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4:48am June 11, 2014
pixieboy01 asked: Do you know why people on here say allistic instead of neurotypical? It's nothing bad in being atypical, it just means you're statistically less common than those not on the spectrum. I have AS myself. In Sweden we use neurotypical a lot.

Because neurotypical doesn’t mean the same thing as nonautistic.  Neurotypical means you have no neurological differences — a person with ADHD is not neurotypical, for instance, even if they are not autistic.

Why they use allistic, though, is a different matter.  It used to be that people used to just use nonautistic, if they wanted something more specific than neurotypical.  Nonautistic just means not autistic, the same thing allistic means.

Then an autistic teen came along and wanted to make a specific word that meant not autistic.  She saw that autistic meant aut- from self and -istic, so self-istic.  And so she got the opposite of self all- meaning other-, and made allistic, or other-istic.  I find this pretty offensive because it implies that autistic means self-centered and nonautistic means other-centered, and that this is the main difference between autistic and nonautistic people.  

For many years, only a few people used the word allistic.  Most people just did not care to need a new word when the word nonautistic was already there for specifically nonautistic, and neurotypical was already there for specifically having no neurological differences at all.  And some people, me included, didn’t like the implications of allistic as if autistic people are centered on ourselves and nonautistic people are centered on others.

At some point, fairly recently, though, and heavily powered by tumblr as far as I can see (or at least by people who are also on tumblr), tons and tons and tons of people started saying allistic.  And they started saying that this was because it was like an equivalent to ‘cis’.  Like there’s cisgendered and transgendered, cis and trans.  And that it’s more respectful somehow to say cis instead of non-trans, because saying cis normalizes being trans.  And that saying allistic normalizes being autistic in a way that nonautistic doesn’t.  At least, these are the reasons that were given to me recently when I told people that I really, really don’t like the implications of the word allistic.

(In the course of that conversation, however, people also assumed that I am either a nonautistic person, or an NT-passing autistic person, and that I must just not understand the struggles of the very autistic people who really are self-oriented.  Or else that I must mean that there’s something wrong with being self-oriented.  None of those assumptions were true, I just care about accuracy, and autistic people are no more self-oriented overall than nonautistic people, so it pisses me off to use a word that was deliberately coined to mean that we are.)

Anyway, I don’t actually buy the argument that allistic caught on because it normalizes the word autistic in a way that the word nonautistic doesn’t.  I think it caught on because people were using the word and it spread.  Then, after it had spread, people came up with explanations for why it was a really good idea.  But not before it had already spread a good deal.  I don’t think they were thinking too hard about the matter as the word was spreading.  I’ve seen a lot of words spread in the same manner, and they don’t generally have logical explanations for why they spread.  They just hit a certain critical mass and explode and suddenly everyone is using them.  And that’s probably the real reason that it eventually caught on — enough people started using it, that it spread faster and faster until it was extremely widespread.

So basically, someone invented it, probably circa 2002.  It didn’t really spread.  A tiny number of people used it, most people ignored it.  Then sometime probably around 2010 or later, it exploded.  Words do that.  Especially in certain kinds of communities where new words spread like wildfire.

But basically… there did need to be another word besides neurotypical, because neurotypical doesn’t just mean non-autistic.  But there was another word – non-autistic.  So there was no actual necessity for allistic.  Except when you want to “normalize autistic” which is part of an ideology I don’t buy into, so I still don’t think it’s necessary.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this