What I Write About When I Write About Autism

One of the primary tasks I consider my duty as someone who writes about autism is to be articulate, human, and empathetic. I’m trying to break the stereotypes of the autistic person, though I’m well aware that there are many autistic people who do fall into certain stereotypes. There is a constant tension in what I do, trying to make autistic people seem more human while at the same time talking about the things that we do that make other people think of us as less than human.

Being nonverbal

Tics and stims

Violent, uncontrolled emotional behavior

Rigidity

Pattern-seeking

Echolalia

Special Interests

Lack of eye-contact

Inability to get jokes

I wish that I didn’t have to spend so much effort for the bare minimum of showing autists as human, and yet, here we are.

Sometimes I am amused at the ways in which autists are told that their way of inhabiting the world is too rigid — by people who have their own rigid ideas of what counts as validly human. Sometimes I’m amused by the insistence that if we don’t perform empathy the right way, that means we have no feelings and don’t deserve to be treated as human.

I’m fighting all the time against people who say, “You can’t be autistic” because I’m “too functional.” I’m too human, it seems, to be seen as autistic. Every time someone says this, I’m jolted with the realization of how other autistic people aren’t seen as human. And I want to point out that this isn’t fair, that just because I was traumatized enough as a child to force my compliance with social rules, and just because I happen to have a certain set of masking skills as an adult, does not make me more human. It might make me pass as more human. But those rules of yours — those rigid rules of what counts as human. Those need to change.

I work very hard to try to be seen as human, to interact in the world on a regular basis in a way that codes me as human according to those strict rules. But I also talk openly about my autism because I want to make sure that other people begin to see the ways in which they’re excluding other autists from humanity and that this is a grave mistake, and that it is caused by a lack of true humanity. I can explain my autism to you, but that doesn’t make me less autistic.