“

Well, as I wrote to The Advocate, modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) are part of language for reasons that have soundness. Modifiers facilitate the transmission of meaning with efficiency. Sentences without modifiers end to have awkwardness and to display the quality of stiltedness. In addition, since people who do not have language processing problems can with instantaneity translate sentences without modifiers into sentences with modifiers, the degree to which creating phrases that have convolutedness causes people with language processing problems to experience confusion may exceed the degree to which it causes people without language processing problems to experience consciousness raising. I have giftedness with language, so I can translate clauses of nominality into adjectives with adequacy of facility. I’m also autistic, and I prefer nomenclature that has straightforwardness.

Reason #1, in other words, is that autistic people typically prefer straightforward language and are easily confused by convoluted language.

Adding extra words and grammatical contortions to say exactly the same thing that can be said with a single adjective makes it more difficult for autistic people to participate in discussion. Therefore, doing this within a context where autistic people could reasonably be expected to want to participate (such as discussions about autism) shows little more than inconsideration and disrespect for autistic people’s communications.

The fact that non-autistic people came up with the term “person with
autism” is not in itself a reason for me to reject the term. After all,
it was also non-autistic people who came up with the term “autistic,” and it was non-autistic people who invented language in the first place. But when I–and other autistic people–choose to refer to ourselves as autistic and express our preference for being referred to that way, and we are told that our opinions don’t count because non-autistic people have decided it’s better for us to be called something else, this shows absolute contemptfor us as self-aware, communicatively competent people.

The idea of putting the “person first” in language makes about as little semantic sense as saying “White Christmas” is racist. Adjectives *always* refer to nouns, and in English, adjectives usually precede the nouns they modify. “Autistic person” is perfectly correct English. Furthermore, when you say, “So-and-so is autistic,” it goes without saying that you’re referring to a person. Autism is a characteristic that occurs in persons.

A chair cannot be autistic. A mushroom cannot be autistic. Only a person can be autistic. We may say that language or behavior are autistic, but again, the language or behavior being referred to is the language or behavior of persons. What “autistic behavior” really means is “behavior that is characteristic of autistic people.”

Your “belief in a common bond of humanity which transcends belief
structures” is not usually manifested through contorted language. Non-autistic people have not decided to banish *all* adjectives when referring to people. Qualities that are considered neutral or positive are still described with adjectives: You say “tall person” and not “person of height,” “blond person” and not “person with low hair pigmentation,” “athletic person” and not “person with athleticism.”

This is considered acceptable because in connection with physical appearance or areas of skill and interest, you can agree that terms like tall, blond, and athletic apply to persons. When you decide it’s necessary to take an adjective away, to separate the quality from the person, you are revealing the belief that there’s something *wrong* with that quality–something so wrong that having it connected with one’s personhood somehow diminishes that personhood. I am aware that it has been a common perception that autistic people have diminished personhood (a perception fostered by the writings of people like Bettelheim and now carried on by neo- Bettelheimians like Frith), but this is a perception held and promoted by non-autistic people. To put it bluntly, *your* prejudices are not *our* problem, and you should find ways to deal with your prejudices without trying to cut our nature off from our personhood. It is tremendously invalidating to say that people’s basic perceptual and mental processes are so inferior that they’re not compatible with personhood.

Autism is not a peripheral attribute that can be cut off and still leave the same person without it. You could have a different physical shape and appearance, a different hobby, a different set of skills in areas that are not central to your personality, and you would still be yourself. Yet you see no problem with using adjectives to describe those characteristics of yourself. What about attributes that are more significant–things like culture, gender, or spirituality? Do you call yourself a person with femaleness, a female person, or a woman? A person with American citizenship, or an American? What about your relationships with your family, the people who mean the most to you: Are you a person who has offspring, or a mother? When attributes or circumstances are important enough to be central to a person’s lifestyle, there’s a tendency to use *nouns* rather than adjectives to describe them, and again, no one questions that it’s a *person* who is being referred to as a woman, American, Presbyterian, or whatever. What’s the difference between being musical (adjective) and being a musician (noun)? One indicates a greater importance of music in the person’s life. Are these descriptives depersonalizing? Would it be more respectful to refer to both the musical person and the musician as “persons with musicality”?

Yet autism runs at least as deep as any of those other central attributes. Deeper than most, in fact. Persons who are not autistic share many many common experiences and perceptions regardless of things like gender, culture, religion, family status, etc., which are not shared by persons who are autistic. And as more of us discover each other, we’re beginning to find that persons who are autistic share common experiences and perceptions which are not shared by non-autistic persons. Autism is an integral part of who we are. Of course it’s not ALL of who we are (any more than being female or American, etc., is ALL of who anyone is), but it is an inseparable part of who we are. It is not possible to separate the autism from the personhood: if we were not autistic, we would not be ourselves. That’s why some of us refer to ourselves simply as autistics, as a noun. The reference implicitly assumes that an autistic is a person. “Autistic” simply describes a certain *kind* of person. There’s no stigma in it because there’s nothing wrong with being autistic. It’s just one way of being human, that’s all.

Apart from all the theoretical considerations, there’s also my own personal experience with the ways non-autistic people treat me. It seems that among people who insist on making a distinction between the person and the autism, I am never seen and related to as myself. I’m seen either as a person with AUTISM–the autism overshadowing the personhood so that I’m seen only as a collection of symptoms and deficits, not as a credible, self-aware, self-directed being–or as a PERSON with autism–I’m seen as a person (at least initially), but I’m expected to be a person “just like everyone else,” with no recognition or tolerance for the differences between me and people who aren’t autistic. This often leads to mistreatment when I don’t fulfill those expectations. In order to know *me*, you have to recognize both my personhood and my autism at the same time. You can’t break them up.

”

— Jim Sinclair, Thanks, Susan (a Usenet post that was the first coherent objection to person-first language by an autistic person, back in 1992)  More autistic history you probably never knew about, given that most people’s memories seem to go back 5 years at best…