One comeback if someone gives you shit for self-diagnosing as autistic, free of charge:
“Yeah, and Harvey Milk wasn’t gay, and Dolores Huerta isn’t brown. Any other questions?”
wtf, Temple Grandin. *anxiety intensifies*
I don’t buy this assimilationist, anti-worker, anti-poor nonsense. Full stop.
I’ve worked way too many jobs where i was miserable, my coworkers were miserable, the department heads were miserable — and those were the sort of “not just a job, a career” sorts of positions she’s talking about.
It’s not just her, unfortunately. Some corners of the Autistic community, especially among people who tout being high functioning (or being “cured”) as a panacea, have a ways to go in terms of:
– not playing high/low, aspie/autie games, especially “high-functioning” punching down towards “low-functioning”
– active inclusion and acceptance of POC
– active acceptance of people who self-dx
– acceptance of neurodiversity, neurodivergence and neuroqueerness in general
We’re a community, not a horse race. Asserting that we’re not dealing with the same core issues is bunk, even if they manifest to varying levels from person to person, and within a given person.
When people try to draw a hard distinction between auties and aspies, or the employed (and careered, no less) vs. the unemployed, what they are doing is attempting to reify passing, including passing as allistic and/or NT, as well as “I never would’ve guessed that you’re autistic” sorts of mind games. It may work for them to do that, and that’s fine, but insisting that everybody be like them is both cruel and divisive.
Counter-propoganda for your informational needs:
TW: allistic violence, conformity, ABA, murder
I don’t know if anybody has written about this in these exact terms, but it’s fairly unmistakable — it happens when you don’t adhere to allistic social norms, in terms of eye contact, speech or social interaction. It’s the “wtf is wrong with you” look.
The worst version of it is someone institutionalizing an autistic person, committing acts of violence (including ABA) against them, or murdering them outright.
The more common versions are looking at you sideways, verbally questioning, correcting, or patronizing you, or jaw-dropping silence followed by deflecting/changing the topic/making a “joke” out of things.
It’s a form of compliance insistence. It’s triggering. It leads to us being rejected from work positions (or fired from them), failed relationships (with allistics), or in some cases, arrested, assaulted or worse.
I wish I could just say “come on, try harder” and have that be enough, but I see the same thing happen from white people towards people of color, men towards women, and against disabled people in general.
As always, we need to create our own media, and act collectively in our own self-interest. It’s up to us, not them. It should be better, but as with so many movement-level shifts in society (let alone liberatory and transformational ones) it’s not going to come through mere awareness. It’s up to us to make it happen.