[CHATTER] Life updates, website updates, considering journal updates

[monsterqueers]

Heyo!

Been awhile, whoops! Keep being busy or hanging out elsewhere and then just not updating, alas! Gotta be more consistent.

So life updates; we are trying harder to get on our bad sleep. We think its some flavor of sleep apnea, considering the waking up a lot in the night, sometimes out of breath, and the morning sore throat&dry mouth and headache, and the fatigue and the family history of sleep apnea, and our default breathing being really shallow. Doctor wanted to rule out thyroid with a blood test and that was predictably negative so made another appointment about it. Hopefully this time we get a sleep study!

Website updates; New links have been added and two new essays! Was gonna go for three but lost some steam. Someday we will reach the end of our link hoard that we still need to sort and be finally caught up, but today is not that day haha.

Essay 1: The Scent Thing - An essay about how two of us have our nonhuman identities intersect regarding specific behaviors around scent.
Essay 2: A Formal Critique of Consciousness Labels - an essay about 'consciousness labels' in the plural community and why they are not so great as a mandatory framework.


Considering journal updates:
Weve been wanting to be more active on dreamwidth- but our main issue is that by splitting our blog topics between fandom AND personal-plural-nonhuman stuff we have created a space that if we are more active many people will see lots of posts they didnt follow for in one sector or the other and fandom activity may cause people to be rude about the plural&nonhuman thing. So we are considering putting the fandom stuff (that we barely post here anyway) on another account and manage two personal accounts and the plural media review mirror account.
We feel like this change might actually get us to post more than once every 4 months or more lol.

Comments

[lb_lee]

I had completely missed the consciousness labels thing and am not sorry either.

[monsterqueers]

The consciousness labels are just so... 'This was coined without talking to literally anyone but other newbies' its painful. The rigid lines, the theory attached to the experience... Its a mess and in a number of spaces there is pressure to use them as a Required Declaration Axis alongside origin labels and its Exhausting.

Certain spaces use them more than others but every week we have been linking that essay for a bit now because wowie are they treated like a fact of the universe by some people. We feel obligated to ensure the poor newbies in the spaces we use know they have options to not buy into all that.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, just reading it felt like learning about a ship war in a fandom I know nothing about. Super glad not to have run into this one at all, thank goodness. Even trying to wrap my head around this concept makes my brain hurt, because what switching "feels" like differs from headmate to headmate? Like, this binary or idea doesn't even work for me, it's like trying to ask me if I'm cubist or neo-Romanesque. It's a meaningless question for the way I experience the world.

[monsterqueers]

Yeah its such a 'asking a caveman if hes a protestant or catholic' situation for so many people. And yet when you try to explain that to people they dont want to listen! The words are coined so that must mean experience follows that in their eyes.
So many people seem to feel language is a prerequisite to experience and if the experience doesnt fit a framework then it Actually Really Does- you either just havent thought about it long enough/are being difficult or the experience itself isn't correct. The more microlabeley part of the plural community is just especially bad with this.

[professionaljaywlker]

"The scent thing" was quite interesting to read, as a comparison of perspective on a very specific instinct, liked it a lot.

The other one I have less context into, so I cannot quite comment on it. I'm not in plural spaces, so the debate is something I've just seen briefly come up, and a lot of the intricacies were lost on me, ahah. Interesting read nonetheless.

[monsterqueers]

Glad you enjoyed it! We have a few other essays around instincts we want to do at some point too, we just havent gotten around to it yet.

[lithophiles]

Istevia:

Our reading comprehension is not super great at this moment (combination of pain/painkillers stuff affecting it) so we want to go back and read the essays more carefully later. More output than input. But oh lord, did I want to note this:

"Our speculation (as our efforts to dredge up the exact discord server conversations that coined it did not bear fruit as the sever seems to have been deleted) is that an unknown number of systems -who have likely not been selves-aware for longer than 5 years and/or are younger than ~25 and thus likely have not had a plural community that was not an extension of microlabel coining spaces- coined the terms because they were not aware of the preexisting conversations elsewhere about what switching felt like and why and what was and was not possible in relation to it. This is because the coinage was done in a MOGAI discord server, and that is the demographic that most uses those kinds of spaces; someone who is young, mostly or exclusively socializes online in MOGAI spaces, and prone to coining without research or wider community consultation."

Please take all my kudos/likes/upvotes for this. Or just, I guess, imagine me metaphorically furiously clicking on a "like" button going "WHY CAN I ONLY LEAVE ONE LIKE, DARN IT ALL."

MOGAI is... one of those things that seems to attract a lot of autistic people whose autism works, in some way, the opposite way of ours, so that we often feel as different from them in some ways as we do from most neurotypical people. This all actually made me think about our past encounters with people trying to do microlabeling in the autistic community. (BTW, if I use any terms here that you don’t recognize – I know we sometimes use a lot of terms that aren't used as commonly today – just let me know and I’ll tell you the meanings.)

We remember back, like, 15-20 years ago when nearly everything about autism online was dominated by "autism parents," to a much greater extent than it is today, and sometimes we would end up keeping company with shitty autistic people who had really weird and sometimes bigoted ideas, just because we felt powerless and drowned out in the face of all the parents and like we had to stick together (this was also the era of all the Andrew Wakefield anti-vax wackery and "if the child does not have intensive ABA before the age of 5 they will spend the rest of their life in an institution"). And a lot of the online communities for autistics that *did* exist, weren't very particular about the kind of people they let in or the kind of conversations that were allowed in their spaces, probably because the mods were, like us, working off the idea that we all had to stick together no matter what, and that we had some kind of solidarity, that didn't actually exist in reality.

And there was this subset of people who were really obsessed with categories and functioning labels. A lot of them were aspie supremacists and had no problem with saying that people with an Asperger's diagnosis were the only "good" autistics who should be allowed to exist, because "we are logical geniuses with abilities that contribute to society" or whatever. And there was also a subset who thought people with an HFA label should also be allowed to exist, but that HFA and Asperger's were distinct and separate things, and kept making topics and threads about "the difference between HFA and Asperger's" -- but never questioning or searching the history that led to there being two separate labels in the first place, or interrogating the idea that the criteria and models used to make the diagnoses were accurate to begin with. And some of those people wanted to break down HFA and Asperger's into even further subsets, based on perceived skills, perceived intelligence, etc. (I say "perceived" here because they were using extremely mainstream criteria for their assessments, even during a time when it was becoming more known among academics that IQ tests were actually shit at measuring the abilities of a lot of autistic people. But then again, these were "we're worthwhile because of our special genius abilities, please pick me Dr. Attwood, Dr. Baron-Cohen, pick me" people to begin with.)

(Also I wish I had examples to concretely point you in the direction of, but a lot of it was on messageboards or blogs that don’t exist any more, or private Livejournal posts. I’m pretty sure I can bring up some similar stuff with enough searching, but I’ll have to do it on another night.)

Looking back, I think our biggest problem with it all was that they saw these "types" they were inventing as, yeah, frameworks of concrete and unchangeable abilities and limitations, rather than tendencies that could fluidly change with life, time, and experience. And despite some people being able to coin large numbers of "subtypes of aspies," very few people ever used those labels for themselves or their experiences, or seemed to get any use out of them. The only way we could describe our aversion to it at the time was "this isn’t how we want people to see us."

And the microlabel-coining subculture shares the same problem, which I can only describe as being overall too fixated on the idea of people as static frameworks, fixed and preset abilities, rather than dynamic, changing process (can't think of good english words for this now, sorry). And in reality, existence is a continuous process of being and becoming. I haven’t talked as much here about my experience with plurals who want to resolve everything down to neat categories, but in the past, we have definitely met, and clashed with, such groups. They may not have been using the exact same series of labels and frameworks coming out of MOGAI spaces nowadays, but the attitudes behind them, and the habit of drawing on very limited demographics of experience, weren’t that different, I think. There was a point where the defining and labeling seemed to stop being useful for anybody, like even the people coining the terms didn’t actually use them for themselves that much, and just turned into battles of ideologies and trying to prove that your view was the correct one.

One of the patterns that is sticking out for me right now is that the people we’ve known who tried to divide both autistic and plural experience into strict categories did a lot of… I guess the kids nowadays call it “shadowboxing." Structuring their definitions in response to arguments they’re having only in their heads with objections no one has ever really raised. “People could take offense at this part, and if they were offended, this is what they’d say, and we would have to deal with that, but then they might say THIS,” etc, etc. and new categories or specifications are created to accommodate the hypothetical people who Might Take Offense.

Usually my personal response to that kind of thing, nowadays, is “holy shit, GO TOUCH GRASS. And when you come back, try shopping your theories around to *actual* people instead of the hypothetical offended people you’re inventing,” and that would have been the best response to the people doing it years ago, I think, but… The truth is, I can honestly see nowadays how much of Tumblr’s discussion culture – where taking knee-jerk offense is valorized as a righteous expression of marginalized anger and you’re encouraged to respond with the first thing that comes into your head, rather than reflecting and trying to find points of common ground before responding to someone – makes it so that this kind of shadowboxing is often justified paranoia rather than off-the-wall. People on Tumblr really will attack with the most extreme objection, the insults and accusations you feared the most, in many cases, in our experience. I sometimes think that the tendency towards dividing everything into microcategories is, in some ways, a response to that paranoia. Make a category for everything you can think of, including experiences that no one is actually reporting, and that way no one will jump on you for “appropriating their experience” or whatever. And the thing where someone actually will eventually say the most extreme thing you can imagine in response to your posts, if they get enough exposure, can crawl into your head and clamp down on your thoughts. We’ve always had those sorts of paranoias, as a response to our birth family’s behavior, and Tumblr just… blew it up and made it so much worse.

Anyway, I hope I didn’t go on too much here. I have A LOT of thoughts about this, about how it compares and contrasts with our experiences years ago of people doing microlabeling in the autistic and plural communities, but body is… getting tired and we should rest. This has definitely inspired me to start drafting some of my own posts, though, so we’re really glad that you wrote it.

[monsterqueers]

Glad you enjoyed our work!

Oof yeah weve actually STILL seen this debate between Aspergers, HFA, 'level one autism', and 'highly sensitive person' and how to distinguish them come up in spaces online. As early as *this year* we saw discourse on tumblr about this- so no worries, we are familiar with a good portion of the autistic sublabel nitpicking you describe.

And yeah, microlabeling in autistic communities seems to often be an extension of the categorization-without-use-or-examining-the-system-it-lives-in thing. Everything Has to have a label to feel safe and comfortable to many of these people (to the point of it bordering on intrusive thought & compulsion territory that they Need to have a label or Else), and when people disturb their careful frameworks

You hit the nail right on the head about the source of the shadowboxing, sure the lifetime of interpersonal trauma autistics often have (as well as many plural folks) is a factor- but spaces like tumblr, twitter, and tiktok are violently awful to grow up in and cause people to Need to do this to not be jumped on by people with a hair trigger temper and zero reading comprehension. It reinforces this behavior severely and makes it so much worse. Because these sites are popular, their behavior then starts to leak out into other websites also(see discord servers often being horridly toxic, it oozing into reddit and other social medias, etc). No idea how to fix it beyond encouraging people to spend less time on social media, but the first step of fixing a solution is to identify the problem we guess.

This is perfectly fine! Long responses are fun, we dont mind them at all! Glad our post could inspire you!

[gze]

Hi--hopefully this does not come across as obtrusive given we aren't a subscriber! We just wanted to comment on your Consciousness Labels essay and thank you for writing and sharing it.

We first read it around the time it was posted, but had been thinking about the terms as a system before then. We were very confused by the framework when we first encountered it on Tumblr, and it caused our core member some distress that we could not fully understand it or how it worked in relation to our own system. I even have a quote from them that was written almost exactly one year before you posted your essay: "Finding out about monoconscious and polyconscious lately made the intrusive thoughts on reality and doubting myself 100x worse."

We've since been able to distance ourselves from the framework, which has been better for us, and your essay had a part to play in helping us do this. Thank you.

-B

[monsterqueers]

Its perfectly fine!
Glad you enjoyed our essay and it could help you!