WYR: The Difficulty of Including Everyone

http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2019/09/you-cant-have-neurodiversity-without.html

This is a summary of a Twitter thread written by an autistic person with intellectual disabilities.  They have a number of good points, so I highly recommend you read the linked post, particularly if anyone in your life has learning or intellectual disabilities.  

What I wanted to focus on here was a specific complaint Ivanova has regarding the neurodiversity movement.  As you'll see, this complaint shows why you basically can't have hard and fast rules for any given situation.  They observe that new rules are being made for conferences or gathering places for neurodiverse people, mandating that everyone be quiet.  This is meant to help people who are easily distractible or have sound sensitivities (or both, like me).  With less noise, people like me can focus more clearly on the presentation material.  Sounds great, right?

Well, turns out it's only great for that particular type of autistic person.  Ivanova talks about their friends (also with intellectual disability) who actually need noise in order to focus.  These are people who play in the Special Olympics, people who've accomplished good things.  People whose input would be valuable to the conversation about neurodiversity.  Clapping, echoing words, or being able to jump up and run around is just as important to these autistic people as silence is to me.  

So here's the tricky part: neurodiversity mandates the inclusion of everyone.  How do you reconcile two such different needs?  

My best guess is that you try to seat people like me towards the front, and people like Ivanova's friends towards the back, and you don't set a noise policy but you do ask people to stim quietly if they can, and warn people like me that they may need to handle some noise because other people have needs too.  Is this ideal?  Certainly not.  The noise-sensitive autistics may jump with every clap, and the people that need to clap so they can pay attention may feel suppressed because they've been asked to clap quietly or stim in some other manner.  However, I'm told a good compromise makes everyone unhappy, so it's at least a start.  

A truly good policy or rule is inclusive to all people.  That is remarkably hard to pull off when peoples' needs can vary so much.  And because people with intellectual disabilities are just as valuable people as I am, it's important that we accommodate them and give them a platform for their voices, too.  Even if they use methods of communication that we don't already know how to understand.  Even if they're entirely nonspeaking and rely on 100% nonvocal methods of communication.  

If this was a more high-tech age with a lot of money to throw around, I would say a reasonable accommodation for very noise-sensitive people like myself would be noise-canceling headphones that are linked into a closed hearing aid loop system.  You see, in churches and some other places, you can have a channel for people with special hearing aids.  Using this, they can hear the music and the sermon as it's picked up by the microphones for the church's sound system.  It's like a direct line to the "important noise" of the event.  The noises around them aren't amplified, and so they're able to pay attention much more clearly.  Having headphones that canceled out the random noises around us, but still gave us the ability to hear what was going on?  That would be a great solution.  

In all honesty, though?  It may take a few decades, but I'm hoping Virtual Reality (VR) will close the gap and make it so you can virtually attend a conference without having to be in the room.  In such an environment, you could mute everyone who wasn't the speaker (if you need silence) or mute yourself (if you need to clap or jump).  With holograms and such fine-tuned control over your surroundings, anyone's needs could be met without too much difficulty.  

The movement for quiet in neurodiversity conferences were made with good intentions, but like any group does eventually, it's gone too far in a single direction.  In doing so, the people who made these rules have strayed from what neurodiversity is meant to mean.  I fondly hope that these conferences will listen to Ivanova and their friends, revoke these restrictive rules, and seek a way to make events as accessible as possible for everyone.