I Really Don’t Care About “Normal” People
January 31, 2023 Reading time: 10 minutes

Every so often, there’s a discussion in anarchist circles about how we need to tread lightly, sound more realistic, and stop dreaming about “perfect utopias” because otherwise we’ll “scare the normal people off.” If we keep talking about a world so drastically different from the one we’re in, the “normal” people won’t even want to participate! We’ll never get traction! No one will want to do it!

This sentiment is beyond infuriating, and it doesn’t make me care about “normal” people because “normal” people—or anyone who claims to be “normal”—just don’t care about people like me. Queer and disabled people are never seen as “normal,” so we’re automatically written out of this statement by virtue of existing. The world in which my neurodivergent self can happily and safely exist is not the same one that “normal” people even want to support because they’d rather pretend that everyone understands everything in the exact same way.

Every time we say that we need something, we’re told that it’s “too much” or that it’s “too hard” or “too expensive” to possibly include everyone.

“Normal” also often implies a certain set of hegemonic values that are frequently colonialist and patriarchal in nature. This means that a lot of people, based on a race and ethnicity alone, don’t get to be “normal” in whatever geographic location they live in. They’re often seen as “strange” and “weird” and “foreign,” and their needs go overlooked because “normal” people wherever they live just “won’t understand.”

And yet people keep saying that we should be more considerate of “normal” people, as if we haven’t spent our whole lives doing exactly that. What they’re us is that we’re not allowed to loudly and collectively envision a world in which we want to exist.

Because it “scares people.”

“Normal” people need to be scared. They need to start realising that they aren’t in control of everything anymore and that they don’t get to decide who is and isn’t acceptable. They need to recognise that the world isn’t made in their image and that they don’t own it, that the people they’ve written off as “abnormal” and “weird” and “undesirable” for simply being who they are is abhorrent. They need to know that we no longer accept their constant and systemic bigotries in the ways they choose to try to deny us safety and joy.

They need for us to make it clear that everything they have been doing to us and the planet is unconscionable. “Normal” people need to be forced to reckon with the pain, frustration, and abuse they have made so many of us endure just to fit in and deal with the world they created for their own benefit.

I don’t care about “normal” people.

When I’m told to be less scary and to make myself more legible to “normal” people, it enrages me. Why should I have to accommodate those who see themselves as “normal” in envisioning the worlds we want to exist within when they’ve never accommodated anyone else? Why should we make sure that people who have always been comfortable remain comfortable in envisioning and building the kinds of worlds that we all need?

It doesn’t make any sense. Why is it that we seem to think that they should be coddled while the rest of us are left to struggle?

We’ve already seen what a world controlled by those who are perceived as “normal” looks like, and it seems to be one that they’re intent on killing. It doesn’t even seem to matter to them that they’re willing to go down with it, that they’re willing to die with it as long as they get to live in comfort and luxury and lord it over everyone else that they perceive as “abnormal” or “wrong.” They want to pretend that everything is fine because, for them, it has been.

We’ve been shown repeatedly, especially through the COVID pandemic, that “going back to normal” is what everyone supposedly wanted despite the fact that it left many of us in even worse situations than we already had. Many immunocompromised and disabled people were, almost as soon as people started going back out, left to figure out how to remain connected to their communities and be safe. Anxiety and fear increased among whole populations, and instead of dealing with it in ways that would be healthy for everyone, we were forced to just manage it and figure everything out for ourselves.

“Normal” people don’t care, and I don’t know why we should care about what they think.

Because “normal” benefits them even when it’s lethal to the rest of us.

The concept of “normal” is hard to unpick and to really define because it contains so much within something so incredibly small, and these things all change and have different meanings based on where we are and who we’re around.

If someone’s part of a culture that deviates from that of where they live, they’re often seen as strange and weird—as abnormal—because that “isn’t what we do here.” They often aren’t even allowed to participate in their own cultural practices unless it’s seen as something that can help them assimilate into society, even if it means sharing cultural practices with people who use them as costumes or to pretend they’re more “culturally enlightened” than everyone else. Companies will find ways to capitalise on the existence of these new traditions, trying to increase their audience by pretending to be far more inclusive than they ever really care to be.

Representation is great and being able to see people like you is immensely helpful, but at what cost when the people capturing it are only doing so to profit? When people are still being shoved into some narrow definition of “normal?”

When those practices can’t help in assimilation, they’re often relegated to being hidden behind closed doors when they can be practised at all. The people of the dominant culture will refuse to understand them and intentionally misrepresent them in the least charitable light possible to make it stop or at least force it into hiding. They will enable and use their children to exert pressure on the future generations of a marginalised culture, ensuring that they feel guilt and shame for being themselves. All of those children grow up learning what’s “normal” and what society deems as “acceptable,” and they enforce it upon everyone else.

That’s what we’ve all done. We’ve seen “normal” as we’ve grown up, and we persist in forcing everyone else to do it.

We police everyone into these narrow confines of what we feel is “acceptable” unless that version of “weird” can be capitalised on in some form. Being “normal” is an act of domination. The kinds of food we eat, the clothes we wear and when we wear them, the ways we want to live our own lives are all things that other people feel they should have control over. Because they hold their beliefs and behaviours to be “normal,” they see it as part of their duty to police and dominate everyone else until they fall in line.

We shouldn’t want “normal” people to feel comfortable. We should want them to recognise that shit’s got to change, and there isn’t any way around it.

We’re trying to change the world we have. We’re trying to create space for multiple and connected worlds within this single planet, and we’re scared of what happens when “normal” people find us just a tiny bit terrifying because it unsettles their reality and upsets what they value?

It’s absurd. So many of us have spent our whole lives knowing that we don’t fit in, and we’ve dealt with a lot of years of being made uncomfortable by the “normalcy” of it all. We’ve watched as we’ve been forced into unhealthy situations all for the sake of “normal,” and we’ve seen people completely neglected by “acceptable” society.

I don’t give a shit about “normal” people. It’s their turn to be made uncomfortable, to know that we don’t want their world because their world is harmful and dangerous. And at the worst, the most they will ever have to deal with is recognising that they will have to be a little less comfortable than they were before.

And I especially don’t give a shit about anyone’s anarchism if it coddles them and leaves everyone else to drudgery, abuse, pain, and neglect. If your anarchism is scared of creativity and imagination, if it’s scared of trying to find new pathways out of this garbage world, I don’t want it.

It’s not worth having.

The Eugenics Movement Never Ended
July 26, 2021 Reading time: 12 minutes

Note: I want to make it clear that not all people with neurodevelopmental disorders see themselves as being disabled (though, I would argue that we are made disabled by society, which can be explained through a social model of disability). I state this because the conversation around disability is super complex, especially within and between people who share a given disorder. So while I do see myself as disabled, I do not speak for others with neurodevelopmental disorders in how they see themselves. Though, I do wish that more people would recognise their own existence within a framework of disability and the connection of their various oppressions with it.

Far too many people have bought into the illusion that eugenics went away after World War II and that we gave it all up. We didn’t. A lot of people, ashamed to be peddling outright eugenics, hid it behind kinder words, nicer sounding policies, and politer manners.

But they still kept doing it.

Yet, since people see “all the work” that has gone in to get things like legislation that “protects” disabled people and “gives them rights,” “providing them with opportunities they never before had,” they mistakenly believe we’ve progressed a significant amount. People see groups that seek to “cure” neurodevelopmental disorders, like autism and ADHD, as being helpful because they can speak the loudest and have the most resources.

Yet they don’t want to listen to us. 

They want to ignore us and assume that the world is hostile because our disorders make it hostile. They assume that, since they “couldn’t cope with all the problems” that we deal with on a daily basis, we must want to be cured.

This is despite the fact that the majority of responses by people with neurodevelopmental disorders is that we don’t want to be cured. We want the world to be kinder. We want the world to accommodate us as if we are part of it.

Because we are.

It’s not uncommon to engage in social media and run across hateful comments toward a marginalised and vulnerable demographic of people. That’s a daily occurrence, though it’s not confined simply to ‘The Internet’, as many people dearly love saying. Nothing on the internet is simply or purely on the internet; it is all around us, but the abuse more clearly exists across various social media platforms, highlighting the problems on a grander scale.

This has to be said because people constantly try to pass off every negative comment and every form of abuse as “just something online,” as if the offline world contains none of the same issues or is never impacted by what happens online. They mutually impact each other, and they have for as long as they’ve existed. This should be obvious.

So it’s not surprising to see ableist comments such as the following:

A society in which autistic people could function with no setbacks would be a bad society for the rest of us so yes.

These views clearly come from a shared perspective that exists within society. Though this quote can easily be found online and is situated in a context of “curing” autism, it isn’t novel.

It sounds exactly like the complaints about autistic students by my former colleagues in our schools that I have had to fight against for years. It sounds precisely the same as the complaints I have received from parents of non-disabled students who think it’s “unfair” that their children have to interact with someone who “has problems" and "slows them down."

Honestly, it sounds exactly like the so-called “expert” special education teacher who trained teachers in my university courses and made sure to tell us what words to "avoid using" because it "upset parents." It mirrors her abhorrent beliefs about how we “cater too much to lazy children who are getting disability diagnoses so they can do less,” even though that is so far from the truth.

But this is decades, if not more than a few centuries, in the making. These are the exact programs, inside and outside of schools, that we have created for disabled people. Without our experiences and input.

There’s a reason a common phrase among the disability community is “Nothing About Us Without Us.” It’s because we’ve never been considered, even when our needs are being discussed.

The world is not made for us. Specifically, the world as it has been shaped is made for a small percentage of people because it’s not really made for anyone, but the world is very much not made for disabled people in the slightest. This can also be made worse based on a range of other factors: our gender (perceived and actual), our race and ethnicity, whether or not we have simultaneous disabilities, where we live, our socioeconomic class, our migration status, if we have a language barrier, and so on. There is a lot that can make the world more or less accessible to us.

Yet, as is true for most axes of oppression, we are expected to assimilate into society. If we do not assimilate (or fail to assimilate correctly), we can face a wide spectrum of abuse: harassment, neglect, and torture.

And torture is not hyperbole. This is most noticeable in the #StopTheShock campaign, which is a response to the fact that a court overturned the FDA’s ban of the use of electric shock on disabled students at the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Instead of reorganising the world to include autistic people, to include all disabled people, far too many think the world would be better off without us. And this belief is not confined simply to the far-right. Many people who consider themselves “on the left” or as “progressives” often share these values, too, and refuse to even take time to self-reflect on how they're perpetuating harm.

The history of the Progressive Movement in the early 20th century is littered with eugenicist rhetoric, and many people still hold these Progressive figures in high regard without even trying to understand their flawed history.

Schools, as we know them today, were largely developed under the Progressive Movement. Unsurprisingly, schools were filled with eugenicist policies. In overtly negative uses, these policies often targeted poor and non-white children; in more "positive" ones, they pushed for "gifted and talented" classes to support the "better children" in society (which usually meant supporting wealthier white children).

In the early 1900s, institutions such as the Indiana School for Feebleminded Youth often talked about how there were too many “feebleminded” children and how it would be “a tremendous burden of expense to every community” if no one did anything to ensure there were fewer of them. They called for those children to be isolated from society, they called them defectives, and they suggested that the “defectives” living in other states shouldn’t be allowed to relocate to Indiana (in case they encouraged an increase in the population of both “feebleminded” children and adults).

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is how organisations such as Autism Speaks (and their supporters) talk about autistic people. This is the same kind of rhetoric in the discussion about “curing” autistic people. And this isn’t limited to just autism; this is precisely how many people talk about any kind of disabled person. It’s how they talk about people with any neurodevelopmental disorder. It's how they discuss people with mental health issues.

It also runs parallel to how people have talked (and some still talk) about queer people. I definitely remember hearing (and being terrified of) this rhetoric around the “gay gene” when I was a kid because that's what scientists studying the Human Genome Project kept looking for. I remember news reports talking about how we could erase this so-called “gay gene.”

It’s almost the exact same, and so is the fear I feel for both.

This conversation is much more complex and nuanced than whether or not to cure people of neurodevelopmental disorders and/or disabilities, but many of the people having the conversation about whether or not to cure us are not impacted either by society or the disorders/disabilities they want to treat (and eradicate). The only people who get to say that they "wish they had a cure" are the people who have to deal with having a neurodevelopmental disorder and/or disability. No one else gets to have that say, even if they are the parents of someone with one.

The people who wish they had a cure are not pawns to be used to push for eugenicist policy and research. They are people who have the lived experience to understand why they, personally, would want a cure who should have the space to articulate their frustrations. They are not talking points, and they are not 'gotchas' in debates about whether or not we should cure autism or anything else.

Literally anyone else can do everyone a favour and shut the fuck up.

And while they're shutting the fuck up, here are some suggestions for what they can do instead of advocate for eugenics: Before even thinking of trying to cure us, solve the problems that neurotypical and non-disabled society has forced upon us and has made our lives more difficult. Get rid of the systems that force us to assimilate and tolerate accommodations that other people assume we need, since everyone often refuses to talk to any of us about what we actually need or want. Stop pushing for legalising assisted suicide first, especially when society refuses to let us have access to medical care or accommodations at all.

Most of all: Just fucking care about us being happy and healthy. Accept us for who we are and let us grow as we need. Stop trying to pathologise and eradicate everything and everyone that isn't immediately understood.

Additional Resources:

Academia Can Never 'Lead the Charge' for Change
June 30, 2021 Reading time: 17 minutes

The status quo around grading is in part a response to the perceived demands of college, so it is fitting that colleges should lead the way forward. -Barry J. Fishman 

A common refrain as I read about reforms to education (and even the wider goal of changing society) is that universities will lead the way. Academics put together outlines about how the university is central to everything and, as a result of its existence, has necessitated everything that exists to change "for the better." Through their supposed wealth of research and knowledge, they will be the ones to shine the light on what needs to change, what can be changed, and how to change it. So many academics proclaim this without a hint of irony, and they do so with more zeal than I’ve ever seen out of the most saviour-y of primary and secondary teachers (some of whom also think like this, though it’s often more specific to their own teaching practice).

But academia, much like systems of compulsory schools, will not “lead the charge.” They can’t because, in order for society to be healthier, those institutions must cease to exist.

There seems to be a constant assumption that universities, at some point in time, were “terrains of intellectual growth” that have – because of the encroaching neoliberalism on the institution, many claim – become “market places of self-promotion.” I don’t think this is true at all, considering the history of both schools and universities. Starting as institutions that were only available to the elite to perpetuate the very system they benefited from, schools and universities have only really been ‘public’ institutions for less than a few hundred years (and this changes wildly depending on the location being discussed).

Yet, even as ‘public’ schools, they were never truly intended for public education. While wealthy white boys have always had unfettered access to schools and the related resources, granting them access to positions of power and continued wealth, that has not always been true for everyone else. From the very beginning, poor white boys originally received the most minimal education in comparison to their wealthy peers, which focused largely on basic literacy and numeracy skills that would help them with the day-to-day ‘business dealings’ in their future. Only sometimes would one lucky white boy be plucked from the ‘garbage heap’ of the poor so that he could continue and follow the same path as his wealthier peers, allowing him the possibility of achieving ‘social mobility’ and helping to build the myth of a system based entirely on merit (while also functioning as a way to prop up the “American Dream” within the US context).

This highly tiered system also attempted to assimilate different peoples into following the culture of powers who sought to dominate and eradicate them, especially with regards to Indigenous and Black people. For many Indigenous peoples, they were forced into residential schools that were supported either by the state or religious institutions like various Christian churches (and sometimes, they were supported by both). Children were stolen from their families and forced into these torturous and genocidal institutions. Tens of thousands of the children who were forced into these schools were murdered, as evidenced by the many grave sites being found in Canada. For many others, the children who grew up in those schools are adults today and have been forced to recall the abuses they endured for government reports (which may lead to very few, if any, consequences for the people and institutions who committed grave acts of genocide).

This system – the very act of removing children from their families and communities in order to “protect” them – lives on in the form of foster care. It is a system that continues because we refuse to build networks that support families in need, allowing every member to have a safe and stable environment. It also continues because we don’t allow children to have the agency to make decisions about leaving families that are harming them, giving them opportunities to live with people who they know care about them and will care for them. And it is a system that continues because, as with everything, white people profit from the destruction of non-white families.

Everything is created to be as harmful as society will allow, and that’s entirely by design.

As for the public school system, it has changed a little over time. Schools now grant access to more people and promote those who can best follow the rules, being able to meet criteria that may or may not actually be “important.” But it’s still built entirely on colonialism, racism, misogyny, ableism, ethnocentrism, and classism. It’s still built to do the most harm to the people who don’t ‘fit in’ for whatever reason, to hurt the people who question what’s happening around them, what they’re being taught, and demand something better. The system continues to work because it continues to punish people challenging the racist and colonial structures (something we see in both the United States and the United Kingdom with regards to conservative propaganda against Critical Race Theory).

Many people see a path forward to a ‘better’ institution through reforming what exists. These people demand initiatives that “improve” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) through vague programs that never quite address underlying issues. They never explain how this is supposed to help in the long-term because it’s just assumed that it’ll be better if we just give a few more people seats at a table that was already designed to exclude others. They see ‘representation’ as the solution that can fix an institution developed around elitism and bigotry.

Though representation is incredibly important, this view is entirely nonsensical. You cannot reform an institution that was built to completely disenfranchise as many people as possible; you cannot reform an institution that has eugenics as its foundations. Keeping the basic structure intact while changing the faces does very little to actually create any meaningful change, and it’s not even certain if the people belonging to those faces are willing to do the work to ensure that things get better. Sometimes they end up playing into the status quo, perpetuating much of the same harm that was already in place but at a different scale or using "kinder" vocabulary.

This has happened repeatedly with disabled people, and I know this from personal experience. Getting access to accommodations as a student often felt impossible and was a battle I never wanted to fight in the first place, even as an adult student. At no point was anything easy for me. The institutions that claimed they cared about whether or not I could access the curriculum and content refused to make it accessible, forcing me to constantly break down from being mentally exhausted because of the amount of work I had to put in to complete my studies. I fought with professors (including one who, ironically, was teaching a ‘special education’ module for my teaching degree) about making things more accessible for me and others, and they often told me that I “shouldn’t be there” because I clearly “couldn’t handle it.”

As a teacher, I had the same arguments with my colleagues. I fought for my needs in our staff meetings because I was the only disabled person on staff, and I fought for the needs of my students every time someone tried to deny them. For all the claims in every school I ever worked in that we were “inclusive environments,” they made it next to impossible for disabled students and staff to get what they needed to succeed. They threw out excuses like “they’re just lazy” or “they’re not trying hard enough” instead of working with any of the disabled people in the school. My own colleagues called me “unreliable” when I kept missing deadlines after they refused to accommodate a simple request for everything to be put on a calendar that we could all access that was kept up-to-date; even when I made a personal calendar for this purpose, they would change deadlines and not tell me.

These people put effort towards sabotaging us and making it more difficult to even succeed in a system that shouldn’t even exist, and that has been the point ever since schools started “accommodating” people who were seen as “inferior.” In an article discussing the influence of eugenics in Indiana’s public schools in the early 20th century, Robert Osgood wrote:

"[S]chool officials insisted to the public that the teaching of mentally defective students need not include academic work because 'we decided [they] could not learn.' When challenged by 'the courts or somebody' who said 'How do you expect him to learn if you do not try to teach him?' Herman Young, an Indiana University professor and consultant to the Bloomington school district, advised district teachers 'to keep on for awhile trying to do the impossible, trying to give these children academic work when they cannot learn it in order to convince people that they cannot do it.'"

These kinds of comments mirror many of the same things I have heard colleagues say almost 100 years later, which have often been used against students from any marginalised backgrounds. These are comments that are made throughout the disciplinary procedures, highlighting how badly many educators actually think of these children.

You can’t reform that.

Most of the people who call for reform are the same people who see how a bigger change, such as school abolition, could impact their careers. It makes them uncomfortable that, should these institutions fall and be replaced by something entirely different, they would lose the power that they believed they held. There are so many people who view education as a career when it never should’ve been.

It is a journey to gaining an understanding of the world in which you live and your place in it. It’s learning how your actions can impact your community and the wider world. It’s learning how to be part of your community. That isn’t something that ever should’ve been a career.

Academia has further entrenched this idea through the whole structure. Placed at the top of the hierarchy, academics are often seen as the “most knowledgeable” and the “most objective.” Much of this comes because research is frequently separated from the people it actually impacts, as the system perpetuates the idea that they will only be subjective and their biases will be a problem. They forget or neglect the fact that the researchers they employ are inherently biased and often frame things through their beliefs rather than our realities.

The whole system is intentionally broken into smaller pieces, trying to obscure how knowledge from one field impacts another. For example, they refuse to acknowledge how history can be found in everything and that it is necessary to explore the history of fields like science to understand how they can be used to hurt people. That’s only part of the reasoning for why the University of Otago could come up with the world’s first magnetic mouth wiring system, designed to further stigmatise and torture fat people. It’s also why they double-down on every criticism of a device that, beyond its design, isn’t a new concept at all and claim that it’s meant to be “helpful.” They presume to “know better” than the rest of us, when all the research (that they probably ignored) shows that fat people are more likely to die because of the harmful biases of the healthcare system constantly telling us to lose weight instead of taking us seriously.

But history isn’t an area that academia likes to focus on anyway. This is telling in how they constantly are attacking and removing resources from social sciences and humanities fields. It’s also obvious when you start reading through their own histories, which are largely written by them and often are willing to ignore heinous acts that they were complicit in because they’d rather “celebrate” (obscure) the truth of their existence. Honestly, how often in the brochures for any school in the University of California system do they discuss their complicity in Japanese internment camps, studying the “massive upheaval” of the “Japanese-American minority problem?” How many universities in the United States are still, to this day, in violation of NAGPRA (the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act)?

At no point have these institutions ever truly been where learning really happens. They have always had these problems, but our society has been willing to listen to the same propaganda about their oversized importance.

Also Academia and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex have attempted to hijack the revolution, take credit for, change the language, and again be the “legitimate” forms to struggle. Academia takes folks away from their communities if they’re people of color and oppressed. They attempt to define the struggle for the people from the ivory tower and they have a monopoly on book knowledge inaccessible to the majority of society. - Joaquin Cienfuegos

Yet, people want to assume that academia could ever have been a site for any radical tradition or change. That’s impossible because outside of a few radical people who managed to exist within the system, the whole thing refuses to admit all the ways in which they have harmed so many people. From literally stealing from people on the ground in order to publish as much as possible to co-opting entire movements in order to silence them and build their own careers, it should be clear how academia has never been a source for radical change.

They have always fought against change, and that is true practically from their very inception. Students may have catalysts for change within academia and in wider society, but it was never the institution. It never could have been because that was never the purpose of academia.

Instead, it subsumed the student and youth movements and turned them into career paths. It enabled people, as they aged and saw that they could help commodify the movements, to sell them back to their communities in little chunks and pieces while also making it impossible to afford access without taking out excruciating loans to do so. And the people who built their careers on the backs of movements, they made it possible that all radical meaning was drained from the demands of activists.

As Judicaelle Irakoze so succinctly put it with regards to the abuse of decolonisation within academia:

Academics championing the word “decolonization” from institutions that must be abolished if we are to ever decolonize anything, is the irony of it all.

And this process is continuous. It will not stop until these institutions go away. They will continue to defang movements and keep us silent by giving us breadcrumbs because that is their purpose. Every single change that we call for will be turned into a career for a handful of people to hold onto instead of something that helps build community.

They can and will never bring effective change.