Are you or a loved one suffering from Internalized Social Construct Disorder?
Talk to your legislator today about whether gen-o cide is right for you
Content warning: discussion about the ongoing dehumanization and oppression of and violence against autistic, transgender, and gender-nonconforming persons
Dear Readers,
For personal reasons, I need you to know that I’ve been sitting on this post for a few weeks now, tweaking it over and over again, uncertain whether it will make sense to a wider audience and doubting myself more than ever since having a stroke last year and feeling like my mental faculties aren’t what they used to be. The chronic stress I am living with compounds my mental lack of clarity. So, though it’s probably still fairly disjointed, hopefully it’s at least not nonsensical. It’s very difficult for me to say it’s good enough and to just get it out there, but I have to get these thoughts out of my head and bring these distressing matters into the light. I am putting aside my pride and perfectionism in the interest of sharing important information.
Once again, I’m attempting to help sound the alarm about an issue that is deeply concerning, especially to me as an autistic and agender person with an entirely trans/gender-nonconforming and autistic/neurodivergent family. This is one of the primary reasons we fled the United States earlier this year, and I have two disabled, gender non-conforming, neurominority family members who remain trapped in the state of Georgia—where anti-trans bills have already been passed into law—by inhumane and human-rights violating Social Security Administration disability rules that prohibit people receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) from maintaining their disability benefits after moving out of the country.
I should probably write a separate post to raise awareness of that issue one day, too…
First, a word from our sponsor, Allistic Speaks…
Do you have a loved one who clings to their strange mental collection of vintage notions as if they were the gospel truth? Affliction with Internalized Social Construct Disorder (ISCD) is a tragedy affecting many families today. Allistic Speaks™ is here to help. Our ISCD Awareness Revolution™ is here to shed light on this baffling and terrifying phenomenon.
ISCD symptoms may include:
A penchant for attaching arbitrary gender labels to roles and behaviors, even if it defies all logic.
An uncanny knack for squeezing sexual and romantic attraction into a tiny, rigid box.
A fervent belief only one correct way of engaging in loving relationships exists, as if humans are all romantic robots.
An affinity for religious practices, because who wants to face the absurdity of existence with rationality anyway?
An irrational distrust of people based on superficial traits, often accompanied by a sense of personal superiority based on one’s own superficial traits.
A bizarre obsession with random social behaviors like handshakes, accepting non-consensual hugs from your uncle, and being quiet and holding still in certain times and places even when it causes discomfort.
A passion for enforcing ever-changing fashion fads and grooming routines, environmental and social costs be damned!
A strong desire to hoard and worship money, as if paper, metal, and currency made up of zeros and ones hold intrinsic cosmic value.
The conviction that time is an actual commodity, ripe for… commodification!
An unexplainable urge to bow down to authority figures in hierarchical power games.
A strange need to normalize forced participation in government and economic systems, because just like your uncle says, consent is over-rated!
With symptoms like these, it's no wonder communication breakdowns and conflicts arise when Normal People attempt to bridge the gap!
Fear not, for we have solutions!
Our ISCD Awareness Revolution aims to help you navigate the baffling landscape of ISCD and address the challenges it poses by:
Educating the masses about the peculiar traits of ISCD
Unraveling the mysteries of why some people are afflicted with this perplexing hidden condition and finding the means to prevent them from happening
Attempting to unveil the hidden potential within ISCD-afflicted individuals
Challenging symptomatic ISCD carriers’ notions that they have a monopoly on sanity and reason
Sparking curiosity among ISCD sufferers to explore a world beyond their boxed-in beliefs
Finding a cure for these strange beings whose bewildering beliefs and behaviors leave us all tearing our hair out
Let’s face it, ISCD traits are maladaptive to the survival of our species. We're committed to fostering understanding and acceptance for all and creating a world where people suffering from ISCD can reach their full potential—but if that doesn’t work out, well, we might need to rethink our strategy and resort to some old-school planet cleansing.
This piece of satire is intended to act as a mirror reflecting the ridiculous and obscene framing that has been used to demonize and ostracize autistic people for decades. If you feel like bawling your eyes out or screaming with rage, go check out the promotional videos hate groups like Autism Speaks have produced about “finding the cure,” for example.
What I hope to help people understand is how both autistiphobia and transphobia spring from the same genocidal well. I want to help others see how our existence as autistic and transgender people is seen as a threat to the socioeconomic order. A “cure, or treat and prevent” narrative, like the ones concocted by entities that want to eliminate us, is being embraced anew in support of a particularly menacing political ideology.
In 2020, J.K. Rowling lamented on her website that, “The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.”
Earlier this year, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene went on a transphobic rant claiming LGBTQ+ activists were targeting vulnerable autistic children. “Many of these victims have diagnoses of autism, of mental illness, they have depression, they have anxiety, they have psychosis.”
And speaking of Georgia, the shit-show of a state we fled earlier this year, an anti-trans law went into effect there on July 1st that weaponizes autism diagnoses to deny trans young people their rights. The law dismisses autistic people’s capacity to understand ourselves to make their argument for denying transgender minors access to necessary, life-saving medical care. “Gender dysphoria is often comorbid with other mental health and developmental conditions, including autism spectrum disorder,” the law reads.
In February, the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry published another vile argument from the perspective of autistiphobic eugenicists. This research was conducted on genetically engineered “mutant mice” with “human induced neurons.” They attempt to justify the “therapeutic treatment” of “neurodevelopmental disorders” like autism with the anti-epileptic and “mood stabilizing” drug, lamotrigine (name brand Lamictal). The study’s authors discuss a genetic mutation they believe may cause autistic “neuropsychiatric disease,” which took the trash rag The New York Post less than a few hours to publish an alarming article about (kinda like it was planned and coordinated?), linking autism to babies born to women over the age of 30 and clutching pearls over the exponential rise of rates of autism in New York City. (Rubbish.)
There really aren’t adequate words for me to explain to you how worrying all this is, especially given the current political climate in the U.S. and U.K. where dangerously deranged people are being allowed public platforms (including this very one I’m writing on) to openly demonize anyone who doesn’t check all the Christian Nationalist’s “Ideal Man” boxes. As if there wasn’t enough murder-inspiring hatred already being expressed about trans and nonbinary people, these necromancing peddlers of bigotry are bringing ableist talking points back to life that had finally started to enter the realm of a hushed, “We don’t use that word anymore, grandpa.”
From my point of view as an agender autistic person who feels that my scoffing at the very concept of gender and my autism are inseparably intertwined, all the flawed studies that try to qualify the causes for the undeniably quantifiable overlap between autistic people and gender non-conforming people are obviously being conducted by cisgender allistic researchers who miss the forest for the trees. They don’t ask the right questions. They don’t zoom out to see the answer that’s so obvious to so many of the people they are studying, which is that the criteria that determine whether people are considered “normal,” and are therefore rewarded in society, are just made up!
The Masters—the most dominant members of neoliberal capitalist society (the primary beneficiaries of the system that end up within the right tail of the bell curve)—maintain their power and control by convincing everyone that a specific set of imaginary characteristics are normal, ideal, or acceptable. Anyone with imaginary traits that fall outside of that “normal” range get labeled as abnormal—social deviants, criminals, those pathologized as disordered or mentally ill, the less able-bodied—relative to the “normal” person who has the greater perceived ability to be useful to the Master’s whims.
Those in the left tail are deemed “surplus” by the Masters. The surplus are the people more likely to end up excluded from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—forced into poverty and more likely to be institutionalized in mental hospitals or prison (prison is far more likely these days). It is worth noting that those who exhibit the Dark Triad traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—are, not un-coincidentally, over-represented in the right tail.
Maintaining the illusion of meaning ascribed to labels means the people who identify with the labels that fall within the normal range will be, in general, more able to reap the benefits and rewards of living in society. Those who are labeled with terms ascribed to deviation from the range of normal falling to the left side of the curve will be less able to enjoy those benefits and rewards. The more of one’s identity that falls into the left of the curve, the more powerful the effects of oppression are likely to be.
And so we end up with “research” from institutions funded by the white supremacist colonial capitalist hegemony that frames a “lack of alignment between gender and sex” as a tragic result of the deficits “autism spectrum disorder” cause and a whole bunch of other pseudoscientific garbage like “ADHD is a chemical imbalance” so you should do (only legal and profitable) drugs about it.
I don’t have a deficit. I am not disordered. I do not lack. I am free from internalizing society’s silly dogmas. My parents and other family members, the education system, my peers, my workplaces, the legal system, media and pop culture figures… all tried to impose their internalized constructs on my mind. Any discomfort I ever experienced was due to my attempt to reconcile my authentic self with the false reality they tried to force me to accept as true.
They wanted to install the Social Constructs v. 20.0 (copyright late 20th century) software, but it wasn’t compatible with my operating system. My OS isn’t wrong, just different. I’m not going to suggest my OS is superior, but I will argue how important it is to ensure the availability of different kinds of operating systems to prevent any one monopoly from dominating.
And that’s how you should view what’s going on. Attempting to marginalize and erase autistic people and transgender people is like a mega-corporate hostile takeover to create a monopoly on what the acceptable forms of human diversity are. And that’s bad for everyone.
Trans people are being murdered by the hundreds annually and an unprecedented number of anti-trans bills have been introduced or passed in U.S. state legislatures. (The U.K. is doing just about as much damage to trans people’s safety and existence, as well). But I never see the media point out that a high number of trans people being criminalized and murdered also means a high number of autistic people are being criminalized and murdered. Because that would call attention to harm being done to an historically marginalized population that has gained more social acceptance in recent years and we can’t let people see that an attack on trans people is an attack on autistic people.
Autistic people, as a group, had made progress in recent years, becoming more understood and accepted, even if for mostly wrong and often untrue reasons, such as when targeted corporate hiring programs glorify and commoditize autistic people as especially loyal and profitable tech gurus. *gag* Trans folx had just barely started to get a real feel for what it felt like, at the group level, to live authentically and be loved as we are. But now, autistic and trans people are being targeted for exclusion and violence once again.
Fascists have always targeted transgender and autistic people. Our natural immunity to, and existence outside of, the social constructs that the fascist foundation rests upon threatens to expose the illusion. The anti-autistic research, anti-trans laws weaving in tired anti-autistic tropes as support for bigotry, monstrous public figures like Rowling and Greene, and the media publishing sensationalist headlines about the menace of trans fads and soaring autism diagnoses are collective threats that need to be taken seriously.
I saw the potential for genocide of my kind in the United States. I decided I wasn’t going to stick around to find out how that chapter in history ends.
I adapted Pastor Martin Niemöller’s original warning in the hopes you will not underestimate the critical moment we are in right now. The order has changed somewhat, but the targets remain the same as ever.
First They Came, 2023
First they came for the Liberals And I did not speak out Because I was not a Liberal Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for the Atheists And I did not speak out Because I was not an Atheist Then they came for queer people And I did not speak out Because I was not queer Then they came for the trans folx And I did not speak out Because I was not trans Then they came for the neurodivergents And I did not speak out Because I was not neurodivergent Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
Don’t let history repeat itself. Please stand up for your autistic, trans, and nonbinary friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. We need your voices. We need your political action. We need your votes. We need you. And you need us, too.
This is so, so, so important! I'm very glad you put this out there despite your personal reservations. In fact, I found the opening paragraph to be inspirational as I've been hesitant on posting anything publicly since I still have a perfectionist mindset. But reading this made me feel like you just gotta say fuck it and put it out there, so thanks for being real!
The satire was spot-on too. Everything about the way we live is completely absurd. It's easier to see that when you're neurodivergent, and that's no good for the capitalists. That's why they lump together trans and autistic people so they can kill two socially deviant birds with one stone. Also, autistic people can't be visually identified but trans people sometimes can. A visible target is easier to hunt down than an invisible one.