Dogpiling Helps No One
Toning down autistic infighting
Very few things bring me down more than witnessing autistic infighting. It only happens sometimes. Thankfully, we have pretty strong in-group solidarity as a whole, but there are occasions where unnecessary rifts become apparent.
I want to discuss an example I witnessed on the video platform TikTok. Since I don’t want to magnify or spotlight the participants or heighten tensions, I choose not to provide links to the conflict.
The debate involved a marriage and family therapist who identifies with the profile of Pathological Demand Avoidant (or pervasive drive for autonomy), is also autistic, and has a reasonably large platform on TikTok. The autism community has several differences with this creator on the value of Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) as an identity due to its lack of empirical acceptance as a recognized diagnosis. But this particular back-and-forth dialogue is not what upset me since it was a civilized debate.
The marriage and family therapist released a video lauding Hans Asperger’s work as a child psychiatrist who was compassionate and caring. Most autistic people who have been following the academic literature would recognize this claim as untruthful given the revelations that have come out from Edith Sheffer’s book, Asperger’s Children, where she documented that Dr. Asperger was complicit in the murder of children who we would classify today as having medium and higher support needs. Indeed, there is a lot of literature one can easily find that has highlighted Dr. Asperger’s role as being — well, nothing less than a villain of history who should be spoken in the same breath as a Goebbels or a Mengele. But the confusing dynamic to some people is that just a few short years ago, Dr. Asperger was praised to high heaven in a New York Times best-selling book by a highly reputable author who got it wrong because they did not have all the facts at the time. Indeed, in their apology video, the TikTok creator said they cited another neurodiversity-affirming book (separate from the one linked above) to claim that Asperger was compassionate and caring towards his patients. Evidently, the creator simply had not been keeping themselves up-to-date on this topic. I found this surprising and a bit jolting, mainly because they are a licensed therapist, but nothing they did produced hate in my heart toward this person. I simply figured they were misinformed.
It wasn’t too long after this creator released the video that the dogpile started. One person stitched a video to the creator saying something like…”I am disgusted with myself and horrified that I ever trusted you.” Others lampooned the creator for perpetrating harm against the autism community as well as the Jewish Community. These attacks dysregulated the creator, so, at first, they could only respond with written texts embedded within a TikTok video. The creator decided to take a break from the platform when this response was met with more ad hominem attacks. Then, the creator made what I considered a sincere video apology weeks later, and while they received many supportive responses, the dogpile of personal attacks towards them continued. Like any cycle of internet rage, it seems to have died down, and the creator is back to doing their thing. But it bothered me.
Why did it bother me? Let’s ask ourselves an honest question: What does more harm…an autistic creator who erroneously put out a statement that can be easily fact-checked or punching down on an autistic person who made a mistake and should have known better? I think the latter. Yes, this creator indeed has a large following, and yes, they should have known better. But all it would have taken is a dozen or so responses politely letting the person know what the revelations about Dr. Asperger have shown, and I’m confident they quickly would have corrected themselves. This was not a creator with hate in their heart who was out to deceive people fallaciously. They made a surprising mistake. I was frankly concerned about the creator’s mental health after witnessing the dogpile, and they disappeared for a few weeks.
We all have made mistakes, haven’t we? Did we all get 4.0's in school? Did you ever tell someone something you realized later on was untrue because you did not have all the facts? We’ve all done it. We are all guilty of being wrong on occasion. Yet it’s pretty easy to shame people who commit this sin when they do it online. But doing so does not make one virtuous.
See, I think if we are honest with ourselves about what causes more damage, it is shaming our fellow autistic people for making mistakes rather than simply allowing people to fact-check untrue claims. From a utilitarian standpoint, shaming fellow autistics sets a harmful precedent that one must never make a mistake when they open their mouth lest they find themselves on the wrong end of the pitchforks and torches. This only serves to silence people who, 99% of the time, might have something valuable to say. Why would we choose to do that?
Trauma. Jews are victims of history. Autistics are victims of history. No one wants anything said about oppressed groups that continue this oppression. This is understandable. However, we should not individually oppress others, thinking this helps stop group oppression. It doesn’t. This isn’t even to mention the fact that autistic people are a particularly vulnerable population who can have burnout and traumatic responses to a group of people attacking them. When we silence individual autistics who make mistakes, we are perpetuating the very oppression we are vowing to stop through our advocacy.
I wish this were the only example I can conjure up, but many others happen occasionally. These episodes splinter our community into isolated individuals too afraid to speak for fear of being scorned. I am sure most of us do not want that.
Do not cast the first stone unless you are committed to being perfect for the rest of your life and never being wrong about anything. Vigilante online attacks don’t solve anything constructive in the world, and all they really do is isolate people already in a vulnerable state. We can disagree and have constructive discussions as a group without takedowns and dogpiles. Eliminating this infighting will sharpen our advocacy and foster much greater inclusiveness for a community that badly needs authentic connections.
