Autism is a Culture NOT a Disorder

Read now (5 mins) | Why you already love Autistic Culture (even if you don't know it!)

September 18, 2022

All autistic people are neurodivergent. Not all neurodivergent people are autistic. And here is why this matters.

Autism is not just a less common (but wildly underdiagnosed) neurotype—it’s also a CULTURE.

Neurodivergence includes autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, epilepsy, hyperlexia, Dyspraxia, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, PTSD, and probably a whole lot more identified and not identified.

All roses are flowers, but not all flowers are roses.

And if you see a daisy and start assigning its characteristics to a rose, you are going to run into some problems.

When you use the terms Neurotypical (NT) and Neurodivergent (ND), all you are saying is, “Does this person have a brain type that fits in the big fat middle of the bell curve?”

My 100% unscientific guess is that about 80% of people are NTs, and about 20% of people - whether they know it or not - are NDs. 

It is GOOD TO KNOW, but all NDs shouldn’t be grouped together to say much more than that. 

The reason it’s so important for autistic people to find each other is because we often feel like we are on the Wrong Planet.

In fact, my friend Alex Plank runs an online community of this name which was one of the biggest supports for me when I was diagnosed 10 years ago.

Suddenly, when I found Wrong Planet, I found my CULTURE! 

We are about to publish a memoir of an amazing woman who was adopted, and when she found her birth mother, she found her Native American culture — a culture she was ripped out of and separated from. She was, as her book is titled, Tribeless. When she found her birth family, she was able to stitch together things about herself that did not make sense outside of that culture.

This is what it is like to be autistic and to find your natural born culture in the way my amazing friend and client Shana Ross found hers. (You have to read this book!)

Like any culture, autism has ART, MUSIC, MANNERISMS, DRESS, LANGUAGE, RITUALS, FOOD, and MORE!!!

If you have an autistic partner, friend, or child and they are not celebrating their culture, this can exacerbate the “wrong planet” feeling.

Autistics have a much higher rate of suicide and depression. This doesn’t COME with autism. It’s not a medical symptom or our natural state. It’s CAUSED by feeling that we live on the wrong planet. It is CAUSED by the requirement to mask.

Imagine being dropped on Mars and just having to figure it out. You might make it, but if you didn’t, no one would blame you if you got a little depressed about missing your home planet.

Stigma against autistics is STRONG, and we literally are blamed every day for not being able to magically adapt to life in a culture that is SO WEIRD to us.

I’ve written a lot about the Double-Empathy Problem. This is the repeated, juried, scientific set of studies that PROVES beyond a shadow of a doubt that autistics are JUST AS empathetic as allistics — in fact, we might even be MORE empathetic and have HIGHER EQs WITHIN our culture. 

This EQ shit is so ablest y’all. EQ is a measurement of empathy (and other “soft skills”) by Allistics for Allistics and within a western/capitalist framework. I have an incredibly low EQ score in several categories, and I’m very proud of that.

It means I have unmasked and embraced my autistic culture, and I’m not trying to squeeze into a world according to rules that don’t apply to me. I am focusing more and more on celebrating Autistic Culture!

Here are some highlights:

I love the autistic accent! Our language is detailed; linguists and speech pathologists call it “mazing” (I call it amazing…lol). This refers to a high number of stops, restarts, and revisions within words or phrases. People outside of our culture complain excessive mazing can really interfere with the clarity of our message. (We get it; you can’t follow all the tangents. It’s okay your brain processes more slowly. Just tell us to slow down for you, and we’ll do our best.) 

With so much information to pack in, autistic dialect isn’t as peppered with squeals of high highs and low lows and other distractions from the facts. Allistic experts outside of our culture will try to describe this as having a flat affect or being monotone. I understand why someone outside the culture would interpret it that way. It’s like thinking everyone with a British accent is smart, or a southern accent is uneducated. Accents can be confusing if you are outside the culture. In our culture, we use RATE instead of PITCH to convey importance. If we are speaking more quickly and stressing syllables differently, it’s because of our cultural bias toward dense and accurate information.

BTW - ALLISTICS LOVE OUR CREATIONS!

You know how people visit Australia and buy art from the aboriginal culture because it’s so stunning even to non-indigenous eyes who can’t read the art? 

That happens to Autistics too. 

WE CREATE WORLDS!!! 

You love Pokemon! The Star Wars world! The Marvel multi-verse - Earth 6.1.6, Asgard, Jotunheim! GUESS WHO CREATED THEM????? AUTISTICS!!! How do I know???? OUR CULTURE HIGHLY VALUES DETAILS AND SYSTEMS AND MOTHERFUCKING ACCURACY….

We were born to create worlds. You're welcome.

Autistic food is my favorite but maybe you not so much… I’ll share this, for me, Cornflakes are the height of my spiciness meter. We keep it beige and bland and like it that way - mashed potatoes, Mac and cheese, vanilla ice cream - give us all your ‘tasteless’ treats because our powers of heightened senses make them a WONDERLAND. Allistics need Sriracha and sauces and spices to bring out the flavor; the flavor is always on the surface in Autistic culture.

Fashion in Autistica is so good. If you have ever benefited from a tagless t-shirt or a seamless sock, thank autistic culture! We value simplicity EVERYWHERE because our thoughts are so deep and complex. In our culture, we simplify external things like food and clothes, so we can focus on big, complex problems in our brains without distraction. This is part of our monotropist nature. Allistics benefit from it too! We invented the capsule wardrobe and dressing in the same thing every day - see our Autistic family members Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg (unconfirmed) for details. 

Autistic culture is rich and beautiful and valued by many outside our culture without realizing it. This is just the tip of the iceberg. 

No missing puzzle pieces here.

Welcome to AUTISTICA!

How do you celebrate Autistic Culture? Tell me about it in the comments!

Related episodes of The Autistic Culture Podcast:
Episode 04: Industrial Light & Magic is Autistic (Star Wars episode)
Episodes 16: Pokémon is Autistic
Episode 28: Superheroes are Autistic

*Background note: Most people only have a vague (often, highly stereotyped) version of autism in their minds and believe that autistic children need (traumatic) ABA therapy to "overcome" their disability and appear "normal."  After receiving an autism diagnosis in her thirties, Dr. Angela Lauria realized that she too had been mostly unaware of what it means to be Autistic.  Like so many people, she started her journey by first gathering information and resources from the omnipresent (and problematic) Autism Speaks, but eventually moved away from the 'autism community' in favor of the 'Autistic community,' where she found kinship with other Autistic individuals and learned to let go of pathologizing language like 'autism spectrum disorder' and 'Asperger's Syndrome.'  This autism blog (and her autism podcast, "The Autistic Culture Podcast") is meant to share her lived-experience insights to support others on a similar journey of diagnosis, understanding, and community. Embrace Autism--differences are not deficits.