Welcome to Autism Awareness Month
Happy April! Welcome to Autism Awareness Month! We do it a little differently here. No puzzle pieces or blue, we like the rainbow infinity sign instead. We condemn ABA. We stay away from Autism Speaks and prefer the Autistic Self Advocacy Network instead.
If this all sounds strange to you, stick around! We’re gonna talk about the history of autism and we’re gonna break down everything to make it make sense! And no judgement in this classroom, ever. If you’re here, ready to do the work and learn some new stuff, you’re in the right place! I had to learn all this stuff before, too. Onward!
And if all of this stuff sounds like how you talk about autism, then welcome to you, too! Hopefully you’ll leave here with some new understandings. And I hope I’ll get to learn stuff from you, too!
There is a lot of misunderstanding about autism out there, by the world at large and even by autism professionals. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, Hans Asperger, the man who is credited with describing autism, did not believe that women and girls could be autistic (and that is like the least of the problems with that dude but we’ll get to that in another post). So for many decades, an entire population was gatekept from autism and because women and girls are more likely to mask highly (we’ll also be talking about this), any research and education focused only on autism that presents without a mask. That ignorance echoes to this day.
A second reason is because autistics have long been kept out of autism research and education. This is not unique amongst those with disabilities and, in fact, for a long time the Disability Rights Movement has demanded “Nothing about us without us” because the stigma keeps researchers from listening to the groups they are supposed to be helping. Autism looks very different from the outside than from the inside (another future post). So when researchers LOOK at an autistic person and describe them, but not actually LISTEN to them about what they are thinking or feeling, they are inherently describing autism from the perspective of the researchers. And because of that, the research is often, frankly, wrong. A neurotypical cannot understand autism without input from autistics. Period.
So follow along! I’m on Facebook most often, but I’ll keep all my socials updated with posts as they come up. Let’s learn together!
