Since time immemorial, I’ve been wondering: Why do ableist neurotypicals go the distances they go to make us look like a plague to be wiped out (even in the middle of an actual plague that threatens to wipe out a lot more than just us)?
Media representation has a lot to do with it, and no, I’m not just talking about “Music” or any other film or TV they’ve weaponized against us. Do you ever notice how, whenever there’s an incident like a school shooting or a dude in a van mowing down people on a street, the first conclusion people pounce to is “he must be autistic and unable to comprehend what he’s doing”? That was, after all, the defense used for Alek Minassian after he ran over 26 people with a van in Toronto in 2018.
Well, setting aside the problem of autistic people being picked on until they’re in such a distressed emotional state as to drive them to commit acts of violence, these unfortunately are the kinds of incidents that garner a lot of media attention. (Mind you, I am by no means saying that acts of violence are a necessary consequence of autistic people being picked on. Some of us have learned a hard lesson about reacting to negative stimuli. We’ve learned it’s a lot safer to shut down and dissociate than to risk a meltdown and/or outburst that could bring us to serious grief with the authorities.)
So media coverage does tend to poison people’s perceptions. It happened with Alek Minassian in much the same way it happened with Adam Lanza, the notorious machine-gunner of Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Autism, and an accompanying absence of mental competency, was the defense that Minassian’s attorneys used; and if the finger gets pointed in that direction to explain Men Behaving Badly, public opinion is all “OH NO DE AUTIZIMZ 😱” which also has a poor effect on parents whose children have just been identified.
So I think what we, the autistic people of the planet Earth, in order to form a more perfect humanity, need to do is try to draw media attention to our positive achievements as we make them. Maybe not as sensational, maybe less likely to get attention from the press, unless of course it’s something particularly positive and impactful, like on the Greta Thunberg scale. People who are #ActuallyAutistic, or believe they are autistic, who accomplish something great shouldn’t be afraid to let their neurological identity be known if they receive media attention. (Although it would be nice if they were better human beings than Muskallunge, whom I still hold to be an overrich douchebag who could find better things to do with his excessive wealth than privatize Twitter.)
And you know what else would help? If people like lawyers and teachers and politicians stop using autism as an excuse for a person’s shitty behavior. Not only does it give #autistic people yet another black eye, it’s not likely to help their case — it didn’t help Alek Minassian for sure. After all, as noted, Minassian was an incel — which is a trait that does not in any properly researched book go paw in paw with autism. Incels, in my estimation (and experience), come in all neurotypes. They have serious work to do on their self-improvement so that they will be at least more likable, and might find other paths to direct their energy rather than sitting around wringing their hands and waiting for a manic pixie dream girl to come along and do all the work for them. Blaming women for your own bad behavior is no more justifiable than blaming your neurology and misrepresenting it as a whole.
What would help more than anything is if a person could just for once safely disclose to employers, authorities, etc. that they are autistic and not be at once shunned, dismissed, canceled, or targeted for harassment that would immolate their mental health. A friend on AutiComm relates how she opened up about being autistic at work, and was accepted at first until her job came under new management, and: “When they found out I was openly autistic (and much more well liked than they), they started to purposely antagonize me, so I would have meltdowns and they could claim I was a danger and unfit for the job.”
With that, we’ve gone from misrepresentation to outright discrimination. I can count on one paw the number of people at my job who know I’m autistic, none of whom is a manager. Even if I did open up, all it would lead to is “well we all gotta deal with the same shit and none of us needs an exception, so we’re not making any, oh and show us your tits.” (Not word for word, but that’s the general idea.)
There are certain ethnic groups that are targets for violence and discrimination due to the actions of a very, very few of them. Autistic people are already targets for discrimination and prejudice — we need no more preemptive violence inspired by media sensationalism.
The Autyssey 