If you suggest that whatever you experienced that had been described as a disorder was, in fact, not necessarily a sickness, or even just a different way of being in the world that has its own advantages and disadvantages, then you tend to get hit either with the charge that you’re too sick to be involved in the debate, or are an attention-seeking faker because you don’t act sick enough. That you’re “faking mental illness for attention” (right after you get through saying that you don’t think it’s an illness) and “you can’t possibly understand how sick, fucked-up, crazy, suffering, etc, Those People are, don’t try to talk to me about Those People, I know just what they’re like, my mother was a psychiatric nurse who worked in an institution and I know all about Those People.”

About getting hit with both sides at the same time– yeah, we’ve experienced some of that, and the “Anyone who holds such crazy beliefs as that shouldn’t be trusted to speak for themselves. Oh, wait, but I don’t mean you. You aren’t like all The Others. You’re sane and decent and rational and etc, etc.”

I remember particularly a few debates about plurality in which multiples were declared unfit to speak for themselves because simultaneously “these people hold these bizarre, wacky beliefs and are obviously insane and need either to be institutionalized or laughed at and left to kill themselves” and “I/my friend/relative/etc worked with Those People and I can tell you definitively that these people are faking because they aren’t sick enough.” When someone who actually did fit the clinical model would enter the debate, they would be told “that condition doesn’t really exist, it’s made up by attention-seeking fakes” and “you obviously are too sick to say anything rational,” at the same time.

It’s exciting to see how your work, along with the Autism Hub and the scores of others linked here and elsewhere, are beginning to similarly change “what autistic humans are capable of.”