There are bad-faith actors trying to convince people that autism is “caused” by vaccines and similar garbage. They see the growing autistic population as a “woke epidemic”
Not even that necessarily, they just like to act as if a lot of autism diagnoses are made up or at least severely exaggerated.
shit like “bah you’re not autistic, you’re just an introvert, you just need to try harder!”
I’ve faced this myself from my mom’s SO, he was just fucking incapable of entertaining the idea that i’m autistic before i got my diagnosis, despite working with other neurodivergent people and accepting them! It’s maddening.
People still think of autism in like… Rain Man-terms.
As much as people like to think popular depictions (The Big Bang Theory, Abed in Community, etc) of autistic behavioral patterns are somehow furthering “the cause” (whatever that is) - ultimately, they amount to little more than vaudeville and can be incredibly damaging to people who don’t “seem autistic”.
It’s very tiring to assure people that yes, you are indeed autistic, when all they know is Sheldon Cooper and Raymond Babbitt.
Especially annoying if they think you’re some sort of genius, when the average autistic’s intelligence generally is lower than average.
Especially now that so many fucking lunatic autistics are committing atrocities.
If you’re obviously greatly disabled autistic=not threatening
High functioning autistic=liability
I was diagnosed 20 years ago, and even I had a very hard time recognizing and accepting that my own partner is also autistic (now diagnosed as an adult).
But then again, it seems to manifest dramatically different in men v.s. women, as well as there not really being any depictions of autistic women in media for the longest time.
And a gigantic part of autistic women no doubt went undiagnosed for a long time (and still are).
i’m curious where you get the part of autistic people on average having lower intelligence, afaik the opposite is true. Better pattern recognition and stuff like that, with the tradeoff of generally struggling more with social stuff.
There are bad-faith actors trying to convince people that autism is “caused” by vaccines and similar garbage. They see the growing autistic population as a “woke epidemic”
Not even that necessarily, they just like to act as if a lot of autism diagnoses are made up or at least severely exaggerated.
shit like “bah you’re not autistic, you’re just an introvert, you just need to try harder!”
I’ve faced this myself from my mom’s SO, he was just fucking incapable of entertaining the idea that i’m autistic before i got my diagnosis, despite working with other neurodivergent people and accepting them! It’s maddening.
People still think of autism in like… Rain Man-terms.
As much as people like to think popular depictions (The Big Bang Theory, Abed in Community, etc) of autistic behavioral patterns are somehow furthering “the cause” (whatever that is) - ultimately, they amount to little more than vaudeville and can be incredibly damaging to people who don’t “seem autistic”.
It’s very tiring to assure people that yes, you are indeed autistic, when all they know is Sheldon Cooper and Raymond Babbitt.
Especially annoying if they think you’re some sort of genius, when the average autistic’s intelligence generally is lower than average.
Especially now that so many fucking lunatic autistics are committing atrocities.
If you’re obviously greatly disabled autistic=not threatening High functioning autistic=liability
I was diagnosed 20 years ago, and even I had a very hard time recognizing and accepting that my own partner is also autistic (now diagnosed as an adult).
But then again, it seems to manifest dramatically different in men v.s. women, as well as there not really being any depictions of autistic women in media for the longest time.
And a gigantic part of autistic women no doubt went undiagnosed for a long time (and still are).
i’m curious where you get the part of autistic people on average having lower intelligence, afaik the opposite is true. Better pattern recognition and stuff like that, with the tradeoff of generally struggling more with social stuff.
So you are trying to say there is a bad-failth-actor-idemic. Got it.