Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking

by Autistic Self Advocacy Network

What they don’t see, however, is the real cost of this normalisation, which can be very high indeed. The people taking this approach I’m sure are mostly motivated by concern. However, they are subscribing to one huge fallacy – the one which says that the Autism is somehow separate from, and ’burying’, the ‘real’ (i.e.: normal) person underneath. Not so. Autism runs all the way through. It’s a deep neurological difference. It can no more be stripped away or ‘cured’ than our gender or race can be ‘cured’ or taken away. It’s that central to our being. An autistic child who grows up knowing that something which is that intrinsic to their very selves is so hated and loathed by those around them, who has those same adults demand that they suppress, deny and ‘get rid of’ all evidence of it, is not going to grow up feeling good about themselves. They will likely grow to hate their Autism, and themselves with it. Even if they don’t have a formal diagnosis, it’s still possible they will hate their ‘weirdness’ or ‘difference’ anyway, and will likely feel almost as much pressure to be ‘normal’.