TW: allistic violence, conformity, ABA, murder

I don’t know if anybody has written about this in these exact terms, but it’s fairly unmistakable — it happens when you don’t adhere to allistic social norms, in terms of eye contact, speech or social interaction. It’s the “wtf is wrong with you” look.

The worst version of it is someone institutionalizing an autistic person, committing acts of violence (including ABA) against them, or murdering them outright.

The more common versions are looking at you sideways, verbally questioning, correcting, or patronizing you, or jaw-dropping silence followed by deflecting/changing the topic/making a “joke” out of things.

It’s a form of compliance insistence. It’s triggering. It leads to us being rejected from work positions (or fired from them), failed relationships (with allistics), or in some cases, arrested, assaulted or worse.

I wish I could just say “come on, try harder” and have that be enough, but I see the same thing happen from white people towards people of color, men towards women, and against disabled people in general.

As always, we need to create our own media, and act collectively in our own self-interest. It’s up to us, not them. It should be better, but as with so many movement-level shifts in society (let alone liberatory and transformational ones) it’s not going to come through mere awareness. It’s up to us to make it happen.

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