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The reality of how cure culture interrupts the neurodiversity movement
Scene from X-Men

Rogue enters and says "Is it true professor, they can cure us?"

Professor X answers "Yes, Rogue. It appears to be true"

Storm intersects "No, Professor. They can't cure us. You wanna know why? Because there's nothing to cure, nothing wrong with you. Or any of us, for that matter".
Scene from X-men

The above scene is quite poinient to the topic of this article. Here we have Rogue, a mutant who kills everything she touches, and Storm, who can control the weather.

One might be forgiven for not necessarily seeing the connection between this and Autistic experience, but it is in fact a very good allegory for the battle between the normative violence of cure culture, and the neuroqueering approach of a lot of the Autistic community. Rogue and storm disagree on the benefits of a cure because they both have different profiles of how they embody their Self and experience the world.

In much the same way, Autistic people who support cure culture are ostracised and spoken poorly of. I’m going to let you in on something, I used to be one of then. I longed for someone to make me “normal”. I was tired of being the outsider. I, of course, was lucky enough to discover the Autistic community. I learned how to co-exist with my particular profile of traits and intersections. I was taught how to make the best of being a marginalised person, and came to see the harmfulness of cure culture.

Not everyone has had the access to the community I have had.

There in lies the crux of the matter. The cult of normality, peddlers of normative oppression, face less scrutiny while our energies are spent fighting amongst ourselves. While hearing the harmful views of those who are yet to dismantle their internalised ableism is difficult, we need to give them the space to learn and grow with us. If we are fighting each other, we are not fighting the system.

This isn’t to say that we should excuse or accept harmful words or behaviour, more a commentary on the idea that everyone is at a different stage on their journey of discovery and growth. Much as we were brought in from the harsh cold of society, we need to create a space where those with less knowledge and self-acceptance are willing to listen to us and grow alongside us.

Cure culture has done so much harm. From the children being fed bleach, to the trauma Autistics experience hearing those stories, to the civil wars in our own communities. We need to find a way of showing that we understand.

This is what we need to understand; all of us have our own unique experience of being Autistic. Much as Rogue and Storm has vastly different experiences of being mutants, not every Autistic person has a profile of traits and intersections that is congruent with our own. Some of us have been so traumatised that we can not come to terms with our Self. We need to help people come to love who they are, even if that person has more negative experiences than we do.

We need to consider how we create a world that truly accommodates diversity, and not just the pretty, idealistic version of diversity that sells t-shirts and pays lip service during company diversity campaigns.

The infantilisation of Autistic people and the future of our blossoming culture

I would be lying if I said I was not somewhat inspired by the fact that it is Valentine’s day today. It’s a day that gets mixed responses from the Autistic community. Relationships are often a touchy subject for us. We live in a world that fights hard to keep us at the fringes. This, of course, led me to a talking point that has been considered time and again. Autistic people are not perpetual children. We do become Autistic adults, and we engage in adult relationships. You might think that this is all that needs to be said, but actually, there is a deeper conversation to be had about the infantilisation of our community and how this impacts our growing culture.

Wider society views us as “less than”. This is not a debatable point. It’s a fact. When you consider the history of autism and neurodiversity as a whole; we have been relegated to a lower rung of the social ladder than those who can successfully perform neurotypicality. We are treated as though we are child-like, and at times as though we aren’t even human. I have genuinely heard people say that having sex with an Autistic adult should be criminalised. It is assumed that we lack the capacity to make those sorts of choices for ourselves.

Let me pause their for a minute. Yes, it is true that there are Autistic people who lack the capacity to make decisions around romantic and sexual partners. There are Autistic people who are very vulnerable, whom predators wait to take advantage of. I do not want to take away from this. What I want to highlight is that Autistic people, in general, are more than capable of deciding they want to engage in an adult relationship or sex.

So now, we are left with this uncomfortable fact; we are seen as perpetual children. What purpose does it actually serve for those in power and privilege to allow the perpetuation of an idea that is so incredibly incorrect and harmful?

Autistic people are finding new ways to connect and organise. This has resulted in us having our own dialect, forms of socialisation, social rules, and collective hopes and dreams for the future. The growth of the online neurodiversity movement has empowered Autistic people beyond the point of activism. At this point, we are an emerging counter-culture. This is an important distinction to make.

By centring our existence as an identity and culture, we are disempowering medical and diagnostic models of neurodiversity. Normative systems have relied on the framing of autism as a condition of asociality and a lack of meaningful personhood. If we are emerging as a culture, clearly, we are more than a tick box exercise that can be used to fuel a captialist medical industrial complex. The claim that we lack sociality and personhood is fundamentally dismantled when we show the world that we are capable of not just building a culture but building one that diametrically opposes existing oppressive structures.

The quickest way to conquer your cognitive dissonance in this scenario is to assume we are incompetent. This incompetence comes on the form of infantilisation, which itself is rooted in childism and the assumption that all child-like people lack full personhood.

This is why, for the sake of our communities future, we need to crush infantilisation. We need to demonstrate not just our personhood but the reality of Autistic adulthood. We need to build the taboo nature of adult pursuits into our culture. This has been all-the-more important to me in my work with Autistic drug users. So many times have I seen Autistic people denied support because “Autistic people don’t use drugs”. Infantilisation is more insidious than invalidation of out culture, it is life-threatening.

If we want to move into a future where being Autistic can be more than an identity in a hidden counter-culture, we need to start by disproving the idea that we lack competence. We need to take a stand and demonstrate that we will not tolerate being treated as children.

Cure culture and normative attitudes towards Autistic people

Nothing sickens me more than people who believe that being Autistic requires intervention. The idea that we have to “improve” an Autistic person’s “skills” is in inherently ableist. Where does this ableism come from?

The truth of the matter is that as we edge closer and closer to a post-normal society, those who have succumbed to normativity fight hard to preserve the world that they believe is “right”. We have been taught that deviation from cultural norms is a disorder, but this is an abject lie.

Society has been built upon a foundation of bigotry and oppression of minorities. When we subscribe to the idea that Autistic people are suffering or in need of intervention, we further that belief. We have centred our own normative ideas into disabled people and made our internalised bigotry their problem.

When we can recognise that the problem is not the Autistic person, we are then able to externalise the issue into the environment. If you want to know why Autistic people are suffering, look no further than their experiences of the wider world and their immediate environment.

The responsibility is not on Autistic people to assimilate into society. The responsibility lies with society to make space for the inclusion of Autistic people.

Every time you empower the curists, you set a blockade on our path to progress. If you are reading this thinking “but you’re not like my child” I would respond with this-

No, I am not, I am an adult. I would ask you to consider why you believe your child is abnormal, where you learned your standards of normalcy from, and why you believe normality to be so important. We have a right to grow and change into whoever we wish to be. No one should be trying to control our expression of the Self, or the way we think and relate to the world.

I ask only one thing of my readers. Please step away from the concept of normal. Recognise that all normality measures is how comfortably we can serve a society that doesn’t give a damn about us.

If we can’t operate at the right level of productivity, without causing a nuisance to other people, we are written off. This is the world that curists want us to fit into, a world that would sooner destroy us than make space for us to exist as whole people.

We have a write to our Self.

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