Multifarious Threads

Sociological Hyperawareness

I’m autistic. But what does that MEAN?

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(content warning: including child sexual abuse, bullying, harassment, slavery, and exploitation)

I’m autistic. But that explains everything and nothing about me. I1 am also thirty-five years old, live in a postage-stamp apartment with my eight-year-old tabby cat, and love cheesy pop music. I have a job I love, a circle of dear friends, and a community that has seen me through the best and worst of my adult life.

I don’t like writing much about myself; I’d rather write about my work and what I’m interested in. I don’t actually crave the spotlight, but I feel I’ve been thrust there just to make myself understood. I am also aware that I may sound like a self-narrating zoo exhibit, though I try to avoid this. I am not Temple Grandin, Daniel Tammet, or Stephen Wiltshire. I am not Social-Justice Rain Man; I am not your fucking inspiration. I am not a computer, and I am most certainly not your computer, not a flesh-and-blood Siri, Cortana, or Alexa. I’m just human. And since I want to just be human, I don’t talk very much about myself. But I’m going to try today anyway.

I hear of concepts that imperfectly describe what I see and feel: hyperlexia, savant syndrome, autism, Pervasive Developmental Disorder. But I could understand what I read as a child unless I was dissociating and couldn’t focus. I don’t have an intellectual disability. And what do you make of someone whose development is delayed in some ways, advanced in others, and utterly normal in still others? The other ones are no improvement: “gifted” smells of the schoolroom or the psychic’s booth, and in any case, I associate it too much with shitty elitist educational policies. “Asperger syndrome” is all wrong; I associate it with “Aspie supremacists” and autistic people who are more abstract than sensory—I’m both. Just “autistic” won’t work, either, because there are different kinds of autism. And “twice-exceptional”? What the hell does that even mean? And I’ve often felt more exceptionable than exceptional, anyway. One of my high-school teachers compared me to Temple Grandin, but I didn’t really make the connection; I thought I was just weird2.

I don’t talk much about my internal experiences because my abilities are verbal and symbolic; I’m not a human calculator, musical prodigy, or virtuoso painter3. Because I can filter what I say with words, I understate just about everything. I also worry about being believed, even though I know others with overlapping experiences.

  • Imagine what it would feel like if the words, numerals, ideas, and other symbols that you hear and read had feelings, shapes, sounds, emotional associations, historical references, textures, personalities, and smells—and you feel them almost as acutely as you do your normal senses. This is ideasthesia, which I have in excess. Ideasthetes process abstractions as concrete sense data. For me, words and symbols call up visual, spatial, emotional, historical, textural, and auditory impressions. Ideasthesia makes me a good writer and designer, but it’s also painful for me to see bad typography, misspelled words, punctuation errors, and poorly matched patterns.
  • When I read my friends’ words on my computer or phone, it feels as though they’re physically there—I feel their personalities, energy, texture, and emotions. That alone makes it all worth it.
  • What some see as abstractions—racism, poverty, discrimination—I see as embodied realities. Not only because of my own experiences with marginalisation, which are legion, but also because I actually feel them. Racism is my enslaved ancestors shackled together as they are forcibly repatriated to an alien world. Fingers being sliced off for learning how to read. I think of my sharecropper great-great-grandparents bent over double, picking tobacco in the humid Carolina heat. Demonstrators with calloused feet, sweaty brows, and determined faces holding signs saying, “I AM A MAN.” It’s Blind Tom Wiggins, a kindred spirit from another age, exploited and manipulated and treated as a curiosity. Though his talents were different from mine, there’s a pleasing familiarity in his perceptual acuity—and the plaint of someone who hasn’t been allowed to be a someone. And it’s my being followed around stores, constantly being asked, “Can I help you find anything?” It’s the inexpressible fear of becoming the next George Floyd or Mike Brown if I walk down the wrong street on the wrong day at the wrong time. I don’t want to become a hashtag I’ll never be able to read. When I see Black Lives Matter signs, I start welling up a little. I’m grateful for the acknowledgment that my life does matter, but I’m also angry that it’s taken this long for people to say it.
  • My verbal thoughts are in complete sentences, using standard syntax, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Sometimes I can even choose a font for my thoughts. I can also read fluently in my dreams.
  • Symbols can be heard, tasted, befriended, felt, touched, heard. My ideasthesia is a kind of animism: facts and words and dates and numbers are alive. This is part of why I’m so fanatical about spelling—I’m not upset at the person making a mistake, but I am upset to see an impostor instead of the word I expected. A misspelled word is like a misspelled name. I try to be patient with people, but that’s hard when errors in spelling, punctuation, diction, and usage are saws, lawnmowers, and fireworks going off in your ears. If I’ve ever snapped at you because of an error that set off my internal alarm bells, I’m sorry.
  • Minute details in people’s speech, writing, and actions weave themselves into larger patterns—my brain seems to have created wetware algorithms. They’re not always perfect, but they’re reliable enough. When I point out the details that helped me identify the pattern, people are incredulous: “Why are you acting this way?” “What’s the matter with you?” “Why do you care so much?” Because those minutiae add up, and if I see certain things constantly going together, I’m going to draw an inference. If you’ve ever sincerely asked why I feel so strongly about things, thank you. Your asking showed that you cared.
  • I project myself into concepts I want to understand thoroughly. I was never able to understand the idea of derivatives and integrals in calculus until I jumped into the problem, so to speak. For differentiation, I saw myself in a freeze-frame animation moving along a curve. For integration, it was several versions of me superimposed on one another on a single point on that curve.
  • I have many intense interests, but my primary one is humanity: who we are, what we do, and what we can become. It’s easier to blend in when you’re doing what everyone else does by talking and using symbols. Because of that, I think people understand me all right most of the time, but I’m always steeling myself for quizzical looks when my thought processes reveal themselves unexpectedly.
  • I remember a lot of things that most people forget. It’s not as severe as full-blown hyperthymesia—I can use my long memory for practical ends—but some aspects are similar. I don’t consciously choose to remember those details. At times I like having all these memories; at others, I’d prefer to forget them. I have PTSD, anxiety, and clinical depression, so it’s sometimes torture.

Although I’ve become more comfortable over time with my being autistic, it’s difficult to cast off all the accumulated shame: shame for existing, shame for being “too much,” shame for seeing things differently from most people, shame that I could never make myself easily understood no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t help that my parents were emotionally and sexually abusive. They are homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, self-hating, deeply traumatized, hard-right evangelical Republicans who would vote for a flaming pile of shit if it had an R next to its name.4 They exploited my mind, body, and dignity for their own perverse and self-interested ends. I was treated like a card catalogue, Google Translate, a RealDoll, a pet—never like a person. Some abuse memories are filmlike flashbacks, but other incidents linger only as bodily memories, intrusive sensations, fears whose cause I’ve long forgotten. I suspect that my parents treated me the way they did for a few reasons: they isolated me to avoid reports to Child Protective Services, they have their own intense internalized ableism, and they simply didn’t know what to do with me. Although I can understand the last two reasons—I was doubtless difficult to raise—nothing in their past or present can excuse what they did to me. I hope they’ve never harmed any other child in their care.

On top of that, I grew up in a military family, where change is constant and stillness is brief. We moved every three to four years, going from state to state to country to country. (I have an especial dislike for jargon and alphabet soup because of all this; I can’t help thinking of all the military acronyms and initialisms—DoDDS, DEERS, PCS, TLF, BDUs, MREs, AFB.) Like other Air Force households, ours was organized as a strict hierarchy; we all had to know our place. Although my father was said to be at the top of this hierarchy, my parents shared power more equally than they would admit. Children were to be seen and not heard—or at least not heard too loudly. This is why I both need and fear attention: I want to be around people who also want to be around me, but I’m also terrified that if I stick my neck out, it’ll get chopped off.

Military families often organize themselves like units and battalions; individuality is subordinated to unit cohesion, family cohesion, national cohesion. Unquestioned obedience is the norm. You may be incoherent on the inside, but you’d better look sharp regardless. This may work for the troops, but it’s no way to raise a child. It was no great feat for eleven-year-old me to empathize with the characters in The Giver and Nineteen Eighty-four: these dystopias were just military-base life intensified 5. Of course Winston Smith was easy pickings for the Thought Police; he yearned for humanity in a world that despised the individual. I am terrified of a world shorn of all beauty, sense, and purpose—not surprising for a Technicolour child who grew up in a monochrome world of brown-and-tan buildings, impersonal bureaucracy, uniforms and uniformity. When I see people treated as numbers, I recoil—you won’t be remunerated well in the military, but you will be well enumerated.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

(That boot is my father’s.)

I ran away from my parents when I was twenty years old and never looked back. I knew everything was all wrong; I could never love Big Brother. I shudder to think of what might have become of me—if there’d still be a me—had I not known people who were kind enough to help me flee. I celebrate the day I left—10 October 2006—as my “observed birthday.”

I pity my parents, but I can’t forgive them, despite all the indoctrination I heard as a child. Even if the abuse were emotional only, even if my parents’ evils were limited to shouting and belittling and isolation, they were evil nonetheless. There’s always a chance that your child may be an extreme statistical outlier. Improbable is not impossible, and people like me will always break ostensibly airtight statistical models. I am a statistical outlier, so I push against the reduction of incommensurable human life to statistics and figures6. (The universe is a troll, though, so I ended up studying sociology and public policy. My apologies to my statistician colleagues—you do good work! Just remember that people like me exist, too.)

I make connections that others don’t, but much of what we take for granted started out as those connections. Let’s consider language. It’s all around us, so we see it like air or water. People see and hear language as marks on pages or arbitrary sounds that are mere vessels of meaning. But let’s look at that a little more: natural languages use concrete descriptions to refer to abstract phenomena. Comprehension means grasping together. Description means writing down. To discover is to remove something from its hiding place. The words idea, wit, and vision are cognate—in the Indo-European languages, sight is the primary metaphor for knowledge. I suspect that the first users of language were ideasthetes. Our languages would be very different if they weren’t.

(This is why doctrinaire descriptivism fills me with existential terror—the model seems to neglect those of us who do see, hear, and feel spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage as sensory stimuli. What are you doing, you monsters! You’re letting people hurt my friends.7 I can’t abide their sanguine predictions of radical linguistic change that we can never control—or their blasé attitudes toward so many of the things I find abhorrent. But I suspect they may think the opposite about us. How dare they change the flow of language? It’s its own phenomenon, and we’re foolish to change it. Being swallowed by the indifferent crowd, being laughed at for caring about style or beauty, being told that feelings and culture don’t matter—this is nightmarish, not reasonable. It just reminds me of my parents, the military, and the hell of my childhood. Apathy is the mother of dullness, so I resist it at every opportunity.)

This is one of the most difficult things I’ve written, since I bristle at the idea of showing too much vulnerability, too much sadness, fear, and trauma. But I’ve done a lot of difficult things this year—in the past six months, I’ve left a toxic nine-year relationship, started living alone for the first time after years of sharing with housemates, and started processing more of my trauma—so why not do another difficult thing?

I see my friends’ and colleagues’ faces as I write this, and hope you’ll understand what I’m talking about, at least a little. I do this for you, and I do this for everyone like me who feels alone in an intense, chaotic, and often frightening world.

I wish I’d known someone to show me the way when I was growing up. (I think I taught myself so much because there was nobody around to teach me.) I couldn’t understand how I was making connections others couldn’t see, even though they were as real as breathing.

But all of us, whether neurotypical or neurodivergent, rely on connections—social, symbolic, physical, mental, intellectual. Some of us make those difficult connections naturally. Others have to be shown the way. But all of us can make connections, at least a little bit—because that’s what makes us human.

  1. Really, “I” is a misnomer; I’m just using it for your convenience. (I do a lot of things for people’s convenience.) ↩
  2. It gives me a chill up the spine, though, to think that I was on a discussion panel with her last year. Over Zoom, of course. ↩
  3. I am an artist, but I’m just good, not great. ↩
  4. Donald Trump would qualify. ↩
  5. (Lois Lowry, who wrote the Giver quadrilogy, was a military brat, too; I wonder whether it had an influence on the series.) ↩
  6. I owe an intellectual debt to the late Jacques Barzun, who deplored what he called the “Stat Life.” It’s a recurring theme throughout his œuvre. ↩
  7. I hate their constant mutilation of all right, one of my calming phrases. I repeat it to myself, all right, all right, all right. It’s a grounding mechanism: all will right itself. Two words, not one. Alright, on the other hand, is a false sense of security, a dissociative haze, a repugnant mixture of gloppy processed cheese and rancid vegetable oil that sticks in my throat. Allright is just a car crash that I can’t stop staring at. I hate seeing words wrongly run together—alot, aswell, atleast, eachother, and the like. They’re colliding into each other! Or maybe they’re like enmeshed couples who really need to break up for their own good. ↩

The Socioeconomic Dimensions of Software Privacy on Android and Windows

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Big Tech’s indiscriminate data-harvesting practices are an ethical outrage in themselves, but systemic social inequality determines who is most affected by these practices. Microsoft’s and Google’s operating systems are installed on low-priced devices, but users pay with their data instead. (I focus on Microsoft and Google, rather than other companies like Facebook or Amazon, because users can avoid using Facebook or Amazon, but they can’t use a phone, tablet, or computer without an operating system.)

Apple has made commitments to protecting users’ privacy, but its products have a relatively high entry cost. The cheapest MacBooks cost around $1000 new, and that’s just in the United States. New iPhones are similarly expensive, even with monthly payment plans. Apple’s prices are even more prohibitive in other markets. MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS can’t be run on non-Apple devices unless you go the Hackintosh route, which has become increasingly difficult. In contrast, you can get a Windows PC or Chromebook for a few hundred dollars. Windows itself isn’t cheap, but the cost of the licence is built into the cheap PCs it’s installed on. That’s how Microsoft gained its market dominance in the first place: it licensed MS-DOS, and later Windows, to multiple computer manufacturers. Android phones are similarly affordable. Unfortunately, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, have used their desktop and mobile operating systems to gather large amounts of data on their users. In the Global South, Android and its rapacious data-collecting practices rule. People who use Android devices as their sole means of accessing the internet are a captive audience for Google and device manufacturers that also install data-harvesting apps. Android Go, a lightweight version of Google’s flagship operating system, is explicitly geared toward people in lower-income countries.

Granted, technically inclined users can install Linux on just about anything, but that requires the knowledge, experience, and interest to install an alternative operating system. If a user’s goal is to browse the internet, write documents, send emails, and use social media, the jump to Linux may be an insurmountable barrier. People can also buy used iPads, Macs, and iPhones, but buying used devices is riskier than buying new ones, especially if they’re out of warranty. For lower-income users, the consequences are higher if you make a risky financial decision. In most cases, the only clear choices are Windows or Android—and their concomitant privacy violations.

I’ve avoided Windows as a primary operating system for nine years, and I flatly refuse to use Android. I exclusively use Apple devices, but if I couldn’t afford to do so, I’d install Linux on my computers and an alternative operating system on my phones. My avoidance of Android and Windows is a product of financial privilege and technical knowledge. Others may not have the same choices.

Coverage about the privacy violations that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have focused on the ethical problems of unaccountable data harvesting on its own, but haven’t examined this problem using a socioeconomic lens. This obscures one of the most significant problems with these companies’ use of customers’ data: they’ll get most of their information from people who cannot opt out. This is a form of technological class exploitation. Billion-dollar companies make obscene amounts of money by selling the data of people who can’t afford to opt out, or don’t know how. It’s a classic feature of unregulated capitalism, where profits always come before people. Low-income users may not buy first-party applications, high-end Windows versions, or top-of-the-line phones, but they have plenty of data. Most of these captive customers will also put up with advertising if it means they can keep in touch with their family, friends, and colleagues.

Technology should be affordable, accessible, and inclusive, but users should have a reasonable expectation of privacy, too. Unaccountable exploitation by rich and powerful tech interests has caused poor and working-class people to pay for this accessibility with their data. Tech writers portray the shift from Android to iPhones, or Windows to Linux or Mac, as a painless transition without financial consequences, but that’s far from true; jumping ship may be extremely risky or downright impossible. Coverage of unethical data-gathering practices must therefore consider the individual, regional, and global socioeconomic factors that force people to use Android and Windows.

The slipperiness of “I”: emergent properties, personal mythos, and co-creative development

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I’ve talked before about having psychiatric disabilities and being an abuse survivor. Today, I’m going to go into a bit more detail. This hasn’t been easy to write, but I think it’s a story that needs to be told.

It’s honestly a misnomer to say “I” in the first place; it’s more for your convenience than it is an inner truth. There are a lot of ghosts in this machine. I have a complex, intricate personal mythos; though I am very private about what that entails, it’s still a central component of my experience. I don’t feel comfortable with any of the “official” diagnostic labels that come close to what I experience, but there’s some similarity to Internal Family Systems. I’d say that the experience is more complex than that therapeutic model encourages, but it’s vastly better than anything that immediately evokes thoughts of Sybil and Three Faces of Eve.

I said this when I was 19:

It is difficult to define me in a few words; I see myself as a fissiparous, separate collection of ideas consolidated into one whole, forced to work together because of physical unity. In my mind exist multitudes of plots, characters, turns of phrase, denouements, orchestras with rousing crescendos and subtle diminuendos, the decisions and revisions of daily life, and the constant analysis of information. I’ve likened my brain to a large music-box or production factory; the ideas and influences of this world enter me, and I take them and combine them through my perception and interpretation, and take the universe and make it into [my own].

So many “psychiatric disorders” are extreme responses to a disordered, chaotic, and often mean world. To imply that the person experiencing psychiatric disability is the one who is “disordered” lets abusers, dictators, and warmongers off the hook. Our lives are intricately linked with others’. It’s important to understand individual factors, but it’s also vital to remember that we exist within systems: families, towns and cities, friend groups, countries, Earth at large. My lack of a contiguous “I”-narrator is in part a response to the circumstances in which I was brought up. I don’t—can’t—believe anything with absolute certitude, because I know my entire universe can be ruptured at any moment. It gets even more intense when you add in generational trauma: slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, and centuries of tilling the land without being able to reap the results of one’s own handiwork. This is not a stable foundation on which to build a singular sense of self, but my brain mitigated this problem by allowing for varied and co-creative senses of self to exist instead. I’m not anti-psychiatry, but I am vehemently against seeing people’s mental health as something extricable from the contexts in which people grow, live, work, and play.

A contiguous sense of self is an epiphenomenal emergent property anyway, not a concrete reality that can be used as an absolute benchmark of sanity or insanity. Because it’s all people know, they act as though it can be used to delineate what is beneficial and what is harmful. That’s not to say that there aren’t consistent tendencies, traits, and behaviours I can label as mine, but they’re the traits of a microcosm. There are plenty of other creative people who “contain multitudes,” pace Walt Whitman.

On a meta-level, it’s already pretty fucking weird that a collection of atoms can perceive itself at all. Thought itself is an intangible process generated by electrical impulses and chemical baths washing over our brains. I could continue the reduction to the sub-atomic levels: quarks, photons, and the like.

If it weren’t for the way my cognition is arranged, I don’t think I’d be alive to be telling you about this today, or if I were still alive, I think my quality of life would be greatly diminished. Having an internal support team has allowed me to pull through difficult traumas and create a better life for myself. This is deeply important to me and I am horrified by narratives that pathologise, flatten, and diminish my interiority or its positive effects on my external presentation. It’s especially galling when those judgements come from other neurodivergent people who seem to think that only some forms of cognitive difference are acceptable. Anxiety, autism, and depression are OK to talk about, but nothing else is. This is not OK. There is no point in trying to win the Oppression Olympics. Some animals are not more equal than others.

I don’t typically talk about it publicly because I have no interest in ontological debates, especially when people drag in the medical model. I’m also profoundly uncomfortable with having people apply inaccurate, minimising, and hurtful narratives to my experiences, turning a complex, multi-dimensional topological space into a two-dimensional figure or stripping it into non-contiguous pieces separate from the context in which they originally existed. It’s particularly painful to see people who know me well do it. I don’t want people to delve into extensive analyses of my personal mereology. I just want them to listen and not try to create their own—ultimately inaccurate—stories that they think supersede my own.

I refuse to allow people to denigrate me for having internal mechanisms that allow me to survive and even thrive after years of abuse, discrimination, marginalisation, and oppression. It’s time to take my power back by telling my story. Our story.

Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry

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Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live or must be second-class citizens by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

  • Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
  • Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

  • Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
  • Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
  • Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
  • Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
  • Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

Worst Practices: The Discrediting of Autistic Narratives through Pathologising Constructs

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The one positive of my neuropsychology horror story was the series of existential, epistemic and personal revelations that proceeded from it. I knew that after that experience, I had to move forward in rejecting the politics of shame and pathologisation and move towards a more holistic framework to understand myself and the way I gather and express knowledge. Since that incident, I’ve been thinking about how professionals’ ideas of autistic epistemology (people’s relationship with knowledge, how it is gathered, and the validity of that knowledge) and ontology (ideas about existence and what it represents) are rooted in the idea that marginalised people’s self-perceptions and -knowledge are intrinsically invalid because of who we are.

A few days after I received the letter from Beth Israel’s patient relations department standing by the neuropsychology department’s poor methodology, I came across some writing by the disability scholar and activist Alex Haagaard about how the voices of people with chronic illnesses are routinely discredited by doctors because these doctors have either consciously or unconsciously adopted an attitude towards marginalised people that renders their words unreliable. Their writing reminded me of some of my own ideas on how medical professionals discredit the self-perceptions of autistic people and treat us as though our self-knowledge is either non-existent or reliable; we are Hans Asperger’s ‘intelligent automata’, even if they may not directly refer to us as robots rendered in flesh in their reports. People who do not feel a fundamental tension between their self-knowledge and the ways others view them—the fraught relationship between the subjective ‘I’ and the objective ‘me’ that George Herbert Mead refers to in his work—will not appreciate the level to which this subjective/objective tension affects people’s lives. For people whose life is blissfully absent of this tension, there is a clear distinction between Normal and Abnormal, between truly human and monstrous. Furthermore, the tension that we feel is inherent to us, a flaw that must be corrected, rather than a reflection of the complex interplay between individual traits and social structures. It is a form of victim-blaming applied to people who find themselves on the wrong end of a power differential; if you’re not powerful enough to matter, your problems are your fault. You are the problem. (Incidentally, this is why I am generally indisposed to refer to neurodivergent experiences as being disorders instead of disabilities except in specific circumstances; being disordered implies that the problem inheres within the individual and exists separate from a broader context, whereas disability implies a more complex state of affairs in which people experience both internal disabling experiences and social disablement. It’s even worse in languages like German, in which disorder is translated as Störung, or disturbance.)

When your clinical standpoint requires that ‘disordered’ people must be discredited, then it is far too easy to reject or distort patients’ experiences. After all, our existence is a flaw in the human design. Anything we produce must be flawed by extension. This is magnified if autistic people also experience intersecting forms of marginalisation, like misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia or classism. The discrediting experiences that women, people of colour, low- and moderate-income people, and LGBTQ people encounter reinforce and magnify the disablism we face. People like me cannot be reliable narrators under this framework. The idea, for example, of a black, queer, disabled person being intelligent enough to question the underestimation of their intelligence and to question the idea that the methodology used to evaluate me would accurately describe my cognition, is unfathomable. Recognising that a black, autistic man was capable of being empathic would destroy the very foundations upon which his faulty framework of autism was based. After all, aren’t black men all brutes and autistic people unfeeling robots? Had I come into that office with the same level of education – at the time I was a semester away from finishing my master’s degree and had mentioned being interested in doing a doctoral dissertation – and work experience as a white, non-disabled man with unconditional male privilege, I doubt I would have received the same treatment.

This neuropsychologist had a clear ontological framework of Being Autistic: restricted interests, poor social skills, unable to have legitimate insights into one’s own intellect, knowledge-gathering processes, or background. This pattern of traits was his foundational definition of being autistic within the world. I suspect that he had an absolute, reified version of autism in which it exists as a solid entity with clear boundaries, rather than a socially constructed phenomenon or set of phenomena that is defined primarily for its utility, not its concrete existence.

While I refer specifically to a professional who was immured in a particular kind of thinking and applied it to me, this is certainly not limited to him. It’s the entire foundation of how autism is viewed within traditional medicalised practice. Please note that I’m not a strict adherent of either the social or medical model; rather, I view disability as a combination of social and medical factors. I admit that I am more hostile towards the strictly medical model than I am the strictly social model; I find the former profoundly dehumanising and Othering in ways I do not see the latter. I am generally opposed to models that view people as entities entirely deracinated from the social and cultural contexts in which they live, work and learn.

This systemic devaluation of autistic self-knowledge and existence has real, palpable effects: self-hatred, depression, anxiety, free-floating existential angst. They lead to a construction of an oppositional self-concept that internalises those messages. Whenever I think about my experience with this doctor and and other ‘experts’ like him, I fall into spirals of self-doubt, wondering if my perceptions can be trusted or if my memories are real. I start tearing myself apart, constantly trying to psychoanalyse myself in an effort to find out why I view myself the way I do. I feel a nasty chill running up my spine and a metallic tang in my mouth. I can feel my thoughts starting to scramble and introjected voices taunting me and trying to discourage me from scholarship and intellectual inquiry. I’ve had lifelong mental health struggles because of this kind of devaluation. I know I’m mostly talking about it from a theoretical standpoint here, but it goes beyond that. Remember that even the most abstruse academic theories about identity and selfhood attempt to address internal experiences and social structures that can and do affect real people.

If this happened to me, somebody who does have educational privilege and can engage critically with academic literature, imagine what might happen to someone else who doesn’t have those external markers of credibility.