In a speech to Congress, the US Health (sic) Secretary, recently declared that autistic children “will never pay taxes, never hold a job, never play baseball, never write a poem, never go out on a date and many may never use a toilet unassisted…It has to stop”. That statement is profoundly dehumanising and deeply inaccurate.
When I started this blog last year, I wanted to help change attitudes to and stereotypes about neurodivergent people of all kinds. Ageing Autistically is for people who’ve felt different for most of their lives and have only recently found out why. It’s also for anyone who is interested in understanding better. I can only speak from my own experience, and everyone is different, but there’s a growing body of up-to-date thinking and research that needs to be widely shared.
The US Health Secretary has also vowed to find the cause of autism by September. Besides being ludicrous, this is sounding ominously like the attitude to autistic children in Nazi Germany in World War 2. Those children were the subject of inhuman experiments after which many were sent to the death camps. They were considered expendable. We are living in dangerous times. This statement from the United States will inform the direction of this blog for the next few issues.
While it is undeniable that some autistic children have an intellectual disability and other co-occurring conditions, they are no less valuable or deserving of support than anyone else. The majority of us are not intellectually disabled but can be hobbled not so much by autism itself as by society’s refusal to take its associated challenges into account.
It is important to understand that every neurotype contributes to the whole. Without neurodiversity, there would be no science, no original thinking, no art, no poetry. I have said before that in every social and professional group you will find autistic people, contributing hugely and against difficult odds.
Autistic women have flown under the radar for decades. Only in the last few years have autism “experts” admitted that there are autistic women and girls. I have just finished reading a new book by British neuroscientist Gina Rippon. Called “The Lost Girls of Autism”, it documents the history of autism research since its inception, seeks to define what we understand of it now, eighty years on, and to explore why women and girls have been excluded from it.
Rippon concludes that women’s historical exclusion has two main sources, the fact that the spotlight has always been on males, and also and importantly, that women camouflage autistic behaviours in order to fit in. While autistic boys and men seem less driven by social considerations, girls and women often desperately want to fit in. And so we have learned to observe, to mimic, to suppress our natural selves, but we still fail and are labelled weird.
Rippon admits that autism researchers have contributed to the bias of autism study and diagnosis by buying into the narrative that autism is a boy thing. She has realised that a more complete picture will be gained only by listening to autistic women and girls themselves. She says that when researchers listened to women’s experience, “it became clear that for many diagnosed women, or women with high levels of autistic traits, that the need to fit in, to have friends, to avoid being noticed as different, was a powerful driving force in how they interacted with other people – much more so than for autistic males.” This echoes my own experience.
Over the next few posts, I will be tracing the history of autism, how it has been identified and characterised, and how recent research by autistic scientists, and the interesting discoveries by neuroscientists, are shaping the way we see autism today.
I and many of my fellow autistics see neurodivergence as a difference in brain wiring, not a series of deficits. While we continue to characterise it in terms of what people struggle with, and don’t consider their strengths, we will stay stuck in the stereotypes.
