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 […]
Update/2022: We now have a new word, created by me my collaboration for ASY’s (Suomen Autismikirjon Yhdistys ry.) project for equal glossary for autism. In the project a Finnish glossary was created to replace outdated and unequal autism terminology. The glossary also included some new terminology to describe autistic experience. By definition, nentism is prejudice, […]