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“When Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling published the piece "TERF Wars" on her blog in the summer of 2020, she specifically mentioned her fear that many transgender men are actually Autistic girls who weren't conventionally feminine, and have been influenced by transactivists on the internet into identifying out of womanhood. In presenting herself as defending disabled "girls," she argued for restricting young trans Autistic people's ability to self-identity and access necessary services and health care. Rowling's perspective (which she shares with many gender critical folks) is deeply dehumanising to both the trans and Autistic communities.”

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Book:Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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“Racism has permeated psychology and psychiatry from its genesis. Early clinicians came from white, European backgrounds, and used their culture's social norms as the basis for what being healthy looked like. It was a very narrow and oppressive definition, which assumed that being genteel, well-dressed, well-read, and white were the marks of humanity, and that anyone who deviated from that standard was not a person, but an animal in need of being tamed.”

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Book:Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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“It's meaningless to question whether a trans Autistic person would have "still" been trans had they not been born neurodiverse, because Autism is such a core part of who we are. Without our disability (or our gender identity) we'd be entirely different people. There is no separating these aspects of ourselves from our personhood or personality. They're both core parts.”

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Book:Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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“Masking also obscures the fact that the world is massively inaccessible to us. If allistics (non-Autistics) never hear our needs voiced, and never see our struggle, they have no reason to adapt to include us. We must demand the treatment we deserve, and cease living to placate those who have overlooked us.”

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Book:Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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“In a landmark study into the psychology of perceived “creepiness,” psychologists McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) asked 1,341 respondents to answer questions about which personal qualities and behaviors they associated with “creepy” people, and used statistical factor analysis to develop a measurable “creepiness” factor. The creepiness factor they developed included the following traits: a person having awkward, unpredictable behavior, an unnatural-looking smile, laughter that occurred at “unnatural” times, speaking for too long about a single topic, and not knowing when to end a conversation.[30] When Autistic people attempt to socialize and bond with others in an affable, enthusiastic way, these are often the very traits we embody. Even as we try to put the neurotypical people around us at ease by smiling, keeping the conversation moving, and staying present, we might be seen as scary or unsettling. A series of experiments by social psychologists Leander, Chartrand, and Bargh (2012) found that when a person engages in social mirroring in an even slightly inappropriate way, it skeeves people out, and even makes them feel physically colder.[31] A little bit of mimicry is normal among friends. People mirror one another’s postures and mannerisms as they get comfortable and fall “ into sync. But if you mirror someone too much, or at the wrong time, these studies show you can literally give other people the chills. Autistic maskers try really hard to mirror other people, but since we can’t do it as fluently and effortlessly as neurotypicals do, we often unwittingly set off NT’s creep-dars. The solution, then, is to stop hiding and pretending to be something we’re not. Instead of straining (and failing) to imitate NT people, we can become radically visible. Sasson’s research found that when participants were told they were interacting with an Autistic person, their biases against us disappeared. Suddenly they liked their slightly awkward conversation partner, and expressed interest in getting to know them. Having an explanation for the Autistic person’s oddness helped the creeped-out feeling go away. Follow-up research by Sasson and Morrison (2019) confirmed that when neurotypical people know that they’re meeting an Autistic person, first impressions of them are far more positive, and after the interaction neurotypicals express more interest in learning about Autism.[32] 30. McAndrew, F. T., & Koehnke, S. S. (2016). On the nature of creepiness. New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 10–15. 31. Leander, N. P., Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (2012). You give me the chills: Embodied reactions to inappropriate amounts of behavioral mimicry. Psychological Science, 23(7), 772–779. Note: many of John Bargh’s priming studies have failed replication attempts in recent years. For a discussion of a failed attempt of a related but different series of temperature priming studies, see Lynott, D., Corker, K. S., Wortman, J., Connell, L., Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E., & O’Brien, K. (2014). Replication of “Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth” by Williams and Bargh (2008). Social Psychology. 32. Sasson, N. J., & Morrison, K. E. (2019). First impressions of adults with autism improve with diagnostic disclosure and increased autism knowledge of peers. Autism, 23(1), 50–59.”

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Book:Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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“Neuroscientists have observed that Autistic brains continue to develop in areas associated with social skills for far longer than neurotypical brains are believed to. One study, conducted by Bastiaansen and colleagues (2011), observed that though young Autistic people experienced far less activity than allistics in the inferior frontal gyrus (an area of the frontal lobe involved in interpreting facial expressions), by age thirty no differences between non-Autistics and Autistic people were evident. In other words, Autistic brains eventually “caught up” to neurotypical brains, in terms of how actively they processed and interpreted facial expressions as social data. Other studies have found that Autistic people over the age of fifty are comparable to allistic people, in terms of their ability to make sense of the motivations and emotions of others. Researchers aren’t sure why these findings occur, only that they help to justify conceiving of Autism as a developmental disability or delay. For my part, I suspect that Autistic people get better at reading faces and understanding human behavior over time because we eventually develop our own systems and tricks for making sense of the world. We might have developed at the same pace as neurotypicals if we’d been given accessible tools earlier on. The social scripts and shortcuts that work for neurotypical people do not work for us, so we have to teach ourselves to develop social instincts.”

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Author:Devon Price
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