Neurodiversity Quotes

This crusade to fix herself was ending right now. She wasn't broken. She saw and interacted with the world in a different way, but that was her. She could change her actions, change her words, change her appearance, but she couldn't change the root of herself. At her core, she would always be autistic. People called it a disorder, but it didn't feel like one. To her, it was simply the way she was.

My room is the safest place my body has. My mind doesn’t really have a safe place.

Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It's also a radical act of self-love.

Despite what the words "attention deficit" imply, ADHD is not a deficit of attention, but rather a challenge of regulating it at will or on demand.

By autistic standards, the “normal” brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space.

Most of us are haunted by the sense there's something "wrong" or "missing" in our lives--that we're sacrificing far more of ourselves than other people in order to get by and receiving far less in return.

Our therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to bear their difficulties. Not to eliminate them for him, but to train the person to cope with special challenges with special strategies; to make the person aware not that they are ill, but that they are responsible for their lives.

Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs.

Many women latch onto language from popular psychology, such as "panic attack," when often they are instead experiencing sensory overwhelm.

We have to keep other people at arm's length, because letting them see our hyperfixations, meltdowns, obsessions, and outbursts could mean losing their respect. But locking ourselves away means we can't ever be fully loved.

One of the most promising developments since the publication of “The Geek Syndrome” has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.

neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.

Researchers would eventually discover that autistic people stim to reduce anxiety—and also simply because it feels good. In fact, harmless forms of self-stimulation (like flapping and fidgeting) may facilitate learning by freeing up executive-functioning resources in the brain that would otherwise be devoted to suppressing them.

High stimulation is both exciting and confusing for people with ADHD, because they can get overwhelmed and overstimulated easily without realizing they are approaching that point.

What non-Autistic folks often don’t realize is that Autistic people experience intense sensory input as if it were physical pain.[6

Much of what we call maturity is a silly pantomime of independence and unfeeling, not a real quality of unbreakable strength.

It’s neurotypicals who categorized autism as a social disorder.” Autistic people don’t actually lack communication skills, or a drive to connect. We aren’t doomed to forever feel lonely and broken. We can step out of the soul-crushing cycle of reaching for neurotypical acceptance and being rejected despite our best efforts. Instead, we can support and uplift one another, and create our own neurodiverse world where everyone—including neurotypicals—is welcome.

Though masking is incredibly taxing and causes us a lot of existential turmoil, it’s rewarded and facilitated by neurotypical people. Masking makes Autistic people easier to “deal” with. It renders us compliant and quiet. It also traps us. Once you’ve proven yourself capable of suffering in silence, neurotypical people tend to expect you’ll be able to do it forever, no matter the cost. Being a well-behaved Autistic person puts us in a real double bind and forces many of us to keep masking for far longer (and far more pervasively) than we want to.

Recovery is predicated on aligning your life with your values, and you aren’t going to be able to align anything until you know who you are.

People with so-called “female Autism” may be able to make eye contact, carry on a conversation, or hide their tics and sensory sensitivities. They might spend the first few decades of their lives with no idea they’re Autistic at all, believing instead that they’re just shy, or highly sensitive.

Instead of seeing the children in his care as flawed, broken, or sick, he believed they were suffering from neglect by a culture that had failed to provide them with teaching methods suited to their individual styles of learning.

I had always been overwhelmed by loud sounds and bright lights. I got inexplicably angry in crowds; laughter and chatter could make me blow up with rage. When I got too stressed out or became overcome with sadness, I found it hard to speak.

There are billions of us -- humans everywhere, with access to our own minds and no one else's, tossing one another songs and sentences to bridge the gap.

A speech-language pathologist named Michelle Garcia Winner told me that many parents in her practice became aware of their own autistic traits only in the wake of their child’s diagnosis.

Aware adults with autism and their parents are often angry about autism. They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.

Research shows that most Autistic people have a reduced sense of the body’s warning signals, or interoception.[31] Most of us tend to feel like our bodies are not really our own, and struggle to draw connections between the external world and how we feel inside.

By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not “symptoms” of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness.

The world will benefit significantly from talents such as empathy, emotional intensity, certitude, sensitivity, ability to detect details, depth of thought, will to embrace, and many other things that we need in a time where alienation, coldness, superficiality, and emotional hardness are predominating.

The concepts of “work-life” balance and “burnout” just don’t always translate to Autistic people’s schedules in the ways neurotypicals might expect.

We are not “differently abled”—we are disabled, robbed of empowerment and agency in a world that is not built for us. “Differently abled,” “handi-capable,” and similar euphemisms were created in the 1980s by the abled parents of disabled children, who wished to minimize their children’s marginalized status. These terms were popularized further by politicians[76] who similarly felt uncomfortable acknowledging disabled people’s actual experiences of oppression.

It's not always possible (or helpful) to try to untangle which of a person's traits are Autistic and which are caused by the trauma of being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world.

When I think back upon the kids that I tried to treat back in the 1960s, who were so extremely self-injurious, I think, “Boy, they were tough!” What they were really saying is, “You haven’t taught me right, you haven’t given me the tools whereby I can communicate and control my environment.” So the aggression that these kids show, whether it is directed toward themselves or others, is an expression of society’s ignorance, and in that sense I think of them as noble demonstrators. I have a great deal of respect for them.

If the rest of the world says you're obnoxious or stupid or just not braining right, loving yourself is an act of rebellion, which is beautiful but exhausting, especially if you're a little kid.

Many masked Autistics are sent to gifted education as children, instead of being referred to disability services.[18] Our apparent high intelligence puts us in a double bind: we are expected to accomplish great things to justify our oddness, and because we possess an enviable, socially prized quality, it’s assumed we need less help than other people, not more.

Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals.[72] One reason for that is many of the fears and inhibitions of Autistic people are often entirely reasonable, and rooted in a lifetime of painful experiences. We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have been browbeaten into ignoring our feelings too much.

Interestingly, adults are only shamed for having an obsessive interest if that interest is a bit too “strange,” and doesn’t come with the opportunity to rack up a lot of achievements or make a lot of money. People who routinely complete eighty-hour workweeks aren’t penalized for being obsessive or hyperfixated; they’re celebrated for their diligence. If an adult fills their evenings after work learning to code or creating jewelry that they sell on Etsy, they’re seen as enterprising. But if someone instead devotes their free time to something that gives them pleasure but doesn’t financially benefit anyone, it’s seen as frivolous or embarrassing, even selfish. In this instance, it’s clear that the punishing rules imposed on Autistic children reflect a much broader societal issue: pleasure and nonproductive, playful time are not valued, and when someone is passionate about the “wrong” things, that passion is discouraged because it presents a distraction from work and other “respectable” responsibilities.

One of the cruelest tricks our culture plays on autistic people is that it makes us strangers to ourselves. We grow up knowing we're different, but that difference is defined for us in terms of an absence of neurotypicality, not as the presence of another equally valid way of being.

One of the major ways abled society dehumanizes the disabled is by calling our maturity into question. “Adults” are supposed to be independent, though of course no person actually is. We all rely on the hard work and social-emotional support of dozens of people every single day. You’re only seen as less adult, and supposedly less of a person,[3] if you need help in ways that disrupt the illusions of self-sufficiency.

By the time I entered education in the late 1980s, schools were about as well adapted for my neurotype as a set of stairs is adapted for the use by a Dalek.

Bad storytelling is bad theology.

My alphabet hates itself. Like ... imagine someone says, ‘Think outside the box.’ My hyperactive mind creates a sphere and laughs at the box and researches for hours on end how much better spheres are. Then my Autism freaks out that I broke the rules without realising there were any, and wonders why we are supposed to think inside cardboard boxes in the first place. Surely being inside cardboard boxes isn’t comfortable.

The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder. It also includes people with brain injuries or strokes, people who have been labeled “low intelligence,” and people who lack any formal diagnosis, but have been pathologized as “crazy” or “incompetent” throughout their lives. As Singer rightly observed, neurodiversity isn’t actually about having a specific, catalogued “defect” that the psychiatric establishment has an explanation for. It’s about being different in a way others struggle to understand or refuse to accept.

People who are not autistic tell themselves stories. They fill in the gaps of the people they meet, often with information that isn't correct. It's why they like horror so much. It's why they get so easily scared. They see a ghost and the ghost doesn't need to do a thing. They will complete the story, they will scare themselves.

Most of us are haunted by the sense there’s something “wrong” or “missing” in our lives—that we’re sacrificing far more of ourselves than other people in order to get by and receiving far less in return.

When an Autistic person is not given resources or access to self-knowledge, and when they’re told their stigmatized traits are just signs that they’re a disruptive, overly sensitive, or annoying kid, they have no choice but to develop a neurotypical façade. Maintaining that neurotypical mask feels deeply inauthentic and it’s extremely exhausting to maintain.

... the neuro- in neurodiversity is most usefully understood as referring not just to the brain but to the entire nervous system–and, by extension, to the full complexity of human cognition and the central role the nervous system plays in the embodied dance of consciousness”(Walke2021, p. 55).

Masking also obscures the fact that the world is massively inaccessible to us. If allistics (non-Autistics) never hear our needs voiced, and never see our struggle, they have no reason to adapt to include us. We must demand the treatment we deserve, and cease living to placate those who have overlooked us.

Finally, at age seventy, Goodman was able to get the diagnosis and access to services he needed. Joining a support group for adults run by the Asperger’s Association of New England, he says, was “like coming ashore after a life of bobbing up and down in a sea that seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions.

bringing on new talent with very different backgrounds, assumptions, and cognitive tendencies is quite possibly the only way an established company can break through to a new level of success. Stop and read that last sentence again. Give it some thought.

The kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have grown up to become the architects of our future.

In 1997, cognitive psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen found that the fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were more likely to be engineers.

for the pathfinders and those who empower them to discover the space where we each can belong

[Temple Grandin] told him that the one thing she wanted more than anything else in life was for someone to hug her - but the moment that anyone did, she couldn't bear it.

-autism is neither a deficit, disease nor disorder, but simply a different, and equally valid, way of being.

My ears work. My brain understands. Can't you see I am a REAL PERSON?

Maintaining that neurotypical mask feels deeply inauthentic and it’s extremely exhausting to maintain.[5] It’s also not necessarily a conscious choice.

The problems are not the person.

people on the spectrum were fully capable of irony and sarcasm at a time when it was widely assumed that they didn’t “get” humor.

There's a reason why we're different. You and me. Why we're made this way. And it's for us to decide. It's none of their business.

Divergence is nature’s way to expansion.

Notice when you keep expecting a strategy to work, even though it consistently falls short. This isn’t your fault; it’s not the right approach for you.

A diagnosis is not a prediction. It doesn’t tell you what’s possible. It doesn’t change you, your colleague, your child, or your friend. It just opens up tricks and tools to thrive.

So if we are to create a world where all Autistic people of all backgrounds are able to unmask, we have to remove the systems of power that might violently punish those who fail or refuse to conform.

The public education system did not promote the enlightenment of the individual, but rather suppressed critical thought and neurodiversity. It produced preformatted, standardized, and obedient worker-citizen consumers that are programmed to feed the system that holds them captured, exploited, and enslaved. Silently and collectively, they are sawing the branch of reason on which we are all sitting.

You’re not defective, Ewan,’ she continued. ‘You’re not broken. You’re not the wrong kind of person. And don’t let anyone in this world tell you otherwise. You and your friends are exactly who they’re meant to be.

During World War II, the British spy agency MI8 secretly recruited a crew of teenage wireless operators (prohibited from discussing their activities even with their families) to intercept coded messages from the Nazis. By forwarding these transmissions to the crack team of code breakers at Bletchley Park led by the computer pioneer Alan Turing, these young hams enabled the Allies to accurately predict the movements of the German and Italian forces. Asperger’s prediction that the little professors in his clinic could one day aid in the war effort had been prescient, but it was the Allies who reaped the benefits.

I made friends by drinking. Alcohol gave me dating and adventures and sex. Without it, all of these things are much harder, some of them impossible. I don’t leave the house very much anymore. In a lot of ways, I became a more autistic person when I got sober.” The flip side of this can sometimes be true. In order to get sober, sometimes you have to be willing to be more Autistic.

We are hyperreactive to even small stimuli in our environment We have trouble distinguishing between information or sensory data that should be ignored versus data that should be carefully considered We are highly focused on details rather than “big picture” concepts We’re deeply and deliberatively analytical Our decision-making process is methodical rather than efficient; we don’t rely on mental shortcuts or “gut feelings

Autistic people are born with the mask of neurotypicality pressed against our faces. All people are assumed to think, socialize, feel, express emotion, process sensory information, and communicate in more or less the same ways. We’re all expected to play along with the rules of our home culture, and blend into it seamlessly. Those of us who need alternate tools for self-expression and self-understanding are denied them. Our first experience of ourselves as a person in the world, therefore, is one of being othered and confused. We only get the opportunity to take our masks off when we realize other ways of being exist.

Asperger survived the war, but his concept of autism as a broad and inclusive spectrum (a “continuum,” his diagnostician Georg Frankl called it) that was “not at all rare” was buried with the ashes of his clinic and the unspeakable memories of that dark time, along with his case records. A very different conception of autism took its place.

Almost every Autistic person I spoke to has found that in order to build a life that suits them, they’ve had to learn to let certain unfair expectations go, and withdraw from activities that don’t matter to them. It’s scary to allow ourselves to disappoint other people, but it can be radical and liberating, too. Admitting what we can’t do means confronting the fact we have a disability, and therefore we occupy a marginalized position in society—but it also is an essential part of finally figuring out what assistance we need, and which ways of living are best for us.

Non-compliance is a social skill. It's only bad if you're looking at it from the outside, from the perspective of someone who seeks to control or restrict. (Rabbi Ruti Regan, RealSocialSkills)

Neurodiversity? Indeed. According to The New York Times: “As psychiatrists and neurologists uncover an ever-wider variety of brain wiring,” a new kind of disability movement, calling for an acceptance of neurodiversity, has been born. Proponents of neurodiversity argue that “brain differences, like body differences, should be embraced,” and appeal for a neurologically tolerant society.76

The Geek Syndrome” has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.

We tend to be both easily disturbed by sound in our environment, and unable to tell when a noise actually merits our attention, at the same time.[44] I often brute-force my way into paying attention to something by shutting the rest of the world out. I think it’s also likely that lifelong masking has rendered me hypervigilant, almost as a trauma response. My sensory system is used to scanning the environment, to determine whether I’m alone and thus “safe” enough to be myself. Trauma survivors often become hypervigilant, which tends to come with intense sensory issues.[45] Some researchers have also theorized that sensory issues in Autistics are, at least in part, caused by the anxiety and hypervigilance we experience from living in a world that doesn’t accommodate us, and often treats us with hostility.[46]

learning in adulthood that you have been secretly nursing a disability all your life is quite the world-shattering experience. Adjusting your self-concept is a long process. It can involve mourning, rage, embarrassment, and dozens upon dozens of “wait, that was an Autism thing?” revelations. Though many of us come to see Autistic identity as a net positive in our lives, accepting our limitations is an equally important part of the journey. The clearer we are with ourselves about where we excel and where we need help, the more likely we are to eke out an existence that’s richly interdependent, sustainable, and meaningful.

When designing an interior space,” Marta writes,[1] “design for how you actually live, not how you aspire to live…your space must be designed to accommodate the reality of your life, without shame or judgement.

Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals. One reason for that is many of the fears and inhibitions of Autistic people are often entirely reasonable, and rooted in a lifetime of painful experiences. We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have been browbeaten into ignoring our feelings too much.

As an individual, as a person with the power to affect other people with your words, actions, and expressions every single day, you can give people who see the world differently the gift of accepting who and how they are.

For Autistic self-disclosure to really have an impact on someone, you need a mutually respectful, trusting relationship. They need to be willing to keep learning and revise their understanding of what Autism is as they go along.

Writer Tara Mohr (2014) discusses ways in which women minimize their impact with the use of qualifiers in their communications. Similar to “I’m sorry,” one of these qualifiers is the word “just.” Mohr explains that using this modifier—as in “I just want to add…” or “I just think…”—diminishes a woman’s power. “Just” quickly disempowers what might otherwise be a stunning idea by connoting something more along the lines of “barely” or “I’m saying this with apology.

The redemptive self essentially is an unmasked Autistic self: unashamed of one’s sensitivity, profoundly committed to one’s values, passionately driven by the causes ones cares about, strong enough to self-advocate, and vulnerable enough to seek connection and aid. A person with an integrated, redemptive sense of self knows who they are, and isn’t ashamed of it. They’re able to resolve life’s tensions in an authentic way that honors their feelings and personal ethics.

I noticed that there were clear patterns in which kinds of Autistic people succumbed to this kind of fate. Autistic women, transgender people, and people of color often had their traits ignored when they were young, or have symptoms of distress interpreted as “manipulative” or “aggressive.” So did Autistic people who grew up in poverty, without access to mental health resources. Gay and gender nonconforming men often didn’t fit the masculine image of Autism well enough to be diagnosed. Older Autistics never had the opportunity to be assessed, because knowledge about the disability was so limited during their childhoods. These systematic exclusions had forced an entire massive, diverse population of disabled people to live in obscurity.

I know so many Autistic people for whom their diagnosis or self-realization was a clarifying and affirming moment. After the initial shock and shame passes, coming into a neurodiverse identity can prompt you to reexamine your entire life, and all your old values, allowing you to build something slower, more peaceful, and more beautiful. But it’s not only Autistics who benefit from embracing neurodiversity in that way. We all deserve to take a step back and ask whether our lives line up with our values, whether the work we do and the face we show to others reflects our genuine self, and if not, what we might want to change.

I played Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and recognized myself for the first time in the game’s wordless, androgynous protagonist Link. He didn’t speak, and didn’t belong in the community of childlike elves he’d been raised in. His difference was what marked him as special and destined to save the world. Link was brave, strong, and softly pretty, all at the same time. He was clueless and ineffectual in most social situations, but that didn’t keep him from doing important things or from being met with gratitude and affection everywhere he went. I loved absolutely everything about Link, and modeled my own style after him for many years.

When Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling published the piece "TERF Wars" on her blog in the summer of 2020, she specifically mentioned her fear that many transgender men are actually Autistic girls who weren't conventionally feminine, and have been influenced by transactivists on the internet into identifying out of womanhood. In presenting herself as defending disabled "girls," she argued for restricting young trans Autistic people's ability to self-identity and access necessary services and health care. Rowling's perspective (which she shares with many gender critical folks) is deeply dehumanising to both the trans and Autistic communities.

I met Autistics who’d at first been diagnosed with things like Borderline Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I also found scores of transgender and gender-nonconforming Autistic people like me, who had always felt “different” both because of their gender and their neurotype. In each of these people’s lives, being Autistic was a source of uniqueness and beauty. But the ableism around them had been a fount of incredible alienation and pain. Most had floundered for decades before discovering who they truly were. And nearly all of them were finding it very difficult to take their long-worn masks off.

Humans are biased machines, and we are especially influenced by negatives. We want to believe the worst about ourselves and will pick those scraps up throughout the day and piece them together until we have something that we can look at and say, 'Look, arent I terrible' even if everyone else says otherwise. Maybe that's just me.

Masked Autistics are frequently compulsive people pleasers. We present ourselves as cheery and friendly, or nonthreatening and small. Masked Autistics are also particularly likely to engage in the trauma response that therapist Pete Walker describes as “fawning.”[53] Coping with stress doesn’t always come down to fight versus flight; fawning is a response designed to pacify anyone who poses a threat. And to masked Autistics, social threat is just about everywhere. “Fawn types avoid emotional investment and potential disappointment by barely showing themselves,” Walker writes, “by hiding behind their helpful personas, over-listening, over-eliciting or overdoing for the other.”[54]

After [Paul] Schilder mentioned that he had treated a schizophrenic teenager with psychoanalysis because the “sex center” and “fear center” of the brain are adjacent, he could no longer contain himself. [Leo] Kanner pointedly asked if people call their spouses “honey” because the sex center and the sugar center of the brain are also close together.

After discovering that he and his sons were on the spectrum, Hedin joined the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP), one of the largest support groups for people with autism in the United States. Looking back, he feels certain that a number of hams he knew in the course of fifty-five years of surfing the airwaves would have qualified for a diagnosis.

Before I knew I was Autistic, I was profoundly alienated in every possible sense. I was at odds with myself, unable to understand why normal life felt so perplexing and imprisoning to me. I was detached from the world, with no trust in others or in my own potential to connect and be understood. Because I was so alone, my identity was also completely unmoored. I had no community to anchor myself within.

I have spent my life clinging to my own shores for safety. Flying like a bird above the storm waters of my own body, too scared to land. I guess that is why the sea floods in to visit me. I have been too frightened to venture out into her depths alone. The central core of me is dark and churning, I can only sense it vaguely. It scares me with its power. As a late-diagnosed autistic woman, I realise that this experience is partly neurological…my sensory abilities are all hyper-aroused on the surface, and my nervous system melts down when it becomes overwhelmed in everyday places. But my ability to know what is going on within is flawed. Instead of an accurate information readout, there is a big, dark, unknowable mass within. I am sailing blind without map or lighthouse within my own skin. It feels a very scary place to have a life sentence. This is why I write: to attempt to find words for what this big scariness is, to try and find images to give form and name to the wild churning expanse.

I have spent my life clinging to my own shores for safety. Flying like a bird above the storm waters of my own body, too scared to land. I guess that is why the sea floods in to visit me. I have been too frightened to venture out into her depths alone. The central core of me is dark and churning, I can only sense it vaguely. It scares me with its power. As a late-diagnosed autistic woman, I realise that this experience is partly neurological…my sensory abilities are all hyper-aroused on the surface, and my nervous system melts down when it becomes overwhelmed in everyday places. But my ability to know what is going on within is flawed. Instead of an accurate information readout, there is a big, dark, unknowable mass within. I am sailing blind without map or lighthouse within my own skin. It feels a very scary place to have a life sentence. This is why I write: to attempt to find words for what this big scariness is, to try and find images to give form and name to the wild churning expanse. Pearce, Lucy H.. She of the Sea

The idea that Autism is a “boy’s” disorder goes all the way back to when the condition was first described at the turn of the twentieth century. Hans Asperger and other early Autism researchers did study girls on the spectrum, but generally left them out of their published research reports.[55] Asperger in particular avoided writing about Autistic girls because he wanted to present certain intelligent, “high-functioning” Autistic people as “valuable” to the Nazis who had taken over Austria and were beginning to exterminate disabled people en masse. As Steve Silberman describes in his excellent book NeuroTribes, Hans Asperger wanted to spare the “high functioning” Autistic boys he’d encountered from being sent to Nazi death camps. Silberman described this fact somewhat sympathetically; Asperger was a scientist who had no choice but to collude with the fascist regime and save what few children he could. However, more recently unearthed documents make it clear that Asperger was far more complicit in Nazi exterminations of disabled children than had been previously believed.[56] Though Asperger held intelligent, “little professor” type Autistics close to his heart, he knowingly sent more visibly debilitated Autistics to extermination centers.

Common, Healthy Autistic Behaviors Intense studying of a new favorite topic Not noticing sounds or social signals when focusing on an engrossing task Needing to know exactly what to expect before entering an unfamiliar situation Sticking to a very rigid schedule, and rejecting deviations to that schedule Taking a long time to think before responding to a complex question Spending hours or days alone sleeping and recharging after a socially demanding event or stressful project Needing “all the information” before coming to a decision Not knowing how they feel, or needing a few days to figure out how they feel about something Needing a rule or instruction to “make sense” before they can follow it Not putting energy toward expectations that seem unfair or arbitrary, such as wearing makeup or elaborate grooming

When society first starts flirting with accepting a marginalized group, that acceptance is often wrapped up in a born this way type narrative. For example, in the early 2000s, many straight allies claimed to support gay people because being gay wasn't a choice, and we couldn't help being the way that we are. There was a lot of pop science writing at that time exploring the search for the "gay gene," and suggesting that certain hormone exposures in the womb might predispose a fetus to being gay. Today we don't have conversations about the biological causes of gayness very much anymore. In the United States at least, being gay has started becoming accepted enough that queer people don't have to justify our existence by saying that we can't help but be this way. If someone were to choose to be gay, that wouldn't be a problem, because being gay is good. Similarly, Autistic people deserve acceptance not because we can't help but have the brains we have, but because being Autistic is good.

The opposite of alienation is integration, a psychological sense of connection and wholeness.[1] People whose identities are integrated can see a through-line connecting the many selves they have been across various times and places. Every human being changes over time, of course, and alters their behavior depending on the situation or setting they’re in. There is no static “true self” that stops adapting and changing. To a masked Autistic person, this fact can be really disturbing, because we may lack a consistent “story” to tell ourselves about who we really are. Our personalities are just means to an end, externally motivated rather than driven by some internal force or desire. Someone with an integrated identity isn’t disturbed by change and variance, though, because they see a connection that endures across the many people they have been: core values that persist across their life span, and a narrative of personal growth that explains how they moved from the person they once were, to who they are today.[2]

Internally, I was fractured, a series of faked personalities and protective shields that kept people at a distance. I could only drop the shield when I was alone, but even in my solitude I was miserable and confused. I was all defense mechanisms, with nothing left inside worth defending. When a masked Autistic person lacks self-knowledge or any kind of broad social acceptance, they are often forced to conceive of themselves as compartmentalized, inconsistent parts. Here is the person I have to be at work, and the person I must be at home. These are the things I fantasize about doing but can’t tell anybody about. Here are the drugs that keep my energy levels up, and the lies I tell to be entertaining at parties. These are the tension-defusing distractions I’ll deploy when someone begins to suspect there’s something off about me. We don’t get the chance to come together into a unified whole that we can name or understand, or that others can see and love. Some sides of us go unacknowledged entirely, because they don’t serve our broader goal of remaining as inoffensive and safe as possible.

They also devised an ingeniously low-tech solution to a complex problem. Even highly verbal autistic adults occasionally struggle with processing and producing speech, particularly in the chaotic and generally overwhelming atmosphere of a conference. By providing attendees with name-tag holders and pieces of paper that were red on one side and yellow on the other, they enabled Autistics to communicate their needs and desires without having to articulate them in the pressure of the moment. The red side facing out signified, "Nobody should try to interact with me," while the yellow side meant, "Only people I already know should interact with me, not strangers." (Green badges were added later to signify, "I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.") These color-coded "interaction signal badges" turned out to be so useful that they have since been widely adopted at autistic-run events all over the world, and name-tag labels similar to Autreat ("autistic retreat") green badges have recently been employed at conferences for Perl programmers to indicate that the wearer is open to spontaneous social approaches.