“When an academic writes accurately about aspects of autistic lived experience in their research, some people grumble. “All they needed to do was ask me and I would have told them,” some will say.”
Dyspraxia is when you have a lot of trouble with motor planning, which is our ability to learn new movements. So it’s not the practicing part of it, it’s the learning part. When you’re introduced to [a new movement], how smoothly can your brain understand what the demands are and get your body to do that?
The problem is not autistic hand flapping. The problem is when the decision has been made that hand flapping is annoying or weird, and not natural (and adorable!).
It’s important to avoid infantilising your teen or adult autistic offspring, meaning treating them as though they will always be a child—whether they’re five, fifteen or thirty-five.
The sad truth is that so many Autistic people, children and adults, go through autistic burnout with zero comprehension of what is happening to them, and with zero support from their friends and families.
ABA therapy training to adapt doesn’t in any way help us adapt—it forces us not to complain about the routine sensory punishment beatings we take because we are autistic and society is inflexible in its attitude.
It’s not okay to dismiss one autistic person’s lived experience as having nothing to do with “real” autism simply because you don’t understand what autism is like for them.
Hans Asperger was, most likely, a complicated and conflicted man who recognized the potential of “autistic intelligence” long before anyone else did, but who was willing to go along with his Nazi bosses even when Jewish storefronts were burning in front of his eyes.
Functioning labels do not always relate to people’s real skills and can be based on hurtful stereotypes about autistic people. They also assume that people’s skills cannot change over time.
Ellenby wrote in the first half of Autism Uncensored that she was Zack’s accommodation and he “rides” her. By the second half of the book it is becoming clear that she is riding Zack, using his autism for a social payout to herself.
