Kindle Notes & Highlights
should have removed myself from the stress, but I didn’t. Pay attention to sensory input and how it might be stressing out the Autistic people in your life (including yourself).
Some ways to try to mitigate emotional overload include staying calm around the Autistic people you care for, even during a meltdown, and helping the Autistic children in your life to learn to identify and name their own emotions. I know, it’s not easy. But the less you react emotionally to an Autistic person’s emotional distress, the easier it will be for them to recover from emotional overstimulation. I find that the more I am able to recognize my emotional states, the better I am at calming myself and, if needed and possible, removing myself from emotionally stressful situations. It’s
Just like a person who needs to vomit and is stuck in public has no choice but to vomit in front of everyone, an Autistic who has reached overload and is stuck in public has no choice but to stress out in front of everyone. It’s embarrassing. Humiliating. Traumatic. I never went back to that food court the rest of the time I was a student at that university. I couldn’t bear to revisit the scene of my trauma, the place of my shame. The loss of control is frightening. The loss of dignity is appalling. When a person pushes me to overload, especially when they over-ride my protests to do so, I
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The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2013 the U.S. poverty rate fell to 14.5% but the poverty rate for disabled people rose to 28.8 percent. The overall unemployment rate dropped to 6% but for disabled people it was over twice as high, at 12.8%. Seventy percent of the general U.S. population over the age of 16 are participating in the workforce while only 20% of the disabled
But “quiet hands” is not autism acceptance. It is part of the goal of so many autism therapies: to make an Autistic person “indistinguishable from their peers.”
“The danger here may be obvious: It may be the people most capable of passing for normal, the most obvious ‘success stories’ in the eyes of non-autistic people (some of whom became so adept at passing that they were never considered autistic in the first place), who are the most likely to burn out the hardest and suddenly need to either act in very conspicuously autistic ways or die.”
wasn’t so. Teaching Quiet Hands isn’t harmless. It teaches us that we are mistakes. It silences a big part of our voice. It seeks to shape our bodies in the image of some unrealistic ideal. And, for many of us, it reduces our ability to function.
You might complain that we scream or cry too much but haven’t noticed that we scream and cry less when we are allowed to live our truth on all levels.
Whatever it is that we do, we don’t do it to annoy you. In some cases we can stop doing those things but the cost is too high to justify asking us to stop.
that is completely uninterested in sex. But when I say “the stars must align before I become sexual,”
Quarterly. As Straus points out, the original term was “idiot savant” and it was generally applied to people who were intellectually disabled, but who could perform in one area brilliantly.
The brilliant musicianship, for example, was valuable because people liked to hear the music and would pay money to listen. The “idiot” nature of the rest of the person’s life was considered worthless.
something like dyslexia or ADHD. Do not mourn alleged overdiagnosis; rejoice at de-institutionalization. Hoffman’s
When someone can do a thing
that you find amazing, do not discount their competence in other areas of life.
The Aktion T4 program was a trial run for the larger exterminations of Jews, Romany, Homosexuals, Polish, etc. This is what happens to disabled people who are valued only for what they can produce.76 You may be tempted
rather because the Autistic mind latches on to things it loves and savors them thoroughly.
It’s not “savant syndrome.” It’s people who are hard-wired to really get into the things they love.
If you have never gotten really deeply into something, so far that you were eating, breathing, and dreaming about it, you will not understand this joy. You don’t have to be Autistic to experience it, but it helps.
This is not a separate competence in a desert of incompetence. This is an Autistic way of being. It is whole and to call it “savant syndrome” is to cut us into little pieces so you can say
And if you were wondering how you should refer to Autistic people with talent, now that you know that “savant” and “splinter” are unacceptable words, there it is. We have talents. We have abilities. We have passions. Speak of
our skills as skills, not as freakish anomalies.
To discover what an Autistic loves, listen to what we know.
This is one of the problems with therapies that seek to make us “indistinguishable from our peers.” If you try to stop us from
doing anything that looks Autistic, you will be constantly picking at us to stop almost everything we do and we will feel overwhelmed and traumatized. So pick your battles.
again. For many of us, too, lying is traumatizing in itself, and so trauma can re-traumatize again and again by forcing us to lie.
Autism acceptance means helping, mentoring, guiding, but never trying to re-shape an Autistic person for no good reason beyond the comfort of others. If you accept Autistic people, you will accept that we often move differently, communicate differently, and think differently. Autism acceptance does not mean just letting us “go wild.” We need mentoring just like anyone else.
Autism acceptance means working to understand why we do things and carefully discerning before you try to change our behavior: Do you want to change it to help us be healthier and happier? Or do you want to change it because you think other people will not accept us the way we are?
If you think people will not accept us because we look, think, and communicate differently, do not try to make us into people we aren’t. If you think we will not be accepted, you must work to change the world into one that can accept people regardless of neurology, color of skin, religion, or any other...
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Do not traumatize us in the name of helping us fit in. Do not try to make us smaller; work to ma...
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as a result there is increased unity among people of diverse disabilities, increased solidarity, and an increased ability for all of us to work together for the rights of all of us.
“Asperger’s” is to draw an “us vs. them” distinction within the neurotribe of autism. It is a “dog whistle” that speaks a code of “functioning labels” and supremacy.
disability of autism is external, placed upon us by the judgments of others, but socially-imposed disability is disability nonetheless.
It is in this way that we fight against a society that holds up a monolithic notion of “normal” and “perfect” that is oppressive to everyone, but especially to those who fall outside society’s “circle of virtue.”
It is ironic that so many people fear us when Autistic people are much more likely to be subject to violence and abuse than to perpetrate it against others.
are Autistic and thus easier to manipulate, more likely to have a weak personal support system to protect us, and more likely to have gone through compliance training that teaches us to accept abuse as a normal part of life.
the abuse tends to be repeated again and again, chronically. The researchers found that 49% of people with intellectual disability will experience sexual abuse or assault 10 or more times in their lives.
Additionally, the victimization of disabled people is greatly downplayed. It is often reported in the system and in the media as “abuse and neglect,” as opposed to naming the actual crimes that occurred, such as rape, assault, or murder.
I am middle-aged and very experienced, yet someone was still able to figure out where the chinks were in my armor, insinuating their way into my life in an abusive manner. And they did all this from a distance. They renewed my sense of vulnerability and increased my fear of letting new people into my life. It was so easy for them to take my life by storm that way. How much more vulnerable are people half my age? How much more vulnerable are children? Who is looking out for us? Who can we trust?
Autism acceptance means presuming competence, but it also means building a community that helps Autistic people defend ourselves against predators. The standard education children
Predators try to overwhelm us by moving things along fast. Autistic people need to know that it’s okay to slow down, to take our time, to think things through.
ever more inclusive. Our great diversity as Autistic females/women doesn’t stop people from trying to define the female Autistic experience.
We can be a sisterhood without being identical twins.
That connection among Autistic women runs deeper, even, than the chromosomes. Recently, another friend came out as trans, and I already knew months before. I had spotted a sister in her long before she announced what her proper pronouns are. There wasn’t a moment of surprise, merely confirmation, because I had already seen her at least a year before.94 Sisters know our own.
So then, what can I say about Autistic women? I can say that we’re grossly underdiagnosed, partly because of messed up checklists that try to paint a reductionist portrait of a group
Autistic children face an extra barrier when they are subjected to compliance training. Compliance training intentionally works toward breaking a person down and rebuilding them in a different image.
Compliance training teaches that resistance is futile and torment ends more quickly when a person just gives in and does what others want.
Children raised with compliance training struggle to find a sense of self in the midst of all the demands placed on them. And children raised with compliance training learn early on that they do not own their body.
Those statistics you saw in the last chapter about rape and abuse? They apply to all Autistics, but Autistics viewed as female take the lion’s share of that rape and abuse. There are counters that we try to teach our non-autistic daughters: run away, scream, kick, hit, bite, shout ”NO!” as loudly as you can. Every one of those defense mechanisms have been systematically disabled in girls who go through compliance training under any name or overarching philosophy. Compliance training, by design, creates victims out of Autistic men and compliance training coupled with social standards creates
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It is terrible when the defining factors Autistic women share are things like oppression, lack of services, lack of recognition, and widespread abuse. That is why I love to focus on the sisterhood we share. I prefer to think about the bonding moments. I met an Autistic girl recently and was pleasantly shocked to see how much easier it is for me to make eye contact with her than with most people. She doesn’t speak, but she reached out to touch my face, then laid her head against me, and I felt myself melt from the inside out with shared love. This is how I define my life as an Autistic female.
