Tumblr crosspost (8 February 2021)
May. 9th, 2024 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineAutism rant:
People tell me “I’m awkward, maybe I’m on the spectrum too!” so often and … okay.
I know there are autistic people who have milder cases than I do, so it’s not fair to be like, well, that lacks features of my experience of it and therefore can’t be the real deal. Nor is the exact mixture of sensory, processing, verbal, social, etc issues going to escalate along a smoothly graded path—people can have more severe difficulties in some areas and less in others, compared to other autistic people. So even people whose autism is roughly comparable to mine might deal more with things I don’t struggle with as much and less with things I do struggle with and look quite different on the outside.
In any case, I’m not equipped to diagnose or anti-diagnose(??) people in general.
But still. I’m so wtf at this whole “autism == social awkwardness” thing.
Tagged: #istg some people act like being kind of awkward and having hobbies is all it's about
People tell me “I’m awkward, maybe I’m on the spectrum too!” so often and … okay.
I know there are autistic people who have milder cases than I do, so it’s not fair to be like, well, that lacks features of my experience of it and therefore can’t be the real deal. Nor is the exact mixture of sensory, processing, verbal, social, etc issues going to escalate along a smoothly graded path—people can have more severe difficulties in some areas and less in others, compared to other autistic people. So even people whose autism is roughly comparable to mine might deal more with things I don’t struggle with as much and less with things I do struggle with and look quite different on the outside.
In any case, I’m not equipped to diagnose or anti-diagnose(??) people in general.
But still. I’m so wtf at this whole “autism == social awkwardness” thing.
Tagged: #istg some people act like being kind of awkward and having hobbies is all it's about
no subject
on 2024-05-10 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2024-05-10 05:51 am (UTC)In my experience (not everyone's!), it's more common for people to headcanon characters as autistic based on evidence ranging from the ephemeral to pretty strong, and then present them in fic or headcanon posts as actual autistic people with real symptoms, even if those symptoms aren't canon. I can't speak for all autistic people, but I actually have no problem with this in itself.
Insisting characters are autistic as a bullying tactic to silence criticism of those characters (especially if they pretty obviously were not written that way) is bad, and simply insisting that a character must be read as autistic based on extremely generic traits is bad, and those do happen. Like, I personally do read Jyn as mildly autistic but I'd never say anyone else had to! It's just a headcanon that's not difficult to make work and makes me happy. OTOH there are characters who are very obviously coded as autistic and people do sometimes make profoundly ableist arguments about them (I've seen this with She-Ra's Entrapta, say, who is about as unambiguously autistic as a secondary world canon allows).
But my experience of the phenomenon skews more towards people (often autistic themselves) representing characters as genuinely autistic (even if they were not originally written that way) rather than depicting them as mildly quirky with hobbies and then framing that as real autism.