Getting the truth out on autism
Omigosh! It’s her! The woman on the site Getting the Truth Out: https://www.gettingthetruthout.org/ is the very same woman who maintains the blog Ballastexistenz, Amanda Baggs: https://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=52
This page is my favourite. You can say – oh my – some sort of splinter skill in that video. https://www.gettingthetruthout.org/pagee001.html
But I say – Oh wow – and now check out her blog. Doesn’t seem so low-functioning anymore, does she?
“My appearance and life are political in nature whether I like it or not. I often wish I could spend my time entirely around people who don’t have those two opposing views. People who just saw me. As roughly who I am. Without exaggerating the similarities or differences. Without awkward discomfort. Without rushing to prove they “understood that stuff all along” to mask the fact that they didn’t. And saw neither horrible empty tragedy shell for my appearance nor amazing genius for my typing. Nor the ghost of who they wish or imagine I was or would have been.
I’ve met people like that. But Getting the Word Out ensures that it will be harder and harder for any autistic person to meet people like that. Because they have more money and power and credibility in the eyes of many. They will be believed. Our voices will be lost and denied. All of us.”
Here she’s quoted in an interview with Cal Montgomery, ‘Autistics Speak’, on Ragged Edge Magazine:
“With Getting the Truth Out,” says Kim, “I wanted to write a site that started out like the typical descriptions people use to raise money, along with the typical photographs, and all that kind of thing, so that the people who would normally read that sort of thing would take interest and read further. And then to show what is really behind that stuff — not just ‘behind the autistic appearance’ or whatever, but how people use these images of us, how they stick their own captions on them, and how they pretend to know better and all that, when all of it is a way of getting money, power, recognition, etc, without truly making anything any better for us.”
Dear Amanda,
Was looking up the Eugenics movement in America, and how it led to the Holocaust. Found this Image Archive – OMIGOD, thanks for telling me.
You can find a chronicle here. It’s so sad:
There are also video clips on Dr. Jamison, a manic depressive who’s written about manic depression. She talks about what it felt like when a doctor told her not to have children.
The idea of the ‘degenerate’ was common in American eugenics as well, IIRC. Eugenics being a worldwide phenomenon at that time.
Ballastexistenz, thank you so much for commenting. I love what you say about medicalization having a ‘subtle or not-so-subtle distorting effect’. It’s potentially dehumanizing too, when things are taken out of context, or put into wrong, or inappropriate contexts.
I’ve just started to read your blog. It’s fascinating and so well written. Comments on your blog are also wonderful to read. There’s so much to explore.
Your site ‘Getting the truth out’ is powerful. I’m very interested in that sort of thing – when words and images are used to prejudice and distort, to pathologize. I hope you didn’t mind that I linked to you, and posted a photo from your site, and excerpts. I was so delighted to see that you added a personal comment to explain more.Â
You probably know, if you’ve looked at some of this blog, that I’m no fan of psychiatry. And since low functioning/high functioning are psychiatric labels, I have no respect for the terms. But I imagine most everyone else does. Still, I should have written something.
Again, thank you for explaining.
Speaking about labels, I found the following on the Nazi psychiatric label ‘degenerate’. Don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I thought you might be interested …
Isn’t that something? Conformity and uniformity taken to twisted extremes.
Don’t forget the thing about low and high functioning being fairly meaningless terms. 😉
The descriptions and pictures of me on the first part of Getting the Truth Out are how I’ve generally been described when described in a medicalized light. They’re not false, as such, but they’re incomplete, just as they are incomplete for every single autistic person who they are used on. Medicalization has a subtle or not-so-subtle distorting effect.
I was meaning to do exactly what I said above, and also to evoke hopefully what people seem to see and react to when they look at me in person for the first time with no other knowledge of me. Because in print, with no other knowledge of me, people immediately imagine something totally different than my actual appearance. I wanted to give people the reverse experience, of encountering me in print from other people’s eyes and then rapidly shifting to what I really think about things. (In order to accomplish everything I said in the interview.)
So, no, I don’t seem that low-functioning in print (unless I’m having language problems), but then, low-functioning is a simplistic illusion anyway, as is high-functioning, seemingly convenient but ultimately useless. (As I tend to demonstrate every time I… uh… do anything.)