Will People Waving Their Arms Around and Making Strange Noises in Public Really Help Dismantle Anti-Autistic Prejudice, or Just Make Them Look Like They Are Mocking the Disabled?

April 2nd was annual World Autism Awareness Day, a worthwhile enough cause, you may have thought – and so it was, until the identitarians got their twisted hands on it.

There is nothing wrong with being autistic. But is it really something to be ostentatiously proud of? Another annual festival, Autistic Pride Day, takes place every June 18th. Tellingly, the occasion – marked with marches through the streets flying a banner with a rainbow-coloured ‘infinity symbol’ logo on it – was directly modelled upon the previous key identitarian movement of Gay Pride.

This rainbow infinity symbol represents “diversity with infinite variations and infinite possibilities” because, nowadays, autism, just like gender, is said to exist upon a limitless spectrum – whether this is actually true or not, as I have recently discussed elsewhere.

Ready and Able

The stated ideological desire of the politicised wing of the Autistic Pride movement is to metaphorically ‘disable’ normative society wholesale, much as the stated desire of the Gay Pride movement is to metaphorically ‘queer’ normative society likewise. The idea that autism, like homosexuality, is a deviation away from a societal norm is hereafter to be challenged, as a point of purest partisan principle. After all, in our brave new woke world, there are to be no more human norms anymore at all, at least not officially speaking: ‘normality’ is merely a societal myth used to uphold the malign historical hegemony of the Foucauldian power-matrix that is white, cisheteropatriarchal capitalism.

Therefore, say some campaigners, most social challenges faced by severely autistic people are to be henceforth reconceptualised not as a sad and limiting consequence of some persons unfortunately being born with the condition, but instead as unnecessary normative societal limitations placed upon their natural state of freedom of being, a form of innate systemic prejudice termed ‘ableism’.

Rather than it being a disability or neurological disorder, some autism sufferers would prefer to remake themselves as yet another oppressed minority victim-group. Just as few psychologists today would try and ‘cure’ homosexuals of being gay, certain ‘Auties’ – as the identitarian branch of sufferers sometimes call themselves – argue they should not be subjected to any kind of medical intervention, aid or treatment either, just allowed to exist as they are, on their own terms.

Up to a point, this idea sounds perfectly reasonable. The problem comes when certain of the more Cultural Marxism-riddled hardline minority amongst the Auties take their cause quite some considerable way beyond the point of perfect reason.

Autie Knows Best

If you want to sum up the entire deluded ‘ableist’ narrative in one simple idea, it is this: that the existence of stairs is a gigantic historical conspiracy against wheelchair-users. Alternatively, you could say the widespread prominence of written signs is likewise a vast sinister plot against the blind, or music and speech are sadistic schemes intended purely to disadvantage the deaf.

Within a specifically ‘neurodiverse’ context, since many extremely autistic people often have trouble fully functioning in close human company, the widespread use of common social norms such as maintaining eye contact, shaking hands or communicating face-to-face and verbally, rather than via the more impersonal intermediary medium of screens and text-typing, may similarly be considered ableist restrictions upon the freedom of such ‘Auties’. Professional workplace or school and university standards, like having to give speeches or presentations, or needing to sit still at your desk wearing a suit, also now become revealed as cruel acts of severe anti-autistic repression.

Some Auties say all they want is to be treated equally. Trouble is, just as ideologues from Stonewall and Black Lives Matter interpret being treated ‘equally’ as in fact meaning ‘establishing a tyranny of the perpetually aggrieved minority against the majority for no good reason’, so certain rather unrepresentative Auties take their demands and behaviour rather too far. Unfortunately, given the way Western society is increasingly becoming structured, it is this particular minority of activists who now tend to get all the accolades, funding and attention from those in positions of institutional power.

Danger: X.Z.B.!

The most prominent such Autie in Action today is possibly Lydia X.Z. Brown, described by Wikipedia as “an American disability rights activist, writer, attorney and public speaker”, but by me as “a typical self-obsessed far-Left identitarian ideologue who gives normal autistic people a bad name”. Naturally, therefore, rather than simply being roundly ignored, like she should be, Brown has been garlanded with honours and positions by the Establishment she claims constantly discriminates against her, but which in actual fact falls over itself to fawn over the very fact of her being.

Again according to Wikipedia, Brown is currently “Chairperson of the American Bar Association Civil Rights and Social Justice Disability Rights Committee… Policy Counsel for Privacy and Data at the Centre for Democracy and Technology, and Director of Policy, Advocacy and External Affairs at the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network”, as well as being the proud recipient of several public awards too piously and prolixly titled to be worth my enumerating fully here (they feature emetic phrases like “Champions of Change”, which I can barely even force myself to type). In 2013, Brown even received a special accolade from then-President Barack Obama in the White House – where she appears to have spent her time performing a series of very strange sensory-stimulating acts with the curtains.

Besides being autistic, Brown is also a transgenderist, in the niche respect that, despite being born a female (i.e., she is a female), she feels, at least as far as my limited normal brain can understand matters, that she magically possesses no sex or gender at all. Going by the modish pronoun ‘they’, Brown has helped popularise the exceedingly obscure self-identity of being ‘gendervague’, a term she is sometimes inaccurately said to have invented, and which refers to some tiny particular self-ID nexus perched precariously upon the ‘intersection’ between transgenderism and autism. As if all this was not enough to cope with, Brown is also Chinese or something.

One laudatory 2018 profile describes Brown thus: “A gender non-binary, queer, disabled person of colour, Brown is self-described as ‘multiply-marginalised’.” Now that the ‘marginalised’ [sic] have inherited the Earth, however, surely the term should actually be redefined as ‘multiply-advantaged’?

Brown initially went to college innocently dreaming of becoming an Islamic scholar, having a lifelong love for ancient Persian Sufi poetry – yet creating actual scholars is no longer the main intention of the ideologically captured U.S. university system, and she seems to have self-radicalised (or been groomed so, a cynic may guess) into becoming a Leftist activist instead. Realising in her Freshman year that there were “systemic problems” on her campus where “ableism ran rampant” (I guess the buildings must have had stairs or something), Brown came to feel that “becoming a student advocate was not a choice… it was mandatory”.

Brown quickly became a student leader, admirably advocating more sign-language and speech-caption availability during lectures to help any hearing-impaired students. Great, well done. Then, though, she moved on to becoming a lecturer, delivering speeches with telling titles like ‘Re-Thinking Disability: From Public Policy to Social Movements’. Thinking about disability as a ‘Public Policy’ means reasonable, humane things like installing wheelchair-access ramps in public buildings. Thinking about it as a ‘Social Movement’, however, means something rather different.

Now, what was needed was not Disability Policy, but (uh-oh!) Disability Justice. What’s that? According to her 2018 profile, “Disability justice seeks reparations, a deep pivot of values away from ableism, and an understanding that the law alone – in all its plodding deliberateness – may not be enough.” Why did she become a lawyer, then? (Actually, you can see her deranged far-Left thoughts about “the [U.S.] in-justice system”, which occasionally dares to imprison violent black criminals – even ones who gang-torture and slice the scalps off disabled white kids live online – here.)

Acting Like a Retarded Person

The above sub-heading may sound offensive to some readers, but this is actually what X.Z.B. herself advocates. Head over to her strange and extensive blog, Autistic Hoya, and look for the essay ‘The Neurodiversity Movement Needs Its Shoes Off, and Fists Up’, which tells the tragic tale of how, while working in an office job one day, our heroine was sat at her desk with her shoes off, as this apparently made her feel more physically comfortable – or, as she puts it with typical overblown rhetoric, “it’s infinitely more comfortable and freeing for my proprioceptive needs”, whatever they might be. (Lydia does admit that she voluntarily wears such horrible items when walking outside, however, “a task that, for me, always needs shoes”.)

When a supervisor noticed this, she told Brown it looked a little bit unprofessional but, in what sounds like a sympathetic compromise to me, said she could keep them off under the desk, but had to wear shoes when walking around the rest of the workplace so nobody else would notice. At the time, Brown agreed to this reasonable concession but, she later wrote in her blog:

Since then… I have to respond [to this argument for me to ‘keep my shoes on’ in a wider metaphorical sense – i.e., to maintain normative, allegedly ‘ableist’, standards of public behaviour] with a resounding and vehement NO. I do not believe in even attempting to appease the impossible, asymptotic standards of respectability politics and (white, abled, cis, masculine-centric) professionalism simply because such attempts will always and inevitably be doomed to fail.

Brown repudiates the entire notion of ‘Respectability Politics’ – i.e., acting normally, like normal people do, because they are normal – as an anti-activist dead-end, doomed to inevitable failure, with society’s constant demand for Lydia to participate in self-erasing white capitalist heteronormative things like wearing shoes in public being a repressive masking of her true sacred inner-self. Having explained this, Brown begins to sound alarmingly Leninist in tone:

Radical, militant anger — and radical, militant hope, and radical, wild dreams, and radical, active love — that’s what’ll get us past the death machines of ableism and capitalism and white supremacy and laws and institutions working overtime to kill us.

“Death machines”? She seems to mean such hyperbolic phrases literally (emphasis mine):

We have cultural narratives to rewrite because they [straight, white, able-bodied, ‘neurotypical’ people] really do hate us and they really will kill us, and if we’re going to rewrite the narratives, then there’s no reason to hold ourselves back from our most radical and defiant rewritings. We have autistic children who need us to support them as architects of their own liberation against the schools and clinicians and institutions and police and prosecutors who would crush and destroy them.

Honestly, Lydia, you really don’t have to worry about anything like that at all: nobody sane is ever going to go around killing autistic people.

Committing Identity Fraud

Some autistic or extremely mentally disabled people often engage in an uncontrollable form of public activity termed ‘stimming’ – i.e., ‘self-stimulating’ that is, making strange noises, flapping their hands about, pulling faces and sticking out their tongues. Brown herself, not being profoundly autistic, doesn’t need to do this at all, any more than she needs to take her shoes off. She more than possesses the necessary capacity for self-control. And yet, as part of a self-invented form of Autie activism she calls “autistic subversion”, she voluntarily chooses to act like this anyway:

I deliberately choose to stim by hand-flapping and sometimes rocking, in public spaces. I did not hand-flap or rock intuitively as a child. I did not start to do so until I was well into college, and by then it was always a conscious, deliberate choice. This does not make stimming any less authentic than it is for someone who has always done it their entire life.

In other words, she goes around pretending to be disabled when (at least in this particular sense) she actually isn’t – and then gets a big medal or something from President Obama for doing so. This, Brown says, represents authentic self-stimming “joy” – but so does public masturbation, a sceptic may observe, and that tends to be generally thought against the law. “Public stimming is beautiful, and we should keep doing it,” Brown advocates.

Imagine if she had said: “I have full control of my bladder and bowels. And yet, in order to combat the pernicious scat-hetero demands of the evil Western toilet-industrial complex, I joyfully elect to piss and shit myself in public on a daily basis and this performative incontinence is no less authentic than that of someone forced to wear a colostomy bag or a catheter.” Would she get a Presidential Medal for that? As the current U.S. President is the similarly afflicted Joe Biden, maybe so.

Up until highly recently, acting up like this in public would have been considered nothing less than a reprehensible act of mocking the disabled. Now, it is artfully reframed by wokeists as “a political choice, because it is choosing to be openly and unapologetically autistic”. To the rest of us, though, it still just looks like mocking the disabled – and will dismantle prejudice just as effectively, which is to say, not at all.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.