Learning About Autistic Culture
Autistic culture is not the first thing we’re led to learn about when we discover our autistic identities.
Usually we start with assessment which focuses on a deficit discourse, then we’re told about the importance of early intervention, then we receive referrals to allied health service providers, then we join Facebook support groups, then we communicate with school and try and land on realistic learning goals, then we go through the deficit discourse again with the NDIS, then in our exhaustion we finally sit with how it all feels and try to make sense of why it just doesn’t quite all feel right.
And it rarely feels right.
If we are autistic, if our children are autistic, we just KNOW that this scenario is missing something vital, well before we know what that something is.
Let’s talk about autistic culture. This is the foundation, the truth and the missing education that our ‘welcome to autism’ experiences should be built on.
