mulder-are-you-suggesting:

k-pagination:

“Some Autistics who talk neurodiversity on the Internet also like to ascribe certain Autistic traits to select narratives. One such narrative is that those of us who identify ourselves as speaking Autistics tend to be non-visibly Autistic and have few direct support needs. Often, the narrative includes the idea that we’ve learned how read non-autistic people’s behavior or at least mimic it…There are Autistic people who fit this narrative, and there is nothing wrong with that. The issue occurs when the narrative doesn’t make room for other people’s stories.

…

People who espouse this narrative seem to assume that other Autistics have the same struggles and the same strengths – and therefore there is no room to even consider what high-support Autistic people, and other people who don’t fit the narrative, can contribute to our movement.”

I’ve found that, even in autistic spaces, people often seem to assume
that autistic people like myself (I can communicate via speech, am
considered “high functioning” and didn’t get diagnosed until adulthood,
but I’m also very obviously autistic, and can’t successfully do the
“pretend to be a neurotypical” thing) don’t exist. I hear a lot of
people talking about why dividing autistic people up into “high” vs.
“low functioning” is bad, but at the same time, I see people who do this
also making the assumption that people who get put into these
categories actually fit the stereotypes associated with them. So it gets
turned from “what people who are high or low functioning are like” to
“what people who get called high or low functioning are like” and
I don’t fit a lot of the stereotypes about what
people who get called “high functioning” are supposedly like.

Expecting ways of communicating to define an Autistic person