yeah but im kinda quiet about it cuz i'm one of 'em "diagnosed early, put through the trauma wringer" type of ASD folks. can't bring myself to be too proud of a trait i was systematically fucked over for :/

... sorry if that was a downer

i feel like a lot of the autistic pride type stuff i see on my queer corners of the internet are driven by adult diagnosees and self-diagnosis folks who are happy to be able to understand and find community in something about themselves that they didnt understand for most of their lives. and that's great

but for me, someone who had even things about her completely unrelated to the autism attributed to the autism, and who basically spent her entire childhood not being taken seriously or even... really treated as a full fledged person in the first place because of her diagnosis, it can be... hard to interact with that sorta thing. instead, my struggles are about the masking that i basically can't stop doing because it was beaten deep into my psyche and i can't ever turn it off except in the most private, quiet moments, and the deep internalized shame and self-hatred my upbringing left with me

so... i'm just quiet about it. i've been forcibly defined by it, against my will, for so long, i just... don't parade it about, because i dont want it to define me anymore

• I asked my mom to help me with gender stuff. She immediately tried to make an appointment with 'the best doctor she could find'. This was Kenneth Zucker who is a notorious transphobe. Dr Zucker couldn't see me because of being in Toronto or something, so she took me to an old guy at Columbia who had worked with John Money. At this guy's office, he and the other person suggested I have autism. Because I was reluctant to share my feelings. I was reluctant to share my feelings because he was like 70 and I'd just met him!
• She took me to a psychiatrist at Drexel who said I didn't have gender dysphoria because I was 'too cheerful'
• Immediately ask if there were support groups to take me to so I could become 'normal' (They never took me to any lol)
• Find a specifically Christian psychology practice and scream at the psych to 'fix it'
• Say I have 'asparagus'
• When I was switching majors from architecture, she suggested I switch to information systems so I can work with computers instead of needing to work with people

one of the worst things the entire autism parenting industry beats into people's heads is that autism universally leads to us being not sociable. struggling with certain social nuances isn't not being sociable. so often we get... siloed away from our peers and others, told that we're Not Able to go into fields that prioritize communication and sociability, and forced into this awful "autistic savant" box where it's a forgone conclusion that we're some kind of maths and sciences whiz when autistic folks are just as diverse in interests and skills and fields as the rest of the world

my own parents tried to shove me in this "learn to code/hard sciences that'll be what you're good at even if you're bad with people" box that it took so long to come out of and realize that language is my field. editing. writing. proofreading; the humanities and arts.

Yeah it turns out my autistic special interests include economics and organisational behaviour, so while yes I struggle with unspoken social expectations, business is actually a pretty good field for me

Meanwhile I hate programming and working with computers because I have a boomer attitude that I should reasonably expect the computer to jdo what I want it to do because that's its reason to exist