Hello, welcome to another episode of Unpacking Neuroqeerness.
In this episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about autism awareness and acceptance month,
which is the month of April.
I did a similar episode to this one last year, but you know, here we are again, about to
start April again, and I have a lot more listeners now than I did last year.
So there are a lot of people that probably didn't have the chance to listen to that episode
from last year.
So I'm going to do a similar episode for this year.
So April can be a tough month for autistic advocates, and some people would wonder why,
because it is autism acceptance month, so you would expect it to be a good month for
us because you would expect it to be a month where a lot of people are listening to what
we have to say and trying to make the world a better place for us.
However, historically, that has not been the case.
Historically when autism awareness month originated, and it used to be called just autism awareness
month, it was with the narrative of praising parents of autistic kids for being superhero,
autism moms, or autism dads, which is basically praising them for the so-called burden of
raising a disabled child, which is very harmful to autistic people such as myself.
And others, especially those with high support needs, because it makes us feel like a burden.
It makes us feel like, oh, you know, like we're praising, like our parents are getting praised
for dealing with us, essentially.
It's like, like because they wish we weren't disabled, which is very ableist.
And people don't even realize because there's so much emphasis on only the struggles that
come with autism and the fact that sometimes they're just little changing, like sometimes
what really needs to happen is people need to be better accommodated.
And I understand that it's frustrating because, you know, and this was the case for my parents
too, like advocating to get your child accommodations in school can be really frustrating when the
school is not willing to provide them.
And when the system that we live in, the society that we live in in general does not provide
enough accommodations to autistic people.
And we have to acknowledge that the fault of the lack of accommodations, of the lack
of support, of the struggles that autistic people go through is not entirely due to their
autism.
It is due largely to the way that society has not accommodated autistic people and how
society does not provide enough resources.
Most places, most institutions do not provide enough resources to support autistic people
in the ways that they need to be supported, that we need to be supported.
So historically, a lot of the narrative around this month has been centered around trying
to cure and trying to treat autistic people as if we had some kind of disease, as if we
were a disease that needed to be treated and eradicated and corrected and cured.
And the reality is we are people, we just have different support needs and we just need to
be accommodated and we have different communication styles.
We don't need to be molded into neurotypicals.
A lot of us don't want to be molded into neurotypicals.
A lot of us don't want to be cured.
We just want to be accepted, included and accommodated and have our different ways of
being and thinking and existing honored.
And so that's why a lot of us, including myself, have started calling Autism Awareness Month
Autism Acceptance Month or even Autism Acceptance and Awareness Month because I do acknowledge
that in order to have acceptance, we do need to have more awareness and understanding.
It's just the right kind of awareness.
We don't want the kind of awareness that's like portraying our disability as some sort
of disease where we need to be corrected and treated and we're usually given very little
autonomy and voice over how we want to be accommodated.
It's a lot of gaslighting that occurs on the part of medical professionals that a lot of
times do not receive much training on autism and neurodiversity and all and have very dated,
very stigmatized, very stereotypical ideas of what autism is supposed to look like and
they don't usually recognize that autism is a spectrum of different support needs to different
intensities and even those support needs can vary day to day.
They can be dynamic.
So that's why I talk so much on this podcast about how important it is to understand that
autistic people communicate in different ways and not make assumptions about what someone
is trying to tell you based on anything that's not what they're actually saying because neurotypicals
tend to focus a lot on nonverbal cues which we don't, which autistics don't usually use
and an autistic person might be communicating something very directly to the point with
the best wording possible and our faces don't always match what we're saying so the person
might be paying more attention to, if we're talking to a neurotypical person they might
be paying more attention to our faces instead of what we're actually trying to communicate
and then they might accuse us of being untruthful or of communicating something completely different
than what we're actually saying.
That's just one example of how our communication styles differ and so that's one of the main
things that that's like the first thing you can do if you want to better understand and
support your autistic friend or family member is to honor our communication styles.
Moving on, listen to our experiences and listen to how we feel and what we want and what we
need even if they challenge what you've been taught about autism or what you've heard
or what you've seen in movies and TV shows or whatnot.
Remember to listen to our experiences.
Also help us advocate for change.
Probably the most important thing that I can't stress enough is that please help us advocate
for change by reaching out to schools, businesses, community organizations, supermarkets.
An example of an accommodation that could be made at supermarkets is sensory hours where
the lights are dimmed and the music is lowered and there are less people allowed in the market
because sensory overload and overstimulation is one of the top things that autistic people
struggle with especially in environments like supermarkets and so that's one example that
I always talk about instead of worrying because I see this narrative out there like with the
eugenics research with the people that defend treatments and cures and whatnot.
They say that it's because they worry about let's say Johnny which is a high let's say
this hypothetical high support needs autistic child named Johnny that has high sensory sensitivities
that they worry about him being able to they want him to not have sensory they want to
like desensitize him because they want they worry about him not being able to thrive in
this world but I asked the question of well why don't you advocate for a more inclusive
world why don't instead of worrying about oh well Johnny ever be able to go to the supermarket
and making Johnny and putting the burden and the responsibility of that change on Johnny
that is already dealing with being stressed out and overload and he shouldn't have to
desensitize himself in order to fit the world we want the world to be more accommodating
to Johnny and see if we if we just have if Johnny's local supermarket with enough help
from the non-autistic people around him if they advocated for Johnny's local supermarket
to have sensory hours well that that isn't Johnny's sensory sensitivities are no longer
an issue so that's just one example of how people can help and another huge thing as
I wrap up because this is going to be a pretty short episode that one of the main things
I tell people also is call out people on their microaggressions and or ableism when they're
speaking about autistic people especially and otherwise disabled people for that matter
especially when the autistic person or the disabled person is not there to defend themselves
when we are not there to defend ourselves and you are there and someone that you know
especially if it's someone that you have a relationship with be it a friend or a distant
family member or whatnot says something that is ableist or that definitely would be perceived
as a microaggression by your autistic friend or a family member please call them out and
please politely educate them on why what they said is problematic because if we don't do
that if we don't stand up for our friends and family members if you guys don't do that
my community and I will continue to suffer through these microaggressions and ableism
will continue to be rampant and it's like people are affected by this and ableism is
such a massive systemic force and issue that sadly it's unlikely that ableism will be completely
dismantled in one person's lifetime like by the end of my lifetime decades hopefully
many decades from now we might still be fighting this fight and people don't realize that neurodivergent
people have been fighting this fight for many decades already and the term neurodiversity
was coined in the 1990s and people have been advocating with different terms and different
terminology since way before then the disability rights movement was in the 1970s and yes we
have the ADA now and yes we have more accommodations but the ADA is not perfect and the ADA still
does not include people with hidden disabilities people that aren't able to access a diagnosis
they're not everyone is required not every business is required to comply with the ADA
there's still a lot of places that do not have accessible ramps for people in wheelchairs
and accommodations for other kinds of disabilities yes the ADA is huge and it's definitely something
that should be celebrated but it is not complete there is so much more work to be done to get
true inclusion so yeah so that's essentially what I wanted to talk about today I hope you
enjoyed this episode I hope it was helpful for you thank you for all those who have
stayed on for this long I know I get kinda all over the place when I'm making my points
sometimes but eventually I always get around to what I want to say so yeah I just wanted
to thank everyone once again for listening I hope you got something out of this and I'll
see you next time.