"a joy to have in class" aka This Child Will Not Be Diagnosed for at least Eight Years

today, april 11th, is the anniversary of Mel Baggs' death. Mel Baggs was one of the early founders of the neurodiversity movement and believed that no one was too disabled for human rights, something that modern nd movements fail to understand to this day. sie was so instrumental to my understanding of literally everything. sie died from medical ableism and neglect during the beginning of the pandemic. we would be nowhere fucking near where we are now without hir. i've decided to make a masterlist of some of my favorite posts of hirs, organized into different categories.

(some of these are listed in more than one category because they overlap so much)

here are some of the "essentials" (what you might have already read by hir/should read first):

here are some of hir beautiful writings on perceiving/communicating with hir environment as an autistic person, and on communication in general:

on personhood and who has the authority to take it away:

on institutions and the I/DD service system:

on online social justice communities/their inaccessibility:

misc:

this is hir poems and creative works:

this is hir writing on autistics.org:

may hir memory be a blessing/revolution.

favorite author i have never read

hey there buckaroos thank you for all the DEEP DISCUSSIONS we are having a great time here on tumblr. thought today i could make a post that is slightly more difficult its not all sunshine days ahead and requires a little introspection. LOOK AT US we have all arrived here together through trust and love and i think we can keep this going. chuck made this post on other platforms years ago and i think it was said very well then and led to some good discussion, so i am going to repost here. okay lets go deep bud here we go:

i would like to spend moment today talking about common joke i hear online (and even too my face at conventions). this is jokerman way i hear ALL the dang time: ‘chuck tingle is my favorite author i have never read’ or less jokerman way but of ‘i have never read his books but i love chuck tingle’.

first of all, THANK YOU buds. this is not way of call out post to make you feel bad, i appreciate your way and understand you are trying to support. this is not attack on your message and from bottom of chucks heart THANK YOU.

BUT i have to say something about this. please consider what you are saying when you post this. would you send this as message to STEPHEN KING or NEIL GAIMAN or NK JEMISIN? i doubt this. it would seem VERY RUDE to message other authors. just imagine trotting up to a writer and saying ‘i would NEVER read your books haha’ but it is sent to chuck all the dang time.

obvious reason buds say it to chuck is that i am queer author with a unique way. yes i write in realm of wild fantasy and erotic pairings, but by saying ‘i have never read chuck BUT’ you are really saying 'i am posting my support of this but PLEASE DONT THINK I AM REALLY INTERESTED IN THIS PERSONALLY.’ there are similar distasteful jokes that i will not repeat involving saying 'no bud on bud pounds’ after a sentence that works in similar way.

is sexual art really that bad? is queer art really that embarrassing? is unusual outsider art really that funny?

it is one thing if your preferred pound is not one of chucks tinglers, that is TOTALLY FINE BUD, but if you are an adult i would say 'is it REALLY that scary to read a book about a way of sex that is not yours? is it that difficult to think that something that seems silly to you could actually MOVE YOU in an important way? do you HAVE to disconnect yourself from lgtbqia art with a 'but i don’t read this myself?’

keep in mind, there are gay tinglers, there are asexual tinglers, there are trans tinglers, there are select your own timeline tinglers, there are horror tinglers. TINGLERS FOR EVERY TASTE. the thing that buds are often REALLY saying with ‘favorite author i have never read’ is ‘this is WEIRD and dont be confused because im NOT WEIRD IM COOL DONT THINK I ACTUALLY LIKE THIS’. funny enough even the proudly fun and wild and unique buckaroos will STILL say this line, maybe without taking time to think of what it means or how rude it is?

WHY would you never read a chuck book? because my way is queer? because it is neurodivergent? even if that is not there reason or even if YOUR ARE ALSO PERSONALLY QUEER AND NEURODIVERGENT TOO, think about what the joke is IMPLYING.

is sincerely enjoying something thats kind of unusual that difficult? do we really have to slather it in irony and ‘so bad its good?’ before reposting?

in closing as man name of chuck i will say you can still make this joke if you want buckaroos i know you are just having a good time proving love in your own way. i am not upset with you bud and i appreciate your support in any way you give it. there are some buckaroos who just CANT AFFORD tinglers and that is an important way i understand as well. obviously this conversation does not apply to those buds. but for the rest of us trotting along, MAYBE think about what you are really saying with this jokerman way first, and MAYBE try cracking open a tingler because you might be surprised. its not that scary bud. thank you for listening

being sincere is VERY COOL and VERY PUNK ROCK. i encourage all buckaroos out there to give it a try.

LOVE IS REAL

Autistic kids need to be able to talk about disability

Disabled kids need to be able to talk about disability. Difference isn’t a good enough word. Everyone’s different from everyone else in some way. Not everyone has a disability. People who have disabilities need to be able to talk about that, both in general and specific terms.

I’m writing this partly in response to comments I’ve seen on several good posts that have been circulating recently on why it’s important to tell autistic kids they’re autistic.

I’ve seen some parent responses that seem superficially positive, which actually miss the point:

That’s not good enough, because it doesn’t address autism as a disability. Knowing the word “autism” only goes so far. Kids also need to be able to talk about disability in a nuanced way, without glossing over things.

Kids will know that there are difficult and painful aspects of being disabled whether or not you talk about it. You can’t protect children from that knowledge by refusing to talk about it; you just end up sending the message that they’re on their own in dealing with it.

Here are some other things autistic kids need to know, beyond the word autism (not an exhaustive list by any means):

The basic version:

Some other, more complicated (and also not exhaustive) information:

And any number of other things.

Disability is complicated. Disability is something we spend our whole lives dealing with, and that we never stop learning about. This is not something you can cover with your child in one conversation When you talk to your kids about being disabled, it’s really important to let it be complicated, and to be honest about it being a long-term conversation. It’s important that they know that you can handle talking about it, and that it’s ok for them to have questions, feelings, and to need help figuring things out.

tl;dr Telling your autistic kid that they are autistic isn’t enough. You also have to talk to them about disability.

THIS THIS THIS

“In other words, they found that an important contributor to social and communication problems stemmed not from the autistic individuals, but rather from the neurotypical reactions, based on (by definition) exclusionary social attitudes and first impressions, which led to a decreased drive to interact with autistic individuals. That is to say, neurotypicals tend to decide, within moments of meeting autistic people, that autistic people are less worth socialising with than neurotypicals.”

Wow!  Shocker!  Yet again, Shocking Research Findings that they could have had literally DECADES ago if they had bothered listening to Actual Autistics™ at any point in their theorizing.

I read this to my Dad (also autistic) and we both looked into the camera like we were on the Office …

[Image description: an animated GIF from “Brooklyn 99″ of the Captain saying “Vindication!” spelled with multiple N’s and exclamation points. Description ends]

While it’s tempting to dismiss this as a “Water is wet,” piece of news, it’s important that studies like this are being conducted from outside the autism (and wider disability) community.

Because it’s much harder for the people that need to hear this news to dismiss it as disabled people “only seeing what you want to see.”

Let’s talk about the astounding similarities between cats and autistic people, and how we should make them the official autism mascot instead of that godawful puzzle piece

Oh man, now you’ve got me going!

Firstly, cats stim. They purr, swish their tails and knead their paws against pillows, blankets, and other soft things. Many cats actively seek out sensory experiences, like listening to birds singing, lying in a sunbeam, rolling against the grass, etc.

Cats have sensory sensitivities— many of them dislike walking on certain flooring, touching certain textures, and certain smells or sounds may make them anxious. Their fur is very sensitive, they can sense the lightest touch, or speck of lint, or dust and their skin will quiver until they can lick or rub it off. When they become overstimulated cats retreat into a small, dark place to recover.

Cats love routine. Many cats know the exact time that their owners wake up in the morning and will wake them. A cat with a routine is a happy cat— they love to have their meals or soft food on a schedule and will learn their owner’s schedule. Cats will become anxious when the schedule is disrupted or if their owner doesn’t follow their usual routine.

In the same vein cats are very wary and/or anxious when it comes to the introduction of new things or people into their environment. Cats require time and patience to get used to anything or anyone newly introduced. Cats also feel anxious when existing furniture is rearranged or when a new smell (like an air freshener) is introduced into the home.

Cats often have “special interests”, a particular activity or thing that they love and can spend hours enjoying. It could be playing with a particular toy, chewing on something, listening to the radio, or watching the clothes in the washing machine. My cat Kitty has a certain ball that she fixates on and will happily enjoy and obsess over for hours.

Finally, cats have a very distinct and subtle body language. The difference is particularly evident when compared with the exuberant, unsubtle dog. The slightest twitch of a tail or turn of the ears, the frequency and timing of blinks, and the positioning of the tail in relation to the body are all little movements that can express much. To the untrained eye it may appear as if a cat is bored, aloof, or unaware of its surroundings. But once you learn to recognize cat body language and understand cat communication, you’ll be amazed at the depth of emotion and how expressive your cat really is.

Yes, I think that cats have a lot in common with autistic people. And that’s wonderful!

also can I add to this:

cats like to show their affection just by sharing the same space. a cat will generally want to be in the same space as you, even if you’re not really interacting and are half way across the room. still hanging out! 

they don’t always want to be touched, and can be easily overstimulated by physical affection.

they don’t like to make eye contact.

their body language is often misinterpreted- and then they are blamed for it, or have negative motivations ascribed to it. a cat following you around is stalking you instead of wanting to hang out. a cat that doesn’t want to make eye contact with you is ignoring you instead of being polite. a cat that lashes out because it’s over stimulated, or you ignored their body language telling you to leave them alone is suddenly an asshole who hurt you for no reason.

I had this book as a child and I’m glad to see the comparison is so widely recognized too

I KEEP SAYING ALL CATS ARE AUTISTIC IM SO HAPPY THIS POST EXISTS PLEASE SOMEONE ARTISTIC MAKE A CAT WITH THE NEURODIVERGENT SYMBOL ON IT FOR AUTISM MASCOT :D

The book above has been updated to better align with the current understanding of autism as well!!

Even if you don't think ABA is inherently abusive, a look at the kind of people who are drawn to the field should be cause for alarm in itself.

"Helping" professions already seem to draw a disproportionate number of petty tyrants, but this one...dear *god*. Terrifying even by those standards.

Here’s what baffles me about ABA: I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that contemporary psychology considers radical behaviorism totally discredited, a bad theory from a bygone era. My sense is that if you ask a psychologist what they think of Skinner, at best they’ll say he was well-intentioned but mistaken, at worst they think he was an ideological crank. Behaviorism is so ill-regraded now that we don’t even apply it to animals, never mind humans, hence the infamous “I wouldn’t even treat a dog that way” quote.

But ABA seems to have missed this development completely. It’s like if there was a sub-branch of chemistry still working with phlogiston theory.

This is the same thing I wonder too. Behaviorism seems like it wildly oversimplifies human beings, but as soon as it's mentioned in the same sentence as autism, THAT'S DIFFERENT. It's almost like they... don't know that.. autistic people are... peop.... OH

There are at least a couple of real things going on here that leads to this.

1. Yes, they consider autistic kids only dubiously “people.”

2. There’s a thing where research standards when it comes to autism are much lower than they are around any other topic. An autistic researcher named Michelle Dawson has written a fair amount about this, but the standards in what often gets passed off as autism research would never fly in almost any other discipline.

2.5. In part this has to do with a history of rhetoric about autism being the worst thing that can happen to a family, or a “fate worse than death” for a child, so kind of anything goes in efforts to combat it.

3. The way that practitioners of ABA are trained leaves them very isolated from closely related disciplines, current knowledge and best practices (in both scientific method and child development/education/disability studies/current knowledge about autism).

When parents or therapists used to yell at me “If not ABA, then what?! Do you just let a child bang their head or never learn to communicate?!” I thought they were being rhetorical, but after I fielded a certain number of sincere questions from students who were looking to leave the field but still wanted to work with autistic kids and had no idea where else to go....I realized that they were not. They don’t know. Sometimes they literally don’t know what other kinds of therapy developmentally disabled kids often get, or the services that families need. Sometimes they think that ALL therapy is in fact ABA or that ABA is an umbrella term for all therapy.

There was a research study that came out just recently that found that a large percentage of people doing research on ABA have no idea what constitutes a conflict of interest, like if the person designing the research on a method is also selling or practicing that method.

So yeah. There were a lot of factors that led to autistic people being considered this pocket universe, basically, when it comes to ethics and research standards, and BCBA’s often BOTH don’t really consider autistic kids people, and are cut off from contemporary psychology.

People talk about needlessly gendered items but one time I got diagnosed with female presenting autism and I’m still losing my mind over it

This is why Autism Speaks studies are invalid. it’s resulted in people thinking that only men can have autism. Thus resulting in stupid terms like female presenting autism.

FEMALE PRESENTING AUTISM???

I refused to give my adhd evaluator my gender/sex so she logged my traits and answers from the questionaires both for the “male” adhd and “female” adhd traits and the results varied so much that even my evaluator was shocked by it bc it was the first time she had done both “genders” for one person (and i think it opened her eyes on how wrong and inaccurate sexed tests/evals are). my hyperactivity, and impulsivity scored lower (aka downplayed) on the female page but had a HUGEEEEE spike for it on the male page, their were things like my emotional dysregulation that were also“less apparent” on my female results than my male ones. Genuinely ask who ever is evaluating you to remove sex/gender from the evaluation process and if they refuse demand that they test you as a “male” and “female” Lots of us esp black and brown autistics and adhders are getting duped out of a proper diagnosis bc white perisex cishet people are seen as the “standard” for literally everything in the medical field 

Not know how come some people that diagnose autism when them teenager or grown up not understand different of be able make it that long not get diagnose and person like Taylor that have get diagnose when baby cause when am 2 still not walk eat play make sounds just stim and want papa or daddy love hold cuddle me that it and just if not been therapy and get special education whole whole life maybe not do any thing still and some one struggle when kid cause no diagnosis not same as every one can tell kid need diagnosis cause can’t do any thing with out lot lot lot support whole life because if Taylor not get that much support me never do any thing not go school not eat not drink not do any thing all cause actual can’t with out help is different things hard with out help to actual can’t no matter how hard try is why people need listen people like tay learn different of autism like sister and autism with intelectual disability like tay we not same even if have some same things and not understand people get mad I say not same tay need lot lot lot help have severe autism not mean other people not need help not mean other not struggle it mean is different different autism different disability different kind struggle

Fun perspective on autism and culture: Now that I am living in Japan, I generally find eye contact a lot less demanding here than I did in the United States. That “East Asian cultures find American levels of eye contact socially inappropriate” is oft cited. But my definitely not-autistic friend/labmate from Lesotho, Africa finds eye contact exceedingly demanding in Japan because she says in her culture they don’t necessitate eye contact at all. 

She said she had to learn how to make eye contact after moving here and that when she does make eye contact she finds it very hard to listen and process what the person is saying because she is overwhelmed and distracted by all the details of their face. 

She gave this information and perspective freely btw, without any prompting or previous discussion about eye contact or autism between us. This is a classic “autistic impairment” completely culture grown presenting in a non-autistic person just because she was dropped into another cultural environment with different social expectations. 

Cultural differences in eye contact are just one area that really drives home how context bound the “disorders” of autism are & that the underlying cause can’t be some sort of inherent “deficit in social understanding”. If that were the case, then every autistic kid in Lesotho would always be staring into your eyes. 

Mental and developmental health is exceedingly culture locked and I really love talking about it because it’s such a cool way of relitigating our understanding of symptoms and impacts.

I met a refugee from Angola who was telling me about the cultural training she needed after coming to the US. She told me that in Angola its impolite to make eye contact with other people and that I was making so much eye contact with her at the moment that she had to keep reminding herself that I’m not mad at her. It was kinda funny cuz the whole conversation before that point I was actually thinking very consciously that I needed to make eye contact or I would seem rude.

I saw an interview on the Jim Jefferies show about suicide rates in South Korea. A Korean guy, probably a psychologist or something, was talking about how in South Korea they dont talk about their emotions nearly as much. And Jim thought maybe that’s why they have such a high suicide rate but I’m not sure.

It’s really interesting how every foreigner, if their accent and race were not factors of bias, would be diagnosed with a mental illness purely because of culture. Like are Angolans mistaken for showing symptoms of autism or are they actually borderline autistic? Mental illnesses and neurodivergencies are all social constructs, and while you can be classified into them based on an uncertain amount of vague qualifiers, it’s probably just a behavior you learned from your surroundings just like a South Korean might learn to hold in their feelings.

Wait a minute …

Common ADHD symptoms:

Must be waaay less common to have “obvious hyperactive symptoms” in Italy

actually, to your point, there is a quite well-known study about cultural differences in perspectives on child rearing, that looked at Italy vs. America vs. one other country I can’t remember, and there was a significant difference found between the degree to which American parents cared about their child learning to “behave” in the sense of being quiet and settled vs. Italian parents who did not care about this much at all. 

I’m surprised there’s actually a study! That’s incredible though. Not even the baseline beliefs about childhood are the same

I made some mems

I’m not “pro self-diagnosis” for Autism. Like, I am, but I actually go even further than that. 

I’m anti formal diagnosis. I don’t think a formal, medicalized diagnosis of Autism is important for someone to have. I don’t think it makes any sense for Autism to be viewed and understood through a clinical or medicalized framework. 

Hear me out. 

Autism is not a disorder or a disease, it is a neurotype. It is a fairly common way of the brain working. The more we learn about it about how it manifests in various populations, and the better the (pretty fucking shitty) diagnostic tools get, the more people we discover who live and belong under the Autistic umbrella. And since Autism is a series of spectrums – each Autistic trait is itself a spectrum of its own – a lot of people live in a middle space between full, iconique stereotypical Autism, and complete neurotypicality. 

We know already at this point that Autism has genetic components. It runs in families. We know that lots of people have gone undiagnosed for decades of their lives, because the prior diagnostic categories were shoddy and limiting. We know that access to an autism assessment is difficult and expensive. We know that people who meet every diagnostic criteria for Autism get turned away by assessors on a regular basis – because they’re women, or because they’re trans, or because they just “look” too “normal” or whatever the shit. And we know that in families where Autism runs, there are lots of family members who never got diagnosed or assessed, but who have a ton of Autistic features that impact their day to day lives. 

What all of this means is, at any given time, there are probably more un-diagnosed Autistic people, or autism-spectrum people, than there are people who are diagnosed. And there’s also the fact that if you’re an adult, getting a diagnosis… doesn’t generally change jack or shit about your life. You don’t get any benefits. There aren’t specific, well-researched adult “treatments” for Autism, because it isn’t a disorder you can treat or cure, it’s a way of being in the world. 

In many cases, getting diagnosed with Autism as an adult can make your life worse. For many years, you couldn’t immigrate to Canada if you were Autistic. In many places, you can’t get access to trans healthcare as easily as allistic people can if your doctors know you’re Autistic. Autistic people regularly have their agency stripped from them in various ways. It’s not beneficial, unless you’re pursuing a workplace disability case in court or something, to have that stigmatized feature of yourself on your records. 

What I am proposing is a framework of Autism that is completely non-medicalized. Therapists and doctors and neuroscientists had their fucking chance with us, and they blew it. They called us less than human. They erased those of us who weren’t white cis boys who loved trains. They tried to cure us and created more stigma for us. They advocated to have our kind completely erased from existence. They ignored us when we asked for help managing the social and sensory traumas of existing in an allistic world. 

They don’t get to define who we are and what we need anymore. They botched the fuck out of it. I am pro self-realization of Autism. I am pro self-identification as Autistic. I don’t care if you would be categorized as Autistic by some outmoded ass diagnostic tool created for children and later adapted, poorly, to flag a handful of stereotypically Autistic adults. I don’t care if you spent thousands of dollars trying to get a bigoted doctor to validate what years of self-knowledge has taught you. I truly don’t care. 

I don’t think you need to be cured. I don’t think you need someone to approach your neurotype in a way that assumes you want to have it eradicated. I believe it is neurotypical society that must change, not you. I believe that the only way for Autistic people to thrive is for us to oppose any framework that says we are something to be measured, monitored, contained, and controlled. I believe society must get used to us, because we are not going away. I believe there are far, far more of us than any researcher or diagnostician has a good record for. I believe in your autonomy. I believe in your agency and self-knowledge. I don’t believe in diagnosis. 

Ugly Dolls is seriously underrated (spoilers)

Ugly Dolls. The trailer made it look like a cute movie, and the reviews it’s getting are pretty bad. After watching it for myself, I think it has some pretty interesting things to say about discrimination and representation. Here are some things I noticed in the movie that may not have been the intention of the creators, but can be interpreted in these ways.

This movie isn’t very hyped up and I didn’t even know it was out until earlier today, but for those of you who don’t want this movie spoiled, you might wanna stop reading.

1) Eugenics

Anyone who’s seen the trailer or read a synopsis of the general plot should know that there are 2 towns: Uglyville (where all the ugly dolls live) and the Institute of Perfection (where the “perfect” dolls live). It seems more like simple segregation at first, until you get closer to the end and find out the origins of Uglyville. Uglyville is essentially a paradise for ugly dolls filled with music and color and fun. The founder of Uglyville (Ox) later reveals that before the town was created, ugly dolls were sent to an incinerator (which is referred to as recycling in the movie to soften the implications this has for all the child viewers). Ox was extremely distraught by the discovery of the incinerator, and he boarded the entrance to it to prevent ugly dolls from being sent there, instead being redirected to what would become Uglyville. The leader of the perfect dolls (Lou) actively tries to make the incinerator look like a good and merciful option for ugly dolls, saying they’ll be remade into more perfect dolls that kids will actually want to play with. This idea sounds eerily similar to things eugenicists and autismoms say about how it’s good and merciful to euthanize disabled people so “they won’t have to suffer through life with a disability.” The result of eliminating euthanasia as an option resulted in the thriving community of Uglyville where everyone’s differences are celebrated.

Another very interesting note is that the dolls in Uglyville seems to take their community for granted, blissfully unaware of the efforts of the oldest doll in town to create this community for them. To them, their happy lives are normal, but it wasn’t very long ago that they wouldn’t have even been allowed to live simply for being deformed.

2) Discrimination in disguise

The motivation for the main character (Moxy) that drives the plot is the idea that she can some day be chosen by a child. People in Uglyville don’t believe that the human world and children exist, but Moxy never gives up hope of being adopted by a child.

When she and her friends arrive at the Institute of Perfection, Lou maintains a front of caring and wanting the ugly dolls to succeed in passing the rigorous tests that all dolls have to go through before being sent to the human world. The tests are designed in such a way that the ugly dolls will fail just by being themselves. The first test involves making sure that the dolls don’t get messy from having stuff spilled on them, and before the tests even begin, the ugly dolls were having fun spraying glue at each other. Their punishment: being thrown in a washing machine. Lou explains that each time a doll is thrown in the washing machine, they become “a little less perfect” until they eventually become unacceptable to humans and end up in the trash. The ugly dolls are fun loving and clumsy, so they get thrown in the washing machine several times. When Moxy manages to make it through the obstacle course perfectly clean, Lou slashes a permanent marker across her back when she’s not looking, so she has to go to the washing machine again even though she did nothing to deserve it. 

Also, while the ugly dolls are living in the Institute of Perfection, they’re led past a bunch of houses that look exactly the same and are on very organized streets. The ugly dolls themselves are led to a supply shack that looks pretty run down compared to the other fancy houses. They embrace their housing arrangements and are actually put off by the uniformity of the houses. 

To the people watching the movie, it’s made clear that he wants to see the ugly dolls fail and is actively sabotaging them. However, the characters themselves believe that Lou cares about the ugly dolls and is giving them a fair shot.

This reminds me of the education and prison systems in real life. Disadvantaged people (people of color, people with disabilities, etc) find themselves being unsuccessful at certain things simply for being who they are, and even managing to do everything perfectly still isn’t enough in some cases. All the while, people put up a facade of caring about their needs and wanting them to succeed, but are also hindering their success and blaming them for their own failures.  

3) Pressure to conform and High/Low Functioning Distinctions

Not even the perfect dolls who are sent to the Institute of Perfection are immune to the judgment and hatred of Lou and their other perfect peers. When Lou is introduced in the movie, he sings a song called The Ugly Truth, in which he insults perfect dolls for the most arbitrary reasons (having a slightly smaller head, a slightly longer neck, a freckle that he needs a magnifying glass to see, etc). All the perfect dolls wear the same clothing (all the girls dress one way and the guys dress another way) and live in identical houses.

The perfect dolls are made so self-conscious about their microscopic imperfections that they do their very best to hide them at all costs. One female character was about to cry when she saw that another girl had stolen something of hers, when the thief told her “Don’t cry; it’ll give you frown lines,” and this causes the doll to stop crying and smile. 

Mandy, a perfect doll, has some kind of visual impairment that makes wearing glasses necessary. However, she would rather bump into things than wear her glasses because she felt that they made her look ugly. This is indeed seen as an imperfection, and she felt more comfortable wearing her glasses around the ugly dolls because they didn’t judge her for wearing them. 

Mandy is in the position of the “high-functioning” disabled person; she experiences the effects of a disability, but is able to hide it from people so that she can experience some level of acceptance in her society. Her needs are disregarded, and trying to accommodate herself or making her disability visible would result in rejection. The ugly dolls have very easy to spot differences, making them analogous to “low-functioning” disabled people. Even when Mandy gives them a huge makeover and dresses them in the same clothes as the perfect dolls, their differences are still very easy to see, and they’re still rejected. Mandy is sympathetic to the ugly dolls’ cause and does her very best to help them succeed.  

4) Representation/Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

When the ugly dolls first arrive in the Institute of Perfection, they see the perfect dolls going though some kind of scanning device that says “You are a (Insert profession here) and a model” (this is also shown in this trailer). At the end of the movie, Moxy finally finds a home as a birthday gift for a young girl. The girl sees Moxy, looking very stunned and not knowing how to react to getting an ugly doll. And then she smiles, revealing 3 teeth that look exactly like Moxy’s teeth. In the end credits, Mandy (who’s wearing her glasses) is being held by a child who’s being given an eye exam. 

One thing I thought to myself before watching the movie (and a lot of other people thought this too) is that the ugly dolls aren’t actually ugly; they’re all really cute. It wasn’t until after actually seeing it that I realized that this is supposed to include the message that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Even though the rigorous beauty standards of the perfect dolls would categorize the ugly dolls as ugly, they’re not ugly to us. 

The girl who received Moxy as a gift shares a very subtle physical similarity with her. The girl who received Mandy has a doll with glasses, just as it’s implied that she herself will have glasses. 

Conclusion:

The ending did drag on a bit too long and had a few unnecessary moments that just felt like gratuitous additions to make it more like a conventional kids movie, but overall, I thought it was pretty great. I recommend this movie. 

Text:

Due to alexithymia/avoidant attachment I find it hard to identify what I need. A trick I use is to ask myself what feels like a relief:

Does it feel like relief when you don’t have to talk?

Does it feel like relief when the noise stops/the lights are turned off?

Does it feel like relief when you don’t have to look someone in the face?

Does it feel like relief when people stop touching you?

Please know that what feels good and doesn’t feel good for you matters. The fact that your needs and wants don’t follow the norm doesn’t make them less true. It doesn’t make them less important.

Images: White semi-cursive text in a long purple oval that reads “I’m too autistic for this”, and a screenshot of some of the different hoodies, shirts, and other merchandise like mugs and notebooks that you can have it printed on. End of image description.

“I’m too autistic for this”, for when you’re just too autistic for whatever allistic nonsense you find yourself witness to.

Get it as a sticker, mug, shirt, notebook, and more <3  https://www.redbubble.com/people/amythests/works/35770925-im-too-autistic-for-this

if i buy this there is going to be the temptation to wear it every day.

my favorite autistic stereotypes are the ones that are true

I wish I could make more people understand that, when it comes to things that involve sequencing, physical prowess, right/left differentiations, mathematical concepts, etc. I can’t just learn how to do them the way the average person does, I have to learn how to learn them first. 

I can’t just say “Okay, according to the tutorial, this is how you do X,” I have to say “All right, how can I make my brain understand that this is how you do X.” 

And there isn’t a tutorial for making your brain understand the tutorial! It’s like having to answer a fucking sphinx’s riddle every time I want to directions I can process. That’s why I give up on so many things, or take longer to do them than most people. Because you got directions you could read and I had to stand on a bridge for two months arguing logistics with a fucking troll.