"I need to be useful in a social situation or I panic. Hello! Can I take your coat! Can I help make you drinks! Can I help put out the food! Do you need furniture moved! Can I sort your clothing by color and sub sort by texture! Please for the love of God give me something to do that isn’t small talk! I’m not the only person I’ve met who has a story about fixing a toilet at a party, and its always such a joy and relief when I meet these other people, which I finally have started doing. Other autistics and the socially anxious, generally. People who struggle with the intricacies of acting human in this society...
My favorite characters are robots and I never looked up to girl characters or saw myself in them. I loved robots so much but didn’t recognize the feeling as representation because that doesn’t make sense! They’re not people like me, and besides that they were usually Boys. And then there was 7 of 9, a robot girl, but also a sex object. Not allowed to just be a robot girl, she also had to be really hot. Very confusing. So can I be a robot girl if I’m also really hot? No, that’s an entire set of violence all it’s own. People are a lot nicer to robots on TV than to autistics in real life. Part of the joy of watching sci-fi is how robots are a valued, cherished part of the team. Their social mistakes are seen as endearing and quirky and met with compassion instead of being yelled at, slapped, sanctioned, drugged, imprisoned, killed. As it was I spent a lot of my childhood feeling confused, guilty, traumatized, and deeply sad."
--moss williams, "Antifa, Autism, and the Border Wall Around Punk"