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7:27pm April 18, 2013

I can’t write at length about this because I feel really sick right now.

But maybe I’ll end up writing at length about it anyway.

But anyway.

So there was a place and time in certain autistic communities, where people thought that Jim Sinclair and Donna Williams were THE people to emulate. Where people thought that all real autistic people were like them, and it was literally not okay to be different from them. (Never mind they’re quite different from each other in some ways.)

I actually have a lot in common with Donna Williams and a fair bit in common with Jim Sinclair. That’s just who I am, I can’t help that. But I weirdly enough experienced the pressure to be like them, as worse than the pressure to be like different stereotypes that I am not.

I was new to the idea of being autistic then, and there were some people who had jumped at the opportunity to “mentor” me into the autistic community, and were feeding me a lot of weird lines about how I had to be certain ways because all real autistic people are.

And being very similar to the stereotypes, meant that it was harder for me to differentiate when I was just being myself, from when I was adopting a stereotype very like myself (but not quite because a stereotype is never quite like anyone). And it was very confusing and harmful to my ability to become self-aware about my autistic traits. I would say I was a certain way because everyone told me to be that way, and then later on I had to wonder, was I really this way, or was I just caving to pressure? And of course I would adopt traits that really had nothing to do with me, just because someone fairly similar to me happened to have those traits. And later on I would have to detach those ideas from my self-concept.

And when I began to realize the extent to which I’d been pressured into acting certain ways, describing myself certain ways, I went too far the other way. I began saying “I’m not really that way” even when I was. Because I knew there was pressure to be that way, and I had trouble figuring out that yes I really was that way even though I was pressured to be like that.

And these are problems common to people first figuring out what it means for themselves to be autistic. I think these pressures are worst on people new to the idea of being autistic, or still trying to figure out who they are in relation to autism. Especially if they have any tendency to be gullible or easily led, which many autistic people do.

These days people don’t, in the communities I’ve seen, seem to be pressured to be like Donna Williams so much. (Except among a small segment of people who have decided that “real auties, unlike aspies” are like her, which I find disgusting. Mind you, I don’t think any person that people are pressured to be like, are at fault for people pressuring people to be like them. EXCEPT if they themselves cause some of the pressure.) But the pressure is no less destructive, no less confusing for people new to self-understanding as autistic.

And yes. There are people who are pretty much exactly like the stereotypes. Or at least, they’re exactly like the words of the stereotypes. They’re still not like the stereotypes. As in, even Donna Williams and Jim Sinclair could never live up to the stereotypes created in their name, where everything they ever wrote became a dogma for some people to emulate.

For instance, Jim Sinclair once wrote that xe wanted to interact with people but didn’t need to in the way nonautistic people did. Then, when I tried to say that some autistic people needed social interaction, another autistic person, one of the people trying to mentor me into the community, told me “It’s okay if we want social interaction, it’s just not okay if we need it.” That was straight out of Jim Sinclair’s writing, but that was personal writing about xemself, not ever intended to be a demand made of other autistic people. But people turned it into a demand, just like they turned it into a demand for autistic people to have “characters” (which is how Donna’s plurality was interpreted at the time) for use during social interaction.

And the reason I have such a problem with all this has nothing to do with whether I fit the words used to describe the stereotype, or not. It has to do with watching fifteen years worth of different autistic subcommunities online, where some smaller group within these communities always made these demands of other autistic people. Where you weren’t a real autistic person unless you were the stereotype. Where your experiences of the world meant nothing. Where the incredible diversity within the autistic community was torn to shreds in favor of one or another type of autistic person (whether real or imaginary or some part both) being the “only real kind”.

And… Understanding yourself is a really fundamental thing for people to do. To harm people’s self understanding is something I see as one of the worst things you can do to a person. Like Josiah said, autistic people who do this to each other aren’t totally at fault for it. But at the same time, the entire process of doing this to each other is so destructive, and it’s destructive to everyone in the community whether they fit the stereotype or not, whether they try to force themselves to conform to the stereotype or not.

One reason that I know people are forcing themselves and each other to conform, is that different autistic communities would favor different types of autistic people, and suddenly the same people, in different communities, would become whoever the community favored. It gets to where if someone said liking the color green was an autistic thing, everyone suddenly liked the color green, regardless of their actual preferences, and suddenly liking the color green became the way of determining whether someone was a real autistic person or not.

And I’m always going to speak up about these messed up community dynamics. Because I’ve seen the great harm done to me and other people, and I can’t just sweep it under the rug in the name of keeping a community together. (Honestly I’m not all that interested in keeping an “autistic community” together, because I don’t have a lot invested in such a community. And if a community can’t withstand some soul searching, it’s not much of a community.) I’ve been seeing this for too long. And my problem with it is not what kind of autistic person becomes the “real autistic person of the week ™”, but rather the damage done to all the people involved. Everyone. Whether anyone wants to recognize that damage or not, I will recognize that damage, because it’s really horrible and deep and bad and it hurts real live actual people in long-term, damaging ways. 15 years is too long to be silent.