The ability to express one’s authentic autistic self is much more complicated than an individual choice to unmask. Dr. Amy Pearson explores why this is, and what we can do in order to make the world a safer place for autistic people.
Maybe there’s a reason autistic authors have often opted to write neurotypical characters. Maybe it’s proven to be more sellable and “believable” than their own experience. I’m upset, wondering how many wonderful autistic stories we’re missing out on as a world because of neurotypical gatekeeping.
Reading A Kind of Spark, I felt a part of myself represented and explained on the page that I’d never seen anywhere else before. I feel so much for Addie, the 12-year-old autistic main character: How she puts herself in the historical stories of witches, and how the injustice of their history upsets her, while others seem detached.
I guess there’s not many spaces where I feel safe to be myself without great repercussions. If I’m not dealing with racism, it’s homophobia, and if I’m not dealing with that it’s ableism.
I truly do not know why some parents don’t want to listen to autistic adults. There is so much good autism information for parents from autistic adults, and so much of it is freely available, and yet the parents choose not to know.
On being angry and frustrated at the celebration at children’s “recovery” from autism, by people who will not actually bear the consequences of losing that diagnosis, for the rest of their lives.
Lily Levy at INSAR 2018 [image: Lily Levy, a white British woman, presenting a poster at an autism conference.] INSAR 2019, the International Meeting For Autism Research, starts in three days. Before we begin our coverage, we’d like to emphasize research and themes from last year’s conference INSAR 2018, in Rotterdam—so we can proceed with a
Kerima Çevik theautismwars.blogspot.com The author’s idea of what displaying autism positivity looks like [Image: a Black woman over 50 with braided gray hair wearing Neurodiversity 3.0 by ThinkGeek, a black T-shirt with a world globe design on the upper chest area in the shape of a human brain, colored in physical map fashion i.e., water
I am not socially awkward and lazy or incompetent. I did not get this autism diagnosis diagnosis because of shyness. I am autistic, with all the joys and pains being human brings.
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.
