I fucking loathe the born this way narrative.
"Oh the poor things, they deserve pity and compassion, they were born broken"
which also leads to eugenics. Because if we're born this way, then prenatal screening would be used to exterminate.
Kinda funny that the attitude that queerness is only acceptable because "born that way, the poor things" never applies to other things that are protected, or even benefits that are entirely voluntary choices
Like religion.
Or bigotry.
Presentation and expression are not predetermined, and choice is important and affirming
And
Well, I'm aro. Lust and attraction affect me, not love like that, and it's so fucking often represented as direct analogue to cishet relationship structures
I actually fucking hate it
"it's worth not oppressing because they can't help it, the poor things, they are wired that way"
Which
I'm fucking autistic
It's the same shit
Why yes this is technically a repost and consolidation of posts and it is not new but I am still fucking pissed off about this.
This post above is like, what I live for: Expressions of Pain upon contact with Human Society.
One of my favorite topics in the uh... "Public Discussion" of Autism and Neurodivergence is probably the very easy to describe problem of Joe Simple trying to navigate high friction social statuses as a baseline human. If you go and read Queer Intersectional texts about compound social statuses, you get this nice picture of multiplicative quality-of-life damaging consequences to Queer and Neurodivergent people, adding one's cultural/ethnic status only makes the equation more bleak and we can increase the resolution by including historical migratory population data as well. The Angry Queer of the 1980's was particularly angry because of a reflexive and justifiable response to the casual hatred and eugenics of their social cohort and society, and this largely has not changed thanks to consistent re-framing (by U.S. conservatives in particular) of acceptance and Queer statuses as "damaging to society".
The Quick thesis here: Abnormal Human Behavior is inconvenient and that inconvenience violates the sacred principle of the low-friction, high productivity focused Western Society. Friction in this case refers to the amount of action taken by one of the 'passing' classes of heteronormative, dominant cultural-ethnic, or neurotypical statuses to account for dynamic and unusual persons in their domain. Through early exposure to Queer, Neurodivergent, and non-dominant cultural-ethnic identities, the cardboard-cutout mentality can be mitigated to an effect size that is much less damaging to cohesive and diverse global human society. It's ironic that the outer skin of the society made by the human animal appears as Pro-Social, but its entire skeletal structure is comprised of our species' most Anti-Social instinctual predispositions. There is hope on the horizon for human society to improve the concept of the Universally Accepted Human, but like all things without great effort to motivate change, things will remain assumed and unchallenged. It does little to mitigate the day to day growing pains of a society and species whose understanding of itself is constantly on the move, but we can look at these aches and hope that it's the pain of growth and not the pain of disease.
If you wanna read more...