It’s Time To Stop Portraying Autistic People As ‘Aliens’
A video showed up in my Facebook feed recently, shared by an autism advocacy organization. It’s an old clip from the well-known children’s series Arthur. In the sequence, a character with Asperger syndrome explains his experience in the world by comparing it to that of an astronaut navigating a strange planet. The title of the upload on YouTube is straightforward: “Asperger’s syndrome explained for children.” Non-autistic child viewers are shown that their autistic peers are like aliens. Autistic children are taught that they were born on the wrong planet, that they are perpetual outsiders who will never quite belong.
In her 2005 book Constructing Autism, Majia Nadesan provides a useful but woefully under-recognized definition of autism. She writes that autism is “a nominal category useful for grouping heterogenous people all sharing communication practices deviating significantly from the expectations of normalcy.” In simpler terms: autism is a label for people whose social behavior is very different from what their culture expects. Today, autism has broadened into an almost catch-all social category. Anyone who is withdrawn or rigid or awkward might be suspected of being “on the spectrum.”
I like to think of autism as a genre of stories that we tell ourselves. Fundamentally, this genre is about defining “normal” human…
