Thread by @mykola

Me: “this is an autism account. And a part of my advocacy is telling all you people with adhd that 60% of you are autistic.”

ADHD twitter: “nah”

Me: “this is a Neurodiversity account. Here is how adhd works. Now, here is how it relates to autism.”

ADHD twitter: “oh”

Right, didn’t show my work, sorry.

The overlap is huge. Current numbers, *which only reflect diagnosis*, are very high.

But most autistic people are undiagnosed adults.

So, yeah.

https://twitter.com/DellaLuna/status/1666928322939592704

Why am I so confident that so many people ADHD folks are actually AuDHD?

Because of the rise of the idea of “less common ADHD traits”, lists of which include things like:

1) sensory issues
2) social challenges and communication problems
3) stimming
4) etc

AKA autistic traits.

We know autism is massively under-diagnosed.

We know it is frequently co-occurring with other neurodivergent conditions, especially ADHD.

We know that there are way more people qualified to diagnose ADHD than autism accurately.

What would it look like if this were true?

Well, we’d have a booming discourse about “less common adhd traits” shared by folks that worked very, very hard to say “but it’s different from when autistic people do the exact same thing because REASONS.”

Right?

Do you see it yet, or should I keep going?

This. Like, if I seem a bit salty about this it’s because the online ADHD community is rife with internalized anti-autistic ableism.

When we speak up about this we often get mobbed. “You can’t diagnose me (as broken like you)!”

And like. Friends.

https://twitter.com/EleniTWehner/status/1666990967809867776

If you are reading these threads of mine and having A Feeling or two, listen. All of this is complicated, and it’s personal.

We are just barely having the “yes! ADHD and autism are connected!” conversation and so I KNOW y’all aren’t ready for this one but:

Autism is queerness.

What I don’t mean: “all autistic people are gay”, “queer people are mentally ill”, or anything that is reductive or silly.

What I do mean: the word “queer” didn’t just manifest. It was fought for, for a reason, by activists.

Why do you think they did that?

Because if you get it, you get it: every letter you add to LGBT+ introduces a new category defined by excluding people it doesn’t explicitly include.

“Queer” flips the script. It says “everyone who has been excluded for who they are, full stop.”

And like. There’s a thread, here, right?

I’m not being abstract or poetic or idealistic when I say: that thing that “queerness” is pointing to is the same thing that “neurodiversity” is pointing to.

It’s just, different vantage points. But, converging models.

So when I say “autism is queerness” what I mean is that to be autistic is to be, in both the general and in a very specific sense, queer.

Which means, to reframe it again in a different way, that society doesn’t tell any stories about you that you’d want to hear.

It means we have to tell our own stories. Often to people who don’t want to hear them, because people telling their own stories is weird and makes people uncomfortable.

Thankfully, autistic people don’t worry about that so much, once we heal/learn we are allowed to be here too.

We are powerful and natural allies in this fight. And we need to find language and framings that allow us to point to and celebrate the convergent thing we are all discovering.

But when we are ableist, transmisic, homophobic — we introduce a paradox, right?

Anyway.

Long-winded aside to just say that, so, of course, obviously:

ADHD is queerness.