Thread by @UndercoverAutie

You know what? I’m really losing my patience with “autism parents” (not a thing - your child is not autism) right now.

There are many #ActuallyAutistic people having important discussions on Twitter. We are figuring out world that was not made for us.

We are talking about things we find easy and things we find hard, our likes and dislikes, how we adapt, how we wish society would adapt to us.

These conversations are very new. Particularly for non-men. It has always been seen as a ‘male syndrome’. It is not.

So when we are having discussions and an autism ‘advocate’ comes and shuts us down by telling us we’re ‘wrong’, what exactly is that doing?

Well I’ll tell you, from my POV it’s butting in to a conversation between autistic people about their lives when you’re not autistic.

It’s taking away possibly the first space we’ve had (for me at least) to talk openly about autism with other autistic people. It’s making that space feel just like everywhere else - unsafe and like we don’t belong. It’s making us feel like we don’t matter.

We get it. Some of you have kids with autism who are struggling. It’s scary. They’re different to you and different to kids their own age. WE KNOW. We all struggled to varying degrees in our childhood. I was relatively very lucky with mine and had few problems.

You don’t need to tell me that some people struggle/d more. Again, I KNOW.

What we are doing by having these conversations is exploring the autistic world and lives of autistic people.

We are not all the same, otherwise these conversations wouldn’t be worth having in the first place.

We are not trying to push out your children from the discussion. We are trying to do the very opposite. If you listened for a while, you might gain some insight.

You might find that some of what we say is applicable to your child. You might realise that an assumption you’d made about autism actually isn’t the case for all autistics and enables you to better understand your child. You might realise that we were once like your child.

And that listening to us as adults might give you a clue as to how you could better help your child now.

Again, we are all different and we all have similarities. It is more nuanced that ‘you are one type of autism and my child is a worse kind’.

Furthermore, when you shut us down you are not allowing us space to discuss our own lives. We do not exist as advocates for your child. Many of us would be happy to do that, but we are not obliged to. We are our own people with our own lives and problems.

We have struggles and triumphs we want to talk about with each other. How dare you jump in and start telling us we’re wrong and that somehow we’re not being truthful?

Just because your child has different problems to me doesn’t make mine irrelevant.

Stop taking away our space. Stop shutting down our discussion. We are people, too. We are not autistic robots out to sabotage your plight for your autistic child. We are just humans who struggle and love and cry and rage and celebrate like anyone else.

Our pain and joy is as valid as anyone else’s. As valid as yours, as valid as your child’s. Please allow us this space to be humans.