It goes without saying, in the Actually Autistic community, one of the number one things we hate hearing is the phrase “You don’t look autistic”.
It’s ignorant and ableist because autism doesn’t have a look, but we know what they mean and it isn’t anything good. It’s ableist in more ways than one.
For my purposes here, I don’t want to make a list of rude comments that include this phrase because if you read other autistic people’s lists about unwarranted comments, you will encounter that phrase often.
Instead, I want to talk about the insidious questions I have been asked over the last two years.
I want to highlight those questions that seem as though they mean well but are not kind at all, and the questions that are flat-out rude and practically cause one physical pain.
I highly suspect that these questions are just thought-terminating phrases that are employed to shut down the autistic person’s thought processes in a misguided attempt to signal with subtext that the sudden inquisitor no longer wants to discuss the matter.
Still, even armed with that knowledge of potential subterfuge and sabotage, I feel compelled to answer and counter these questions anyway.
“Why do you want to label yourself?”
This comment is insulting in so many ways, but one reason is that I have had labels applied to me my whole life that were far more shameful and cruel.
I was called weird, rude, and hateful, and told that I got the part of a senile, old woman in a play because “I am like that all the time.” I was also called the R-slur on several occasions.
Having the label of autistic meant that I was not any of the things that people called me. I was disabled and had a different way of socializing and communicating because I have a different type of brain.
It was liberating and freed me from so much self-hatred and doubt. It gave me self-esteem and self-love on a much deeper level than ever before.