I'm getting increasingly interested in how certain behaviours get a pass when someone has enough privilege, versus how differently they're interpreted without it.
I was watching a documentary the other day where an autistic woman pointed out that when you're disabled (particularly if you're not neurotypical or have a mental health condition), support staff will tend to see all your personality quirks as aspects of your disability, as functioning problems that need to be stamped out. Queerness in people with ASD can often be seen as "gender confusion" and problematised by clinicians. Yes, a lot of autistic people are resistant to social pressure towards binary gender expressions, but if the person is happy with who they are, then that's a feature, not a bug.
Edit: I mean, not that queerness is universally accepted when you're not autistic, gah, far from it, but it does illustrate rather well what happens when society says to some groups "all your differences have to be levelled out" and to others "you're normal so we'll overlook that".
no subject
I was watching a documentary the other day where an autistic woman pointed out that when you're disabled (particularly if you're not neurotypical or have a mental health condition), support staff will tend to see all your personality quirks as aspects of your disability, as functioning problems that need to be stamped out. Queerness in people with ASD can often be seen as "gender confusion" and problematised by clinicians. Yes, a lot of autistic people are resistant to social pressure towards binary gender expressions, but if the person is happy with who they are, then that's a feature, not a bug.
Edit: I mean, not that queerness is universally accepted when you're not autistic, gah, far from it, but it does illustrate rather well what happens when society says to some groups "all your differences have to be levelled out" and to others "you're normal so we'll overlook that".