I am very deeply tired of the posts about how no one is neurotypical actually, everyone is disabled if you think about it, mental disabilities are just poorly conceived associations of traits and you shouldn't limit yourself with a label, blah blah blah.
I get that some of this is spurred on by inaccurate generalizations and assumptions about neurotypical people from neurodivergent people who may not fully understand the variations and nuances of NT experience, or who are simply wrong about certain things, or whose venting is imprecise, etc. But some of this
so patently arises out of a visceral resentment at not being centered in every form of disability discourse and advocacy, and refusal to countenance the idea that neurodivergent people a) exist as such and b) are marginalized in a way that many NT people are not.
Some of these posts/commentary are coming from other neurodivergent people with whom I simply disagree. But most that I have seen are pretty clearly written from the POV of someone who knows they would ordinarily be considered neurotypical and resents it in a birdsrightsactivist kind of way:
[A screenshot of a Tweet from the user ProBirdsRights, aka birdsrightsactivist, reading "I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?"]
Autism on any scale but the most severe (and that only sometimes) does not seem real to most of the people writing these posts, additionally. That's part of the thing that makes this so frustrating for me, personally. This line of discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by allistic people who all but say everyone is autistic in their own way, while revealing a mind-boggling lack of comprehension or basic empathy about what it is actually like to go through the world as an autistic person. They very evidently regard autistic self-advocates as, at most, slightly eccentric but basically normal, self-indulgent people whom they just find kind of grating for some mysterious reason that they do not interrogate at all.
It's like ... even when I'm ranting (like now!), I try to put things in a careful way, in large part because I am very easy to misunderstand IRL and I don't like it. But so many of these posts that I see being reblogged (by well-intentioned people who just ... don't get it) make me want to start screaming. Often the frustration takes me hours or days to articulate. Sometimes I'm just trying to think of some phrasing other than "shut the fuck up, you don't know what you're talking about." I never say that directly to any individual. But there is so much utterly unearned and misplaced overconfidence in so many of these posts that it's difficult not to feel it.
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