What assumptions do you wish people would stop making about Autistic people?
There are so many! I think from a trans and wider LGBTQIA+ perspective is that we can understand ourselves and what we need and want from our relationships, and what we need and want from our body, and how we want to show up in the world. How we want to embody our gender or lack of gender or anything else. Believe us, we kind of know what we are talking about. Whether that’s Autistic people or Autistic people with learning disability, or non-speaking Autistic people, we know who we are, just believe us.
Why is it important to make trans+ spaces accessible to Autistic people? And Autistic spaces accessible to trans+ people?
Well, I mean, there are quite a lot of us! Trans and gender diverse Autistic people and otherwise neurodivergent as well, that doesn’t mean that if you are trans you will be Autistic or that if you are Autistic then you will be trans, it just means there are a lot of us who inhabit both spaces. So, with that in mind trans spaces and more widely queer spaces need to be aware that there are likely to be a lot of Autistic and ND people coming to queer coffee spaces and nightclubs – wherever queer people mingle. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, like: “oh, we’ve ticked the Autistic accessibility box so that means all Autistic people can come here now” and the same with trans people as well, we are obviously all different people, so we all need different things.
How useful can online spaces be?
As a late diagnosed Autistic person – it was looking back at 30 years and going “aha! Now that’s why that makes sense that this has happened and that has happened”. So, for me finding similar others online was massive, because having be told or feeling that I’m weird, awkward, a freak – and that was very much connected to my sexuality and my gender expression as well and always has been and how I related to other people. Being able to be in a group of people online where I can say things like ‘I have trouble waiting for appointments’ and they can just say “that is choice paralysis or time blindness”, so not only do other people experience this, but we also have a whole vocabulary there!
Have you got anything else to add about Autism Acceptance Week?
In a lot of online Autistic spaces that I’m involved with people get very stressed about April, because they know that there is going to be a bombardment of misinformation, even words like suffering, disordered, deficit, lacking, empathy problems really burns out a lot of us. So, just be gentler with your Autistic friends this month because we are going to need it because it’s hard to have to constantly fight against a rising tide of bigotry and hatred – and we definitely see this if we are Autistic and trans. So, just be gentle with each other.