... and phobic about a Yankee gutter tabloid journalist, but who cares about him? Not giving him oxygen.
I only respect the pronoun choices of people who respect me, not academics who seize the opportunity to clamber over me up the greasy pole to academic glory.
NB: I am not an academic and hsbr never had the slightest desire to be
In retrospect, if this is how vicious academic competitiveness gets, I think I made the right decision.
What do you make of Walker, a man with a shaved head which arrogantly proclaims his sex, who then demands to pene-trate the ranks of womanhood and dictate his "pronouns" at us.
And who then tries to destroy the reputation of the actual woman who pioneered his field? (For those who don't know, that is verifiably me, in a 1998 academic thesis).
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| Any psychologists care to comment? STOP PRESS! April 2025 Walker has seen which way the wind blows and reverted to admitting he is a male I await his public apology for joining the witch hunt against me |
Sure, Walker did an impressive job of unpacking the density of meaning coiled within my coinage of Neurodiversity. And I have huge respect for that. Especially as his accuracy proves that the concept was lurking in the Platonic realm with a specific meaning all along, waiting to be constellated by the right person in the right place at the right time.
Why was that me? Because I was at the very intersectional node of everything to channel it. This is not being "mystical". I just happened to have the misfortune to be at the intersection of a lot of disadvantages and barriers:
Southern hemisphere, female, Jewish, impoverished background (because working class father, disabiled mother), child refugee in Australia from the Hungarian revolution, nerd kid, outsider.
And no, I am not "White". Jews are only "white" when it suits Gentile to call us that, as my mother discovered. One day, she told me, she was at home in Hungary, a 16 year old "fan girl" swooning over Clark Gable at the movies, and within a week, the Nazis arrive, she was in a ghetto, in transit to Auschwitz. She was the only one in her family to survive, and brought me into a world of trauma. . . .
Thus sensitized to oursiderhood and injustice, I find myself in a Jonah and the Whale situation. I remember well that when I was begining my honours thesis, I sought all over for the term "neurodiversity"and for experts in the field that I could cite. And then it gradually dawned on me that I had to be "the one". I was neither happy about it nor proud, just anxious that I would be laughed at.
And yes, people did think I was an "oddbod" when I started talking about how the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement would change the world. I never expected my idea to "go viral". My honours thesis languished for several years until US journalist Steve Silberman "discovered" me in the 20th Anniversary Issue of Wired Magazine. It was immensely gratifying at first, but with success must come envy...
I can only guess that it must have been painful for Walker to think he was pipped at the post. I sympathise, but his response has been unforgivable.
Transphobia?
And how would I be "transphobic", when I have been a champion of the value of diversity? Trans people and I live in different subcultures and our paths rarely cross. And not to mention that I marched with Gay Liberation in the good old days of the 60's. But I can't take care of all the world's ills.
My subculture was primarily "Single Mothers".And don't imagine that queer people were kind to a dowdy middle-aged mother worn out by breast-feeding and subsisting on the meagre Sole Parent Pension. Well, occasionally kindly patronising, as I recall.
Also a reminder that as I am not of Christian heritage I don't buy into the Christian binary of Good and Evil. So if you are of Christian heritage, even if you don't identify, ask yourself if you might be unconsciously influenced by binarism...
Global gender diversity
If you are White (ie Christian in the First World) you may not be aware that Whites are not the centre of the universe (except by colonial domination). So you may not know that there are many cultures that recognise more than two genders. (here is a list). This is especially so among many indigenous peoples, whose beliefs are actually based on living on actual indigenous land, not on the heritage of Roman Imperialism (origins of Christianity, ICYMI) .
Did you know that the Talmud recognises up to 8 genders, all with their own names!
My post which is claimed to be "transphobic" was NOT based on binarism, but on my cultural background and my other major in Anthropology (the study of all human cultures), which I much preferred to sociology (actually the study of Western society).
From Anthropology, I learned that the binary was not "normal" or "natural". It was a Christian construct.
The biological reality is that Trans"women" may either be biological male or intersexual. Biological males can never be women. But instead of digging their heels in, they might learn from other non-binary cultures and make up a new appellation for themselves. When the only name for an emergent social/cultural phenomenon is created by the dominant culture and is derogatory, make up your own. That's what I did with "Neurodiversity". And I'm proud of it.
But I have made it perfectly clear that I am no Dr Pangloss, the original (male) Pollyanna who believes everyone is inherently "good". (Poor Pollyanna! Why does a woman get to be the icon of naivete?)
But I do strongly believe that society has a responsibility to find a niche for everyone, even if that niche is protective custody.
ENVY
We all partake of the 7 Deadly Sins. But of them all, Envy is the deadliest.
Can it be possible that Chapman and Walker, presumably insane with jealousy because they coulda, shoulda, woulda come up with Neurodiversity, but didna, have kept picking at the wound until they came up with a strategy to destroy my reputation.
And they managed to persuade a couple of second fiddles (in the discipline, they may be very accomplished in their work) to accompany them. Sadly one of them, a woman, has sent me shockingly vicious letters, presumably based on misinformation someone fed her or social media scuttlebutt..
And then this crew went on to dupe a reputable journal Sage into publishing their confabulations, which were craftily garnished with impressive quotes from important postmodernist (or whatever the latest fad is) theorists.
I've long believed that the backlash to all this kind of overreach by a small fraction of an already small minority would lead to the election of Trump.
The analysis I'm reading is that sadly, I was right.
Anyway, I am in my mid 70's now, and I'm over their envious bullshit, but not till I have refuted it in the name of intellectual integrity, and the fightback against Fake News
Nuff said.
You can see a partial rebuttal of their beatups on this blog. It has taken me nearly 2 years but I am about to submit a detailed rebuttal of their allegations, along with screenshots of unashamed gossip, commitment to collusion, and other nastiness.
To remind you much of their evidence relies upon the memories and confabulations of a non-academic Martijn Dekker. A rebuttal of his frankly confirmation-based twaddle is here.
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