this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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you have people with minor anxiety calling themselves neurodivergent now. the term has sort of lost all meaning. if everyone is neurodivergent, nobody is.
Maybe the experiment that is "normal" was a fad. We didn't even have a word for it until the 1600's as physical and mental impairments were much more common and it wasn't until mass manufacturing and early sciences became a thing that our cultural obsession with uniformity cropped up.
As we built up science changed models. It stopped trying to find easy universal constants and started looking at the just how naturally variable everything is. Like how cancer is actually not a singular diagnosis but a very large family of vaguely related conditions that all operate and respond in very different ways. Curing the entire disease family is fighting a hydra.
We could very easily revert to a pre "normal" society model but instead of that being informed by ignorance it could be through compassionate study.
Though we got a ways to go. A lot of people are very... passionate about holding onto the label of normal and the "right" for others to only be referred to as deviation.
Who tf takes pride in being normal? Hell the term "normie" is a derogative term. No one is bragging about how normal they are and I think this is a made up enemy to make pursuing the normalization of "neurodivergence" a more noble goal.
In reality we have people saying they suffer from "time blindness" and want exceptions to be made because they can't figure out how to structure their life in a way that allows them to function with the people around them. Everyone has issues, and everyone should figure out ways to minimize how those issues impact their life and the people around them. Instead, we have people submitting to the idea that "I'm neurodivergent there is nothing I can do to improve its just who I am" to excuse their faults.
Often the " bragging about how normal they are" isn't the way that shakes out. I am thinking more specifically about people who throw tantrums about being called "cis" or "hetero" or "allistic" or even "allosexual" . To a lot of these people they refuse to have any label applied because they figure they should just be assumed the normal and the default and no word should exist that describes their state. To them any descriptive labels are just for "deviations" and being treated on the same footing as a deviation even a little is a threat to the supremacy of normalcy. Often one gets the impression that they want communities of queer or neurotypic people to internally refer to them as "regular people" not so much "normies" as they would probably find that derogatory as well.
Neurodivergence used as an excuse not to improve is just shitty behaviour. For a lot of us knowing our type of Neurodivergence can open doors to figuring out learning styles or work arounds when the something that should work but doesn't. On the other hand sometimes someone will try to force something that provably has never worked for you and not have a lot of empathy when you try and warn them that what they are trying to do has a history of not shaking out for you like they expect it will. It's a two way street. Knowledge of your personal weaknesses and workarounds can be frustrating for other people who see it feom the outside as you not doing what they want because of lack of gumption and willingness to "try" when really you are just very tired trying to do this something for other people have recommended over and over and have developed a boundary to explain that for you it's a fool's errand to try again. To the other person they have never seen all the attempts you have made before doing it their way so to them it just looks like lazy.
You mean people on reddit and twitter? Don't take their opinions too seriously. Some women don't like being called cis women, as they feel its a deliberate attempt to redefine what a women is (which to be honest, it kind of is). I have never heard of anyone being called allosexual, nevertheless getting upset about it.
Yeah... I wish I could have that ignorance but trust me. These people exist out in the world and while they are more prevalent in some places than others they use that policing of language and the sort of "normalcy privilege" as a weapon. Take my hometown, right now there is a concerted effort by these people to influence the school board and town council decorum insisting the labels cis/hetero/allosexual and allistic should be treated as slurs and make their usage an offence for which one can be ejected from chambers or have their jobs threatened.
I know a lot of people in my community who have been challenged, even yelled at in public, in person by these people because they were overhead them using cis / het to describe either themselves or others in a private conversation that these people picked up on.
What these movements do is enforce a double standard on queer communities. There is a concerted effort to rob us of the language to refer to other states of being other than ours in ways that are judgement neutral. This often causes queer friendly scholarship to have to mince through ridiculous hoops making it much more difficult to sussinctly explain concepts which otherwise become much more arcane without the ability to use adjectives.
Trying to talk to these "cis is a slur" people it becomes very clear that they do not think there should be a word for them. Their existence is assumed correct, unremarkable and beyond the ability to comment on. Our existence however is controversial and thus deserves a derivative label.