#ActuallyAutistic or #faking?
Is it my place to question someone else’s self-diagnosis?
If they have no influence over the world, I guess it would not be. I don’t care if you call yourself autistic or pepenistic (it’s just a random invented word — comes from watermelon, “pepene” in Romanian) or the president of the United States of Salami. I don’t care, not one bit. Because if you do it in your own little circle, you should be free to be and act like whatever you want and I will never judge you for it. I might even encourage you and play along if I’m close by (imagination and improvisation are two important aspects of quality of life for me).
But when you do it in a public space, to a large audience (think in the hundreds of thousands), by enforcing stereotypes and thus undoing years of effort of the real autistic community, then I can’t be silent.
I am not as much of a pacifist as DissociaDID are. If you are not familiar with the enormous scandal that Trisha Paytas created recently in the DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) community during the early months of this insane year, please look it up. I will not link to anything because I don’t think she deserves any bit of extra attention for the sheer evil that she has done in the world.
In short, she made a video claiming she has DID and started attacking people in the community and she should not be forgiven for it. I’m pretty sure she is a pure-bred narcissist and that’s all I am going to say about that. I am not afraid to call out on a person for their behavior. Not this person, anyway.
But here’s my dilemma: if someone does something similar to what Trisha did, but without the overt hate and with a public message of “Hey, autistic people are actually cool and can do all of this stuff that all of y’all NTs out there can only dream about”, do I also speak out?
This translates into appropriating a “diagnosis” (ugh) or a label that does not belong to them, knowing that because they are not really what they say they are and are more relatable to NTs, they will get more attention and people will listen to them more than to an actually autistic person.
This is the same thing as people listening to a man talking about sexism above any other woman or people listening to a white person over the voice of any person of color. In those cases, we get angry, but in this case there is the “but what if they are really in that group?” question that may be necessary for you, but is not for me.
It’s not because autism is obvious to everyone. It’s because it’s obvious to us, to autistics, even if it doesn’t present outwardly like gender (in a lot of cases) or skin color.
Case in point: Today I discovered that João Gilberto was autistic (he died a year ago at the beautiful age of 88). It took me all of ten seconds to see it and I confirmed it by reading about him and listening to the only two interviews of his that I could find (he was “shy”, so he didn’t really do interviews).
He was the creator of the unique sound of Bossa Nova, a genre I love so much even more now that I know much more about its originator.
How was it so easy to realize that he was autistic? This article in its entirety describes an autistic person. Not the stereotypical “likes trains and can’t show emotion”, although there are some of the stereotypes there as well. When you look at him during this interview, you cannot but feel how utterly uncomfortable he feels in the presence of this person shooting questions at the speed of a machine gun. And he sometimes answers the questions with obvious answers (the comments on that video are pure gold).
This is just an example to show you that autistic people who don’t mask much (and even some who do) are really obvious, at least to another autistic person. And even if they manage to blend into society by adapting all sorts of masking behaviors, we can still see that those behaviors are fake. They look unnatural.
This brings me back to the faking of the autism.
I only found two discussions online about this. I will not link the first one because it pissed me off with all of the ableist and pathologizing language that I disagree with so much. It mentions Munchausens as a reason for faking autism, but that would require that the person would receive an official diagnosis (as they like to call it) and then support for whatever deficiencies the “illness” that they are suffering from produce.
It’s difficult enough to receive an autism “diagnosis” as an adult even if you are autistic, why would anyone want to spend a fortune to receive forced therapies that help nobody?
Plus there’s the whole discussion about parents realizing they are also autistic when their kids get the “diagnosis”. Guess what, most of them probably are and it helps them to know that they are not alone and that they are valuable humans despite of and because of a label that they may or may not choose to use. This reminds me of these nice videos that Jessica KF made about labels, give them a watch, they are worth every second of your time.
Back to the faking. The second relevant discussion that I found is on Quora (I know, I know, I hate that website too, but sometimes you really do get interesting discussions). There are many interesting answers, but none pertaining to the narcissistic motivation. So I must spell it out.
I’m still confused about this whole situation. Given what I’ve told you already (that I can spot an autistic person half the world away if you give me a few minutes of recordings of them), it should be pretty straightforward.
There is this person with a following in the hundreds of thousands on TikTok (yeah, one of those hi5s of the new decade). She says she is obsessed with psychology (who isn’t, if we’re honest) and started by posting simple videos about autism (using person-first language — any autistic person who studies psychology will quickly realize that person-first language is offensive to 99,99% of autistic people).
All well and good (although not really, given the above). She’s conventionally pretty (thin, tanned skin), has bleached blond hair, uses lots of makeup, sits in well-lit and noisy rooms while talking to her phone camera, looking directly at the damned thing (or at her face while filming, I’m not sure, but still). She edits these videos with a really bothersome noise in the beginning of each clip (I guess those guys at TikTok should work more on audio filters and less on visual filters), so they are really difficult to listen to. She also has really fast cuts between scenes, so you can’t really get all the information she’s trying to convey. I guess that’s what her audience expects (autistic people are not her audience, obviously), so I can understand why she does this.
What I don’t understand is why, after all of this, she’d “come out” with videos in which she says she’s autistic. Her supporting arguments being that she is obsessed with psychology, sports and Disney (Disney in general, not something specific, like say a character from a movie — hey there, Meg, you little nut-meg). I won’t even go into the sports thing (ask in any autistic group “Do you like sports” and you’ll count the affirmative answers on the fingers of one hand).
Where do I even begin?? (cue Dame Maggie Smith stare into the abyss)
OK, after literally staring into the abyss for a few minutes, I’ve come to the realization that it isn’t my place to comment. Even if she’s faking it and using outdated information to paint herself as this “model autistic” (whatever the hell that may mean), she has every right to.
Maybe she’ll soon realize that she’s been influencing her own perception of herself by pushing to be the perfect autistic, ticking all of the “diagnostic criteria” boxes (nobody does, as they are way off and even if they were based on reality, they would still not apply to everyone because diversity), maybe she’ll live in a lie of her own making for the rest of her life, dragging hundreds of thousands of people along with her into the lie, like others have done before.
I don’t care. I don’t like what she’s doing, so I won’t share it. It feels fake, so I can’t support it. Even if she’s trying to make NT people like autistics more. She doesn’t look or sound autistic, even to an autistic person used to masking, so how can NT people believe she is different from them?
To me she sounds like a narcissist who has found an audience willing to show her all the attention that she lacks as just a regular NT with nothing much going on for her. Now she can pretend like “sports” or “Disney” can be autistic special interests, not just things that regular kids in the USA do and grow out of by the time they hit puberty.
The weirdest thing is that we are both working towards the same goal. I also want people to understand that being autistic is not an illness, is not a life sentence, that we can live and thrive together and that we all deserve to receive love and to have our love accepted by others.
I have to write, though, I can’t do this on video. I can’t be bothered to put on makeup or get a decent haircut (or do anything to my hair even if I had a decent haircut). I cringe when I listen to myself talking on camera for my crochet tutorials, especially when I look out the window instead of at the camera while “talking to the people on the other side”. I can’t do the things that other people take for granted (hair and make-up, bright lights). I don’t think I could ever talk naturally to the camera, even if I don’t have any trouble looking people in the eye during conversations.
Will other autistic people think the same of my writing as I think of her videos? But I always provide concrete examples from my life and I support individual reasoning on any matter. I don’t take anything for granted, as many things in this world are not what they seem…
We’ll see, I guess.
