November 5, 2024 • 37 mins
Bertranna’s autism makes her obsessed with finding the Truth about neurodiversity. With Ayesha Khan, PhD and The People’s Oracle.
AND INFORMED BY:
Unmasking Autism by Devon Price
African-Americans With Autism Face Additional Challenges - NPR
The Persistent Invisibility of Black Autism - Undark.org
The Biology Behind Autism Spectrum Disorder - Yale Medicine
Data and Statistics on Autism Spectrum Disorder - CDC
The mother of neurodiversity: how Judy Singer changed the world | Autism | The Guardian
Singer’s thesis was included in a British Open University anthology titled Disability Discourse, and is now available in an ebook called Neurodiversity: The Birth of an Idea
Who coined the term ‘neurodiversity?’ It wasn’t Judy Singer, some autistic academics say
On the neurological underpinnings of geekdom - The Atlantic
Politicizing Neurodiversity - by P.E. Moskowitz:
Empire of Normality by Robert Chapman
Neurodiversity and the Pathology Paradigm | Psychology Today
Negotiating the Neurodiversity Concept | Psychology Today
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silber
Neurodiversity Rewires Conventional Thinking About Brains | WIRED
Neurodiversity in the Classroom by Thomas Armstrong
“The 8 Million Species We Don’t Know” - New York Times Sunday Review
Common Biologically Essentialist Language | by Cat Harsis | Medium
What If Gay-Rights Advocates’ ‘Born This Way’ Argument Is Wrong?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's okay. Baska Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health. But keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional. So in the description of this
and every episode, I'll leave you a list of relevant
resources and links to the things I'm reading. And while
you're listening, take care. Is there anything that I haven't
(00:21):
asked you about that you wanted to talk about?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, the horoscopes.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
If I'm being real, I'm a lebra soun and rising
and a leo.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Moon venus raw you gotta work aphrodia.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Ooh, okay, that's cool, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
That's really like, I feel like you really compliment yourself.
I am a Leo, which is the sun, and my
moon is Cancer, which is the moon, right, and my
rising is Pisces, which is actually the ocean. A lot
of people will be like, think you think the world
evolves around you, and I'm like, I am the sun
and the moon. Baby, it does there night there night,
whereas blinded baby, that's not my move. Wow, alhah. Person's
(01:01):
gonna want, person's gonna want la, person's gonna want person's.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Gonna want la, person's gonna want with what.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Person's gonna want me?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
When I have to president anxiety.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
MM.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
So you know how, there's this really prominent set of
tropes and characteristics that we tend to associate with autism.
The autistic savant like rain Man as portrayed by my
personal short king Dustin Hoffmann, or the extremely direct and
supercilious physicist on that one extremely popular network sit com
(01:41):
about All the Nerds and their one hot neighbor. Or
the Netflix series about a teenage boy with a penguin
obsession whose sensory sensitivities or disruptions to routine often lead
to dramatic and painful public outbursts. I love that one, actually,
But what do each of these examples have in common.
That's right, they're all white dudes. The way that cis
(02:03):
gender white autistic men are overrepresented in mainstream media simply
reflects the way that white autistic men are still overrepresented
in autism research. That's one of the reasons these stereotypes
about autism are so persistent and women and girls, autism
often presents in ways that go undetected by medical professionals,
(02:25):
by teachers, or even their own parents. And that's even
more true for autistic black women and girls, because when
the scientific research about autism doesn't include black participants at all,
then the literature and diagnostic materials don't include them either.
So I was looking for black autistic women to follow
(02:46):
on social media because I was wondering is masking different
than code switching? Or is there a black way to stem?
And at that time, a black autistic fem was hard
for me to imagine until I found Vitrum.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Do you know how autistic you have to be?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Well as like a black woman for doctors who actually
diagnose with autism as a child, like I was, I
was giving.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Spectrum Hershauna is a twenty something med student who lives
in the US. She's black, a woman, and autistic and
also kind of a battie. I found her on TikTok.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
We're not even going to get into the intersectionalities of
race and autism, well just a little bit post three.
Well anyways, I actually was.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Dying and when we eventually talked for real, she told
me that being neurodivergent is a slept on superpower.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yes, this is what I think.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
There's a lot more self awareness that.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Goes into neuro divergent people.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
It's like that white dude that takes like acid. It's like,
oh my god, I understand everything. It's like, bit babe,
we've been there, but glad you're on the Krean. You know.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
She also told me she was going to lie down
during our chat, and to be honest, I didn't feel
like telling her not to. This is basket case. I'm
enke Venusian, sad girl genius with a thing for Plutonian transits.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
If you know, you know, Okay, here's an interesting fact
about Leo's and their pride. You'll notice that there's only
one man in leo Pride, and that's not by accident.
They'll have sons, but once the sun like reaches a
certain age, they fight. The sons keep their place in
the pride because they're really one man allowed.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
My mother's also Leo, and.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I feel like that's what a kind of was my life.
My mother was my.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
First bully, and I think she didn't want me to
reach my power, so I wasn't really allowed to be
like a Leo. So it's like, as fun as bubbly
as I was, who I am now was not the
person I was allowed to be when I was young. No, Tinochet,
that woman had some demons before I got on this earth.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
They're trying to remember that the household was governed by
a rigid set of religious beliefs, beliefs that couldn't ever
be questioned. But she also remembers that for her, there
was another set of rules about where she could go,
who she could talk to. She wasn't really allowed to
leave the house to play with other kids, and on
the rare occasion kids came to her house, they weren't
allowed to stay long.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Like I would like to say the household was like that,
but it wasn't the household.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
It was me as a kid. Bertrana didn't know she
was autistic, but her mom and her older sisters did, because,
as it turns out, Bertrana's autism was so apparent, she
was giving so much spectrum that she had been diagnosed
as a toddler.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Gotta look back at my child's and I see I
was giving textbook autism. Like I would stay out my
CIV tools. I didn't like hang out with kids. I
had extremely special interests, and other people already knew something
was weird about.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Me, write Bertranta's family hid her autism from her and
also tried to hide it from everyone else.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Do you remember the moment in Chilhod when you like
gain consciousness and like you were like, oh shit, I'm
in this bitch, like I'm living.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
What was that moment for you?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
That moment for me, It's gonna get a little dark girl.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
We can move past it.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Bretronta was around four years old, and she remembers this
as an out of body experience, a moment of sudden
and brutal self awareness.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I remember like gaining consciousness and then like my two
older sisters laughing at me while my mother was like
screaming at me.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
She remembers seeing the entire scene as if from outside herself.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
And that was the first time in real life, my
family is making fun of me right now.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Although she wouldn't have the language for it until many,
many years later, the experience taught her something about her
place and the family, that it was something more than
her being the youngest that made them treat her the
way they did.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
So I sorted like crying, like like crying so heavily
that I couldn't breathe. I remember the shop on their
Feezer was like oh shit, like she knows what's going on,
like oh my.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
God, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
To survive at home, she stayed vigilant, noticing following her
mom's rules and trying to decipher the unspoken expectations, but
trying to keep track of all that was confusing and exhausting.
So she also kept to herself as much as possible,
and that time she spent alone provided her only sense
of escape from a difficult home life.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
So I think the majority of time I would be
off by myself because I was like, this is I
don't really want to be around people. I knew I
wanted to learn things. I was like, yeah, there's something
about this world I need to understand that y'all can't
teach me in this house.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
As autism has gained acceptance and wider visibility, a lot
of autistic people celebrate their special interests and intense affinity
or infatuation with something that they wind up knowing a
lot about. For Britrana, that special interest was the universe itself.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
So astrology in itself is like the study of the
stars right in the moon, and like figuring out how
that correlates to us as human beings. Right. I like
horoscopes when I was like six and had this book
the months all or designated and that's how I found
out it was Leo. And I just found that book
to be so interesting at such a young age. And
again like I just know that I don't know something
that I need to know.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
But in her mom's religious household, birthstones and astrology were sus.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
My mother was a very just difficult person, so everything
was like demonic. She was like, this is a satan.
It's like girl, like, it's crystals. Where did I say
that in the Bible?
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Suspecting that her family could only provide her with the
limited version of the capital T truth, she started asking questions.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
I started like needing to find the truth, to understand
if God was even really at a young age, because
it was kind of like trying to understand like my
situation and like why I was going through what I
was going through. I found myself kind of being like God,
why me, Like why is this happening to me? Like
I don't deserve this happening to me. And I think
that was what allowed my special interest to become the
(08:27):
concept of life. So like when I was growing up,
I kind of like started to do my own research,
but I'd be like, I don't feel like God would
do that God wants me to find the truth, don't.
They don't want me to just have my religion be right,
They want me to know the truth. Like that's the
point of us being on this earth to find out
the truth.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Birtrana started putting together a theory of how the world worked,
building her own cosmology, one which was fluid and plural,
constantly in flux, forever adaptable to new information.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
So like people were autistic but really really crave routine, right,
And because my family was a very chaotic family, my
routine was nothing will ever be the same. Like the
routine was never ever assume that this is going to
stay the same.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Because it was expect inconsistency.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yes, expect inconsistency. Right, So with that becoming the basis,
like I was always willing to hear a religious concept,
Like I was like, yeah, like I don't, I don't
think mine is the most right. I'm willing to hear
yours and grab from it and like look into the truth.
And I think that because I had that concept of
like nothing is ever going to be the same, that
(09:29):
I was okay with consistently changing my concept of religion
and how God works and what God was.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
When Brashana was in middle school, she moved to Connecticut
with her family. She was one of the only black
kids in the school. Then they moved to enter Philly,
where she wasn't but it didn't really make a difference.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Kids are mean, girl.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
People just targeted me. It was so weird.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
It was so weird By'reshana sense that at school there
were also rules, expectations about how she was supposed to act,
supposed to talk, what she was supposed to like and
not like. But what those rules were she didn't know.
She could only guess. Even simple things like when she
should laugh were mystifying to her and call it instinct.
(10:12):
But Bertrana also knew that knowing the rules and then
following them was primarily what made social belonging possible. She
knew that being part of the group was safer, and
that being excluded left her vulnerable to threat. Personally, I
don't trust anyone who claims to have enjoyed middle school
solely because it was one of the worst eras of
my life thanks to both braces, my mom's choice and
(10:35):
Jinko Jean's a choice which was unfortunately my own at
that age. I think everyone feels on some level that
not belonging is really scary, And I think sometimes that
fear manifests as cruelty towards the people who most remind
us that our belonging is precarious. It manifests as cruelty
towards people like Bertrana.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
There was one time in sixth grade, I had this
really bad botch perm that my mother gave me, so
you know how we had those like essions. Right, some
girl came up and pulled the ponytail off of me
and ran.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Around the recess room with it.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Right, It was like, damn, Like, I just don't want
to fight. I really just want to get this work
done and go back to the other awful home I.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Had, Like like a lot of autistic people, she did
her best to compensate, to mask, to conform.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I watched a lot of TV, and I feel like
that's what helped me understand social cues, especially with like
sitcom shows. It's oh, you can understand sarcasm because they
put the like audience laughing cue right afterwards. Things like
that helped you decipher what's actually going on.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
But to the other kids, there was something off about her,
something different that was somehow both obvious but difficult to articulate,
an uncanny valley experience.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
And I think around thirteen is when I started to
like actually adjust. I think that's when I started being
like able to mask well enough that like I had
friends and like, even if I was deemed different, it
was more like a quirky not a like different that
people couldn't describe.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
But then Bertrana's mom told her something surprising, something that
made sense that's coming up after the break. When Bertronta
was thirteen, she was in the living room with her
mom watching TV when suddenly her mom announced that Bertranta
(12:30):
had been diagnosed as autistic when she was a toddler,
and that everyone else in the family knew except for Trana.
Her mom waited for a reaction, but Fortranta wasn't sure
how to react. She didn't really understand why her mother
was telling her this and why now after all this time.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
I think she wanted me to be on something like,
oh how could you, like, why didn't you tell me?
And I think he might have expected me to blow
up on her, So I kind of was like, oh, wow, okay,
all right in that moment, like the moods shifted, and
she kind of like was upset that she didn't get
the reaction she wanted out of me. You know a
(13:12):
lot of times I think people do things expecting you
to read between the lines, right, and with autism, like
you don't even view a social hierarchy, like those concepts
don't really exist to you. So I think like a
normal person would have understood, like this is someone trying
to taunt you. But in my mind, I was kind
of like, she's just telling you this fact. But like
(13:33):
I also, I think at this point had made condition
to know that you don't ask her questions and actually
get the truth. I was like, girl, you could you
could have told me for him. You could have helped
me because that explanation would have helped me make a
lot more sense navigating like my childhood and adolescents. But
she told me once I had to learn to.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Mask Forsronta became even more focused on plotting her escape.
She understood that her intelligence and good grades were currency.
The only thing she could rely on. Being a good
student was the only escape patch she could think of.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Like I would cry if I got to be because
I was like, yo, how can I get into a
great college like, I was like already onto the understanding
that my family is not going to help me.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
But I always understood like I'm going to leave y'all.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
She did get into a good college where she majored
in biology and started thinking about med school. She got
a job doing neurological research about the ways ben's drinking
and THHC affect the brain, and as graduation approached, she
applied to join the Peace Corps. Not long after graduation.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Again, Kumladevich did it.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
She was headed to a village in the southern Lusaka
Province of Zambia.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Zambia.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Okay, what was that? Like?
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I loved it, girl, I loved it like like.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
As a Peace Corps volunteer, Vitana was part of a
cohort of community health workers.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
I got to learn the language, which was Tonga, and
I lived in a village in a hut.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
The village was off grid with no running and solar
powered lights.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
It was beautiful. The people there are so compassionate as well.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Zambia is a landlocked country in southern Africa, a country
known for its safe communal feeling and for being home
to a vast array of wildlife. The tropical climate nurtures
more than thirty five hundred species of wild flowering plants. Lions, leopards,
and zebras roam. Its many national parks and wildlife preserves.
Crocodiles and hippos swim in the rivers. Zambia might best
(15:29):
be known for its famed Victoria Falls, a curtain of
water forming a truly spectacular natural border between Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Local tribes call the beautiful explosion of mist and water
the smoke that thunders and above the land. In the
sky of the Zambian countryside, there are the constellations, the
(15:49):
Southern Cross and the Pleiades star cluster Canus Major, which
contains the brightest star in the night sky, the Dog Star.
In fall, there was Leo, recognizable by its sickle shape,
and there was also a Phoenix, named for the mythical
bird that rose from its own ashes. The Zambian night
sky contained more stars than Bertrana had ever seen.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Personally, I've never felt more safe, and I've also never
felt more like not in other.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
No one was sizing her up, deciding how to treat
her based on her ability to follow often unspoken social expectations.
Bertrana was struck by that kindness. It wasn't what she
was used to.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
They'll see difference as oh innovation, Yeah, I mean different
is innovation.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Difference means like a new way to do something.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
For the first time in her life, she felt a
sense of belonging.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
I don't feel like I ever masked, but I don't
feel like it was ever more myself than when I
was in Zambia.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Away from the overstimulating lights and noise of Philly, away
from the US, away from her family. For the first time,
Bertrana felt.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Safe for a solid two years.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I think it really helped by a nervous system regulating.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Each night for Toronto. Would eat dinner with her host family,
and after dinner there'd be music.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
So the kids would come over at night and we
would have dance parties. We would wind our hips. There
was this girl, a little girl named Mary in the village.
She had like wisdom and she could whine girl better
than me. I was like, okay, not too much, don't
want to embarrass me. So it would be like, like,
you know, after an hour of eating and an hour
of dancing, having a really beautiful community. I remember being
(17:30):
like overwhelmed with like good emotion, but also like not
understanding why, Like you ever have like a really great
day with your friends and then you leave them and
you kind of are sad.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Feeling welcome, being celebrated, accepted by her host family and
a whole community. It was an unfamiliar feeling and not
totally comfortable.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
I'm in my head though, and I can hear them.
I hear like tears of children, you know, peoples of children.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Music looking out the window, and like I remember seeing
so many stars.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
With their laughter in the background. Bertranta's thoughts returned to
her own girlhood.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
It was during the time of Peace Corps that I
started like not getting the press memories fully back, but
like I said, I'd have photos.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Bertrana says that for a long time, she only remembered
her childhood and photos, flashes of static images, like postcards
from her subconscious that she didn't want to read. In Zambia,
those images began to animate and become memories. She started
remembering the details of what had happened to her when
she was small.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Not full blown memories were coming back, but like photos
of like being younger than six, where being younger than
first grade were coming.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
This is when she remembered for the first time gaining consciousness,
that moment of self awareness in her mom's kitchen, when
she understood that her mom and sister were mocking her.
She remembered things like her mother scolding her in a
grocery store. She remembered not understanding why.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
I just remember one time a mom like screaming at me, like,
what is wrong with you in a crowd of people
from what I did, but apparently it was annoying. It
was enough for her to be like stopping in front
of the crowd of people and she knew, you knew
what was wrong. He's like, babe, you know, you know what.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
It is like.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
And there were worse memories. One's still too difficult to
talk about. Bertranta's family had tried to instill in her
that she wouldn't amount to anything, that she had no agency,
that there was nothing she could do to deviate from
the future they imagined for her when she got her diagnosis.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
So it was like being taught at a very early
age that like, nothing you do will change what's going
to happen to you. And I think that's why my
mind repressed out those memories, because like, if I had
that mentality growing up, I don't think I would have
achieved as much as I did.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
For Fortrana to keep moving forward. It had taken a
remarkable amount of maturity and faith. It had also taken
a very impressive amount of empathy.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
I think back to those moments, and I'm like, it
probably was difficult to be a single mother raising a
child who is now deem nautistic. Sure, she didn't do
any research about autism was so she probably thought that
meant like I would be a slow child that she
would have to take care of for the rest of
my life and her life as well. It's like I
was a child then, and none of you protected me.
You didn't protect me because you thought I was disabled mentally.
(20:16):
You kind of assume that the way you treated me
would never see the light of day, which is why
you treated me that way. Right.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
They assume that you wouldn't be able to articulate what
happened or advocate for yourself, right, Yes, Yes.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
And that's really unfortunate because you look at people with
disabilities in the United States in general, right, and it's like,
if your own families want to do that too, let's
look at the system or because we live in a
society that purposely makes us feel like if you don't
do it the way the majority does, then you are
not doing it correctly. It just makes it It makes
me difficult for those who are already neurodivergent to like
(20:50):
find their place. A lot of times, especially when it
comes to Americans, diversity is considered only when it comes
to color, right, and like it's more like a black
and white concept, and it kind of correlates back to
the concept of like neurodiversity and how it's now become
like eiooneuotypical or neurodiverts. Right. Yeah, My degree was in
bio and I think about biodiversity. I think about studying us.
(21:12):
I think we need to study ourselves the way we
study animals. And I think that we think human beings
are too complex. We are complex with so are bugs,
and you know, like everything is complex, and it's like
but we're still at the end of the day, mammal.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
If making sense, Yes, I'm nodding, Yeah, you definitely are.
Yes for Toronto was making sense. Let me explain after
the break. So, how did the movement for neurodiversity that
begin in the nineties become how we talk about it today,
(21:45):
a more rigid black and white binary with the neurotypicals
on one side and the neurodivergence on the other.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
My degree was in bio and I think about biodiversity
and it kind of correlates back to neurodiversity and how
it's now become like eioonuotypical or neurodiverts.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I was also curious about that reframe, and what I
found out is that the reality is a lot more
gray scale than.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Black and white.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Autism spectrum disorder can manifest as a diverse and wide
ranging spectrum of traits and challenges. That's why spectrum is
in the name. There's not one way to be autistic.
There are many many ways to be autistic. But a
director of the Yale Developmental Disabilities Clinic says that trying
to pen down the biology behind autism has been difficult
for autism researchers. They have yet to find an objective,
(22:31):
measurable biological difference between an autistic brain and a neurotypical one. Nonetheless,
Judy Singer, the mother of the neurodiversity movement, relied on
biology on an I was born this way premise when
she advocated for more social inclusion and more workplace accommodations
for neurodiversion people. Judy Singer's neurodiversity manifesto was actually her
(22:56):
undergraduate thesis in disability studies was Neurodiversent Woman with a
child on the Autism spectrum, which had inspired her to
get her degree as an adult. Her thesis focused on
autists that were considered high functioning, and it was considered groundbreaking.
It was shared widely, and it was Singer who popularized
(23:16):
the neurotypical neurodiversent binary, which I'm pretty sure she meant
as a middle finger to the ways she had felt
marginalized and excluded by people without cognitive disabilities and also
a lot of neurode people online thought calling people neurotypical
it was funny, And I get that because as of bisexual,
I have definitely called somewhat a monosexual and meant it
as an insult. But in both cases, the binary we're
(23:39):
working with is a social construct, not a biological one.
Robert Chapman is an autistic academic and a neurodiversity theorist
who has written a book called Empire of Normality. And
they say that the categories of neurodiverse and neurotypical are
social constructs. In Chapman's opinion, their social construt drug related
(24:00):
to the needs of the economy. A capitalist economy creates
certain norms related to what does or does not make
an ideal worker, and since that ideal is related to
both historical time and place and the needs of any
given industry, whether you're clocked as neurotypical or clocked as
neurodiversent really depends on to what extent your body and
mind are either accommodated or disabled by the environment that
(24:23):
you are in. So like, do you work in an
office with flickering neon lights because that could be disabling
to anyone with light sensitivity issues, not just autistic people,
Or do you have the option to work remotely because
that could be accommodating to a wide range of people
for a wide range of reasons. Chapman is building on
the neuroconformity model of autism, the idea that we all
(24:47):
vary in how much we can neuroconform to the social ideal,
but no one is actually perfectly neurotypical. But let's put
the binary aside and go back to the idea of
neurodivers popularized by Judy Singer. By many accounts, Singer's research
relied heavily on the conversations happening in an early Internet
(25:08):
forum called Independent Living on the Autism Spectrum or in Live.
In Live was a mid nineties Internet forum where the
earliest conversations about the idea of neurodiversity took place.
Speaker 5 (25:21):
I'm becoming more sure that what allows the human race
to progress socially and technologically is the neurological diversity of people.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
According to the site's founder and archivists, this comment included
the first use of the.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
Term, i e. The atypical among the society provide the
different perspectives needed to generate new ideas and advances, whether
they be technological, cultural, artistic, or otherwise.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Also lurking around the in Live forums was a New
York Times journalist who would eventually publish an essay about
neurological pluralism, acknowledging that humans exhibit a range of cognitive abilities,
none more normal or typical or ideal than any other.
And that was Inlive's central idea, and these ideas continue
to be the basis of the neurodiversity movement today with
(26:08):
neurological diversity in mind. That movement rejects the idea that
autism or ADHD or dyslexia should be thought of as
a disorders rather than neurological differences everyday variations and cognitive function.
As Sieve Silver, author of NeuroTribes, The Legacy of Autism
(26:28):
and the Future of Neurodiversity, wrote in a history of
the movement in Forests and Tidepools, the value of biological
diversity is resilience, and in nature across the plant, animal,
and microbial kingdoms, variation is not pathologized or seen as
a problem to solve. Silver cites the author of a
(26:49):
book about neurodiversity in the classroom who writes, we.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
Don't pathologize at kalalily by saying it has a pedaled
deficit disorder. Similarly, we ought not to pologized children who
have different kinds of brains and different ways of thinking
and learning.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So BIA's definitely absolutely making sense when she told me
that neurodiversity discourse makes her a biomajor think of biodiversity
where variation is normal and expected and isn't cause for
exclusion or hierarchy. Biodiversity or biological diversity refers to the
(27:26):
huge variety of all life on Earth in all its forms,
from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems, from forests to
coral reefs.
Speaker 7 (27:35):
Like whether it's like plants or microbes or animals, right,
everything lives and exists in a collective.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Ayisha Khan is a diversent, infectious disease scientist, gerum doctor,
grassroots organizer, writer, and astrobiologists.
Speaker 7 (27:51):
Like everything is interdependent, right, and not just to each other.
They're very viscerally aware of the interspecies interdependence, right, the
reliance that they have on every thing within their ecosystem,
and all of that coming together to actually create life.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
In their work, I used to get to meet and
learn from people all across the global South, many who
live in land based collectivist cultures in which humans tend
to understand themselves as integral parts of communities and as
very small parts of a vast and interconnected ecosystem.
Speaker 7 (28:21):
So what happens when you take people away from each other,
from land, from realizing that they're meant to care for
each other, They're meant to care for the land.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
And I think what ends up happening.
Speaker 7 (28:30):
Is there's this fixation on individual identities, and I think
even the attachment to identity it's really a maladaptive response.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
To the lack of a collective identity.
Speaker 7 (28:40):
To really the lack of people feeling firmly anchored in
an ecological context where they're like, these are my people,
you know, this is who we are, this is what
we eat, this is what we pray to, this is
how we take care of our land, this is how
the land takes care of us. And I think part
of oppression is the severance from that kind of interdependence
and connection.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
There are somewhere around eight point seven million different species
on Earth, including plants, animals, fungi, and single celled organisms,
and of those more than eight million species, only about
twenty percent of them have been formally recorded and given
a name, like Homo sapiens. What we don't know about
life on Earth far outweighs what we do know.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
A bunch of heart cells need to come together and
make a heart.
Speaker 7 (29:25):
A bunch of different tissues come together to make a
partiovascular system, and a bunch of organ systems come together
to make a human technically, but why end there? Because
a bunch of humans with their land come together to
make an ecosystem, and a bunch of ecosystems come together
to make what is a planet. A bunch of planets
come together with the Sun to make a solar system, right,
(29:46):
and it doesn't need to end at any point.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
When the first astrologers looked up at the stars, there
was no distinction between astronomy and astrology, and no question
about whether celestial bodies the Sun, the moon, stars, or
celestial events the solsus the equinox could have direct bearing
on human life.
Speaker 8 (30:10):
It's like using light to tell time. How do I
know its spring because I'm observing a physical phenomenon that
occurs seclically in a predictable way to let me know
what time it is.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Dana Nichols is a siderial astrologer known as the Peopil's Oracle.
Dana says about the core, astrology is about a human
relationship to time and life.
Speaker 8 (30:34):
For me, astrology is how I know what time it
is like. These things are not mysteries, and it's liberating
in so many ways to know that there is an
order and that there's a pattern, because we need to
know that this is not just all random as.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
The peopil's oracle Dana practices astrology for the well being
of the collective.
Speaker 8 (30:55):
The thing that I've learned is that humans are so
incredibly sol and the simplicity is that we will do
anything to not be alienated anything. Think of the most egregious,
violent thing, but also think of the most beautiful, harmonious thing.
(31:19):
Humans will do anything to not be ostracized and alienated.
And for me, I think the other piece is that
we're the same. We all need validation and respect.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
That's the Sun.
Speaker 8 (31:34):
We all need comfort and safety. That's the Moon. We
all need to be heard and understood. That's Mercury. We
all need to belong that's Venus. We all need autonomy
and a sense of personal power. That's Mars. We all
need for things to make sense in some way, shape
or form. That's Jupiter. And we're all gonna die, and
(31:56):
we all need privacy. That's Saturn. And it's just a
question of what is our cultural relationship with these things
and what are the personal ways we come into relationship
with these parts of ourselves based on our culture and
(32:18):
our home and family.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
With its mathematical tracking of both near and distant stars
moving slowly across the sky. Astrology was the earliest practice
of cosmology, a science that deals with the study of
the universe as a whole. Today's technology means cosmologists and
astronomers alike can know way more about stars and planets
than Babylonian astrologers could have ever imagined. Like, we know
(32:44):
that the same basic elements that form stars, carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus,
nitrogen are the same basic elements that form life on Earth.
These elements are the building blocks of molecules like DNA,
and for proteins and for carbohydrates, all of which are
essential for life. And we also know that when stars
explode or die, new elements are released, including the calcium
(33:08):
that makes up our bones and the oxygen that we breathe.
And that's what that guy was talking about when he
said we're all made of stars. Not long after returning
from the Peace Corps, Be applied to med school. Then
she made the decision to go no contact with her family.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
I started therapy just because I was like starting med school,
and I knew that that I really needed to be
able to come apart mentalize. I remember talking to my
therapist like the first conversation and explaining to her, like
my achievements and like all my accolades, and she was like,
you've chieved so much for your age, and she kind
of asked, He's like, why do you need therapy?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
They're trying to explain that her focus on academic achievements
had all been part of her strategy of escape.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
I'm really proud of all the accolades I have, but
it was like, I need to get out of here,
and I need to do it correctly.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Like I don't have a second chance. I don't have
other options, you know, I don't have someone to fall back.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah, Like, what's motivating you?
Speaker 5 (34:08):
Now?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Me? Girl, I deserve everything.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I deserve it all. I deserve it.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I'm so reliated that that's your answer.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
I love that, Like I deserve it all.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Oh my god, yeah you.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Do so much.
Speaker 5 (34:19):
Yes, I love it.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I'm so so happy that's how you answered.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
I love it. Yeah. No, especially like I look back
and I think about how many out of body experiences
I was having because of how traumatized I was, And
I look back to baby B and I'm like, oh
my god, beg girl, Like, you don't realize how much
you have done for me to be here in this moment,
Like you don't know how much work you laid down,
Like how humble and graceful you moved. I hope I
(34:44):
am half a woman I was at the child, I
really knew he was just on another level of phenomenal,
just getting shit done and being in tunnel vision, like
she did not care about anything else but the prize.
I've I feel like I was never a good masker
in the same way that like I never felt like
I needed to apologize or explain my queerness to anybody.
(35:07):
I don't feel like I've ever needed to apologize or
explain my AUTI sometime anyone, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
I'm like, you need to get over it.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
I don't need to explain to you why I'm this way,
or like try to make you feel more comfortable because
you don't understand me. That's not my problem. I understand
that we call it disability, but it's a disability because
it's disabling others around you. It's not necessarily a disability
unless it makes other people around you feel uncomfortable. I
(35:32):
feel like if we had a world, like maybe there'll
be a Wakanda of all of us just living and
like you know, prospering all of us in neural divergence.
But if there was ever I think a city of
all of us, like, where would be the disability.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Baska Case is a production of Molton Hart and iHeart Podcasts.
This series was created and is executive produced by Jasmine j. C.
Green and it is hosted, produced, and sound designed by
me NK Nicole Kelly. Special thanks to Bertrana, Doctor Ayisha Khan,
and Dana Nichols The People's Oracle, And thanks to Devin
(36:18):
Price and Robert Chapman, whose writing also helped shape my
thinking for this episode. If you're interested in mor spicy
takes on neurodiversity, definitely check out their work. Production support
by Siona Petros and Ammani Leonard. Adrian Lilly is our
mix engineer. Our theme is blue and orange by Command Jasmine.
Our show art was created by Sinay Rolson, fact checking
(36:42):
by Serena Solyn. Our executive producer from iHeart Podcasts is
Lindsay Hoffman
Hey, it's okay. Baska Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health. But keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional. So in the description of this
and every episode, I'll leave you a list of relevant
resources and links to the things I'm reading. And while
you're listening, take care. Is there anything that I haven't
(00:21):
asked you about that you wanted to talk about?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, the horoscopes.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
If I'm being real, I'm a lebra soun and rising
and a leo.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Moon venus raw you gotta work aphrodia.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Ooh, okay, that's cool, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
That's really like, I feel like you really compliment yourself.
I am a Leo, which is the sun, and my
moon is Cancer, which is the moon, right, and my
rising is Pisces, which is actually the ocean. A lot
of people will be like, think you think the world
evolves around you, and I'm like, I am the sun
and the moon. Baby, it does there night there night,
whereas blinded baby, that's not my move. Wow, alhah. Person's
(01:01):
gonna want, person's gonna want la, person's gonna want person's.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Gonna want la, person's gonna want with what.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Person's gonna want me?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
When I have to president anxiety.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
MM.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
So you know how, there's this really prominent set of
tropes and characteristics that we tend to associate with autism.
The autistic savant like rain Man as portrayed by my
personal short king Dustin Hoffmann, or the extremely direct and
supercilious physicist on that one extremely popular network sit com
(01:41):
about All the Nerds and their one hot neighbor. Or
the Netflix series about a teenage boy with a penguin
obsession whose sensory sensitivities or disruptions to routine often lead
to dramatic and painful public outbursts. I love that one, actually,
But what do each of these examples have in common.
That's right, they're all white dudes. The way that cis
(02:03):
gender white autistic men are overrepresented in mainstream media simply
reflects the way that white autistic men are still overrepresented
in autism research. That's one of the reasons these stereotypes
about autism are so persistent and women and girls, autism
often presents in ways that go undetected by medical professionals,
(02:25):
by teachers, or even their own parents. And that's even
more true for autistic black women and girls, because when
the scientific research about autism doesn't include black participants at all,
then the literature and diagnostic materials don't include them either.
So I was looking for black autistic women to follow
(02:46):
on social media because I was wondering is masking different
than code switching? Or is there a black way to stem?
And at that time, a black autistic fem was hard
for me to imagine until I found Vitrum.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Do you know how autistic you have to be?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Well as like a black woman for doctors who actually
diagnose with autism as a child, like I was, I
was giving.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Spectrum Hershauna is a twenty something med student who lives
in the US. She's black, a woman, and autistic and
also kind of a battie. I found her on TikTok.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
We're not even going to get into the intersectionalities of
race and autism, well just a little bit post three.
Well anyways, I actually was.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Dying and when we eventually talked for real, she told
me that being neurodivergent is a slept on superpower.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yes, this is what I think.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
There's a lot more self awareness that.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Goes into neuro divergent people.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
It's like that white dude that takes like acid. It's like,
oh my god, I understand everything. It's like, bit babe,
we've been there, but glad you're on the Krean. You know.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
She also told me she was going to lie down
during our chat, and to be honest, I didn't feel
like telling her not to. This is basket case. I'm
enke Venusian, sad girl genius with a thing for Plutonian transits.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
If you know, you know, Okay, here's an interesting fact
about Leo's and their pride. You'll notice that there's only
one man in leo Pride, and that's not by accident.
They'll have sons, but once the sun like reaches a
certain age, they fight. The sons keep their place in
the pride because they're really one man allowed.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
My mother's also Leo, and.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I feel like that's what a kind of was my life.
My mother was my.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
First bully, and I think she didn't want me to
reach my power, so I wasn't really allowed to be
like a Leo. So it's like, as fun as bubbly
as I was, who I am now was not the
person I was allowed to be when I was young. No, Tinochet,
that woman had some demons before I got on this earth.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
They're trying to remember that the household was governed by
a rigid set of religious beliefs, beliefs that couldn't ever
be questioned. But she also remembers that for her, there
was another set of rules about where she could go,
who she could talk to. She wasn't really allowed to
leave the house to play with other kids, and on
the rare occasion kids came to her house, they weren't
allowed to stay long.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Like I would like to say the household was like that,
but it wasn't the household.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
It was me as a kid. Bertrana didn't know she
was autistic, but her mom and her older sisters did, because,
as it turns out, Bertrana's autism was so apparent, she
was giving so much spectrum that she had been diagnosed
as a toddler.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Gotta look back at my child's and I see I
was giving textbook autism. Like I would stay out my
CIV tools. I didn't like hang out with kids. I
had extremely special interests, and other people already knew something
was weird about.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Me, write Bertranta's family hid her autism from her and
also tried to hide it from everyone else.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Do you remember the moment in Chilhod when you like
gain consciousness and like you were like, oh shit, I'm
in this bitch, like I'm living.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
What was that moment for you?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
That moment for me, It's gonna get a little dark girl.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
We can move past it.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Bretronta was around four years old, and she remembers this
as an out of body experience, a moment of sudden
and brutal self awareness.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I remember like gaining consciousness and then like my two
older sisters laughing at me while my mother was like
screaming at me.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
She remembers seeing the entire scene as if from outside herself.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
And that was the first time in real life, my
family is making fun of me right now.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Although she wouldn't have the language for it until many,
many years later, the experience taught her something about her
place and the family, that it was something more than
her being the youngest that made them treat her the
way they did.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
So I sorted like crying, like like crying so heavily
that I couldn't breathe. I remember the shop on their
Feezer was like oh shit, like she knows what's going on,
like oh my.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
God, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
To survive at home, she stayed vigilant, noticing following her
mom's rules and trying to decipher the unspoken expectations, but
trying to keep track of all that was confusing and exhausting.
So she also kept to herself as much as possible,
and that time she spent alone provided her only sense
of escape from a difficult home life.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
So I think the majority of time I would be
off by myself because I was like, this is I
don't really want to be around people. I knew I
wanted to learn things. I was like, yeah, there's something
about this world I need to understand that y'all can't
teach me in this house.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
As autism has gained acceptance and wider visibility, a lot
of autistic people celebrate their special interests and intense affinity
or infatuation with something that they wind up knowing a
lot about. For Britrana, that special interest was the universe itself.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
So astrology in itself is like the study of the
stars right in the moon, and like figuring out how
that correlates to us as human beings. Right. I like
horoscopes when I was like six and had this book
the months all or designated and that's how I found
out it was Leo. And I just found that book
to be so interesting at such a young age. And
again like I just know that I don't know something
that I need to know.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
But in her mom's religious household, birthstones and astrology were sus.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
My mother was a very just difficult person, so everything
was like demonic. She was like, this is a satan.
It's like girl, like, it's crystals. Where did I say
that in the Bible?
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Suspecting that her family could only provide her with the
limited version of the capital T truth, she started asking questions.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
I started like needing to find the truth, to understand
if God was even really at a young age, because
it was kind of like trying to understand like my
situation and like why I was going through what I
was going through. I found myself kind of being like God,
why me, Like why is this happening to me? Like
I don't deserve this happening to me. And I think
that was what allowed my special interest to become the
(08:27):
concept of life. So like when I was growing up,
I kind of like started to do my own research,
but I'd be like, I don't feel like God would
do that God wants me to find the truth, don't.
They don't want me to just have my religion be right,
They want me to know the truth. Like that's the
point of us being on this earth to find out
the truth.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Birtrana started putting together a theory of how the world worked,
building her own cosmology, one which was fluid and plural,
constantly in flux, forever adaptable to new information.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
So like people were autistic but really really crave routine, right,
And because my family was a very chaotic family, my
routine was nothing will ever be the same. Like the
routine was never ever assume that this is going to
stay the same.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Because it was expect inconsistency.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yes, expect inconsistency. Right, So with that becoming the basis,
like I was always willing to hear a religious concept,
Like I was like, yeah, like I don't, I don't
think mine is the most right. I'm willing to hear
yours and grab from it and like look into the truth.
And I think that because I had that concept of
like nothing is ever going to be the same, that
(09:29):
I was okay with consistently changing my concept of religion
and how God works and what God was.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
When Brashana was in middle school, she moved to Connecticut
with her family. She was one of the only black
kids in the school. Then they moved to enter Philly,
where she wasn't but it didn't really make a difference.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Kids are mean, girl.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
People just targeted me. It was so weird.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
It was so weird By'reshana sense that at school there
were also rules, expectations about how she was supposed to act,
supposed to talk, what she was supposed to like and
not like. But what those rules were she didn't know.
She could only guess. Even simple things like when she
should laugh were mystifying to her and call it instinct.
(10:12):
But Bertrana also knew that knowing the rules and then
following them was primarily what made social belonging possible. She
knew that being part of the group was safer, and
that being excluded left her vulnerable to threat. Personally, I
don't trust anyone who claims to have enjoyed middle school
solely because it was one of the worst eras of
my life thanks to both braces, my mom's choice and
(10:35):
Jinko Jean's a choice which was unfortunately my own at
that age. I think everyone feels on some level that
not belonging is really scary, And I think sometimes that
fear manifests as cruelty towards the people who most remind
us that our belonging is precarious. It manifests as cruelty
towards people like Bertrana.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
There was one time in sixth grade, I had this
really bad botch perm that my mother gave me, so
you know how we had those like essions. Right, some
girl came up and pulled the ponytail off of me
and ran.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Around the recess room with it.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Right, It was like, damn, Like, I just don't want
to fight. I really just want to get this work
done and go back to the other awful home I.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Had, Like like a lot of autistic people, she did
her best to compensate, to mask, to conform.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I watched a lot of TV, and I feel like
that's what helped me understand social cues, especially with like
sitcom shows. It's oh, you can understand sarcasm because they
put the like audience laughing cue right afterwards. Things like
that helped you decipher what's actually going on.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
But to the other kids, there was something off about her,
something different that was somehow both obvious but difficult to articulate,
an uncanny valley experience.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
And I think around thirteen is when I started to
like actually adjust. I think that's when I started being
like able to mask well enough that like I had
friends and like, even if I was deemed different, it
was more like a quirky not a like different that
people couldn't describe.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
But then Bertrana's mom told her something surprising, something that
made sense that's coming up after the break. When Bertronta
was thirteen, she was in the living room with her
mom watching TV when suddenly her mom announced that Bertranta
(12:30):
had been diagnosed as autistic when she was a toddler,
and that everyone else in the family knew except for Trana.
Her mom waited for a reaction, but Fortranta wasn't sure
how to react. She didn't really understand why her mother
was telling her this and why now after all this time.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
I think she wanted me to be on something like,
oh how could you, like, why didn't you tell me?
And I think he might have expected me to blow
up on her, So I kind of was like, oh, wow, okay,
all right in that moment, like the moods shifted, and
she kind of like was upset that she didn't get
the reaction she wanted out of me. You know a
(13:12):
lot of times I think people do things expecting you
to read between the lines, right, and with autism, like
you don't even view a social hierarchy, like those concepts
don't really exist to you. So I think like a
normal person would have understood, like this is someone trying
to taunt you. But in my mind, I was kind
of like, she's just telling you this fact. But like
(13:33):
I also, I think at this point had made condition
to know that you don't ask her questions and actually
get the truth. I was like, girl, you could you
could have told me for him. You could have helped
me because that explanation would have helped me make a
lot more sense navigating like my childhood and adolescents. But
she told me once I had to learn to.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Mask Forsronta became even more focused on plotting her escape.
She understood that her intelligence and good grades were currency.
The only thing she could rely on. Being a good
student was the only escape patch she could think of.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Like I would cry if I got to be because
I was like, yo, how can I get into a
great college like, I was like already onto the understanding
that my family is not going to help me.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
But I always understood like I'm going to leave y'all.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
She did get into a good college where she majored
in biology and started thinking about med school. She got
a job doing neurological research about the ways ben's drinking
and THHC affect the brain, and as graduation approached, she
applied to join the Peace Corps. Not long after graduation.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Again, Kumladevich did it.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
She was headed to a village in the southern Lusaka
Province of Zambia.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Zambia.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Okay, what was that? Like?
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I loved it, girl, I loved it like like.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
As a Peace Corps volunteer, Vitana was part of a
cohort of community health workers.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
I got to learn the language, which was Tonga, and
I lived in a village in a hut.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
The village was off grid with no running and solar
powered lights.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
It was beautiful. The people there are so compassionate as well.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Zambia is a landlocked country in southern Africa, a country
known for its safe communal feeling and for being home
to a vast array of wildlife. The tropical climate nurtures
more than thirty five hundred species of wild flowering plants. Lions, leopards,
and zebras roam. Its many national parks and wildlife preserves.
Crocodiles and hippos swim in the rivers. Zambia might best
(15:29):
be known for its famed Victoria Falls, a curtain of
water forming a truly spectacular natural border between Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Local tribes call the beautiful explosion of mist and water
the smoke that thunders and above the land. In the
sky of the Zambian countryside, there are the constellations, the
(15:49):
Southern Cross and the Pleiades star cluster Canus Major, which
contains the brightest star in the night sky, the Dog Star.
In fall, there was Leo, recognizable by its sickle shape,
and there was also a Phoenix, named for the mythical
bird that rose from its own ashes. The Zambian night
sky contained more stars than Bertrana had ever seen.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Personally, I've never felt more safe, and I've also never
felt more like not in other.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
No one was sizing her up, deciding how to treat
her based on her ability to follow often unspoken social expectations.
Bertrana was struck by that kindness. It wasn't what she
was used to.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
They'll see difference as oh innovation, Yeah, I mean different
is innovation.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Difference means like a new way to do something.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
For the first time in her life, she felt a
sense of belonging.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
I don't feel like I ever masked, but I don't
feel like it was ever more myself than when I
was in Zambia.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Away from the overstimulating lights and noise of Philly, away
from the US, away from her family. For the first time,
Bertrana felt.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Safe for a solid two years.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I think it really helped by a nervous system regulating.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Each night for Toronto. Would eat dinner with her host family,
and after dinner there'd be music.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
So the kids would come over at night and we
would have dance parties. We would wind our hips. There
was this girl, a little girl named Mary in the village.
She had like wisdom and she could whine girl better
than me. I was like, okay, not too much, don't
want to embarrass me. So it would be like, like,
you know, after an hour of eating and an hour
of dancing, having a really beautiful community. I remember being
(17:30):
like overwhelmed with like good emotion, but also like not
understanding why, Like you ever have like a really great
day with your friends and then you leave them and
you kind of are sad.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Feeling welcome, being celebrated, accepted by her host family and
a whole community. It was an unfamiliar feeling and not
totally comfortable.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
I'm in my head though, and I can hear them.
I hear like tears of children, you know, peoples of children.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Music looking out the window, and like I remember seeing
so many stars.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
With their laughter in the background. Bertranta's thoughts returned to
her own girlhood.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
It was during the time of Peace Corps that I
started like not getting the press memories fully back, but
like I said, I'd have photos.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Bertrana says that for a long time, she only remembered
her childhood and photos, flashes of static images, like postcards
from her subconscious that she didn't want to read. In Zambia,
those images began to animate and become memories. She started
remembering the details of what had happened to her when
she was small.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Not full blown memories were coming back, but like photos
of like being younger than six, where being younger than
first grade were coming.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
This is when she remembered for the first time gaining consciousness,
that moment of self awareness in her mom's kitchen, when
she understood that her mom and sister were mocking her.
She remembered things like her mother scolding her in a
grocery store. She remembered not understanding why.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
I just remember one time a mom like screaming at me, like,
what is wrong with you in a crowd of people
from what I did, but apparently it was annoying. It
was enough for her to be like stopping in front
of the crowd of people and she knew, you knew
what was wrong. He's like, babe, you know, you know what.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
It is like.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
And there were worse memories. One's still too difficult to
talk about. Bertranta's family had tried to instill in her
that she wouldn't amount to anything, that she had no agency,
that there was nothing she could do to deviate from
the future they imagined for her when she got her diagnosis.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
So it was like being taught at a very early
age that like, nothing you do will change what's going
to happen to you. And I think that's why my
mind repressed out those memories, because like, if I had
that mentality growing up, I don't think I would have
achieved as much as I did.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
For Fortrana to keep moving forward. It had taken a
remarkable amount of maturity and faith. It had also taken
a very impressive amount of empathy.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
I think back to those moments, and I'm like, it
probably was difficult to be a single mother raising a
child who is now deem nautistic. Sure, she didn't do
any research about autism was so she probably thought that
meant like I would be a slow child that she
would have to take care of for the rest of
my life and her life as well. It's like I
was a child then, and none of you protected me.
You didn't protect me because you thought I was disabled mentally.
(20:16):
You kind of assume that the way you treated me
would never see the light of day, which is why
you treated me that way. Right.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
They assume that you wouldn't be able to articulate what
happened or advocate for yourself, right, Yes, Yes.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
And that's really unfortunate because you look at people with
disabilities in the United States in general, right, and it's like,
if your own families want to do that too, let's
look at the system or because we live in a
society that purposely makes us feel like if you don't
do it the way the majority does, then you are
not doing it correctly. It just makes it It makes
me difficult for those who are already neurodivergent to like
(20:50):
find their place. A lot of times, especially when it
comes to Americans, diversity is considered only when it comes
to color, right, and like it's more like a black
and white concept, and it kind of correlates back to
the concept of like neurodiversity and how it's now become
like eiooneuotypical or neurodiverts. Right. Yeah, My degree was in
bio and I think about biodiversity. I think about studying us.
(21:12):
I think we need to study ourselves the way we
study animals. And I think that we think human beings
are too complex. We are complex with so are bugs,
and you know, like everything is complex, and it's like
but we're still at the end of the day, mammal.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
If making sense, Yes, I'm nodding, Yeah, you definitely are.
Yes for Toronto was making sense. Let me explain after
the break. So, how did the movement for neurodiversity that
begin in the nineties become how we talk about it today,
(21:45):
a more rigid black and white binary with the neurotypicals
on one side and the neurodivergence on the other.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
My degree was in bio and I think about biodiversity
and it kind of correlates back to neurodiversity and how
it's now become like eioonuotypical or neurodiverts.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I was also curious about that reframe, and what I
found out is that the reality is a lot more
gray scale than.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Black and white.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Autism spectrum disorder can manifest as a diverse and wide
ranging spectrum of traits and challenges. That's why spectrum is
in the name. There's not one way to be autistic.
There are many many ways to be autistic. But a
director of the Yale Developmental Disabilities Clinic says that trying
to pen down the biology behind autism has been difficult
for autism researchers. They have yet to find an objective,
(22:31):
measurable biological difference between an autistic brain and a neurotypical one. Nonetheless,
Judy Singer, the mother of the neurodiversity movement, relied on
biology on an I was born this way premise when
she advocated for more social inclusion and more workplace accommodations
for neurodiversion people. Judy Singer's neurodiversity manifesto was actually her
(22:56):
undergraduate thesis in disability studies was Neurodiversent Woman with a
child on the Autism spectrum, which had inspired her to
get her degree as an adult. Her thesis focused on
autists that were considered high functioning, and it was considered groundbreaking.
It was shared widely, and it was Singer who popularized
(23:16):
the neurotypical neurodiversent binary, which I'm pretty sure she meant
as a middle finger to the ways she had felt
marginalized and excluded by people without cognitive disabilities and also
a lot of neurode people online thought calling people neurotypical
it was funny, And I get that because as of bisexual,
I have definitely called somewhat a monosexual and meant it
as an insult. But in both cases, the binary we're
(23:39):
working with is a social construct, not a biological one.
Robert Chapman is an autistic academic and a neurodiversity theorist
who has written a book called Empire of Normality. And
they say that the categories of neurodiverse and neurotypical are
social constructs. In Chapman's opinion, their social construt drug related
(24:00):
to the needs of the economy. A capitalist economy creates
certain norms related to what does or does not make
an ideal worker, and since that ideal is related to
both historical time and place and the needs of any
given industry, whether you're clocked as neurotypical or clocked as
neurodiversent really depends on to what extent your body and
mind are either accommodated or disabled by the environment that
(24:23):
you are in. So like, do you work in an
office with flickering neon lights because that could be disabling
to anyone with light sensitivity issues, not just autistic people,
Or do you have the option to work remotely because
that could be accommodating to a wide range of people
for a wide range of reasons. Chapman is building on
the neuroconformity model of autism, the idea that we all
(24:47):
vary in how much we can neuroconform to the social ideal,
but no one is actually perfectly neurotypical. But let's put
the binary aside and go back to the idea of
neurodivers popularized by Judy Singer. By many accounts, Singer's research
relied heavily on the conversations happening in an early Internet
(25:08):
forum called Independent Living on the Autism Spectrum or in Live.
In Live was a mid nineties Internet forum where the
earliest conversations about the idea of neurodiversity took place.
Speaker 5 (25:21):
I'm becoming more sure that what allows the human race
to progress socially and technologically is the neurological diversity of people.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
According to the site's founder and archivists, this comment included
the first use of the.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
Term, i e. The atypical among the society provide the
different perspectives needed to generate new ideas and advances, whether
they be technological, cultural, artistic, or otherwise.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Also lurking around the in Live forums was a New
York Times journalist who would eventually publish an essay about
neurological pluralism, acknowledging that humans exhibit a range of cognitive abilities,
none more normal or typical or ideal than any other.
And that was Inlive's central idea, and these ideas continue
to be the basis of the neurodiversity movement today with
(26:08):
neurological diversity in mind. That movement rejects the idea that
autism or ADHD or dyslexia should be thought of as
a disorders rather than neurological differences everyday variations and cognitive function.
As Sieve Silver, author of NeuroTribes, The Legacy of Autism
(26:28):
and the Future of Neurodiversity, wrote in a history of
the movement in Forests and Tidepools, the value of biological
diversity is resilience, and in nature across the plant, animal,
and microbial kingdoms, variation is not pathologized or seen as
a problem to solve. Silver cites the author of a
(26:49):
book about neurodiversity in the classroom who writes, we.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
Don't pathologize at kalalily by saying it has a pedaled
deficit disorder. Similarly, we ought not to pologized children who
have different kinds of brains and different ways of thinking
and learning.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So BIA's definitely absolutely making sense when she told me
that neurodiversity discourse makes her a biomajor think of biodiversity
where variation is normal and expected and isn't cause for
exclusion or hierarchy. Biodiversity or biological diversity refers to the
(27:26):
huge variety of all life on Earth in all its forms,
from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems, from forests to
coral reefs.
Speaker 7 (27:35):
Like whether it's like plants or microbes or animals, right,
everything lives and exists in a collective.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Ayisha Khan is a diversent, infectious disease scientist, gerum doctor,
grassroots organizer, writer, and astrobiologists.
Speaker 7 (27:51):
Like everything is interdependent, right, and not just to each other.
They're very viscerally aware of the interspecies interdependence, right, the
reliance that they have on every thing within their ecosystem,
and all of that coming together to actually create life.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
In their work, I used to get to meet and
learn from people all across the global South, many who
live in land based collectivist cultures in which humans tend
to understand themselves as integral parts of communities and as
very small parts of a vast and interconnected ecosystem.
Speaker 7 (28:21):
So what happens when you take people away from each other,
from land, from realizing that they're meant to care for
each other, They're meant to care for the land.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
And I think what ends up happening.
Speaker 7 (28:30):
Is there's this fixation on individual identities, and I think
even the attachment to identity it's really a maladaptive response.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
To the lack of a collective identity.
Speaker 7 (28:40):
To really the lack of people feeling firmly anchored in
an ecological context where they're like, these are my people,
you know, this is who we are, this is what
we eat, this is what we pray to, this is
how we take care of our land, this is how
the land takes care of us. And I think part
of oppression is the severance from that kind of interdependence
and connection.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
There are somewhere around eight point seven million different species
on Earth, including plants, animals, fungi, and single celled organisms,
and of those more than eight million species, only about
twenty percent of them have been formally recorded and given
a name, like Homo sapiens. What we don't know about
life on Earth far outweighs what we do know.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
A bunch of heart cells need to come together and
make a heart.
Speaker 7 (29:25):
A bunch of different tissues come together to make a
partiovascular system, and a bunch of organ systems come together
to make a human technically, but why end there? Because
a bunch of humans with their land come together to
make an ecosystem, and a bunch of ecosystems come together
to make what is a planet. A bunch of planets
come together with the Sun to make a solar system, right,
(29:46):
and it doesn't need to end at any point.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
When the first astrologers looked up at the stars, there
was no distinction between astronomy and astrology, and no question
about whether celestial bodies the Sun, the moon, stars, or
celestial events the solsus the equinox could have direct bearing
on human life.
Speaker 8 (30:10):
It's like using light to tell time. How do I
know its spring because I'm observing a physical phenomenon that
occurs seclically in a predictable way to let me know
what time it is.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Dana Nichols is a siderial astrologer known as the Peopil's Oracle.
Dana says about the core, astrology is about a human
relationship to time and life.
Speaker 8 (30:34):
For me, astrology is how I know what time it
is like. These things are not mysteries, and it's liberating
in so many ways to know that there is an
order and that there's a pattern, because we need to
know that this is not just all random as.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
The peopil's oracle Dana practices astrology for the well being
of the collective.
Speaker 8 (30:55):
The thing that I've learned is that humans are so
incredibly sol and the simplicity is that we will do
anything to not be alienated anything. Think of the most egregious,
violent thing, but also think of the most beautiful, harmonious thing.
(31:19):
Humans will do anything to not be ostracized and alienated.
And for me, I think the other piece is that
we're the same. We all need validation and respect.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
That's the Sun.
Speaker 8 (31:34):
We all need comfort and safety. That's the Moon. We
all need to be heard and understood. That's Mercury. We
all need to belong that's Venus. We all need autonomy
and a sense of personal power. That's Mars. We all
need for things to make sense in some way, shape
or form. That's Jupiter. And we're all gonna die, and
(31:56):
we all need privacy. That's Saturn. And it's just a
question of what is our cultural relationship with these things
and what are the personal ways we come into relationship
with these parts of ourselves based on our culture and
(32:18):
our home and family.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
With its mathematical tracking of both near and distant stars
moving slowly across the sky. Astrology was the earliest practice
of cosmology, a science that deals with the study of
the universe as a whole. Today's technology means cosmologists and
astronomers alike can know way more about stars and planets
than Babylonian astrologers could have ever imagined. Like, we know
(32:44):
that the same basic elements that form stars, carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus,
nitrogen are the same basic elements that form life on Earth.
These elements are the building blocks of molecules like DNA,
and for proteins and for carbohydrates, all of which are
essential for life. And we also know that when stars
explode or die, new elements are released, including the calcium
(33:08):
that makes up our bones and the oxygen that we breathe.
And that's what that guy was talking about when he
said we're all made of stars. Not long after returning
from the Peace Corps, Be applied to med school. Then
she made the decision to go no contact with her family.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
I started therapy just because I was like starting med school,
and I knew that that I really needed to be
able to come apart mentalize. I remember talking to my
therapist like the first conversation and explaining to her, like
my achievements and like all my accolades, and she was like,
you've chieved so much for your age, and she kind
of asked, He's like, why do you need therapy?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
They're trying to explain that her focus on academic achievements
had all been part of her strategy of escape.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
I'm really proud of all the accolades I have, but
it was like, I need to get out of here,
and I need to do it correctly.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Like I don't have a second chance. I don't have
other options, you know, I don't have someone to fall back.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah, Like, what's motivating you?
Speaker 5 (34:08):
Now?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Me? Girl, I deserve everything.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I deserve it all. I deserve it.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I'm so reliated that that's your answer.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
I love that, Like I deserve it all.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Oh my god, yeah you.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Do so much.
Speaker 5 (34:19):
Yes, I love it.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I'm so so happy that's how you answered.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
I love it. Yeah. No, especially like I look back
and I think about how many out of body experiences
I was having because of how traumatized I was, And
I look back to baby B and I'm like, oh
my god, beg girl, Like, you don't realize how much
you have done for me to be here in this moment,
Like you don't know how much work you laid down,
Like how humble and graceful you moved. I hope I
(34:44):
am half a woman I was at the child, I
really knew he was just on another level of phenomenal,
just getting shit done and being in tunnel vision, like
she did not care about anything else but the prize.
I've I feel like I was never a good masker
in the same way that like I never felt like
I needed to apologize or explain my queerness to anybody.
(35:07):
I don't feel like I've ever needed to apologize or
explain my AUTI sometime anyone, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
I'm like, you need to get over it.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
I don't need to explain to you why I'm this way,
or like try to make you feel more comfortable because
you don't understand me. That's not my problem. I understand
that we call it disability, but it's a disability because
it's disabling others around you. It's not necessarily a disability
unless it makes other people around you feel uncomfortable. I
(35:32):
feel like if we had a world, like maybe there'll
be a Wakanda of all of us just living and
like you know, prospering all of us in neural divergence.
But if there was ever I think a city of
all of us, like, where would be the disability.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Baska Case is a production of Molton Hart and iHeart Podcasts.
This series was created and is executive produced by Jasmine j. C.
Green and it is hosted, produced, and sound designed by
me NK Nicole Kelly. Special thanks to Bertrana, Doctor Ayisha Khan,
and Dana Nichols The People's Oracle, And thanks to Devin
(36:18):
Price and Robert Chapman, whose writing also helped shape my
thinking for this episode. If you're interested in mor spicy
takes on neurodiversity, definitely check out their work. Production support
by Siona Petros and Ammani Leonard. Adrian Lilly is our
mix engineer. Our theme is blue and orange by Command Jasmine.
Our show art was created by Sinay Rolson, fact checking
(36:42):
by Serena Solyn. Our executive producer from iHeart Podcasts is
Lindsay Hoffman
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