Where researchers mired in the pathology paradigm might have framed social anxiety as a “symptom” of autism or a “comorbid condition” (thus implicitly framing autism as a pathological “condition”), we explicitly acknowledged that social anxiety in the autistic population was a symptom of the extensive social trauma neurotypical society inflicts upon autistics from childhood—in other words, that what we sought to treat was a symptom not of autism but of traumatic oppression.
