Oddbean

@f32d8a03 @de5cda1d #actuallyautistic #Autistic #autism #autist #autistics This is written to the #autistic community, as well as to the non-autistics among us. My apologies if this offends, I'm just trying to be informative to anyone and everyone about this topic. I'm just gonna say to everyone that the "actuallyautistic" tag initially strikes many #autistics as gatekeeping or exclusionary. This happens *all the time*. There's no way for anyone to know intuitively or by inference that it is actually intended to protect and include *all autistics*, whether self-assessed, professionally assessed, and regardless of so-called "levels" of autism. At first glance, I think most people would interpret the tag, which says the tag users are "actually" autistic, as claiming authenticity and distancing themselves from the self-diagnosed in our community. This is why this discussion arises so often. It's confusing. I've seen this come up constantly on twitter in years past. And it comes up here on Mastodon, too. Of course, the history is that the often abusive and misinformed parents of autistic children were aggressively and hostilely invading into online discussions (especially on Twitter) among and between autistics, disagreeing and talking over us, talking down to us, arguing over their insistence of "severity" levels of autism, telling us we weren't autistic, that we're not qualified to discuss autism, that we don't represent autism, that we're frauds, assuming all of us are just pretending to be autistic, that we don't know what it's really like to be autistic, and in various ways and forms invalidating us. These often were full-on attacks upon our community on Twitter. Some of these "autism parents" or "autism moms" made this a daily affair, acting as if "parent activists" who are out to set the world straight with their presumably "correct" perspective on all things involving autism. Often their views were shockingly ablest, invalidating, erasing our voices, forcing outdated and ignorant misconceptions upon us. So the #actuallyautistic tag was created to declare autistic-initiated discussions to be just for autistics (including self-diagnosed). Allistics could ask questions by using the #AskingAutistics tag, or if they entered an #actuallyautistic discussion they were expected to be respectful of autistic viewpoints. It's actually a good idea to describe this history often, not just for autistics, but for all the well-meaning non-autistics who want to communicate with us. Because... to repeat, the tag comes off as gatekeeping. It sounds as if intended to gate-keep. Any reasonable person might take it that way. And it is gatekeeping in the sense of giving non-autistics a warning to respect autistic spaces and discussions. But it isn't to keep out self-identified autistics.