My name is Paul Isaacs I have been an autism advocate from over 13 years. I was diagnosed with autism and obsessive compulsive disorder in 2010 at the age of 24, visual perceptual disorders and learning difficulties (which includes dyslexia and dyscalculia) in 2012. To read more about my story of my diagnosis and what autism means to me, click here.

In this blog post, I would like to talk about what the current stage looks like for an autistic advocate and the challenges and difficulties that ‘collectivism’ can bring.

I ask how can you educate about bigotry if you do that yourself?

Challenges of Autistic Advocacy

From the very beginning of my autism advocacy (2010), I started noticing challenges and oddities within the autism advocacy movement, such as cliques, reductive and separatist attitudes, viewpoints and militancy.

This went so far as, for example, someone claiming to be an individual was considered as \”the enemy\” ie. if someone dares to go against the grain, the status quo and the stereotypes that are being consumed, he/she was seen as an enemy. This was a sort of militancy in which non-autistics were referred to as \”neurotypicals\” – a word I refuse to use because of its bigoted overtones and \”othering\” – I ask how can you educate about bigotry if you do that yourself? And if one is going to use the term neurotypical, then we must accept that there are diverse, multifaceted presentations of that adjective as there are with autism. 

How autism can be mis-represented

I don\’t like being in those spaces – it makes me deeply uncomfortable – as a speaker, trainer and consultant. I think I have an ethical and moral responsibility to say when I present that my autistic reality is not \”the autism\”. Rather it’s nuanced, personal and doesn\’t represent all autisms because how can it? Other interconnected factors that need acknowledgement are bias related to environment, colour, culture, economics that also play an important role and mould people’s experiences of the world. If we can objectively listen without being reactive then maybe we could share without fear of not being validated.

Autism ‘Fruit Salad’

Collectivism is dangerous because we must be looking at individuals within their own right

My autism \”fruit salad\” consists of being object-blind, meaning-blind, context-blind, body-disconnected and meaning-deaf, in which I navigate the world through pattern, theme and feel, through being tactile, kinesthetic as well as through sensing and emotional introspection. I have met and spoken to people who seemed to have a system that is the complete opposite to mine, in which they are logical, literal, pragmatic in the way in which they process information – both of those modulations aren\’t wrong, they can and do co-exist.

Stereotypes within autism seem to be prevalent as well; and once one is created and done with, another one seems to pop up. I feel (in this context, at least). Collectivism is dangerous because we must be looking at individuals within their own right; not everything about a person is \”autism\”, we have to look at other aspects such as:

• personality types, traits and potentially disorder extremes (obsessive – compulsive, schizotypal, schizoid, dependant and avoidant are common) 

• environment based factors, such as dietary deficits (food intolerances, allergies, vitamin malabsorption), social isolation and alienation, learning helplessness and co-dependency, psycho-social aspects of parents and caregivers, people who have exposure anxiety and cannot handle the sensory flooding of self-awareness, pica related challenges with eating toothpaste and fluoride toxicity, etc. 

• mental health conditions such as mood, anxiety, psychosis, dissociation, attachment and impulse control 

• gut, immune, metabolic, collagen and other disorders, which not only have their own diverse and individual expressions and presentations but can entrench information processing challenges and have impact on other organs within the body.   

And if we are going to look at different information processing challenges that present within someone\’s autism fruit salad, then we have to be specific about which ones and the overlap that may exist between them such as faceblindness, social emotional agnosia, aphasia, apraxia etc etc.

This is why for me, objectivity is so crucial because I do not know everything nor do I claim to. I like to think that if someone had the mindset of eternal novice, we could appreciate realities other than our own.