So some non autistic people have been up to their old tricks and writing articles about us based on their singular anecdotal experience of their autistic child. I avoided reading the actual article till today but did read my boss’s response as soon as it was online because she’s amazing.
I got a bit sidetracked with this blog and then had a meltdown caused by people without blue badges parking in disabled bays in a HOSPITAL CAR PARK!
Anyway, I’ve still not finished reading the offensive article because I noticed another, possibly more offensive article on the same website and topic. This one is from December 2021 and discusses a group some people have created to talk about us behind our backs, like we’re all back in school. The article starts by telling us that this group consists of autism researchers and autistic adults, as well as the usual non-autistics along for the ride. Oddly it doesn’t mention any autistic people, just the non-autistics who always seem to have the spotlight on them for no conceivable reason.
It goes on to talk about what this little group has come up with. Having filtered through the fluff and nonsense, I’ve identified 2 things that this group have decided amongst themselves.
Firstly, they want resources and services that cost no money and can therefore be used anywhere by anyone. Genius, right?! How lazy have us autistics been that we haven’t thought of this game changer ourselves already?! I really hate things like this where people get paid to state the obvious and/or impossible. They’ve given no idea of what these magical services might be and how they might be implicated, I guess that’s our job to tell them what we need.
Except it apparently isn’t because we’re not autistic enough to discuss these unicorn services. Having asked apparently absolutely no autistic people, they decided that we want profound autism to be a thing. Even though we’ve spent forever trying to get rid of functioning labels for various well evidenced reasons, someone who is in charge of functioning labels, who clearly has a lot of time on his non-autistic hands, wants to feel relevant again by taking us back in time to when we had no autonomy and were experimented on by nazis!
Here is my entirely anecdotal opinion: I didn’t speak properly until I was 8/9 maybe 10 yrs old. Nobody thought that this classic presentation of childhood autism could possibly be autism, so I had no choice but to learn to speak. It wasn’t particularly traumatic and everything turned out ok because I’m really clever even if I do lose the ability to function because the world is full of not clever people. If, as would be the case according to their flimsy outline, profound autism was a thing (and girls were allowed to be it!), I would have been labelled as profoundly autistic.
It causes more trauma to me to think about how different my life would have been if that was the case, than my actual, quite traumatic life. I wouldn’t have gone to grammar school or college, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get 3 degrees and apply for a PhD. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have had my life, which for all its ups and downs is my life and I’ve learnt to love it more than anything. I’ve had some truly amazing experiences, some relatively mundane like meeting the person of my dreams and doing this job, others are uniquely special, like being on stage with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (RIP) or sitting in a cafe in Prague being interviewed by the BBC on a snowy Christmas day.
I am not, nor have I ever been profoundly autistic and it makes me sick to think that they could be taking all of this away from people with gaslighting (is that what gaslighting is? when they do nasty things under the guise of pretending to help the people that they are actually f**king over?)
The Lost Generation of Autistic Adults 