Autistic community issues: Gatekeeping edition

k-pagination:

Hi. This is re: the special interest terminology kerfluffle. I am an autistic person with ADHD. I have a request. Could you stop telling me that I have to use two different words to describe the same experience I have that I have no idea which “diagnosis” it comes from? (By the way, brains are not partitioned like that, so my neurology is affected by both, sometimes in very interchangeable ways that you don’t know which one is which!)

Related – the autistic community, as @alliecat-person​ points out here – has a pretty long history, some of which I have put together at @ourautistichistory​, and some of which is probably lost as domain names expired or the list servs went defunct. But the moderator of @actuallyadhd​, who has ADHD, has been involved with list servs and later platforms of the autistic community since 1994. She is an autistic cousin, which is a decades-old term that refers to someone “who is not NT, is not quite autistic, but is recognizably “autistic-like” particularly in terms of communication and social characteristics.”

To ignore that fact, along with @alliecat-person​‘s note that these kinds of words have not been considered exclusive to the autistic community from the start – which is roughly three decades ago – is negligent. A community should know its history, and we need to know our history to work for change. 

And it tells people that we are not a community that welcomes people unless they share our specific neurotype. It tells many people who are wondering if they are autistic that we are a community who will not welcome them. That may make them afraid to approach us, or learn more about autistic community and autistic culture. It tells people we are a community who is willing to gatekeep, and that is not what I want people to think of the community I love and fight for.