L★S
The stars are indifferent. The lines are ours. So we can draw them again — in every color, key, and frequency of neurodiversity.
No. 1 Bone Song — piezoelectric matter & star-forged calcium
No. 2 Love You Down To Your Star Stuff — the phrase & the scale
No. 3 Neurodiversity Field Guide — the paradigm, plainly stated
No. 4 We Are All Star Stuff — voices from the community
No. 5 Underground — the mycelial worldview
No. 6 Eternal Sunshine — starlight, warmth & the light in you
No. 7 You Were Never One Thing — the cell as a truce
No. 8 The Universe Runs on Difference — variety & the failure of monoculture
No. 9 The Lines We Drew — the constructed border & the case for redrawing it ← you are here
Reflection
Which line drawn around you have you been treating as a fact of the sky rather than a choice someone made?
Where have you been disbelieved about your own experience — or missing the word for it entirely? What word would repair that?
If you could redraw the figure from the inside, in your own hand, what would you name it?
The Lines We Drew is the ninth zine in the Stimpunks series, and the companion argument to Field Guide No. 1 — where that guide redraws the constellations, this one is about why redrawing is legitimate at all.
The astronomy moved, and this page moved with it. An earlier version of this zine said the belt was a line-of-sight accident — Alnitak ~740 light-years, Mintaka ~690, Alnilam ~2,000, "nearly three times farther." That was wrong, and we have corrected it. Those were Hipparcos-era parallaxes, and Hipparcos measured these bright, distant, multiple O and B stars badly: its parallax for Mintaka (212 ± 30 pc) is about half the figure that spectroscopy, cluster membership and Gaia DR3 now agree on, and both Hipparcos reductions of Alnilam proved incorrect. Current distances put all three at essentially the same depth — Alnitak 1,260 ± 180 ly (387 ± 54 pc), Alnilam 1,250 ± 26 ly (384 ± 8 pc, from VLTI interferometry: Oplištilová, Brož, Hummel, Harmanec & Barlow, "VLTI observations of the Orion Belt stars: I. ε Orionis," Astronomy & Astrophysics 704, A204, 2025), and Mintaka ~1,240 ly (381 ± 8 pc, Gaia DR3). All three belong to the Orion OB1b association, and the ε Ori paper places its star at that association's median distance: they are siblings from one cloud, not strangers in a row. APOD, cited in our earlier draft, likewise gives the three as a group "about 1,500 light-years away" — it never supported the numbers we hung on it.
The depth is real; it is just in the figure rather than the belt. Bellatrix lies 250 ± 10 ly away, Betelgeuse about 548 (uncertain by as much as 100), Saiph 650 ± 30, Rigel about 863, and the belt near 1,250 — so the hunter is assembled from stars strung across roughly a thousand light-years. We think the correction improves the zine. A page arguing that confident lines get mistaken for facts of the sky had drawn one of its own, in depth, from superseded data — and better instruments moved it. That is the argument arriving uninvited, and it now runs on the spread.
The lineage from stars to people is real and well documented. The bell curve entered science as the astronomer's "law of error": in his Theoria Motus (1809), Gauss used it to model how imperfect measurements scatter around a celestial body's true position — the same method that recovered the lost asteroid Ceres — with Legendre and Laplace close behind. Adolphe Quetelet, who directed the Brussels observatory, carried that error law from the sky to the census in his Essai de physique sociale (1835), inventing l'homme moyen, "the average man" — and, crucially, treating the average not as merely typical but as an ideal from which real people "deviate." Francis Galton kept Quetelet's curve but flipped its meaning: in Hereditary Genius (1869) he ranked human ability along what he called the "law of deviation from the average" and graded groups above and below the line. He coined the word eugenics later, in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), where a footnote to the introduction proposes it for "the science of improving stock." His protégé Karl Pearson gave the field its machinery — the standard deviation (1894) and the correlation coefficient — in the Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolution series, and was later appointed the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London (1911–1933); the mathematics came first, the chair after. The statistical sense of the word "normal" arrives in the 1870s alongside all of this — used apparently independently by C. S. Peirce (1873), Galton, and Wilhelm Lexis (1877), with "normal distribution" settling into place in Pearson's writing by 1897. The sleight of hand was never the curve — some traits really are close to normally distributed — but the leap from deviation-as-measurement-error to deviation-as-human-defect, and the mistaking of a made-up midpoint for a law about how a person ought to be.
Robert Chapman's Empire of Normality (2023) follows this same thread forward, into psychiatry and capitalism. On Chapman's account, Galton reframed the statistical centre as mere mediocrity rather than an ideal — so that deviation above it read as superiority and deviation below as defect — founding the frame that, carried through Kraepelin into the DSM, the neurodiversity movement later arose to name and refuse. That frame's name — the pathology paradigm, and its counterpart the neurodiversity paradigm — is Nick Walker's, articulated in "Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves from the Pathology Paradigm" (written 2011; published 2012 in Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking; revised 2013), not Chapman's; Chapman works with the terms rather than coining them. The "normal" mind, in other words, has a history — and a contestable one.
The border really does move: the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM beginning in 1973; Asperger's disorder was added in DSM-IV (1994) and merged into Autism Spectrum Disorder in DSM-5 (2013). "Epistemic injustice," with its testimonial and hermeneutical forms, is Miranda Fricker's (2007). "Neurodiversity" is not one person's coinage, though it is often credited to Judy Singer (1998). Botha, Chapman, Giwa Onaiwu, Kapp, Stannard Ashley & Walker, "The neurodiversity concept was developed collectively: An overdue correction on the origins of neurodiversity theory" (Autism, 2024), show that "neurological diversity" and "neurodiversity" reached print in 1997 and 1998 in the work of journalist Harvey Blume, who attributed them to the online Autistic community — and that the concept and its theory were developed collectively by neurodivergent people. We follow that correction here. The neurodivergent / neurodivergence coinage is Kassiane Asasumasu's (2000), as logged for Zine No. 3; the paradigm's articulation is Nick Walker's and the wider community's. The reading is ours: that the constructed line was never the sky, and so is ours to redraw.
Further reading: Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality (Pluto, 2023); Stephen Stigler, The History of Statistics (1986); Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking (1986); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990); Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy (1995); Sarah Chaney, Am I Normal? (2022); and, for a general reader, Todd Rose, The End of Average (2016). Online: Fergus Murray, "Weird vs. Normal" (Weird Pride Day). Primary sources: Quetelet's Essai de physique sociale (1835) and Galton's Hereditary Genius (1869).