Many autistic people have spoken or written about the benefits of autistic community.  For example, Jim Sinclair has some eloquent thoughts on the subject.  I firmly agree that these communities have much to offer us.  I’ve facilitated two communities for autistic college students at two different universities, and I’ve also been part of some other autistic groups, and had generally positive experiences in them.

We live in a neurotypical world: a world in which autism is habitually treated as pathology, a world in which autism is marginalized, a world in which we rarely meet people like ourselves, a world in which we must conform to the expectations of the neurotypicals that surround us.  To have even a short break from this neurotypical world, a chance to exist in an autistic space with other autistic people, can be a precious thing – and yet very few autistic people today are part of an autistic community.

This was brought home to me last year when I was passing through a major downtown area on the way to attend a meeting of the autistic community in that city.  By coincidence, the meeting was being held on January 21, the date of the Women’s March, and I was waiting for about twenty minutes at a transit stop next to the march.  The marchers came past in a steady flow, hundreds upon hundreds and thousands upon thousands.  And the attendance wasn’t even that high compared to other urban centres – in some places, hundreds of thousands turned out.

When I finally got to the autistic community’s meeting, there were perhaps a dozen people present.  More trickled in over time, but even allowing for my imperfect memory, there can’t have been more than twenty – and I’m probably being generous.

It’s hard to get autistic people together.  When we try to build a strong community, we face many challenges.

One obvious challenge is the deep stigma that continues to surround autism and disability.  We describe autism as a “disorder” and its features as “deficits.”  Our society is one that encourages conformity and normality, and it openly denigrates the neurodivergent.  Autistic people are chastised for lacking empathy, even though neurotypical people routinely show little understanding of the autistic perspective and even though autistic people are regularly victims of violence perpetrated by others.  We routinely hear outrageous statements about autism that one would never dare to utter about, say, a racial or ethnic group.  In short, autistic people are marginalized and are subjected to stigmatizing discourses.  This situation naturally breeds internalized stigma.

(Moreover, those autistic people who can pass for neurotypical relatively well might make a calculated decision to break ties with their neurotype and attempt to pass.  This is not quite internalized stigma, but it has the same consequence.)

Another challenge is the fact that most autistic people grow up in a neurotypical world.  Some autistic people are the children of autistic adults, but this group seems to be a minority.  Lamentably, there is currently little contact between autistic adults and neurotypical parents of autistic children.  The autism world is a world of silos, and the autistic community is one of these silos.  Therefore, we rarely enter the autistic community until adulthood, and only some of us will do so: those who are interested in joining the autistic community, who are willing to put in the effort it takes to find and join the autistic community, and who are courageous enough to overcome anxieties and internalized stigma associated with joining the autistic community.

Unfortunately, we also create further challenges for ourselves.  I do believe that autistic communities are, in some ways, uniquely accepting of others.  Autistic people may not necessarily be particularly similar to one another, but I and others have observed that we will readily and unconditionally accept and tolerate differences that would invite negative judgements in the neurotypical world.  In autistic communities, difference and atypicality are the norm.  But, even if the autistic community is uniquely accepting in some ways, there are also ways in which it can exclude people.

Although autistic communities tend to be very tolerant of atypical behaviour, I fear that we can be intolerant of opinions that differ from our own views.  For example, we can denounce opposing points of view simply on the grounds that they act as “triggers” that cause psychological distress.  I am not blaming autistic “black and white thinking” for this – I’ve also seen advocacy and identity groups of non-autistic people, and I don’t think they’re much different.  Even so, the politically radical atmosphere that one can find in many autistic communities can, I believe, make people looking purely for a social community uncomfortable.  (This may even deprive us of members who might otherwise, through exposure to other autistic people, be gradually convinced to adopt an advocate’s perspective and agenda.)

We can also struggle because of conflict between personalities.  I’ve been a member of several autistic communities in different places, and I have occasionally seen that one individual will enter into a conflict with another person.  This ordinarily drives at least one of these two people away from the community, and while the conflict plays out, it may make the space of the community toxic for others and drive them away as well.

There are various reasons why we can enter into these conflicts.  Sometimes they reflect differences of political opinion, which I already noted we don’t always tolerate very well.

Sometimes conflicts reflect poor social skills.  It’s true that a fascinating new study (Heasman & Gillespie, 2018) documents how autistic people can be very accepting of unusual social behaviour from one another, but I have also observed cases in which autistic people have said or done things that were offensive – offensive to the point that others could no longer accept their behaviour.  For example, I recall one instance where an individual was complaining about not being able to find a girlfriend.  The language he used made others uncomfortable, because it seemed to assume a right to a romantic relationship and almost seemed to blame women for not accepting him.  A neurotypical person who experienced persistent romantic failure might well have had similarly offensive complaints, and might well have made similarly offensive remarks in front of certain audiences – but in the context of a progressive group like an autistic community, they would probably have recognized the social risk of appearing misogynistic and remained silent.

Worse, in interpersonal interactions, we can sometimes be poor judges of whether a particular remark was intended to denigrate or mock us or not.  Not only do our social challenges sometimes make it difficult for us to discern intentions, but many of us will have long and painful experiences of victimization, including cruel teasing.  Therefore, through painful experience, we can learn to err on the side of caution.  Unfortunately, if one person reacts negatively to another’s comments, this can set off an escalating chain reaction.

What, then, can we do to make our autistic communities stronger and safer for all their members?

I think it can be helpful to take a preventative approach: to set clear expectations to discourage offensive remarks (like the girlfriend comments mentioned earlier), and to issue gentle reminders whenever someone seems to be close to crossing a line.  These expectations could be expressed in a policy.  This solution unfortunately risks reinforcing the problems that can arise due to intolerance of political views unpopular with group members, but I believe this risk can be managed by trying to maintain some separation between social activities and political discussions/advocacy activities, as well as ensuring that the policy is only aimed at preventing harassment and protecting members, not suppressing members’ opinions.

We can also work to be more accepting of others who disagree with us, and we can work to try and assume others’ good intentions until proven otherwise.  This doesn’t mean we have to overlook genuinely offensive remarks, but it does mean we can spend more time trying to understand the perspectives of those who disagree with us and that we can try to be generous in attributing good motives to them.

As I’ve written before, we can also endeavour to introduce the autistic community to people when they are younger, rather than leaving it to adults’ own initiative to locate autistic communities.

Finally, we can continue to work to eliminate stigmas around autism in our society, to make autism an identity like any other: one that isn’t a source of shame, but of pride.

References

Heasman, B., & Gillespie, A. (2018). Neurodivergent intersubjectivity: Distinctive features of how autistic people create shared understanding. Autism. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361318785172

Sinclair, J. (2010). Being autistic together. Disability Studies Quarterly, 30. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v30i1.1075(1).