Here’s a fundamental question: what is the political status of autism?  Are autism and other disabilities simply impairments that need to be addressed through the provisions of services and supports, or are autistic people also victims of oppressive social and political systems that cause marginalization?  Do autistic people just need charity, or do we need social justice as well?

We need to address this question and answer it, for I would say that the present model used to address autism is generally a charitable one.  Yes, there are some efforts in the direction of a social justice model, but the overwhelmingly common response to autism has been to organize services and supports (early intervention, social skills trainings, job coaching, etc.).  While people may sometimes be given a right to access these supports, the basic model upon which they are organized – that is, the model where the autistic person, or their parents, is provided with a service intended to help them – falls far short of an emancipatory change to society.

Overt Discrimination

One simple way of answering the question of whether autism is a social justice issue is to establish whether discrimination against autistic people occurs. If there is discrimination, then the issue is a social justice issue. And unfortunately, it seems like autistic people do face discrimination.

Sometimes we can see this discrimination present in overt policies.  Sometimes autistic people are discriminated against in flagrant ways.  The brazenness of these abuses may stretch the limits of our credulity, but sadly, they are all too real.

For example, let us take the example of the Canadian immigration system.  In the country’s early days, discrimination on the basis of race and nationality was overt, brazen, and unapologetic.  Chinese immigrants were variously made to pay special “head taxes” or simply banned entirely, and in 1939, the MS St. Louis, stuffed full of Jewish refugees, was turned away and its passengers were forced to return to Europe, where many perished.  In 1962, the Canadian government resolved to end all such discrimination.  Henceforth, new immigrants, with no family ties to Canada, would not be subject to any discrimination based on ethnic or national origin.  Instead, they would be judged solely on the basis of their education and qualifications.  This reform helped to pave the way for Canadian multiculturalism.

It would be nearly six decades before the Canadian government thought to do anything similar in the case of disability.

Growing up as an autistic person in Canada, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that my neurotype would not have allowed me to live in the country if not for the fact that I was born with Canadian citizenship.  But then, just as I was ready to start my undergraduate studies at UVic, I was appalled to find that Jeffrey Niehaus – who, in a better world, might have been my intro psych professor – was being expelled from the country simply because his son was diagnosed with autism.

It turned out that, unbeknownst to myself and almost everyone else in Canada, the Canadian government had a total exclusion policy when it came to immigration of people with disabilities.  Even as schoolchildren were learning about the injustices of the Chinese Exclusion Act[1] and about the necessity of preventing anything similar in Canada’s future, the Canadian government was actively preventing people with disabilities from immigrating into the country.  When Canada’s great political satirist, Rick Mercer, found out about a similar deportation case, this time involving an individual with Down Syndrome, he admitted that he was “completely unaware of” the policy, said he found it “hard to believe,” and indeed that his initial reaction had been disbelief, thinking that it simply could not “be true.”  Unfortunately, it was true.  Even cosmopolitan, progressive Canada, with an immigration system that was a model for the rest of the world, was openly and shamelessly discriminating against people with disabilities – and because disability wasn’t thought to be a political issue, almost nobody noticed.  On the rare occasion that there was any hint of popular anger, it was invariably centred around some specific case, not the general principle.

Now, it’s true that the Canadian government is apparently, finally, making some changes, but the policy still isn’t being entirely eliminated.

This is just one example of how autistic people are being brazenly denied equal or egalitarian treatment as a result of established policy.  I picked it because learning about it so shocked my own younger self, but one can find many other examples in many other countries.

For example, in the United States, many autistic people and people with intellectual disabilities are denied life-saving organ transplants simply because of their disability.  (Compare and contrast with the international outcry when China harvests organs from death row prisoners; the latter is considered a political issue, but it seems like the disability case doesn’t get that status.)

To take another example, most diagnosed autistic people in countries like France or South Africa are denied access to mainstream schools.[2]  How, exactly, is one supposed to thrive in our competitive economy when one can’t even get a grade school education?

Hidden Discrimination

Of course, advanced Western countries today rarely openly discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, and so forth. There are some continued problems with officially-sanctioned discrimination,[3] but for the most part, discrimination against identified groups occurs due to other factors, like the biases of individuals, or systemic socioeconomic issues.

Right now, almost nobody is studying such discrimination against autistic people.  It’s just not on the radar.  But it certainly exists.

To show this, we need look no further than some of the studies that have been done, just in the last few years, on prosody and autism (Grossman, 2015; Sasson et al., 2017).  These studies show, very clearly, that we are biased against autistic people on the basis of style, not substance.  When we’re given a transcript of autistic people’s speech and asked to judge that, we don’t see anything problematic.  But when we’re given a short video of them talking, or even just a still image, we immediately pick on some subtle abnormality that makes us judge autistic people negatively.

I hope you can see the consequences of this, because they are far-reaching.  Even without being aware of someone’s autism diagnosis, neurotypicals will automatically judge them negatively based on appearance alone.  Even if we leave aside the implications for friendships and social connections, these findings clearly show that autistic people will face discrimination in employment situations and job interviews.  Even if the substance of autistic people’s answers gives no reason for an interviewer to judge us more harshly than neurotypical applicants,[4] it’s possible that our applications would nevertheless be rejected because of some subtle mannerism.

Moreover, individuals’ biases against autistics can sometimes be much more overt.  For example, a quarter of Americans and two-thirds of Japanese freely admit that they would be unwilling to have an autistic person marry into their family (Someki et al., 2018).  One is reminded of the hatred that attached itself to interracial relationships in America.

Conclusions

Sadly, despite the limited attention that has been devoted to the subject, there is overwhelming evidence suggesting that autistic people face oppression and discrimination.

This does not, by any means, suggest that autistic people do not require supports and services.  However, it shows that such services are not in themselves a sufficient response to the problem of autism. Even if we pretend that a charitable approach to autism was not demoralizing and disempowering to recipients of charity, it would not be able to address the issue of discrimination against autistic people.  Robust protections and sweeping social changes are also required.

I believe that an essential step towards implementing these changes is “mainstreaming” autism and disability across all domains of social policy.  To mainstream something like gender means that government would consider gender whenever it develops or changes or reviews policies, legislation, or programmes.  Given the severity of the marginalization of people with disabilities in our societies, I believe that we have at least as strong a case for mainstreaming disability policy.  People with disabilities are people like any others, and all aspects of social policy can affect us – either to actively and directly hurt us, to passively permit discrimination against us, or to take active steps to protect us.  Mainstreaming of the disability lens would not immediately eliminate all ills and all discrimination, but it would at least help to bring disability into the political realm.  It would make disability part of the political conversation, a conversation from which it has hitherto been largely excluded.

References

Grossman, R. B. (2015). Judgments of social awkwardness from brief exposure to children with and without high-functioning autism. Autism, 19(5), 580–587. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361314536937

Sasson, N. J., Faso, D. J., Nugent, J., Lovell, S., Kennedy, D. P., & Grossman, R. B. (2017). Neurotypical peers are less willing to interact with those with autism based on thin slice judgments. Scientific Reports, 7: 40700. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep40700

Someki, F., Torii, M., Brooks, P. J., Koeda, T., & Gillespie-Lynch, K. (2018). Stigma associated with autism among college students in Japan and the United States: An online training study. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 76, 88–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2018.02.016

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Footnotes

[1] Not the American one from 1882, but the Canadian one from 1923.

[2] Although I don’t take the position that people should be forced to attend mainstream schools against their will, I do strongly believe that everyone should have the right to attend mainstream schools if that’s where they want to be.

[3] It is interesting to note that one of the few remaining exceptions pertains to the LGBTQIA community, presumably because LGBTQIA identities and expression were viewed in medical terms until relatively recently. Only recently have we begun to accept that discrimination against LGBTQIA people is a political issue, and this recognition has allowed us to begin to make progress in this sphere. This relates back to the idea that disablement can be a mechanism of oppression.

[4] And this is a pretty implausible assumption: we tend to struggle most in the moment during unfamiliar social situations involving groups of people and that place complex cognitive processing demands on us.  A job interview with a panel of unfamiliar people, that requires us to react in the moment without delays, and that moreover requires us to explicitly think complex convoluted thoughts about how the interviewers will perceive and react to our behaviour, is one of the most difficult social situations out there.  It’s entirely likely that the substance of our answers would be less what the interviewers are looking for, even if we’re just as able to do the job as anyone else.