Television | Movies
Hollywood’s Autistic Representation Sucks
How Rain Man ruined everything for autistic people
In the 30 years before I was identified as autistic at age 49, I consumed a lot of media about autism. Ironic, right? I read every memoir about autism that I could get my hands on and watched every film and every TV show with an autistic character that was on my radar.
My brain was evidently trying to tell me something for years. Effectively, I knew before I knew.
Since diagnosis, I groan at the thought of watching an autistic character on screen or reading about one in a book if an allistic person has created these characters. And let’s face it, most of them are created by non-autistics.
Even memoirs written by allistic people about autistic people are to be avoided because they do not allow autistic people to speak for themselves and they center the allistic person in our narratives.
Anything written by an allistic parent or someone who works with autistic people is certain to be infuriating, disparaging, and ultimately superior in tone.
They are the most ableist of offenders.
Unfortunately, most of those memoirs I read when I was younger were written by allistic parents of…
