Letters to My Weird Sisters Quotes

“Judgement as often as not happens unconsciously, and in the blink of an eye, but once it's been made, its object is placed firmly in the third person. Once you have been pushed outside the first person plural, anything might be done to you, anything can happen.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“If a woman does not comply, then she is the problem, the ‘feminist killjoy’, the Old Dragon, the Battleaxe, the Termagant, the Nippy Sweety, the Uppity Cow, the Bitch. I’ve come to understand all that, and also to understand that ableism works in the same way, that as an autistic person I am not supposed to make assertions that cause non-autistic people–parents of autistic children, autistic professionals–to feel bad about themselves. If, as an autistic person, I make a non-autistic person feel bad about themselves in relation to autism, it must be because I am a defective person, lacking both an adult understanding of my own condition and empathy for the individuals who are trying so patiently to cope with the consequences of it. I see this very argument–if I must dignify it with that word–used on social media again and again, whenever an autistic person seeks to advocate for autistic people as a group.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“We are, all of us, striving constantly to pass those normality exams, to take our raw and boundless selves and squash them into the forms of neater and nicer girls.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“It is a mother’s job to carry other people’s shame, just as it is her job to carry the unacknowledged truth of human dependency. The two are linked: vulnerability and dependency, in a culture organized around the ideal of the independent self, are felt to be shameful conditions.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“What I understand this to mean is that adulthood is not a developmental stage but a social position, and as such cannot be attained or maintained without the support and acknowledgement of others. And what others are acknowledging is not the state of one’s innermost psychological, mental or spiritual development–whatever that may mean–but the observable adherence to certain norms, of speech, of behaviour, of appearance, and the successful performance of certain roles.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“In the 1860s and ’70s, the Victorians trained their talent for productivity and standardization onto the school system. In 1880, education became compulsory for all children aged between five and ten. This made many things possible for the first time: mass literacy was one; the establishment of a benchmark for normal cognitive development was another. Not only possible, but necessary. For efficiency in mass production, you need your employees to work at more or less the same speed. For efficiency in mass education, you need your pupils to learn and develop at more or less the same rate. Hence the emergence of a new problem in need of a solution: the slow or ‘backward’ child.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“For a start, there are quite a few autistic people who can write but not speak, and it is not because they have no thoughts to express, but because, as Daniel McConnell puts it, ‘my mind moves like lightening and my body like a cement truck’;”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“Sometimes I tell people that moving through society as a Jew for fifty years has been the perfect preparation for learning to move through society as a late-diagnosed autistic person: in both cases, you disclose the fact, and then the person you’ve disclosed it to gets to have fun deciding whether you look it or not.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“To perform the role of a sane person is to perform one’s gender role correctly.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“I had naively thought that my diagnosis was all the evidence I needed to obtain the assistance I was asking for–I hadn’t realized that I had to perform the role of someone with that diagnosis. I hadn’t realized that this role necessitated that I display some kind of perceptible inferiority to my assessor. I had often failed at being a woman. Now, apparently, I was failing to be autistic.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“When I was small, I wanted to be a boy. No, it was more than that–I thought that I had to be a boy. I understand that there are children who refuse to identify with the sex on their birth certificate because they are trans, but I’ve never thought that was the case with me. It was more that the assumption everywhere, in the early seventies, seemed to be that women were lesser beings than men, and girls lesser beings than boys, that they did lesser things and lived lesser lives, and I did not see why I should accept those lesser conditions. There was a whole world out there for me to observe and explore and think about, and I had no interest in interrupting my activities so that the world could look at me and judge whether I was pretty or nice or good–whether, in other words, I was becoming a girl. Why on earth would I want to be one of those? Why would I, when I was so much more interested in looking than in being looked at?”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“I could never quite recognize myself in [Kanner's] version of autism, or in the current clinical versions that are descended from it. That’s because they are describing autism from the outside, as a set of symptoms or deficits, a set of distinct ways of failing to be normal. Autism from the inside, as a way of experiencing and navigating and making sense of the world, autism as a particular way of being–that I’ve known all my life; that I have no trouble owning. But generally, when you say the word ‘autism’ to people, what they think you have told them is that you have sat the Normality Exam and failed–and you have, multiple times, every time you entered a room or occupied it incorrectly; every time you dressed and groomed yourself incorrectly; every time you held your female body or moved it incorrectly, or spoke incorrectly or laughed incorrectly or did the wrong thing with your face. The shame, the sting of all those moments isn’t lessened by describing them in clinical terms; they just acquire a medical smell. Psychologists and psychiatrists sometimes like to argue that their language is value-neutral, but I don’t believe that language which people use to describe other people could ever be.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“People move to comfort grief; they shun humiliation.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“But here I’m mostly talking about those other harms, the smaller humiliations which become so powerful in the accumulation. You have to have experienced them to understand how much they hurt. I have experienced the kinds of adverse events in my life–physical illnesses, traumatic losses, a difficult labour–that freely elicit everyone’s sympathy, but if I were to be honest about it, I would have to say that these experiences, for the most part, are not the hardest to live with. And if they are not the hardest, it is precisely because they elicit sympathy. The more easily people can imagine themselves in your place, the more easily and wholeheartedly they can sympathize. Those other experiences, the ones that seem so trivial but sting so much, are characterized by humiliation, and the social rejection that comes with it.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“The whole point of the work that goes into the presentation of girlhood and then womanhood is to erase itself, and by doing it incompetently we are drawing attention to it, and to the unruly animal body–‘the awfulness of nature’–it is meant to conceal.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“Sometimes, though, a fragment of text can become lodged in a reader in a less benign way. These textual fragments remain other, remain as foreign bodies; they itch, they prod, they nag, they trouble; they will not rest in place; they persecute their hosts.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“Guilt attaches to an act, but shame attaches to a person.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“There is a difference between simply attending to a person's physical needs and caring for that person, with all that the word implies, and when you're on the receiving end, you can feel that difference. It's something to do with the presence or absence of emotional reciprocity and receptiveness. It's the difference between being met as a person and being dealt with like a thing.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“Attachment theory can too easily segue into mother-blaming, so I want you to understand that this lack of a sense of safety doesn't have to be the caregiver's (read 'mother's') fault; a parent and a baby are two different people, and sometimes, with the best will in the world, two people can be a bad fit for each other. Misrecognition is very often mutual.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism