Yavari discussed this about six years ago in our now-defunct group account, and Vova and Jamie have discussed this on our anonymous public blog. And it is now my turn.
We refuse to have all our personality traits and abilities attributed to autism. This was forcibly done to us growing up. It is triggering. It is infuriating. And we can’t do it any more. It’s not because we’re ashamed of being autistic. It’s because it’s reductive, insidious bullshit that objectifies autistic people and puts them on a pedestal; tries to jam people with overlapping, but not identical, experiences, into an ‘autism box’; and treats autism as a monolithic construct.
Unfortunately, we’ve come across several autistic people online (often on Tumblr and The Site Formerly Known As Twitter) who have a tendency of attributing their intellect, creativity or sensitivity to autism. We used to do this for a few years as well, mostly when we were on Tumblr. We mostly moved away from this in 2018, but we sort of backslid in 2019–2022. Some people, for instance, will describe their facility with words as ‘hyperlexia’, even though there are squillions of verbally gifted people outside the autistic community who do not apply diagnostic labels to themselves. (Also, hyperlexia refers specifically to the ability to decode the written word rapidly, typically with comparatively low comprehension—it is a kind of learning disability.) We saw someone posting on Facebook who seemed to think that using rare words was an aspect of neurodivergence (with the subtext being autism, of course), rather than a good education or an interest in words. We see this time and again, but we don’t know how to respond to it without raging. Our wounds are still fresh, and we do not want to take this out on anyone else; they don’t deserve that from us.
This is a suffocating, totalising view that combines a number of questionable—and often disablist—ideas that ought not to be taken as gospel truth: that autism confers extraordinary abilities on all who have the condition; that extraordinarily intelligent, sensitive and creative people must necessarily be autistic, and for them to say otherwise means that they are ‘ashamed’ of the developmental-disability community; and that it is acceptable to shunt people’s diverse experiences under a single label without acknowledging the heterogeneity of the population it includes.
With this line of thinking, no autistic person has the right to be creative, sensitive or intelligent independent of their autism. This is disturbing, not empowering.
After all, intelligence, creativity and sensitivity vary among autistic people, just as they vary among the general public. There are autistic people of average or below-average intellectual ability, as well as those whose cognitive profiles are difficult to categorise using traditional measures of intelligence. (The late Mel Baggs was the ur-example of the last group. It is impossible to overstate the influence of their thinking.) Some autistic people are less sensitive than others, and it would be ludicrous to state that all autistic people have the same interest in, or aptitude for, creative activity.
To assume that creativity, intelligence and sensitivity are an outgrowth of autism is to dismiss the abilities of non-autistic people and inflict an inferiority complex on autistic people whose talents lie elsewhere. It suggests that autistic people are more interesting or valuable because of their intelligence, creativity and sensitivity, which is an example of the very thing they say they’re fighting against: disablism. (A similar phenomenon has occurred in the plural community. I wrote about it some years back. Like the ‘Supercrip’ autistic people, some plural systems make out that we’re more intelligent or spiritually connected than singletons. Or in one case, they said they were more ‘intellegent’. Before going on about your intelligence, learn how to spell the word properly!)
It’s blatantly fucking obvious that there are many intensely creative, sensitive and intelligent people who are not autistic. We know a lot. But according to some elements of Autistic Twitter (I wish I could quote them, but the ephemeral nature of social media prevents this), to say that you’re ‘gifted’ or a ‘highly sensitive person’ is to say that you don’t want to be around the Icky Developmentally Disabled People.
Yes, there is some overlap between people who describe themselves as autistic, gifted and HSP. But they are not the same construct, even within one of these labels! For instance, gifted refers to academically able students who excel in class; the highly intelligent, who show strengths in general abstract reasoning, show signs of marked developmental advancement (which can sometimes coexist with delays, often in bright autistic people) and learn readily, independent of classroom performance; and those who show specific talents in a domain, such as art, music or dance. And autistic, too, is heterogeneous. Although we all experience a kind of social asynchrony, it is expressed differently for each of us.
Why can’t they just use Occam’s Fucking Razor and realise that these people are simply not autistic, or want nothing to do with this suffocating bullshit if they are? If they actually are autistic, let them come to that realisation on their own instead of caterwauling about it on Twitter. I know I wouldn’t be interested in getting a formal evaluation, or even identifying myself, if my first exposure to the autistic community was this rubbish.
For me, the better way to frame the relationship with autism and abilities is to say that someone is creative, intelligent or sensitive in an autistic way. For example, an artist may use recursion and repetition that draws from their experiences with perseveration, or a researcher may home in on specific, seemingly minute aspects of their discipline, or someone may get an ineffable joy from exploring their intense interests. Creative, intelligent and sensitive behaviour is no longer attributed to autism; instead, autism is seen as a prism through which these attributes are reflected.
I can’t control how other people see themselves. If they want to treat their intellectual, creative or mechanical faculties, or their emotional sensitivity as part of their autism, it is their right. But that doesn’t mean that their views are universal.
—Jack