I thought it was funny. I’m a typical. Have had several relationships with neurodivergent people, including my wife.
I do find a lot of the quirks funny or cute. Was just giving my girl shit about the Princess and the Pea because she is extremely particular about her pillow situation. The pillows and stuffies have names. That shit is funny and it makes me grin when I have to help sort the pile.
Well, your story about finding certain attributes about your wife is an entirely different context, and you didn’t use the term as a pejorative.
The person I am responding to used the term as a pejorative, in reference to how a neurodivergent person could easily be confused with an automated bot.
This is inherently dehumanizing.
It’s dismissive, it equates neurodivergent people to being sterile, non emotional beings who only exist to perform complex technical tasks.
This in and of itself is a common stereotype of certain kinds of people with certain kinds of neurodiversity, but neurodiverse actually refers to a much broader range of… different styles of cognitive function, different disorders, whatever you want to call them.
So, now on top of using the term as a pejorative, contextually perpetuating a specific dehumanizing stereotype… it also equivocates a diverse group of people into an oversimplified conglomerate, which in and of itself perpetuates other stereotypes by erroneously associating aspects that may (or may not) apply to a specific subset of neurodiverse people… to all of them.
I guess I see where you’re coming from. Labels can hit different, especially when the label doesn’t fit all the recipients. Being labeled can cause offense. Especially if it’s derogatory. I don’t think it was meant to be derogatory by op, but it certainly wasn’t very sensitive.
The difficult part is that it’s a spectrum. Especially when it comes to level of function. Profound autism is a totally different animal from high functioning people. And there is a whole spectrum of differences in how the divergency manifests between individuals.
Savantism and savant-like actions are fascinating to a lot of typicals, myself included. That level of focus and ability to make the connections or internally churn the information is not an accessible state for most of us. It’s like seeing real magic.
(Obviously, not all neurodivergent folks have savant-like behaviors, most likely just a minority. No idea of the prevalence.)
So, a neurodivergent person inputting letters scraped from Tumblr posts into a genome search engine is funny as hell because it’s such a strange thing to do and produces an interesting result. Why would someone do that? Why would you even think to do it in the first place?
My wife does absolutely hilarious shit all the time. Our house is full of laughter. She’s wickedly sarcastic and full of black humor.
So, given that I think some of the behaviors are awesome while being hysterically funny, what is an inoffensive way to engage in humor about neurodivergent folks, in your opinion? Are there any preferred terms that are shorthand for: “Autistic person pulled some fucked up logic trick or other stunt”?
I mean, I am also autistic, so thanks for perpetuating the social stigma against neurodivergent people, I guess.
I thought it was funny. I’m a typical. Have had several relationships with neurodivergent people, including my wife.
I do find a lot of the quirks funny or cute. Was just giving my girl shit about the Princess and the Pea because she is extremely particular about her pillow situation. The pillows and stuffies have names. That shit is funny and it makes me grin when I have to help sort the pile.
Why do you find it offensive?
Well, your story about finding certain attributes about your wife is an entirely different context, and you didn’t use the term as a pejorative.
The person I am responding to used the term as a pejorative, in reference to how a neurodivergent person could easily be confused with an automated bot.
This is inherently dehumanizing.
It’s dismissive, it equates neurodivergent people to being sterile, non emotional beings who only exist to perform complex technical tasks.
This in and of itself is a common stereotype of certain kinds of people with certain kinds of neurodiversity, but neurodiverse actually refers to a much broader range of… different styles of cognitive function, different disorders, whatever you want to call them.
So, now on top of using the term as a pejorative, contextually perpetuating a specific dehumanizing stereotype… it also equivocates a diverse group of people into an oversimplified conglomerate, which in and of itself perpetuates other stereotypes by erroneously associating aspects that may (or may not) apply to a specific subset of neurodiverse people… to all of them.
I guess I see where you’re coming from. Labels can hit different, especially when the label doesn’t fit all the recipients. Being labeled can cause offense. Especially if it’s derogatory. I don’t think it was meant to be derogatory by op, but it certainly wasn’t very sensitive.
The difficult part is that it’s a spectrum. Especially when it comes to level of function. Profound autism is a totally different animal from high functioning people. And there is a whole spectrum of differences in how the divergency manifests between individuals.
Savantism and savant-like actions are fascinating to a lot of typicals, myself included. That level of focus and ability to make the connections or internally churn the information is not an accessible state for most of us. It’s like seeing real magic.
(Obviously, not all neurodivergent folks have savant-like behaviors, most likely just a minority. No idea of the prevalence.)
So, a neurodivergent person inputting letters scraped from Tumblr posts into a genome search engine is funny as hell because it’s such a strange thing to do and produces an interesting result. Why would someone do that? Why would you even think to do it in the first place?
My wife does absolutely hilarious shit all the time. Our house is full of laughter. She’s wickedly sarcastic and full of black humor.
So, given that I think some of the behaviors are awesome while being hysterically funny, what is an inoffensive way to engage in humor about neurodivergent folks, in your opinion? Are there any preferred terms that are shorthand for: “Autistic person pulled some fucked up logic trick or other stunt”?