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7:58am April 11, 2014
Anonymous asked: i feel ridiculously uneducated asking this but what is allism/allistic people? i tried googling it and got confusing answers, so i thought i'd ask you.

gingerautie:

Ah, sorry. Don’t feel uneducated, and don’t ever feel silly asking questions, especially if you’ve googled :)  Allistic is not a particularly well known word outside a relatively small community of autistic bloggers/activists. Allistic means non-autistic.

It’s kind of like cisgender, or straight, in that it is a word used to mean non-autistic which avoids positing not being autistic as the norm.  It’s used to avoid talking about autistic people and normal people, which has the same kind of issues talking about gay people and normal people, and trans people and normal people does.

I believe it came originally from one of those parody “signs of allism” things where people discuss non-autistic people the way neurotypical doctors discuss us (like field notes on allistics), that was around in the early 2000s. Etymologically it’s a play on autism, where aut- = self, so allism is all- = others. So it’s parodying the idea that we’re turned in on our selves. (Do correct me if I’m wrong here people)

It differs from the word neurotypical (sometimes abbreviated to NT) in that NT means people who don’t have autism or any other neurodevelopmental disorder/difference (ADHD, Downs, dyslexia) or any mental health problems (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia) or any brain injuries. Someone whose brain would be considered typical essentially. Allistic just means non-autistic, so you can be a dyslexic, epileptic person with anxiety and still be allistic, but you wouldn’t be considered neurotypical.

Does that explain things better?

It didn’t come from a parody, it came from an autistic girl named Ettina, who spent years trying to popularize it (maybe about 8 to 10 years) before it really caught on.  But it was the early 2000s that she thought it up.