2:45am October 4, 2014

Has anyone noticed…

Autistic people spend our entire lives learning about how nonautistic people’s minds work and how to interact with them, and we do a pretty good job at it, considering the massive gap we’re dealing with and the fact that we get no formal education in these areas for the most part.

Nonautistic people sometimes spend their entire school career studying autistic people and how our minds work.  They get a lot wrong.  They get a lot wrong.  They get far more wrong about us than we get wrong about them.  They make wrong theories about us.  They design research to prove their wrong theories right, which they can almost always do.  Then they get papers published about what makes autistic people tick, and after that some of them get bestselling books published as well.

Autistic people get no credit for understanding nonautistic people as well as we do, even though we understand them better than they understand us, overall.  (We have to, for survival.)  We can’t get a degree in this.  We can’t get jobs teaching people about nonautistic people, not usually anyway.  We can’t write books and we don’t get paid.

Nonautistic people get money, prestige, fame, and all kinds of things just for making really wild-ass guesses about what makes us work.   They don’t even have to be right.  Or anywhere close to right.

WTF.

Signed,

The Grumpy Stick

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