When RFK Jr. "investigates" autism, be aware that he is deliberately and knowingly engaging in eugenics. He's literally looking for ways to eliminate people like me from the human race. I'm autistic. So when you ask "what causes you?", you're positioning me as something that needs to be investigated. Something that needs to be "cured", which is to say, eliminated. Because I think in a different pattern than some folk do. When someone says, "X causes autism, so avoid X", they're saying, "or your kid might have (gasp) *autism* too!" This is eugenics. It's Nazi stuff. Not an exaggeration. A "science" under the Nazis. We are not broken. We do not need fixing. We just think differently. But we have always been around. That dude that wrote an eleven-volume handwritten guide to every herb in one county in England, or wherever it was? Telling me he wasn't one of my people? GTF. We are and always have been productive and innovative members of society. If anything, we should be seen as an advantage to the species: diversity of thought is *better* thought. Not ours or yours better - but ours and yours are. We aren't a threat, we're not (for the most part) needing round-the-clock specialist care - but be human, will you? If someone needs that, maybe give it to them? Because they're people? Didn't we fight a big war about this a few years back? Something about a guy with a bad moustache who didn't like the disabled people in his society? Among his many targets? Seems to me his central thesis was "I will decide who's people and who isn't people." And that some of us are saying, "How about maybe not? How about all the people matter, and we try to keep ourselves alive all together?" I cannot personally imagine how anyone decides his plan is better. Or more moral. But I'll be over here on Team Everybody Else. #ActuallyAutistic
A Conversation About Trans People Getting Old Friend: You're amazing Cait (she/her/elle) Why is that? I'm just a trans girl who got old. Friend: Because that rarely happens Cait (she/her/elle) Not true at all. There are plenty out there. But when we transitioned, the rule - like, if you break it you're out of the clinic entirely - was that you MUST be stealth. It was strongly recommended that you move cities, and cut ties with everyone you knew. So we did what we had to. We hid from the world. We pretended to be cis women. Some of us married men, and adopted kids because we were infertile cis women. And never told them our past. And they got old. But they're still stealth, only now they have a second life built up. They have spouses and kids and friends and jobs and everything. And if they come out, they fear losing it all, as they already did once. Believe me, having lost it all? I would never do it again, for anyone. They're not "not there". They just can't afford to be out. Some few of us can, for various reasons. I have been for 20-odd years. But it's not been easy, and I pay for it. I can't resent my sisters who choose not to pay a second time. So we exist. There are many of us. I know a few, a very few. And they're super careful about even talking to me, the green-haired widely-known activist trans woman. We talk on Signal only, and they use burner phones. I'm their only contact with trans community, because they're terrified. We exist. We just can't all be out about it. So I try extra hard to be super out. To help make up for their necessary absence. We do get old, dear. You will too. The present bullshit will pass, in time, and we will live openly and happily again. It has before, and it will again. That's why we fight against it, those of us who can. Because we know we can and will win, in the end. We have before. Hold strong, my friend. We're not doomed. ==== If you're moved, help me do activism if you can: