Thread by @erikaheidewald

gatekeeping marginalized identities has resulted in people feeling like they HAVE TO be cis, be straight, be neurotypical when they are not, because they’re not different ENOUGH and that identity is for the REAL marginalized people.

this is just cisheteronormativity & ableism!!!

this is so bonkers! conservatives were never able to convince me i had to be cishet but feminists did because they used my empathy & justice sensitivity to manipulate me into thinking that was my moral imperative. i didn’t have a right to my own experience bc it wasn’t bad enough

the people who have been outraged at me self-identifying as autistic haven’t been the conservative autism moms, they don’t know i exist. it’s been “progressive” people who say i am somehow harming the real autistics. they call me a fake- i must be NT. compulsory neurotypicality.

how have we all been falling for this shit oh my god

i grew up in a red state surrounded by conservatives who tried very, very hard to get me to conform and i never would. but i’m autistic and vulnerable to manipulation by people who act like my friend so people who used social justice arguments on me DID make me conform. for a bit

i tried to fit myself into their boxes for a couple years but conformity is impossible for me so eventually i escaped, moved, & made all new friends. i am still undoing a lot of trauma from that time. 2 years of manipulation by supposed allies was worse than 20 years of hostility

i’ve talked to a lot of autistic people and i see over and over again that a lot of our self-doubt and self-blame have been instilled in us through manipulation by people who claim to share our values and are guilt tripping us. they’re just playing the social status game on us.

they know how to manipulate us into feeling like bad people and thinking they are good people and that gives them power and status over us and that’s all they actually care about. they couldn’t break my will or make me believe i was worthless. they COULD guilt me. so they did.

neurotypical people will always play the social status game on us because that is just what they do. it’s the scorpion and the frog. they will use whatever tool is at their disposal. it doesn’t ever mean anything. it is never true. we shouldn’t internalize it ever. EVER.

allistic neurodivergents are harder to predict. some of them hate the social status game. but some of them are the best at it, and those are the people who got to me. people who used our shared experience of mental illness to make me empathize & let down my guard.

everything they told me about myself has not turned out to be true at all. they just wanted the power to tell me who i am allowed to be. they will never be able to see who i actually am and their opinion of me is irrelevant. it’s not my fault i couldn’t see it back then.

autistic people are vulnerable to manipulation unless we know the patterns, and we can’t know most of the patterns unless someone tells us. i didn’t know how much i had been manipulated until my allistic ND best friend showed me, and I didn’t see the full scope until just now

no trans people would be harmed if i say i’m trans because i’m agender, even though i still plan to present in a femme way, even though i don’t identify with any gender & don’t know how that feels. i only worry about that bc people who wanted to control me guilt tripped me.

autistic people have been convinced we’re not real anything. we’re not real marginalized people. we’re not real trans people. we’re not real queer people. we’ve been convinced that we don’t deserve any support, solidarity, or community. we’ve been convinced we’re not real people.

we believe them not because we hate ourselves, but because our neurology makes us decide who to help based on a cost/benefit analysis of who needs it more, and we can’t choose ourselves just because it’s us. we believe that other people’s needs are real and ours are negotiable