Fish, trees and metaphors

There’s a quote, attributed to Einstein, that comes up a lot in autistic communities: “if you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree it will spend its whole life thinking it’s stupid”.

Which is something I completely agree with, except, well I keep thinking of this:

For those who can’t watch it, that’s a video of a fish climbing a rope.

It’s not that I don’t understand non literal statements – hell, I have an honours degree in English Lit and you don’t get one of those without being able to spot a metaphor. It’s just that my mind goes in all kinds of literal and non-literal and nitpicky directions all at once. And sometimes there are some pretty cool things along the way 🙂

Autism and Activism #2: Accessibility and ‘Accessibility’

A little while ago I was trying to write a response to an article about children and art galleries. In it I was both arguing that if galleries bore children, then that’s more a problem with the gallery than the child, and also talking about how valuable visiting galleries as a child was to me. And that’s when I began struggling with the post, because when I was talking about making galleries better suited to children, I was thinking of light, noisy spaces with lots of movement, where it was okay to run around and be noisy, where you could interact in multiple ways with the art. And when I was writing about why galleries were such a refuge for me, I was remembering how they were quiet with clear sets of rules that were laid out on signs, and how often staff were, once they realised my interest, happy to have a conversation with me where they treated me as an adult, and it was a straightforward conversation about things, not small talk with all its little tricks and conventions.

That’s not an activist scenario, but I do think it’s a good illustration of how there is often a gap between what we perceive as ‘accessibility’ and what actually makes a space accessible, and how this conflict often hits autistic people pretty hard.

Many people in activist communities have woken up, at least partially, to the idea that accessible means more than just ‘has wheelchair ramps’ but needs to incorporate the needs of people with a wide range of impairments. It’s being increasingly recognised that accessibility isn’t just relevent for disabled people, but for (say) parents, those on low incomes, those with limited transport options and so on, and to look outside these as discrete groups, which is important not least because many accessibility needs overlap

But somewhere along the way, the idea of accessibility has become divorced from actual people and what they need to fully participate and beome an athestic, a vague set of ideas about what an accessible environment is like.

The effect of this isn’t limited to autistic people, of course – an article by a local group about one of their events recently used the term “accessible activism”. The only access to that event was up a flight of stairs – I can only assume that they used the term accessible to mean it was a relaxed, fun environment where you weren’t expected to have a lot of background knowledge or commit to anything big. But when accessibility comes to mean “shiny friendly and cool”, it tends to come with a lot of noise, a lot of structurelessness and a lot of emphasis on the social side – all things which have the reverse effect for most autistic people.

I write this as a call to think about what really does make spaces accessible – and in the next post I’ll be sharing some ideas about what people – both autistic, NT and otherwise – can do to make activism and activist spaces more accessible for autistic people.

 

This is part two of a six part series on autism and activism. I will be linking other post below as they are posted:

Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 Accessibility and ‘Accessibility’
Part 3 Immediate Ideas
Part 4 Getting to the heart of it
Part 5 On the positive side…
Part 6 Looking forward

Autism and Activism #1: Introduction

Around 2005, I went to a political conference in another city. I went to a number of them in those years, and I suspect most of this one will have been much like the others. I’ll have argued and cracked jokes and drank beer and eaten Chinese. I’ll have returned, lent and borrowed books. I’ll have met new people and learned a lot. But I don’t remember that really.

What I do remember is waiting the next morning for the people driving back to pick me up. They’d planned to leave at 8:30. There was no sign. I texted. There in five minutes, they said. They weren’t. Nor were they for maybe the next hour and a half.

I was absolutely beside myself, both with panic and with disorientation. I didn’t have the money for a bus fare home, and not only was I scared of hitchhiking, I didn’t know how to get to an appropriate main road. I wasn’t even sure which way was south.

That they were being vague and disorganised and that didn’t matter to them did not even cross my mind. Nor did it occur to me that the middle-aged professional in whose house I was staying would almost certainly have both the ability and willingness to lend the relatively small amount of money it would take a scared, broke, 20-ish activist to get home should it come to that. Even if it had, there’d have been no way I could have asked her.

You know how this ends, right? They turned up and didn’t see there was a problem. I pretended there wasn’t. I got home.

I’ve been involved in one form of political activism or another for the past decade, and sporadically in the years before that, and over that time I’ve felt simultaneously completely at home and completely at odds with not just activist spaces and communities, but also some of the ideas and values that are often taken for granted.

My autism diagnosis gave me the ability to contextualise and make sense of many of these experiences, and they’re what I’m hoping to express in this blog series. I’ll be talking mostly about queer, feminist and general socialist activism, because that’s what I’ve been most involved in, but a lot of it is widely applicable. I’m very new to autism activism, so I’m unlikely to talk about that much. I’ll be writing about what makes these spaces accessible and inaccessible to me, as an autistic person, but also what makes them important, and exploring values that may seem at first glance to be contrary to how we think and interact.

So thanks for reading, and I’m only writing from my own experience, so do feel free to comment with your own ideas and thoughts. The posts will be linked here as they are posted.

Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 Accessibility and ‘Accessibility’
Part 3 Immediate Ideas
Part 4 Getting to the heart of it
Part 5 On the positive side…
Part 6 Looking forward