Universally Autistic

 Naming autistic difference is treated as threat, as it is not to be respected, merely managed.

It all started with a phone call. A relative had found a group for autistic people which actually had heard of autistic burnout – success! About as rare a feat in Norway as it is to realize you're surrounded by bears in a dark forest. I was intrigued, but wary. Too many seemingly neurodivergent-friendly spaces turn out to be run with neurotypical sensibilities and measures in mind, even if they say they're not on the tin. Having burned myself too many times on such ventures, amazing I said yes to this one.

To have an invisible dynamic disability or a neurological condition is sometimes a struggle. It fluctuates day by day and what seemed effortless on Monday can spell a breakdown on Thursday. I've recently come across (and in the progress of relistening to) the podcast Autistic After Hours (more specifically episodes 23, 30, 42, 74 and 75) and it has put into words some of those struggles. The annoyance at being talked down to in otherwise educational settings, however, is not yet among her topics of interest. 

Six participants, five group leaders. We discussed the aim of the group. We spoke of executive functions. We spoke of how to handle stress. We did not venture deep into matters, only as much as the table talk allowed. It was very preschool. An odd choice for grown adults, but I digress. I spoke too much, excited and wanting to share of my knowledge. An opportunity, I thought. It turned out, this particular group wanted engaged listeners rather than speakers. Or else very shallow speakers, as this was a beginners' group for all intents and purposes. Seemingly convinced that to talk of heavy topics or big words like burnout, suicide, aspie supremacy, ABA, autistic history or breakdowns and insisted every little inkling of ASC was part of the “universal human experience”. A fact I was told several times when I outlined the stated differences between neurotypes in relation to just about anything.

What universal human experience, pray tell, causes mid-breakdown teens to be shot by police? To not recognize the stages to fullblown burnout because no one has told them of the hazards, including suicide ideation? To experience complex post-traumatic stress due to societal misfittings? Any such experience ought to be deeply disturbing, as it infantilizes ASC as a cookie-cutter experience and shields those living autistic experiences from discovering ways to learn their own diagnosis. Akin to the aforementioned bears in the woods. If you do not know that bears exist in hunter capacity, you might be fooled by cultural and stereotypical depictions of it and cause you not to notice the very real and hungry bear in the dark woods.

The aim of this course is to teach autistic people about their own diagnosis by way of worksheets and show them tools by way of talking in groups about their experiences. Very standard fare. Welcoming all shades on the wheel, it preassumes no prior knowledge and takes things slow. It asks to leave all assumptions of the (very real) differences between autistic and allistic people behind as you enter the room, as it ruins the aforementioned universal human experience to separate the two neurotypes. One is consistently stressed by living in a world run by neurotypical assumptions and sensibilities; the other barely notices and asks that we quietly anguish over the injustices of the world. In short, autistic people, late diagnosed or not, learn through trial and error to hide our internal pain to reduce additional external pain. I am unsure if neurotypicals do that to the same extent, as it involves masking and neglecting one's need and be misunderstood and infantilized for getting upset. 

Lived autistic experience is not a cute inspiration to force everyone into, regardless of intent or ethics. It does not help if the ‘good helpers’ do not help, but uphold problematic systematic patterns built into methods, structure and culture. I say, as I have done countless times before; it helps little to offer a tooth pick for support when your foundations are rotting beneath your feet. And you center those who uphold and perpetuate the neuronormative status quo and not the ones pointing out the institutional failiures at play. Autistic pain is dangerous to allistic comfort, as it threatens the fiction that our struggles (and by definition human experience) are the same. On the bloody contrary. Difference enriches the human experience; what diminishes it is denying a neurominority's realities. An autistic life experience is as valid as any other disabled experience. It is not a quirk to be ironed out in unequal settings.

Difference, argues disability scholar Jasbir Puar, is not pathology; it challenges the normative as a violent construct and provides alternative ways of thinking and being. The norm is not neutral, but a product of systems of power. Normal is premitted, abnormal managed. The violence is soft. The discordant voice is shamed, silenced and surveiled into compliance. To police the abnormal's language when they prove too witty or clever for the reigning status quo. Such tools present themselves as neutral, even helpful, yet they enforce a hierarchy in which normal is superior and deviation is pathologized. The pressure remains meekness; grateful, apolitical, dependent on support groups and access to peers of one's own neurotype, regardless of their compatablity or knowledge of their own state. Normativity causes debility (maim without killing, in the words of Puar) and debility causes burnout.

Imagine for a moment the same dismissal and infantilization happening to any other visible disability. A blind person being criticized for speaking of the differences between a blind and sighted individual. “Now, now. Careful of dividing blind from sighted. We're all human at the end of the day. Being tired from walking in stairs or getting a headache from taking the tram is just a natural part of the universal human experience!” It would be seen in abysmally poor taste and the person in question rightfully asked to apologize. 

The patterns of oppression is rightfully critiqued, not the severity of the disability itself. Interdisability solidarity is a stand against ableism everywhere, as it tears down the imagined barriers and fosters greater understanding. Scholars across the board like Puar, Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson stress how normativity oppresses difference, not by ranking, but through imagined hierarchies. The hierarchy of suffering is a tool of the ableist, the comparison a standard move in critical disability studies. It reveals how insidious ableism is and how it slithers across contexts, pitting conditions against each other and miring each group in their own struggle. Refusing or calling out comparison as discriminatory or bitter, only highlights how ableism operates differently across conditions. 

Conflicting needs is a different angle. For example's sake, let's assume that in a group of autistic people, there is a peer who also happens to be visually impaired. Accomodiations for success demand dim lights to avoid sensory overload, but in the case of their peer, the light must be brightend to facilitate safe navigation, yet she reads braille. She has a guide dog that also knows autistic service dog commands, yet one of her peers is deathly allergic to dogs. Both needs are valid, but they collide. Would then a lamp be offered, or must the fluorescent lights be lit for the duration of the time? Would the dog have to remain outside once her partner was safely seated? An absurd example, surely. There is no winning or losing side, there is only accomodation, in a perfect world. Yet we live and die in an imperfect one. In this imagined example, the blind autistic person's disability would ‘win’ because her disability is visible to organizers, and easily understandable. The allergic autistic peer is to be assigned to a different group, or asked to attend via video link, because the visible disability is easiest to comprehend. To manage. To care for. The lights remain bright, and resentment festers.

This is structural ableism at work. It pits marginalized persons against each other in a false binary of validity: visible vs invisible, comprehensible vs confusing ect. As Puar argues, this is how debility is produced; not through outright exclusion, but through impossible compromises that slowly erode dignity. And as disability activist Mia Mingus reminds us, true access can never arise from one-size-fits-all, but from access intimacy — the willingness to negotiate, listen and share the burden of accomodation creatively rather than assign it to the most visible body in the room. Despite the ableist rethoric perpetuated. Disability is diversity and society needs to take that into account when offering services designed to help either visually or invisibly disabled people. 

 

When disability is visible society tends to acknowledge it, however clumsily. Getting a guide dog to ride in a taxi due to canine prejudice might be a daily struggle and cause for stress, but at least the condition and hassle is noticed. And enshrined in law. Visible disability can be narrated in terms of disparity; invisible disability must be enquirked or enfreaked or else assimilated to fit the neuronormative status quo. Puar calls normativity a violent construct and this is exactly what she means. The demand is not that autistic adults be understood, but that we erase the difference to preserve the illusion of universality. Our comfort is secondary, even in spaces that claim to include, support and nurture us. To acknowledge that autistic and allistic minds opperate differently is not division; it is truth.