As ‘autism awareness’ April disappeared into the rear-view mirror earlier this year, I was left pondering the topic of autism acceptance. Debate in the autistic community around the terminology and focus for the month often centres around what we should be fighting for. Awareness seems moot – everyone by now is aware of autism and that autistic people exist, albeit they may have very limited and misinformed views of what that actually means. And therefore, many people want to see the focus put more onto autism acceptance, which seems to make sense. You know we’re here, but we now want you to accept us, as we are, and presumably a further step or two, in terms of embracing us and genuinely allowing us to feel like we belong. Which doesn’t sound like that much to ask really, but we are clearly a long way from that, as the recent slew of horrendous news reports showed us.
So, I got stuck on the concept of acceptance, and how I have personally seen this play out. What I’ve seen, by all but a tiny number of people, in my own experience, is that any acceptance is really only surface level at best and often feels performative.
No-one wants to actively look like a bigot or to be discriminatory or prejudiced. Well, perhaps some do, or at least don’t care about it. Some in worryingly high positions of power. But that’s another topic entirely.
We hear of green-washing and there’s even the purple-washing when it comes to disability, but this is often used to describe larger organisations rather than individuals. Trying to outwardly be seen to be accepting and embracing, while actually doing very little to authentically support the cause or group they claim to be so caring about.
When it comes to acceptance of autism on an individual basis, it seems that many people are happy to accept our autistic selves as long as we don’t seem ‘too autistic’. Basically, while our autism impacts very little on them, and causes them no discomfort, they’re totally accepting. Especially when there are others around to witness their ‘acceptance’.
But once anything happens that is too ‘uncomfortable’, that acceptance rapidly dries up. I’m fortunate in a lot of ways that I can mask a lot of the time, but for this reason I’ve witnessed a lot of this performative acceptance. Because as soon as the mask slips, and it eventually always does, so does the acceptance of a lot of people.
People are generally accepting of a need for details and clarity, until they feel that your questions are undermining them or questioning their authority.
People are generally accepting of a bit of anxiety, until you have a panic attack in public and then everyone nervously steps aside or looks the other way.
People are generally accepting of the fact you need some things doing slightly differently, until you dare to ask for adjustments and suddenly you are ‘unreasonable’.
People are generally accepting of sensory differences, until you ask for them to refrain from wearing the perfume that makes you feel physically sick and it’s too much of an imposition. People are generally accepting of the fact that you get overwhelmed, until you have a public meltdown and they can never look at you the same way again and slowly remove themselves from your life.
In my experience, very few people are accepting of an autistic person in distress. Meltdowns are not accepted, and we don’t need to look far in the news to find examples where public meltdowns have in fact lead to death by police. Even on the less final end of the scale, they have been known to lead to the autistic person being sectioned, because society does not accept these things, even though they are a very real part of our reality. These aren’t one-off events, and they affect the multiply marginalised autistic population significantly more – highlighting even further and more prejudiced conditions placed on any sort of acceptance of us. Most people, it seems, are willing to accept autistic people as long as they don’t really come across as particularly autistic. As long as we don’t make them feel uncomfortable with our differences. As long as we don’t make a fuss or need adjustments or embarrass or inconvenience them in any way.
This doesn’t feel like true acceptance to me, and I am not willing to accept anyone’s performative display or virtue-signalling. So, let’s not wait until next April to push for true acceptance, and let’s not settle for any more performative or conditional acceptance of who we are. We deserve more and there’s a long, long way to go until we get there.