So, I wrote the essay that Kelsey linked to (I'm also the sparklebutch, in case anyone remembers that--hey Toast readers, you all seem really nice). Thanks friend, for commenting despite your hesitation. It does make me, at least, feel less alone.

I wasn't going to comment but there are just a couple things that I wish people would hear and understand.

1. I am 500% sure that Steve Silberman is nice, and he certainly seems earnest and thoughtful. I recall briefly meeting him at a conference--not such that he would remember me or anything, but my impression was that he is very sweet.

But here's the thing: At the end of the day, he's still some non-autistic guy who is reaping praise and profit for co-opting autistic voices and experiences. If that sounds like a harsh assessment, consider how justifiably angry we lgb/not-straight people would be if a straight person wrote and benefited from a similar history/treatise on gay rights, no matter how many times that person said "Oh, maybe also deign to read some stuff by this gay person I happen to have heard of." Yet most people seem to think the same situation is totally fine and acceptable and even laudable when autistic people are side-lined from our own movement.

2. Silberman says "...the notion that autism is a historical aberration — the unique disorder of our uniquely disordered time — is very destructive, because it renders previous generations of autistic people invisible." Part of his book's thesis is that "autistic people have been around for millenia" and that autism is "a gift from our deep past."

Autism is an idea. It's a diagnostic label and a social category. It's the name that we, collectively, have given to certain behavioral differences. It IS very much the product of a certain culture at a certain historical moment. What's dangerous is the idea that autism is a natural, fixed, or immutable category. Maybe that sounds too abstract, like I'm nitpicking or being too much of a social constructivist or something. But the mentality that autism--a category marked as "different," as abnormal and deviant EVEN in the conceptual framework espoused by Silberman--is transhistorical or somehow pre-discursive has material consequences. We will ALWAYS be outsiders, always objectified, in that kind of paradigm. Being forever marked as atypical/abnormal/not-quite-whole/not-quite-human--no matter how benevolently--results in things like being spoken over by non-autists and having our work and experiences hijacked, among other very real, very tangible ill-effects.

I encourage folks to please keep an open political imagination, at the very least. And please, PLEASE not only listen to but defer to actual autistic people when it comes to *our own experiences* and control of *our own movement*. Please. Stop stealing and consuming our stories and actually stand up (or, in this case, sit down, honestly) and be trustworthy allies.

Listen: I loved this movie.

The whole theory about empathy posited here really has me thinking, because I've historically been one of the people who pushes empathy as some kind of universal good.