Thread by @Quinnae_Moon

There's no shortage of men who hate teen girls that are "frivolous," loud, girly, and animated.

And those same men hate Greta Thunberg for being committed to a serious cause while being "dead-eyed" and "creepy."

Maybe, just maybe, they hate girls and women.

They hate girls who are screaming fans of Twilight and pop idols. And they hate girls who'd sail halfway around the world to make a serious point. I think we can all see what the common factor is.

But there's been another avenue of attack on Thunberg, led by soulless right wing pundits like Andrew Bolt, that attack her autism. This led to a curious defence from no less than Conor Friedersdorf who argued that Thunberg's neurotype is actually a dissenter's superpower.

This is all just thinly disguised ableism, and it's sickening to watch as an autistic woman. It shows how much the right hates us (not that that should be a surprise) and how little some liberals understand us (not surprising either).

The notion that my autism means my words can't be trusted, or that I'm somehow delusional--or, as Friedersdorf would have it, that I'm incapable of holding two thoughts in my head at once--is simply the rankest bigotry.

Autism as it manifests in girls and women is poorly understood and little discussed.

But it should surprise no one that a man's autism is his excuse for the most heinous behaviour, while a girl's autism is the reason no one should listen to her.

How many times have we seen men try to excuse everything from bigotry to sexual assault by asserting that the (male) offender was autistic? But those same people would have us discount the earnest and scientifically informed activism of a girl because *she's* on the spectrum?

The only people 'in the middle' so to speak are people like Friedersdorf who say we should listen to both Thunberg and the sexist Google memo guy--because he's autistic too.

And, no. We're human. We can be wrong, and we deserve to be evaluated on our merits.

Thunberg isn't right because she's autistic. She's right because all the best climate science shows we're in the midst of an alarming, accelerating ecological crisis that her generation will see metastasise into a global catastrophe.

Friedersdorf's argument that autistic people have some kind of dissenter superpower because we can't handle "doublethink" is ableism masking as a compliment. We're not literalist simpletons incapable of maintaining polite fictions. We simply accomplish that differently.

I've compared it to seeing on the visual spectrum versus echolocation. Both produce useful maps of one's environment, but they're 'drawn' differently. I achieve my sociability by a very means from non-autistic people. That doesn't mean I'm *incapable* of sociability.