how NTs dominate the ND narrative

the text below was adapted from this article. i have switched out ‘cis’ for ‘neurotypical’ and ‘trans’ for ‘neurodifferent’. the original article was written by Cristan Williams.

there are, by orders of magnitude, more neurotypical people than neurodifferent people in the world. when one considers the amount of discourse happening around the neurodifferent experience, due to sheer numbers, a neurotypical understanding of “neurodifferent issues” is dominant in our society today. this dynamic ensures that the dominant “neurodifferent” narrative is also a false narrative that is repeated, analyzed, and criticized ad nauseum by a largely neurotypical audience, reinforcing the validity of this dominant (and factually inaccurate) “neurodifferent” narrative. when neurodifferent people protest the propagation of the dominant (and factually inaccurate) “neurodifferent” narrative about the neurodifferent experience, neurodifferent people are told that we are stifling free speech, that we are snowflakes, or that we just need to learn to perform better public “debates.” when neurodifferent activists express anger, resentment, and/or frustration with this dynamic, neurotypical people can respond with their own anger, resentment, and/or frustration because a lot of neurotypical people have already invested more time and attention into trying to understand the dominant (and factually inaccurate) “neurodifferent” narrative than they ever wanted to in the first place and come to perceive neurodifferent activists as pushy, bossy, and unreasonable.
resolving these misunderstandings in the face of an army of trolls who traffic misinformation, civic leaders who attempt to pass anti-neurodifferent laws, and neurotypical anger, resentment, and/or frustration while also trying to support equality for neurotypical, neurodifferent, is the primary purpose of neurodifferent advocacy today.

this is so spot on.

when neurotypicals speak on neurodifferent issues, they are not speaking for us. they are speaking for their understanding of neurodifferent issues and they are speaking from inside their privilege. they cannot speak for us. it does not matter how well-meaning, well-informed/well-educated or sensitive they are – they are not qualified to speak on neurodifferent issues. that they do, despite their inherent incompetence, is nothing but them using their neurotypical privilege. any organization or educational body that is not run by or directed by neurodifferent people is automatically dominating the neurodifferent narrative are and violating neurodifferent people and their lives.

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Trump is human

We have to acknowledge that Donald J Trump is human. He might a terrible human, and possibly a really nasty person, I agree. His political views might be abhorrent to some of us. Nevertheless in all of what he does and do not do, he is human, and his actions can be analyzed from a human point of view.

When I look at how he is dealing with the Mueller investigation and with Mueller himself I am reminded of the old saying “If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that holla is the one ya’ hit.” – the question I am asking is: How was Trump hit?

Is he simply hypersensitive and feels that any negative attention, or the possibility of negative attention, is a threat to his existence?

Or is he actually guilty and naturally scared witless of getting caught?

Or is it, as my wife suggested when we discussed this, that he is so used to be obeyed, that when he said the first time the Russia connection shouldn’t be investigated, he expected everyone to drop it. That he simply cannot understand why people think it must be investigated?

Or does he have Aspergers? This was also suggested by my wife, because every now and then he seems confounded by the situation – he looks like he doesn’t have a clue as to what’s happening or how to deal with it. He doesn’t have a script to most of the situations he finds himself in.

When my wife brought up Aspergers I was reminded of a meme I saw on Facebook that claimed to depict Barack Obama’s and Donald Trump’s very different reactions to the Sandy Hook and Parkland school-shootings respectively. What I remembered of the images was that Obama was crying and Trump was smiling.

I know from experience that Aspies use ‘scripts‘ to a higher degree than non-Aspies to handle social and semi-social situations, so for me the visual memory of Trump smiling in the aftermath of Parkland clicked with ‘Aspergers’. Smiling at the camera even under very somber circumstances would be a possibility for an Aspie if they do not have a script for ‘very somber circumstances’. They could plausibly default to what they ‘normally’ do in-front of a camera – smile – (another script). Not because they do not feel sad or somber or because they are callous or unfeeling, but because they do not have a script for the specific situation.

I wanted to check out that meme once more, so I searched with “obama at sandy hook v trump at parkland” and I found it:

What I found stunned me – yes, I was shocked, angry, sad and frustrated when I realized that this image is a hoax inasmuch as it is misleading – Presidential Responses to School Shootings.

“Both of these images are real. The photograph of Obama was taken on 5 January 2016, while the President was speaking about the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting”[…]”The photograph of Trump is also real, but it is slightly misleading. The image included in the viral meme is a cropped version of a photograph that was posted to Trump’s official Instagram page after he visited victims of the Parkland school shooting at a hospital in Broward County. The original image shows that Trump is posing with the medical staff, many of whom are also smiling” (my emphasis)

I scrolled down and found two videos – one of Obama’s speech in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school-shooting and one of Trump’s speech in the aftermath of the Parkland school-shooting:

From a human perspective I would say that Trump’s speech was appropriately somber and sympathetic. It was also well delivered with the right amount of emotion and gravity – ‘The idiot Trump‘ could not have delivered that speech.

This caused me to start a process of re-evaluating Trump as a person.

How much of what we see is Trump trying desperately to deliver to those around him (Tea-Baggers), what he believes a President should (because he has no scripts for ‘being the President’) and how much is actually Donald Trump?

Are his fumbling, stumbling and quite often unintelligible stunts in-front of the TV-cameras a result of him not having the scripts for those situations in combination with the stress and confusion that would normally assault an Aspie in such situations? Are his crazy tweets and firings of people in situations he cannot handle simply Trump defaulting to doing what he knows how to do from being a businessman, i.e defaulting to the scripts he does know?

If I had been a CEO all my life and was suddenly made President, perhaps without wanting to be, and not really knowing what that means, I would resort to what I know how to do to relieve the stress of not knowing what to do.

Back to the initial questions in this blog post.

Is he simply hypersensitive and feels that any negative attention, or the possibility of negative attention, is a threat to his existence?

It is quite possible isn’t it? Given what little we know about his personal background, childhood and young adulthood, I’d say it is very possible.

Or is he actually guilty of something and naturally scared witless of getting caught?

What if he is not guilty of colluding with the Russians – but those who brought him to power are – and there is something he is guilty of that has nothing to do with the Russians, that would destroy him?

Or is it, as my wife suggested when we discussed this, that he is so used to be obeyed, that when he said the first time the Russia connection shouldn’t be investigated, he expected everyone to drop it. That he simply cannot understand why people think it must be investigated?

Trump is first and foremost a businessman, a CEO – a corporation of the size we are talking about is not run by the employees. There is no democratic process in place, except among the share-holders to some extent. There are no ‘branches of government’ executive, legislative and judicial, that has to have their say of ‘yea or nay’ before the CEO can make a decision and act on it. What the CEO says is final is final, and if you do not like it or object to that, you are fired. If the CEO says there was no collusion there was no collusion. End of story.

Could it be a combination of all this?

Yes, it could, and I think it is.

I think Trump is trying to ‘be President’ the same way he is ‘being a CEO’ – and it is not working because the US is not a corporation. I think Trump is hypersensitive and feels that any negative attention is a threat to his personal existence. I also think that he never wanted to be the President of the US – he wanted to run for president, but he did not expect or want to win. I think Trump is guilty of something and scared witless of getting caught and I also think he is so used to be the one making the final decisions that it is inconceivable to him why Mueller must investigate Russia’s possible interference in the 2016 presidential election without Trump’s interference.