Autistic Hedgehog

I prefer to be called autistic or an autistic person. I’ve addressed my feelings on the matter on my blog as well as addressed one of the major issues of how allistic people use it here.

To be clear, this is my personal preference; what other autistics choose is purely up to them. 

My opinion is that this doctor is ignorant, ought to be fired, and you should definitely seek a second opinion, preferably from someone who doesn’t need both hands and a road map to find his own ass. 

In point of fact, people with Aspergers are very often diagnosed later in life, specifically because it’s perceived by allistic people as being a higher-functioning form of autism. Far from being “so severe that it’s obvious,” it won’t necessarily express as strongly at a young age; the signs can be more subtle and easily missed, especially in children designated female at birth, because autism “science” is a hotbed of cissexism and gender essentialism. 

I was diagnosed when I was nine. There are a number of people on Tumblr with an AS diagnosis that were diagnosed around that age or even later, sometimes much later—especially since AS only went down in the DSM in 1994. I couldn’t have been diagnosed AS at one because the diagnosis didn’t officially exist when I was one, and that goes for many, many Aspies or just those with some form of autism considered “high-functioning.”

It’s really sad and frightening to me that I feel like I, someone without training or even a complete college education, could do this job better than the people supposedly trained to do it. 

I’ve heard of a fair few autistics that have that problem. For me, when I do have it, it seems to be more related to my ADHD. But it’s not unusual, and it certainly doesn’t make you stupid. 

That is one of the unfortunate things about the way society pathologizes us. If having a brain that doesn’t always function properly makes a person “stupid” than the entire population of this planet is “stupid,” because no one’s brain is perfect. My husband has a terrible time with his memory, for example. And human brains act in a lot of ways to deceive us, distorting our perception especially under the influence of strong emotions.

Something that happened to me the first year I lived in Sweden: We live on the fourth floor and our windows have no screens, so we’re open to everything if we want to open them in the summer. I could hear something flapping around in the kitchen, and I got up to go investigate. As soon as I was out in the hall, a swift came pelting out of the kitchen towards me. In my state of high adrenaline, not only did it look much larger than it actually was, but for a moment I thought it was a bat. Now, it was broad daylight so of course it wasn’t a bat, but the thought went through my head.

Not because I’m stupid or anything like that, but because I was full of adrenaline and fear, and that affected my perception of what was happening. That is the nature of the brain.

Whatever causes you to have this problem, you’re not alone. Not only are you not unusual as an autistic person, but you’re not unusual as a person, and you’re not stupid. 

I haven’t seen either movie, though I’ve seen bits and pieces of Rain Main (hooray, TV syndication?). But I have reservations about both of them.

It’s true that, back when it first came out, Rain Man was actually a positive thing for autism awareness, and Temple Grandin is (obviously) based on a real person, so that ought to be positive as well. But real understanding of autism hasn’t come. Instead, people with autism are generally broken into Rain Mans and Temple Grandins, and the lack of other media representation than those two images of autism has been harmful. Instead of being the positive force they could have been, I feel like both movies help contribute to the lack of nuance in popular views of autism.

This isn’t really the fault of the movies themselves, per se. The fault lies in media itself. Rarely do autistic characters appear unless they’re in stories dealing solely with their issues, and usually then from the perspective of their “poor, burdened” families. On the rare occasions that I have seen autistic characters in media in ways that aren’t all about Issues, they’re either stereotypes, or not canonically acknowledged as autistic. 

That makes it very difficult for such movies to have a positive impact and they often end up having a negative one, however inadvertently. But again, it’s less a problem with the movies themselves as it is with society, and it’s a problem that has to stop. But because of those problems, I can’t help but have reservations about Rain Man and Temple Grandin, because I know what will most likely come of ignorant people seeing them: more ignorance. 

(This is also, incidentally, another reason why I’m writing a book with an autistic main character. I want a chance to get a very different representation of autistics out into the mainstream media and well, if you want a job done right, often you’ve got to do it yourself.)

It’s almost like those blue lights aren’t doing anything to actually raise people’s awareness of autism and what it is…Gosh, I wonder where that particular campaign could possibly be going wrong…

(Pardon my sarcasm. I find sometimes the only appropriate response to these ridiculous stereotypes is a hefty dose of acerbic sardonicism.) 

Honestly, if at all possible, it’s time for you to find a new therapist. This is a woman who has no place calling herself an “autistic specialist;” she ought to be fired. 

She’s wrong. Full stop. She’s ignorant and she’s doing you actual harm, and really, if you’re seeing her for things like depression, then it will only get worse with her treating you like that. You’re not in any way in the wrong here. She, however, is incredibly shitty at her job.