Uncanny Valley Girls

In robotics research, they've found that there's a general tendency for people to prefer robots who look more human. However, at a certain point, this tendency suddenly reverses - people find robots who look almost but not quite human to be creepy and somewhat repelling. This phenomenon has been dubbed the 'uncanny valley'. As many video game players can attest, the uncanny valley can also apply to digitally animated characters.
On the website TVTropes, they have a page where people provide personal experiences of the uncanny valley. I read this page through, and was disturbed to find the following quotes:

"This troper has a cousin with severe genetic defects. On the surface, she looks like an ordinary girl of her age. But spend even a minute in her presence, and the defects become apparent. Not only is she unable to stand upright without support and has seizures, but she is mentally retarded to the point that this troper isn't sure if she's truly sentient. She's like an animal in a human body - and yet she is kin.

• This troper has a great-aunt who's mentally retarded to the point that she has the mind of a four-year-old... despite being in her late 50's. Every time his family goes to visit her, he can't help but be really, really creeped out.
• Two Words: Tear Jerker.
• That's why I can't substitute teach in EC, (what used to be called "Special Ed") classes. My empathetic side feels sorry for them, but every other instinct is calling for retreat. The exaggerated cheerfulness of the other teachers in there doesn't help. They pretty much have to do that to register on the kids."

"This troper has inherited her mother's very pale skin and tall, painfully thin build (aided by a metabolism running at the general speed of a Concorde), along with strabismus (more commonly known as 'squint') in the left eye. This makes it seem as if she isn't looking directly at the person with whom she is speaking (when in fact actually she is) and coupled with the rest of her inadequacies, it makes for a probably overall unsettling image. She has gotten used to the odd looks and sometimes rude remarks and generally tries to dispel them with good humor, an application of subtle self-tanning lotion and a pair of dark-tinted glasses when out in public."

"This troper Has always had issues with pictures of birth defects. Not so much disfigurements from an accident or something, just anything congenital or genetic. There's just something about humans being born looking inhuman that makes me feel like nature isn't to be trusted, and the world is a really squicky place on a primordial level. I saw a commercial for some Discovery Channel show about The Elephant Man when I was around eight, and... Well, needless to say, I didn't watch Discovery for a while after, and that commercial was literal Nightmare Fuel for me off and on for years after. Which probably means this is more like Nightmare Valley for me."

"Not sure where to put this, so I'll just put it here. Many/most Aspies (definition from the other wiki - by the way, no matter what it says, yes we have a sense of humour), This Troper included, both ignore the Uncanny Valley and fall victim to it. ... We fall victim to it in our interactions with those strange creatures known as 'neurotypicals' (you call yourselves 'normal' ;P), where many people pick up on something subtly 'wrong' about us and treat us according to their beliefs on 'different', varying from 'intriguing' or 'finally, someone interesting', through 'humour him, edge away slowly', all the way to 'DIFFERENT EQUALS BAD, DESTROY!'. I'll let you decide for yourselves what this does to someone over a lifetime."

"This Troper have met the Uncanny Valley in a bus. She (it?) looks like a young woman, but thinner than every single thin woman. She must be suffering severe anorexia, to the point were you can see her bones. Yeah, literally, all she got was some flesh left on her bones. Combined with a pale, cadaveric skin, and a black robe in wich she seems to float... Looking at her was like looking to a human skeleton. She was creepy enough, but then she starts to move, like a disincarnate puppet; her arms reaching slowly to the door, straight as two pieces of wood, shivering lightly. And then, she gasps. Ooooooh boy, that was Nightmare Fuel !"

These quotes, as well as some others, indicate that certain real, living people, due to various disabilities, fall into uncanny valley for some people. Does this mean they don't see us as really, truly human? Is this related to disability discrimination? Is it possible for these people to get over this reaction and learn to accept us anyway?

[Note: for those who have trouble with puns - 'Valley girls' are people from a certain region who have a distinctive way of talking ('like, gag me with a spoon'). I'm making a pun on valley girls and the uncanny valley to talk about people in the uncanny valley.]

Pity and Competitiveness

There's a story floating around as one of those annoying chain letters. I don't know if it's a true story, or if it was made up. Either way, what I have to say still applies.
The story is from the perspective of the father of 'Shay', a developmentally disabled boy. Shay was playing baseball with some other kids, and out of pity, the opposing team all decided to throw the game in order to let Shay win. The actual story drags it out a lot more, but that's basically what happened.
There's a lot of things I could say about that story. But the topic of this entry is how the opposing team all assumed that Shay, if he realized he was by far the worst player on his team, would feel unhappy about that.
Now, if Shay was an undiagnosed disabled child, chances are high that they'd be right. I know that I felt bad about being so much poorer at sports than my classmates (although that was mostly because they teased me). Of course, if I realized the opposing team was deliberately making it easier for me, I'd be offended, but setting things up so I could get some degree of success in the game would be a good idea.
But from my volunteering experience, I'd say that most developmentally disabled people don't react this way. It wouldn't occur to them to think of themselves as better or worse at sports than another person, or if it did, they wouldn't put the same sort of value judgements on it. Not that these kids don't realize that they're different from others, or aren't able to make comparisons between peoples' abilities. It just doesn't seem to matter to them. Everyone tries to do their best, and no one cares whether X's best falls well short of Y's best.
I think it's a cultural thing. A lot of people don't realize this, but someone who is diagnosed with a disability in childhood grows up in a somewhat different culture than someone who is considered normal in childhood. Imagine a child getting therapy once a week with a bunch of other children with a mixed bunch of disabilities. In the therapy programs I've seen, it would be unheard of to give out a reward or praise to the kid who does whatever task the best. Sure, they give out rewards, but individually, not as a competitive group activity. Whereas I've seen plenty of regular schools do that.
In addition, since most parents want their kids to have high self-esteem, parents of disabled kids usually adjust their praise to focus more on effort than on outcome, or else praise kids based on how what they just achieved compares to their usual performance. In cases where the child's disability affects certain areas but not others, they often tell their children that their strengths are in the really important skills (such as Torey Haydn telling a dyslexic, highly empathetic student that 'you can't read words, but you can read hearts, and that's what's really important').
Lastly, many disabled kids hang out in groups of friends with wider ranges of ability than there are in most nondisabled friendship groups, because disabled kids often have disabled friends and disabilities are very variable. This means that among their friends, they learn to deal with diversity in ability a lot more than nondisabled kids do.
In the volunteering program I worked in, there was one girl - only one kid - who was self-conscious about her disability. I often saw her refuse to do physical activities because other people were watching. She was new to the program, and was very mildly disabled, and although I don't know her story, I wouldn't be surprised if she'd only been recently diagnosed. The rest of the kids (those who interacted with the other kids) never acted self-conscious. For example, I worked with a girl whose legs seemed to be different lengths, which meant she couldn't run very fast. Once, her and another girl decided to have a race, and the other girl easily left her far behind. She didn't get frustrated, instead she simply laughed because she liked running.

Dealing with Different Abilities

I'm not sure if I mentioned yet that I've made a friend in one of my university classes. I sought her out to talk to because she's disabled (she uses a wheelchair). She also has a number of disabled friends, one of whom I've become friends with somewhat as well.
Anyway, she invited me to her birthday party. We went to a restaurant, four of us - me, my two friends and a third friend of hers. This third friend is more severely disabled and she can't feed herself, so our mutual friend fed her.
I was struck by how different it is when a disabled person gets that sort of assistance from a friend instead of a caregiver. There was none of the 'staff' body language, that sort of signals 'I'm helping you, you need help and I'm the person who gives help'. They weren't going into the 'helper'/'helped' roles, they were both in the 'good friends' role instead. Even though one of them was helping the other, it was clear that they considered each other equals.
Which shouldn't be that strange. After all, friends help each other all the time without any kind of power imbalance occurring. But people tend to treat 'special' help, such as what a disabled person needs, differently from ordinary help. Which gets me to a more general thought: the root of disability discrimination is treating disability like it's a big deal. It should be seen as just some traits that certain individuals have, just like being blond or bad at math or musical or athletic or whatever. Just part of the variation between people.
One interesting thing I've noticed, in my obsession with supernatural fiction, is that many fictional characters deal with supernatural abilities and liabilities this way. One example is in the TV show Angel (about a good-guy vampire), at one point Angel comments that his friend Lorne's driving is really bad, and Lorne teases Angel about not being able to drive during the day because he needs to cover himself in a blanket to protect from the sun. Even though Angel seems to have a more negative view of vampirism than how many disabled people view their disabilities, it's still a safe topic for friendly conversation.
Another example is in the Whateley Academy stories. The story focuses on a special school for kids with superpowers, kind of like X-men. And while they treat the kids in Hawthorne cottage, who have seriously impairing kinds of superpowers (eg a shapeshifter who turns into jelly if she doesn't concentrate on holding any form), like disabled people, the rest of the kids all have different abilities and don't make a big deal about it. For example, Team Kimba, who are the focus of most of the stories, initially had only two kids who couldn't fly. Once, they were hurrying to a battle and realized they'd need to carry one of the non-fliers because otherwise he'd get there too late. The only awkwardness about that was related to having a very pretty girl in physical contact with a heterosexual male teenager, not about the difference in their abilities.
It's interesting how people seem to be able to manage writing this dynamic with abnormalities in fiction, but they don't seem to realize that this applies to real life. In most cases, when they have a real life difference present, the characters react very differently - for example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy was freaked out by Willow coming out as gay, while Willow and Xander hadn't reacted that way to Buffy telling them she was a vampire slayer. In a few cases, they deal with fictional abnormalities according to how real life abnormalities are stereotyped, such as with the students in Hawthorne. But I've yet to see a fictional portrayal of a disabled person who doesn't treat their disability as a big deal, even though it happens in real life.

Types of Giftedness

A lot of people treat gifted kids as if their cognitive skills are equivalent to an older child. In other words, they'd think that a 10 year old with an IQ of 150 would do just fine being taught grade 10 work for a year. Some people understand that gifted kids learn faster, and so that kid should, by the end of the year, be halfway through grade 11 instead of just finishing grade 10.
But a lot of people don't understand that gifted kids don't really learn faster, instead, they learn more efficiently. Meaning, basically, their mental processes aren't the same thing sped up. They are actually learning in a qualitatively different way, a way that allows them to process more information in the same time period.
In my impression, there seem to be two common types of talents resulting in a kid being considered gifted: memorization and comprehension.
Imagine a kid, considered gifted, who has normal comprehension and better memorization. If you got this kid and a typical kid and gave them both some information that was completely new to them, they'd both understand it about equally well. But test them two days later, and the gifted kid might remember it while the typical kid's completely forgotten.
Furthermore, this memorization ability helps them learn new information, too. Imagine teaching those two kids a second lesson that builds on the first. The typical kid will probably need to be reminded of what xe learned in the first lesson, basically retaught the first lesson (though more quickly than the first time). The gifted kid will still remember everything in the first lesson and won't need the reminders, meaning you could spend that whole time on the second lesson.
Secondly, regarding comprehension, imagine a kid with improved comprehension but normal memory. When this kid and a typical kid are taught something new, they'll both remember what they learned about equally well. But in the first lesson, this kid will need less spelled out explicitly, and will be able to extrapolate more on xyr own. Therefore, it would take less time to explain the same concept to this kid.
And at the second lesson, both kids will need a recap of the first lesson. But when you're reexplaining something the kid has learned but forgotten, you can do it a lot more quickly, and chances are that the gifted kid will have figured out part of the second lesson on xyr own during the first lesson. This means that part of the second question will be recapping stuff the kid already knows, and could be done very quickly. The rest would still be quicker than for the typical kid, for the reasons described above.
Incidentally, the first type is more common among high-average and mildly gifted kids, while the second type is more common among highly gifted kids. In addition, some kids have above-average memorization and comprehension, and both of those skills feed into each other (you remember better if you understand the material, and you understand it better if you remember related material). Lastly, not all gifted kids can be described this way. In particular, some gifted kids seem to be just more motivated to learn, and this alone could possibly explain their giftedness (or high motivation could combine with improved memory and/or comprehension).
Anyway, the point is that if you understand how a child is gifted, you can teach them better. A kid with an excellent memory but poor comprehension needs a whole lot less review but only slightly less explanation, while a kid with excellent comprehension and a poor memory needs only slightly less review but a lot less explanation. In addition, you can use memory to build on comprehension and vice versa, by explaining how the material you're teaching relates to things the kid already knows. This will help the memorizer understand, because they remember their understanding of the previous material, and it'll help the comprehender remember, because they can fit this information into a web of linked concepts.

Self-Advocacy

This post is at least partially a response to a blog entry by David Hingsburger, about a developmentally disabled guy named Duncan who was physically attacked by some people because of prejudice, and who reported it to the police, and his attackers went to jail. It's a tragedy that he was attacked, but a success that justice was done.
And it got me on a tangent about self-advocacy, and why that can be so hard for many developmentally disabled people. Why aren't more people who go through things like what Duncan went through doing what Duncan did? Why do so many people just deal with it and not fight back? (This post, I just realized, was also inspired by hearing in my women and gender studies class about Nu Shu, a female-only language and writing system in China. The Nu Shu women put up with so much, and their only rebellion was in secret communications to each other. Why?)
Of course, firstly, disability can have a direct impact. I know a boy whose only communicative speech is 'yes' or 'no'. So unless someone asked him, twenty-questions style, if he was the victim of something like this, he wouldn't be able to report it. And even if you did, would he have the receptive language necessary to understand your questions?
Then there's how reports by disabled people can be discounted and ignored, especially if their communication is atypical. That's one part that I found frustratingly accurate and well-demonstrated in the movie I Am Sam, where the people always seemed to assume that Sam's talk about the Beatles was nonsense even though he was clearly communicating through analogy. Even when someone gets the message across, it's often ignored if they didn't communicate it the right way.
But I think there's something more. It seems to me that many developmentally disabled people learn not to speak out for themselves. For example, my mother is a champion complainer. If she thinks that some business has treated her wrongly, she'll write a letter of complaint, or phone them up, and it's impressive to hear her rant. And she can often get an apology that way. But when I try to complain, and they start to explain how 'that's just the way they run things' or whatever, I get confused. I think: 'Maybe that's actually how it works, and everyone else just knows this and I don't. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation because I'm autistic.' And I'll often give in. It's only with disability issues that I don't tend to give in, because I know the system needs to be accessible to autistic people, and even if I don't get what I want in time to help me, it'll be a help to the next autistic who comes through.
And I think it would be even worse if I'd been diagnosed earlier, and had more typical 'autism parents'. I see the kids in the volunteering programs I work in, and how casually the workers override their interests, and they often don't complain, and when they do, it makes no difference. I see ABA programs training autistic kids, and while the kids may be learning to identify colors and put their clothes on and all that, what they're learning above all is to automatically obey what a nondisabled adult tells them to do. Imagine if a pedophile got at one of these ABA kids, they're already groomed to be easily abuseable! (And no doubt many pedophiles have gotten at these kids, given how high the rate of abuse of disabled people is said to be.)
Someone asked me recently if I write stuff on my blog to help parents of kids like me, so I'll go now into how parents can help their kids self-advocate. Well, firstly, advocate for your child, like my parents did. Don't accept something inferior, when you know your child needs X and the system has a duty to provide it. Even if you don't get it, your child will see you fighting on their behalf, and learn that their rights are worth fighting for.
Next, listen to your child. Even severely disabled kids can tell you exactly what they want and need. As much as possible, respect your child's wishes, and if doing so isn't practical or would infringe on other people's rights, explain this to them while acknowledging that they want it, and see if you can find a compromise. Some kids are actually very assertive already, and if your child's like this, don't see it as a problem! Sure, they're harder to look after, they can be really annoying, but remember that this trait can be a great strength. I've often gotten complaints on AllExperts.com from parents of kids who get into logical debates whenever you tell them to do something, and I always give them the same advice: explain to the child exactly why following that rule is important. If you can't explain that to them, then toss it out as unneccessary. That way, you're encouraging the child to think 'If I don't think something's right, I don't have to do it', which is exactly what people like Rosa Parks did.
Thirdly, learn about discrimination, and teach your child about it. Disability discrimination is the most applicable, but if you're more experienced with some other discrimination, teaching your child about that will make them better able to recognize disability discrimination as well. My parents knew absolutely nothing about disability discrimination, but my mother's an active feminist and anti-racist, and my father supports her in her activism. Of course, being the daughter of a feminist, I learnt a lot about discrimination early on. My Dad told me that when I was told that children weren't allowed at my mother's convocation ceremony, I said: "That's discrimination!" We didn't fight it, but my father affirmed my statement. Make sure that your child knows when they've been treated unfairly, even when it's not practical to fight back. For example, if you know your child will be bullied for doing a particular behavior, rather than just telling them not to do it, tell them that kids are likely to bully them, and it's not right to bully someone for that, but they have the choice of either toughing it out or stopping that behavior. And listen when your kid communicates that a particular injustice is a big enough deal to fight back, too. They need to learn to pick their battles, and that means picking which ones are worth fighting as well as which ones aren't.
Lastly, make sure that showing your love for your child is a high priority, higher than your embarrassment when they do something weird in public, or your fear that they won't be able to hold down a job in adulthood, or your frustration when they have yet another meltdown. All those problems are manageable, and won't stop your child from being happy. But even if you love your child deeply, if they don't know that you do, that can ruin their entire life. My parents were both abused as children, and even in their late 40s, I can see the suffering from that. It's a whole lot harder to heal those wounds once they've been made than to prevent them in the first place.
And remember: a self-advocate isn't someone who has managed to avoid suffering, but someone who has survived and fought back. If something terrible does happen to your child, help them to find their strength to fight for themselves. When my parents learnt that my cousins had sexually abused me, they took what actions they needed to protect me and teach me that I did not have to put up with that sort of thing! Which means that a) if something like that ever happens again, I will protect myself and I will seek justice, and b) I can defend others and try to prevent them from suffering like I have.

Disabled Student Services

OK, so I've found out that the midterm in my women and gender studies class requires that I write three essays during the course of the exam, and I know that it'll be really painful to write that much by hand in a short time, especially when I'm anxious. Well, since difficulty with writing can be a feature of autistic people, and I'm registered at the university as an autistic student, shouldn't I be able to use a computer to write my exam?
Not so fast! They can't just take my word for it! They need a doctor's note, which means I need to bug my Dad about making an appointment with the doctor, so that I can go and tell her what I need and she can write it down. Why is this necessary, again? My doctor doesn't actually know what accommodations I need, she's literally just writing down whatever I tell her, so why can't I just tell them directly?
But anyway, we get the doctor's appointment, a couple of weeks after I first figured out that I needed it. Then I miss it. We reschedule, and finally I've got a doctor's note saying I need to use a computer for essay exams.
I forget the note in the car for about a week. Then my friend with CP who's in the same class says something about the deadline for accommodations for the midterm coming up soon, so the very next day, just before closing time, I give my note to someone in Disability Student Services, who tells me that as soon as they process my note, that accommodation will be added to the list of accommodations I can register for on the website. Which I have to do for every single exam, for some reason, which requires that I actually know when an exam's coming up, so most exams I go without any accommodations. It's only for the major ones that I get accommodations.
A couple of weeks pass, and the website still says I get only room alone and double time, no mention of a computer. So I decided, today, to go bug DSS about this because my exam is coming up pretty soon.
Well, here's what happened:
I wandered in and saw a sign right in the doorway saying [incomprehensible]. I'm about to walk right past it when it occurs to me that it might be important, so I take a second look. It says something about going somewhere else, but I have no idea where. I do have some keywords, though: 'atrium' and 'triage desk'. So I go to the front desk and ask where the atrium is, and they point me upstairs. Then, upstairs, I ask someone at some other desk where the triage desk is, and they point me back downstairs - apparently what I've been calling the front desk is actually the triage desk. So I head back down there.
At the desk, the guy doesn't seem to have a clue what I'm asking for. Probably largely because I don't really have a clue why the sign in DSS said to go there. Finally, he gets someone to come over and lead me past the sign to the actual DSS desk, which I go along with because I have no idea where they're leading me.
I talk to the person at the DSS desk, who informs me that anyone who could help me is in a meeting until 3:30, but also says something about going to the DSS exam office. So I wander off to ask random people (including the guy behind the 'triage desk') where the DSS exam office is, and end up in a hallway looking at a door that says something about exams being in progress. I walk past that door, thinking the sign means I shouldn't go in, but take a second look when I realize the door number of that door matches what I was told about where the DSS exam office was. The sign actually says I should enter quietly because exams are in progress. So I enter quietly.
There's a person behind the desk, good sign because the person at DSS said there might not be anyone there. But it turns out that person can't actually do anything related to exam accommodations, just tell me once again that anyone who could help me is in a meeting until 3:30. By this time I'm overloaded, so I complain pointlessly about how inaccessible DSS is for me, and then leave.
As soon as 3:30 comes around, I'll go back. Hopefully, I'll be able to fumble into actually getting what I need. But it really makes me wonder, why services intended for people like me are so hard for people like me to actually access. And what's really frustrating is that I don't understand the system well enough to figure out what's so darn inaccessible about it for me, and every time I say so, I get a big long string of incomprehensible bureaucrat-speech that doesn't help me at all but is supposed to explain this to me. About the only accommodation I could think of is to have some sort of advocate or something go and manage the system for me, but the closest thing I have to that (one of the people who's in a meeting right now) is just as incomprehensible to me as the rest of them.

Autistic Signals

It's well-known, in the medical literature, that autistic people have different mannerisms from neurotypical people (and other neuroatypical people, often). Diagnosticians can often tell a person is autistic from the way they move, particularly things like rocking, handflapping, etc. In fact, many diagnostic screening tools ask about differences in mannerisms and nonverbal cues to identify which kids might be autistic.
But it's not just the doctors who can tell if someone's autistic. Autistic people, and people who know autistic people (such as family members) can often spot autism - not necessarily with enough accuracy for an official diagnosis, but this still shapes their interactions with these people in various ways.
A similar thing happens among gay people. Gay people, and to a lesser extent straight allies, often have a finely attuned 'gaydar' - a sense of whether or not someone else is gay. This depends partly on unintentional cues, similar to the cues diagnosticians try to observe, but also partly on intentional signals that gay people use to find each other.
Autistic people aren't as common as gay people, and have a much less developed community, but we also use cues to tell each other from neurotypicals. Jim Sinclair, in his article Alien Contact, describes the use of both sorts of signals:

"The women [mother & daughter] were talking quietly to each other. I couldn't make out the younger one's words. But I could hear their rhythms and their tones, and I knew them, and I knew her for one of my people."
[he also describes specific behaviors, such as repetitive speech, that signal this to him]

"And so, standing there in the aisle, knowing they were looking at me, I let my body begin to rock, let my hands begin to flap. Not too much. Only a little. I'm sure the mother never noticed."

Personally, in my volunteer work, I can often guess what disability the child I'm assigned to has been diagnosed with (or should be). Certainly, I can spot the autistic kids. When I work with an autistic kid, especially, I let myself act more autistic, hoping that they'll pick up on that and recognize me as one of their kind. And I get the sense that many of them do, particularly the more severely autistic kids (who, ironically, seem to be more in tune with nonverbal cues), because they often relate to me differently. It's subtle - somewhat greater interest in me, more initiation of interaction, more response to my own interaction. Sometimes I can't even see it until I watch them with someone else. Sometimes I don't see it at all, but someone else does. But the thing is that different mannerisms and nonverbal communication aren't just something that diagnosticians use to find us. We also use them to find each other.