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fuck there is nothing like suddenly recognizing that you’re the product of generational trauma as far as you can trace back of neurodivergent people who tried so hard to fit into this world and suffered so badly for it. my family is all stories of pain, poverty, prison, & death
social justice for me has been such a formative part of understanding the world and learning about intersectionality meant everything to me. here was a clear explanation of social structures and systems i’d never been able to understand.
it was also this fantastic, beautiful, and clearly true explanation that we all have our own unique struggle - things that oppress us, and oppressive systems we benefit from and must take responsibility to dismantle - that also proved that every struggle is all of our struggle.
i loved reading every perspective because each perspective unlocked a piece of the mystery, and helped complete the full picture. every group crosses over with every other group. systems of oppression ruin the world for everyone. there is no winning in the competition framework.
for me personally, though, some of the answers i learned created new mysteries. Black activists talked about generational wealth, and the horrific gap between that of white and Black families. i never knew it existed except for rich people with trust funds.
I of course knew I was white, I could see how white privilege benefited me, but everything else I learned about white people confused me. White people had so much money! My family doesn’t have that. Nobody owns a building, or land, or a paid off house. I never realized others did
Trans activists talked about gender identity, a concept I’d never realized existed. People feel like a gender inside? Do I feel like a woman? Do I identify as a woman? What feeling is that? I found out that most people did feel like a gender. I respected it, but couldn’t feel it.
I wondered then, am I a woman? Am I a man? Non-binary? I’d always related to men more easily, but I read trans men’s and non-binary people’s experiences and that didn’t sound like me either. So I’d table that for myself, support others, & keep learning.
Same for educating myself on sexual orientation. My mom had taught me about homosexuality by listening to Melissa Etheridge and saying, “you hear where she’s singing about someone she loves? she’s singing about a woman.” that made sense to me immediately. yeah why wouldn’t she?
When learning more about all the LGBTQ identities it seemed like everyone had a sexual orientation, you just had to figure it out. My muddled feelings must mean I was bi, so I came out as bi. But then I fell in extra deep love with a girl, so decided I must be gay instead.
Over time it became clear to me that however I felt romantically and sexually and just love-wise overall really didn’t fit any of these labels, and figuring it out was stressful and wasn’t really helping me, so I started using queer bc it was vague. Vague could have nuance.
The biggest thing that was confusing to me is most people seemed to be learning that the world contained more discrimination than they knew, and a lot of the time I was learning it contained more privilege than I knew. How did so many people not know anyone in prison? Or care?
What world had all these people been living in that they were so surprised to hear about other people’s struggles that they angrily denied their existence? Why were people - even ones part of one oppressed group - so furiously unwilling to examine their privilege?
I really didn’t understand why people would be angry at me for caring about the struggles of groups I wasn’t a part of. I finally realized most people only wanted to learn about their own oppression, be angry at everyone who didn’t care, and then not care about any other groups.
That was an extremely fucking depressing realization for me. Most people were not willing to stop being defensive and to adopt others’ struggles as their own. This too had ended up just being a selfish thing. I stopped engaging with a lot & focused on truly intersectional people
This is one thing that pushed me left. I stopped believing in people’s ability to learn and looked for those actually doing the work to help others. Some Communists really inspired me. Eventually some turned out to just care about status, too. No group or ideology was trustworthy
I’ve talked a lot this year about how I don’t want to be in any groups, and any time I could feel people giving me purity tests, I decided to fail them. No. I’m not learning all this shit so I can be on a fucking team. I’m learning it because there are no fucking teams.
I’ve always still found individual activists who I could tell actually cared about ending all oppression and not just getting on the top of it, and it felt great every time I found one. But I still listened to, learned from, and advocated for people of all marginalized groups.
You don’t have to care about me for me to care about you. Then it wouldn’t be real. There’s always more to learn, new perspectives to consider, assumptions I had to unlearn that I was horrified I’d ever held, global systems of oppression with overlapping complexity to unwind.
Discovering disability activism on accident by being called out by the incredible @MortuaryReport who took the time to explain to me how a platform I thought was inclusive didn’t consider disabled people not only opened up a perspective for me, but turned the world inside out.
I’d always held a certain level of understanding of and support for disability activism - my grandma had MS and used a wheelchair since her mid 30s, my mom pointed out ADA noncompliance any time she saw it, and I’d gotten a small handful of mental health diagnoses over the years.
But disability activism presented a new idea. AN ACTUAL NEW IDEA. I LOVE THOSE. There is nothing wrong w/ being disabled - being disabled is normal. Accessibility is not extra. Society should be built for all of us, exactly as we are. Society should be functional for all people!
Disability activists were fighting for themselves, but also each other. I didn’t see anyone advocating only for people who use canes, or only for people with personality disorders. It was for everyone. I still didn’t realize I was disabled 
but I thought it was awesome.
but I thought it was awesome.
As I learned more and more about ableism, I saw how deeply it pervaded our society in ways visible, invisible, and so societally acceptable it blew my mind and devastated me. Over time I realized the depths of my own internalized ableism that had kept so much of life a mystery
Over the past year, twitter entered new levels of hostility and I saw how intersectionality had been weaponized or discarded. People kept making really weird assumptions about me, my family, my life. They felt like one or two words told them who I am and they were laughably wrong
None of these identities people seemed so passionate to defend felt like they had much to do with who I am and the life I’ve had. And the assumptions about my background drove me fucking nuts. They acted like I was born in a castle. What simplistic world do they think this is?
And none, none of the systems of privilege and oppression seemed to explain why my family and I were so materially, factually, objectively different from even the conclusions that seemed logical to make. Why did my ancestors live pain, die young, & leave nothing behind?
In a long story I‘ll save for another time, I finally figured out why. I finally saw how neurotypical brains process information, and that they were living in a story of social status I couldn’t see, so their narratives didn’t explain me. Or my family.
I didn’t know I wasn’t neurotypical. I knew my family was beset by a variety of mental illnesses and some were on the spectrum, but I finally got it. We are all on the spectrum, and so were all my grandparents, so of course none of us knew why we weren’t “normal.”
The missing part of the story was that I hadn’t understood what neurotypical was, and nobody in my family could explain it to me, because none of them knew either, but didn’t know they didn’t know. We all just knew none of us ever totally fit, & the more we try, the worse it gets
Nobody in my family could ever get anywhere, despite being smart and hard-working, because none of us have ever been able to see the system we’re in. We can’t see what it is that makes society exclude us even when we learn all their rules, try our best, try to be good people.
That’s why my family history is menial jobs, incarceration, moving around, self medicating, dying of overdoses and stress-related illnesses. The more they played by the rules, the more they suffered. The happiest ones have been the ones who didn’t even bother to learn the rules.
I’m one of the happiest people my lineage has ever created. They didn’t get to be themselves. They tried so fucking hard and the world cruelly punished them for it. So I have to be as radically myself as I can for me, and for all of them. I’m autistic. And I love it. I love me.
I love my grandparents who died before I was born. I love my living family - the ones still trying to play by the rules and suffering so much, and the ones who said fuck it and are being super weird. I can never be ashamed again, or secretive, bc that story ends here, with me.
I’m not giving up on intersectionality, because it IS the story of us. All of us. When one person is not free, none of us are free. I wish the world was kinder to us, but I’m grateful I’m autistic. Because we’re the ones who can see that there are no fucking teams. Just people.
