Just coming off an online exchange with someone who characterizes autism as abnormal and a pathology. The person has an adult autistic child, so I get the perspective.
But this view — and the response from someone else whose only exposure to autism involves those who need round-the-clock care — runs counter to all the commentary I’ve been reading from actual live autistic people. I flinched after reading it. Online, I laughed it off and backed away, which is how I’ve handled a lot of things in my life.
I will admit that much of the #ActuallyAutistic talk online can be tough for me to stomach. A lot of it lapses into digressions about sexuality and politics and outraged rants about “ableist” attitudes against autistics and others. It gets wearing after a while, especially for someone like me who is often to the right of much of that rhetoric.
(Yet again, here’s another community where I’m an outsider! But I digress.)
Still, I take the views of those who are #ActuallyAutistic seriously. Many seem to be people who, like my daughter, are smart and funny and kind — yet have struggled all their lives with the kind of deep social awkwardness and sensory issues that can’t always be explained away by, say, being “abnormal” or “quirky” or even a “jerk.” Once these regular people found themselves in the experiences of others, either through official diagnoses or their own research, they glommed onto an explanation for their lives. And found relief.
As one of these people, I get that. But a lot of people — like the guy in the aforementioned exchange, who said online that my particular habit probably wasn’t stimming but, he assured me, “normal” — don’t.
(And then he proceeded afterward to subtweet separately, as it were, about how he doesn’t get how enthusiastic some people get about self-diagnosing as autistic. Whatever.)
Anyway, I refuse to accept the idea that a “pathology” plagues my daughter, especially after I vowed that this would be the summer she owns her neurological wiring and learns self-acceptance. I’m not letting her start high school believing she’s a walking pathology. Because she is not.