I don’t like being referred to as a “person with autism”. I can’t just set it down, it’s not something I can remove. It is fundamental to the way I interact with the world, right down to how stim enters my brain. If my brain has types of inputs no allistic person can even approach, and methods of processing inherently different, it is an existence no allistic person can reach. There is no version of me that is not autistic.

A “cure” is the same as shooting me and replacing me with someone else.

The type of person I am is autistic. I am autistic.

I know it is a big trend in leftist spaces to use person first language, but in many situations that just sounds like eugenics to me. Personhood is not some distinct universal experience. There is no “ideal human mind” floating out there in the aether for them to recognize in me.

I get that person first language helps some people recognize that thoughts happen behind my eyes, but if the only way they can do that is by imagining I’m them, I don’t care.

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Honestly, there are others I’ve met who prefer to actually use “autistic” as a noun, like they might say “fellow autistics” or something, and more power to them — but for me it has to be “autist”, so I’m glad to see that there are other people here who also prefer that term.

    I think I probably first started saying “autist” as an influence from Norwegian, actually — that I’d basically hear about or talk about autism less in English-language spaces (i.e. with my family, who already understood me and my needs etc), compared to in Norwegian-language spaces (i.e. with friends, at school, in health settings, etc), and so “autist” being a perfectly innocuous and common word for an autistic person in Norwegian, I just started using “autist” in English as well. And so it was then only much later that I found out about how the word “autist” is misused by channers. Finding out about this misusage of the word didn’t really make me want to stop labeling myself as an autist, rather it made me want to double down and tell the chuds to ligma balls, because I’m sure as hell not going to let those bozos decide how I label myself.

    It is a bit of an interesting thing, though, that the same word could end up getting such different connotations between English and Norwegian.

    Edit: Of course, when allists say “autist” I take this with due skepticism, and I don’t call other people “autist” if they don’t want to be called this.

    • RosethornRanger [it/its, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      3 months ago

      yeah I’m getting a lot of hate for using this one, doesn’t matter if its used as a slur by some we are using it in a positive way to reference our community and ourselves, it is textbook reclamation. I’m blocking a lot of people in the thread lol

      literally every word for ourselves is used as a slur by fascists smh