I was holding back on bothering my Facebook friends about this. I'm trying to cut back on neurodiversity (temporarily) and focus on advancing my career so I can reach a broader audience (and y'know pay rent without begging for money from the parents). But couldn't hold back anymore. Wrote this rant today:
Kelli Stapleton had a fantasy about beating her autistic daughter Issy to death. She decided to make it a reality. She nearly succeeded.
Issy is alive. In a hospital. but alive.
Many people in the "autism parent" community are describing Kelli as sympathetic and understandable. After all, these "parents" argue, the stress of parenting an autistic child will drive anyone to extremes, and we need to demand treatments and cures so that parents like Kelli won't be pushed to these extremes.
The autism parent community likes to paint itself as a long-suffering domestic victim. They point to the the Era of "Refrigerator Mother Theory" and the absence of "cures" for autism and argue that this means their voices are ignored, misunderstood, unheard.
However, people that push the "parents are always victims who deserve sympathy even when they murder their own children" are abusive. And selfish. And irresponsible.
This is the essay that inspired this rant: http://ift.tt/1B4hRW6
The rant that follows is approximately 1,400 words. TW- ableism and mild violence:
When major news outlets treat people like Kelli Stapleton as more sane and relatable than their victims like Issy, that is the message they are sending. That Kelli's peace of mind is more important than Issy's life.
No one in their right mind would deny that being the parent of an autistic person is incredibly stressful. However, a person whose response to that stress is to attempt to murder their kid is not a healthy, reasonable, or relatable person.
I am not an angel. I have slapped, kicked, and punched my brother as retribution for the times that he screamed for hours on end while I was trying to do my homework. I have called him "stupid", "crazy", "pathetic", "needy", "an overgrown baby", a "moron", a "psychopath", and a "narcissist", because unlike me, he needed our parents to talk him through every decision, every homework assignment, every pre-dinner handwashing, and every order at a restaurant. I've cried because we had to cancel multiple family vacations because my brother wouldn't be able to handle going to visit a new place and it wasn't fair that I didn't get to travel to Yellowstone or even to a beach, like the other kids at my lunch table. (Europe, NYC, and the West Coast were total impossibilties to me...I was shocked when I got to Bard and realized that most kids with parents in my income bracket actually got to go all those places multiple times before they turned 18...)
I have cursed at my brother because he wouldn't even let us go to Italian restaurants in the next town over. At 17, I was already seriously considering getting my "tubes tied" because the possibility of having a child like my brother, who would stop me from exploring the world as a grown-up just as thoroughly as my brother's presence held back our family's travels was so frightening to me. I've avoided asking my parents for advice about boys and depression and job searches for pretty much my entire life, because managing my brother took pretty much all their energy and then some.
One time when I was home on "break" from college, my brother started pounding his fists on my dad's back. He wasn't trying to actually hurt my Dad, it was more like flailing out of frustration but given that my brother is 6'4'' and weighs like 200 pounds, being flail-pounded and screamed at by him isn't good. Especially if your early stage arthritis is acting up and you're emotionally burned-out from spending the last three hours arguing with the son you thought would grow up to be a genius about whether he's capable of finishing a three-paragraph history assignment...I couldn't believe that my brother would just inflict that kind of pain on our dad over a 15-point history assignment. No matter how bad his writer's block was...My dad had given up. He was just hunched over taking blow after blow without fighting back....My mom shook her head and went downstairs to her studio because there was nothing she could do that she hadn't already tried....My brother wouldn't stop. Maybe he couldn't stop. But I couldn't help but think, "Why? Why do you do this to our parents?"
That altercation ended with me having to pry my 6'4'', 200-lb brother off of my dad's back (with my brother still screaming, kicking, and flailing his fists the whole time) and then holding my brother long enough for my dad to retreat to his room and lock the door. I couldn't hold my brother much longer than that, and as soon as he broke free of me, my brother ran after my dad, started pounding on my dad's door and screaming the same old line about how we were all torturing him by expecting him to be able to pass high school history and how he "can't do it".
I was livid. I don't remember exactly what I screamed at my brother at that moment but it was along the lines of "I WISH YOU HAD NEVER BEEN BORN! What makes you think you have THE RIGHT to TORTURE US by screaming about every single one of YOUR STUPID LITTLE PROBLEMS?! YOU'RE NOT AUTISTIC! YOU'RE A FUCKING SOCIOPATH!" Then I kicked his shins, which kinda turned out to be a good thing, because after that he chased me down the hallway and left my dad alone for a few minutes.
I wish I could make the point I'm trying to make without sharing this kind of story on Facebook. (I haven't asked my family's permission to post this story. If that makes me a bad sister/daughter, so be it.)
When I advocate for neurodiversity and call people out for dehumanizing autistic people, the most common rebuttal is "Well, you've obviously been lucky enough to only have a 'mildly' autistic sibling. If you understood the full extent of how much suffering a severely autistic person causes their parents and how much caring for them drains the economy, you could possibly argue that autistic people should have agency over their own lives and input into the kind of treatments they receive. If you had actually suffered as I have, you would hold your tongue when you hear dehumanizing rhetoric and demand that science find a cure."
(Translation: "You have to share an anecdote about a time you felt so hopeless you wanted to kill yourself or a time when you hated your brother in order for your experience for your opinion to count.
And even if you do share that anecdote, we will use it as evidence that people like your brother need to either be biochemically altered to be different people or prevented from being born.):
Fuck that. I have been furious at my brother. He has made me cry. He has hit me; I have hit him. We've screamed at each other and pulled each other's hair and cried our eyes out over things the other sibling said to us.
BUT I AM NOT MY BROTHER'S VICTIM. NOR AM I HIS ANGELIC SAVIOUR/PROTECTOR.
I AM HIS SISTER.
His fucked-up, impulsive, anxiety-prone big sister, who hurls insults that she doesn't mean and who will push and shove him if I think he's being unfair to me or my parents. And he's my fucked up, obsessive, anxiety-prone little brother, who is always reminding me that I'm not as smart as I think I am and sometimes kicks or yells at me because he's so overwhelmed and frustrated with the world.
Neither of us is a model American citizen. We've gone through phases of love and hate, resentment and jealousy, rivalry and coexistence, and times where we completely and utterly misunderstand each other. I have wanted my brother to go away. I have wanted him to stop screaming and actually think about the effect that his tantrums have on the rest of us. I have been embarassed by him. I have wished he wasn't quite so strange...
But I have never wanted my brother dead. (Even those times when I was screaming "If you don't shut up, I'm going to kill you!" In those cases, what I really wanted was just for him to shut up.)
So, no. Even though I have been through a lot with my autistic family members, I cannot empathize with Kelli Stapleton.
She tried to murder her daughter. She thought it was morally acceptable because of an "autism" diagnosis. (And if you're one of those people who thinks "living with autism" would be worse than death, ask yourself if you would be okay with a mother attempting to murder her teenage duaghter because that daughter's depression was stressing the mother out. Or if you would say the same thing about a mother who tried to kill her daughter over ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, or sensory processing issues. Then go read the DSM definitions. The line between autism and ADHD and between autism and anxiety/depression is nowhere near as clear-cut as we like to imagine is. No one's murderer should walk because the doc put them on the side of the line that has a stronger social stigma. EVER.)
I think that anyone who would encourage people to empathize with people who kill their children are enabling murder and child abuse.
And it scares me that even though every disability rights advocate on my Twitter feed is talking about the Issy Stapleton case, no one I know outside of that community has mentioned it. End rant
Submitted September 24, 2014 at 03:02AM by SeaDragon29 http://ift.tt/1uWyFhY neurodiversity
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