Learning about Autism

First let's define autism. Autism is a pervasive developmental disability that affects communication, movement, and sensory processing. The amount of support each autistic person needs varies.

There is a lot of misogyny is the autistic diagnosis process. Many AFAB autists are refused diagnosis, and the misogyny has lead to harmful sterotypes. The "extreme male brain" theory being the most infamous. This theory is quite self explainable, it says that autists process the

world through a male lens. Because of this theory the diagnosis process adhere to this, if someone doesn't have a special interest for stereotypical "man stuff" then they can't possibly be autistic and are passed over. The diagnosis process also doesn't take into account how

because of societal pressures AFAB autists "pass" better and are generally better at masking (will be defined later in the thread) than AMAB are. AFAB often get comments saying "You can't be autistic you act so normal" when telling someone we're autistic. Many people see this as

a good thing and a privilege. Being able to pass as allistic should be good right? This idea is incorrect and very harmful. Masking, acting allistic, for long periods of time harm our psyche greatly. I personally have been masking for most of my life and the entire process makes

me paranoid. While I'm masking all I think of is "Is what I'm doing normal" "Is this weird? Am I doing this right". Essentially you're constantly playing a character, not letting yourself feel the emotions you want to feel, do the actions you want to do. A life of constant

masking is a life of forcing yourself to never live how you want to live. All of the former items listed cause autism in AFABs to be dismissed or seen ad “not serious”, in some cases we’re erased from the conversation all together.

Now let's talk about some harmful ideologies people have about autists. It seems that allistics either see autists as people who can do nothing for ourselves and need to be babied or completely ignoring that we're autistic and expecting us to act allistic.

In the first case allistics use this to speak over us on our struggles. "They're different so they can't do that" "Oh but you know they don't understand" These are often sentiments used to validate speaking over autists. I see this most often with family members of autist

"babying" or trying to act like their autist family member is dumb so they can't speak for themself. Don't do that. We are perfectly capable of speaking for ourselves. On to the second ideology. While you shouldn't act like we're babies we still aren't allistic, therefore we will

not act allistic, ever. While we can mask and pretend to be allistic we will never see things or understand things as an allistic does, you can't treat us like we can. An example of this would be a boss getting mad at their autistic employee because she can't understand what

they're saying. Because we are autistic we cannot understand societal cues and norms that well, often causing us to not know what someone means, or not being able to understand the full/implied message. You don't expect an apple to turn into a pear, so don't expect an autist to

act allistic.

Tw for abuse and sexual assault

Because we are autistic we are more likely to experience abuse in our relationships. It's consider normal for us to be abused during childhood because "that's how you discipline them" causing us to find it normal and not seeing it as bad in

relationships. We're more susceptible to sexual assault because it's hard for us to detect lies, social cues, etc. For example if someone told an allistic "Come inside so you can see my dog" they would probably be able to tell that they aren't being truthful. We often can't tell

leading us to be raped or coerced into sex.