Thread by @ballastgrey

Okay. So I'm watching The Good Doctor and there's this episode where an autistic patient and her autistic roommate...interact...in an ambiguously romantic way (S02E13). As this was being set up I was overwhelmed with how much I needed this.

(Uh, spoilers.)

She asks if they can have sex in the hospital room and I pause the episode so I can grab my chest and beg the show to please, please, please let this happen. Please let this happen.

(They don't get to. The doctors shut them down. Meanwhile the episode cuts to, uh, far more appealing people engaging in a sexual context, but I'm too invested at this point to care.)

Suffice it to say that while the portrayal of autism was...completely relatable, the portrayal of their sexual, romantic, and platonic connection to each other was strange. I actually cried. I actually got my feelings hurt by a TV show.

I can just say what was wrong with this episode (disabled people are not allowed to have sexual/romantic relationships and if they do these relationships have to be readable as Strange and Weird and Different than what the audience is used to). But.

This episode was....I don't know. I had no idea how much of my loneliness stems from not seeing people like me portrayed in the media as CAPABLE of romantic/sexual relationships, let alone getting to have them.

Like, kudos to TGD for having more than ONE autistic person present?

These two characters are presented as having a relationship that is entirely strange and foreign, but works for them so...yay? Except, um...we have feelings too. We have romantic and emotional desires, not just mechanically sexual ones.

There's actually an article about this very episode and what they had hoped to do with the dynamic they were exploring with these characters. I wish I could say it made me feel better.

(I'll cite the article here though I'm disheartened by it: indiewire.com/2019/01/the-go…)

Quote: "There’s nothing about her personality and her presentation of behaviors that would want her to say, ‘Yeah I love you too.’ I wanted to pull it back to... acknowledging what he said...not reaching her into this emotional life that she hasn’t had access to likely.”

That statement? Her "emotional life that she hasn't had access to?" UMMM????

Do you think neither of these two people have intense emotional lives just because they speak in practical terms about their living arrangement?

It's...unsettling that both the other characters and the audience (and the writers) STILL think that autistic people have no emotional inner life, or have an emotional life that's so weird and foreign and distant that we could never relate to it. I assure you that isn't true.

And yes, the episode and the article are attempting to redeem the situation by stating that this relationship portrayal made sense based on "research and conversations" with autistic people who had reported a similar mechanical approach to sexuality.

Why do I not feel seen here?

I loved the portrayal of the two characters, to be clear. And I loved their relationship and their being allowed the chance to have a sexual relationship (even if it was strictly off-screen). But it would have meant so much to me if they could have had something...real?

Something messy, something emotional, something complicated? Like REAL people have? Like REAL autistic people have?

It just...people really do think we're aliens, don't they? People really don't understand how autism (or really, any disability that makes the media uncomfortable) can coexist with human relationships. It's, um, hmm.

People think that having ONE Autistic Character IS the plot of the show, but boy, wouldn't it be something if there were a story about autistic people having relationships with each other? More than one autistic person? As more than just the show's gimmick?

I desperately want to see this happen. That is all.