Alongside drama going on around Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, some autism related questions have surfaced. People ask, how much autism explains a person’s bad or incomprehensible behavior. Short answer: no more than a neurotypical person’s neurotypicality explains and justfies their behaviors. Claiming otherwise is nentism. The nentistic prejudics I discuss today are particularly disgusting, because […]
I received as reader feedback the following question I thought for a great topic for a blog post: ”My friend/colleague/this person I’ve met appears to be autistic. Because learning about my autism has helped me a lot, I’m wondering if N could also benefit from such knowledge. How could I bring the matter up respectfully, […]
Inspired by a Twitter mutual, I asked DALL’E’s idea of what does an autistic consultant look like. This was the answer: Here we have, quite neatly, summed up all stereotypical, outdated, misinformed prejudices and clichés associated with autistic people. But where is the consultant? I ran DALL-E with just the word ”consultant”, and it looks […]
Recently, there has been interesting discussion about autistic socializing and friendships in online autistic community. Myths about autistic people being hermits by nature or difficult and trying people nobody in their right mind would want to be friends with are both old and persistent. Empathy gap between neurotypes (Milton 2012), on the other hand, is […]
Aida A. is a young but already accomplished Finnish autism activist. Recently she represented autists at kickoff of Finland’s parliament’s neurodivergence network. Kaiao got the permission to translate and share her speech, which describes some current troubles of autistic people, especially children and young people. Launching of the neurodivergence network is a strong signal of […]
I have sent the following letter to researchers of University of Tampere, in response to this article posted on Neurocenter’s website. Feedback, referring to your recent article @Neurocenter’s website Dear Reija and Matti, I’m writing to comment your recent article concerning of your participation to GEMMA research on Neurocenter’s website from ethical point of view, […]
Well-meaning neurotypical people tell autists surprisingly often, that autism is nothing to be ashamed of. They look very kind, but I always wonder, who exactly are they talking to? I don’t think it’s autistic people. I think so, because per definition, autists have challenges in social interaction and in various tasks related to perceiving social […]
One can perceive an interesting pattern in both international and local autism discussion: autistic people are sidelined, and often absent from it. Instead, neurotypical people are portrayed as ”autism experts”, and neurotypical people also represent autistic people in matters that concern us. There are many reasons for this…and all of them are bad. Most obvious […]
A common and very harmful prejudice against autistic people is, that we are really unpleasant, rude and annoying people. Many people believe that we are difficult to like and almost impossible to love. Knowing this places autists between a rock and a hard place when pondering, whether to disclose autism and face all the prejudice […]
Today, autism information is fairly abundant. However, quality of that information is a huge issue. There is a lot of information that tells more about prejudices and subjective interpretations of its producers than about reality of autism. Some of that information is used to give credibility to actions that cause autistic people suffering or are […]