What is Autism?

This essay was written in order to provide some context, the theoretical framework, behind my previous essay: This Belongs to Us. I encourage that you re-read my previous essay after reading this one and that if you have any questions to leave them in the comments.

What is autism?

Perhaps we could describe what autism is like. Perhaps autism lies in the atypical way in which autistic people tend to interface with their social environment. Perhaps autism lies in an atypical sensory experience. Perhaps the heart of autism lies in atypical interests or focus. Perhaps it is executive dysfunction. Perhaps it lies in motor abnormalities like stimming.

These things describe autism. They do not define it.

What is autism?

Autism is something that all autistics have and that which differentiates autistic people from neurotypical people. The concept of autism did not create this group of people we call autistics. Science was faced with autistic people and science created the concept of 'autism' to define us. From this community the nature of autism--the nature of how autistic people are different from neurotypical people--could then be observed and elaborated on.

Autism is nothing more than a concept to describe autistic people. Autistic people define autism, not vise versa.

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Why is this important? It is important because it begs the question as to who is autistic and why. What makes an autistic person autistic? To answer this question we have been conditioned to look towards science--towards what science has been able to divine about our nature--in order to define who we are. To describe someone as autistic we must be able to look past the abstraction to truly describe who they are. To this I propose:

I, and everyone else who is autistic, are autistic because we are like other autistic people, not because we fulfill a checklist that attempts to describe us.

This Belongs to Us

I want to tell you a secret. I have been accused of being neurotypical or "not that autistic" so many times that it could make my head spin. I have been told this by friends or teachers or any number of other people in my life. I have even been told that I could not be autistic by doctors and even once by a psychologist. I have never been accused of being neurotypical by an autistic person.

Not once.

Autism is a community. Sometimes those who hold the keys to this community are those who have power over us. They are the doctors, the parents, the friends who say to us that we do not belong. Even while we may struggle to be like them we have no right to be ourselves. This is what they tell us.

Yet, be it through ignorance or simple naiveté, they are wrong.

They are wrong because they do not know where to look. They do not see what we see when we see each other. They can not recognize themselves in ourselves. When we see each other and recognize each other in each other we form a family -- a community. It is this shared experience, the experience which we are able to share that defines us. If ever autism could be given form it would be this: our shared experience of what makes us different.

It is ours.

Nobody may take it away from us.