9
The Lines
Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 9

The Lines
We Drew

on constellations, the bell curve, and the border we mistook for the sky

L★S
Love You Down
To Your Star Stuff
· open edition ·
Look up

The hunter
everyone learns

Here is Orion, the way we are all taught to see it: two shoulders, two feet, and the three perfect stars of the belt. A hunter, mid-stride, raising his club against the winter sky.

Almost every culture that has watched this patch of sky has drawn something here — a hunter, a shepherd, a giant, a canoe. We are pattern-hungry animals. Our eyes reach for a shape and our minds hand us one, fast, before we've decided to look.

Then we forget we did it. The line stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like a fact of the sky. That forgetting is the whole subject of this zine.

Betelgeuse Bellatrix the belt Rigel Saiph

orion, as everyone draws it
a shape our eyes reach for

The Lines We Drew · Stimpunks 2
one vantage point the belt, as seen — evenly spaced Mintaka ~690 ly Alnitak ~740 ly Alnilam ~2,000 ly

the same three stars, in depth
the middle one is ~3× farther

Now step to the side

There is
no belt

The three belt stars only line up from here. Alnitak sits around 740 light-years away, Mintaka around 690 — and Alnilam, the middle one, is roughly 2,000 light-years off, nearly three times farther than the stars it appears to stand between.

Their neat, even spacing is an accident of our viewing angle. Step a few light-years to the side and the belt scatters. Some of these stars have more in common with stars in other constellations than with the ones we filed them under.

The line was never out there. It was in the seat we happened to be sitting in. The stars are just… where they are, indifferent to the figure we hung on them.

The pattern was never in the sky. It was in the vantage point — and the vantage point got mistaken for a law.
The Lines We Drew · Stimpunks 3
The same trick, on us

The bell curve
is a vantage point

The curve that sorts us into normal and abnormal began in astronomy. It was the "error curve" — the math for how repeated measurements of a star's position scatter around its true one.

In the 1800s, Adolphe Quetelet — an astronomer — turned that instrument on people, and invented l'homme moyen, the average man. What had described the error in a measurement now described the ideal human, with everyone else scattered around it as deviation. Francis Galton took the next step, reading the curve as a ranking, and built eugenics on it.

So the tool that mapped the indifferent stars got turned on our minds — and the average, a made-up midpoint, was handed to us as the shape we were supposed to be.

"normal" everyone else = "deviation" born as the curve for measurement error

a midpoint, drawn as an ideal
the same line we hung on the stars

The Lines We Drew · Stimpunks 4
disorder difference 1973 homosexuality removed → 1994 ← Asperger's added 2013 folded into spectrum → same people · a different line each edition

where the border sits, by year
revisable means: it was a choice

Who holds the pen

The border
keeps moving

If the line between disorder and difference were a fact of nature, it would hold still. It doesn't. Homosexuality was a diagnosis until the field voted it out in 1973. Asperger's was added in 1994 and dissolved into the autism spectrum in 2013.

The people didn't change between editions. The line did — drawn, erased, and redrawn by a committee holding a pen. A border that can be revised was never the sky. It was always a decision about where to point.

Notthat nothing is real. Distress is real; support is real. The border drawn around them is the made thing.
Notthat our line is truer than theirs. It's that theirs was never the stars either.
Nota line to be earned by passing as normal. There is no normal to deviate from.
The Lines We Drew · Stimpunks 5
Believed, and nameable

The words
to name it

Philosopher Miranda Fricker names two quiet harms. Testimonial injustice: being disbelieved about your own experience because of who's speaking. Hermeneutical injustice: not even having the shared words to make sense of it — because the language was built by people who never lived it.

When the only frame on offer is deficit, we can't describe ourselves except as a lack. We come out sounding like a list of things we're missing — because that's the only vocabulary we were handed.

This is why new names matter, and why they are not decoration. A word you can finally use to say this is what I am, and it is a whole thing is a repair. New constellations need new names.

your account credibility discounted testimonial · disbelieved [ no word ] a name hermeneutical · unnameable → named

two harms, one repair
a usable word gives the experience back

The Lines We Drew · Stimpunks 6
same stars · a different line

the old figure, dimmed · a new one drawn
neither is the sky — both are ours

So

We can
draw it again

Here's the freeing part. If the hunter was never in the stars — if the line was ours all along — then it was never the only line available. The same points hold any figure we're willing to imagine onto them.

That's what the neurodiversity paradigm does, and what our Field Guide to Neurodivergent Constellations does star by star: it takes the same lights the old charts called broken and draws them into the Stimmer, the Deep Diver, the Pattern Seeker — patterns that name a way of being instead of a defect.

The stars are indifferent. The lines are ours. So we get to draw them again — this time from the inside, in our own hand.

The stars are indifferent. The lines are ours. So we can draw them again.
The Lines We Drew · Stimpunks 7
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 is established. Orion's Belt is an asterism, not a physical group: Alnitak lies roughly 740 light-years away and Mintaka roughly 690, while Alnilam — the middle star — sits near 2,000 light-years, close to three times farther, so the belt's even spacing is an artifact of our line of sight (Museum of Science; APOD). Distances to these luminous, distant stars still carry real uncertainty, which only sharpens the point: even our instruments waver about a line we're sure we see.

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," graded groups above and below the line, and coined the word eugenics; his protégé Karl Pearson built the standard deviation and correlation as the first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics. The statistical sense of the word "normal" itself arrives in the mid-1800s alongside all of this. 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 what Chapman calls the pathology paradigm: the frame, carried through Kraepelin into the DSM, that the neurodiversity movement later arose to name and refuse. 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" was coined by Judy Singer (1998); the neurodiversity paradigm and its anti-pathology stance are articulated by Nick Walker and the wider community. 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).

Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 9 · Open Edition
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