To be fair to our autistic women and enby comrades, Its pretty much always been autistic men, but still.
You have no idea how many times I’ve been like “hey dont say that, thats ableism/a slur” and them be like “get over it/grow a spine/just words” and when I confront them about the fact that i’m autistic they’ll say “I am too, so what?”.
Just look at my post history right now. There’s one I’m arguing with right now.
it happens over and over.
At least for people online, I sometimes wonder how many of those shitty autistic people are actually autistic people and not just misanthropic NTs with poor social skills because no one wants to deal with their misanthropic ass. White people raceplay all the time online, and I see absolutely no reason why NTs won’t do the same. Just look at how autism is portrayed in pop culture. It’s always some smug shithead who’s good at math or something and who acts like a rude asshole because he (and it’s always a man) “tells it like it is” because he “doesn’t understand social cues.”
For all its reputation, 4chan and similar communities do not strike me as a place where the rate of autism is noticeably higher than the rest of the Internet. Being a socially awkward misanthropic shithead doesn’t make you autistic. It just makes you an NT who’s also a socially awkward misanthropic shithead. In contrast, furry communities strike me as extremely autistic:
There has been studies shown that autistic children are more quickly attached to plushies and it’s common wisdom that this love for plushies extends to adulthood among many autistic adults. It shouldn’t be surprising that a group of ND people who are very attached to animal plushies would be part of a subculture involving animal personas.
Furries are socially awkward, but not in some shithead misanthropic chip-on-their-shoulder way like a channer. The fursonas and fursuits and so on are a means of getting around that social awkwardness. There’s overall a cheerful desire to emotionally connect with people despite the social awkwardness. In this light, I see their social awkwardness as something that they genuinely see as an obstacle but lack the tools to truly overcome, which points more to them being ND than NT who hasn’t practiced their social skills because they got bullied too much at school.
Just having a rich imaginative world strikes me as something ND. NT are far more likely to reject and be more judgmental about rich imaginative worlds by calling it maladaptive daydreaming or something. Not that maladaptive daydreaming isn’t something that affects people or that NTs don’t know how to roleplay, but frankly, I don’t see NTs valuing a rich imagination for its own sake.
The real smoking gun is that furry communities are intensely queer. Honestly, nothing more needs to be said at this point.
I guess my point is that there’s far more to autism than social awkwardness (which I don’t think is even true since social skills are a constellation of skills and it’s extremely unlikely that someone with autism would suck at every single one of those skills, but this post is getting too long). And as for the person who got banned for using slurs, they’re just another “autism is when no social filters” shithead who’s probably not even autistic.