority. It is inclusive by default and by definition. For anyone who thinks "queer" is a slur so they prefer "gay" because it's not a slur, I'll point out that only a couple decades ago "gay" was a slur and we said "homosexual" to be polite. Language evolves. Embrace "queer" and avoid having to figure out what groups deserve to be part of an abbreviation.

No, that's not how the autism spectrum works. > Autism is a spectrum, and yes, on one end of that spectrum it can be debilitating and both those with autism and their caretakers need and deserve support. On the other end? Normal fucking people with jobs and hobbies and families... While there is a colloquial use of the word *spectrum* to mean a scale from a little to a lot, the "autism spectrum" is a technical term in the field of psychology, so it doesn't mean that. In optics, a spectrum is a breakdown of light into its component colors. It's the rainbow you see when you pass a beam of light through a prism. And similarly, the autism spectrum is how we decompose autism into a set of autistic traits. The autism spectrum is not a scale from low-functioning to high-functioning. There are autistic people who are socially awkward and stim a lot, and those that are fine socially but have a lot of sensory issues. That's what the spectrum means. And "profound autism" is not a thing, either. Autistic people darkly joke that we're either seen as low-functioning so we get no agency, or we're high-functioning and get no support. Bullshit functioning labels do not help us – they only help people figure out the easiest way to ignore us and our needs. Whenever autism becomes the main character, a lot of people will jump into the conversation only to show how ignorant they are. Keep in mind that even people who purport to know about autism generally have very little idea what they are talking about. Be skeptical of allistic people who think they are smart about autism. Dunning-Kruger comes for everyone. #ActuallyAutistic #autism #autistic

gods give me the confidence of a neurotypical man explaining autism to an autistic person

Meelo loves his transom window. Not sure if it's because of the fresh air or how it lets him look down on his lessers. #CatsOfMastodon

I'm so tickled to see posts from all these folks who have never been to a protest before today, and their delight as they discovered what it's all about. If we believe the Alt National Park Service estimates, there were over 7 million protesters today, so we probably activated a couple million new activists. And once activated, people tend to stay active. Consider today a sea change moment for the USA. Things are going to be a little different from now on. #NoKings

I want a competing philosophy meme because I'm tired of the Trolley Problem. The ethical conundrums of our age seem to be less about when we get to exercise power over others, and more about how to compete with others to avoid harm in a rigged system. I'm thinking about the Outrun The Bear Problem. (probably needs a more catchy name. Pursuit Bear Problem?) It's based on that old joke that if a bear is chasing you and a companion, you don't need to be faster than the bear, but just have to be faster than your companion. The conundrum is this: Is it ethical to outrun your companion so the bear catches them instead of you? And what about variations? Is it ethical to do something to slow your companion down? What if you could cooperate to have a 50% chance of both of you escaping but there's a 50% chance the bear gets both of you? I think this could be just as rich a thought experiment as the Trolley Problem, and perhaps more applicable to our current social issues. #philosophy #TrolleyProblem

I have been autistically online for nearly a decade now, and I have never seen the Autistic community as worked up over something as we are about RFKjr's looming fascist bullshit. He obviously wants to use us to push his antivax nonsense, and at the same time he wants to do a eugenics and eliminate us from the population. This is a Red Alert. Glad to see folks aren't being quiet about it, but it's also scary to see everyone as freaked out as I am. #ActuallyAutistic

Happy Llama Dress Day!

In case it's not clear, when a sociopath explains away bad behavior by saying it was "just a joke", they don't mean they were making a joke to be funny. These so-called jokes are a test to see who is in-group and who isn't. If you think it's a good joke, you're part of their group. If you don't think it's a good joke, you're their enemy. This is why their humor sucks. They're not making jokes to be funny, but to weed out the people who don't think they're funny.