I think I am the person who coined the term autistic supremacy. At the least, I came up with it without having heard it before. It was 1999 and I came up with the term to explain certain trends to my psychologist. This, by the way, means that those people who are running around gloating about how us autistic activists brought these people’s offensiveness on ourselves, or ranting about how nobody cared until recently? They have no grasp of the history. None at all. I have been opposing this in all its forms for eleven years and know that others have been doing the same.

Others may use the terms differently and I don’t claim some kind of ownership over the definition but here are the ways I use these words.

Back then it was just a tiny number of people who thought this way. When I used the word, I meant people who went beyond just wanting equality. They thought they were better than nonautistic people. Not just in satire or jokes but for real. Some of them went even further and considered nonautistic people worthless or even worthy of death or being rendered nonexistent by (a distorted idea of) evolution.

A friend tells me this sort of thing is a normal, perhaps even necessary, part of a minority group’s journey to self-acceptance. Maybe, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Some people consider separatism a form of supremacy. I don’t, not unless the separatists are the ones with the power. A white separatist is a white supremacist and a segregationist. But when a minority (in terms of power) is separatist the reason is usually self-protection as much as anything. Sure, some supremacists become separatists but that doesn’t mean all separatists are supremacists. I am not a separatist but I understand the impulse to avoid those with the power to do you great harm.

When I use the term aspie supremacist I mean something more specific. I am referring to “aspies” who think they are superior to other autistics, or to “AS/HFA” who think they are superior to “LFA”. In practice this means, “We aspies are just different but autistics are defective”. “AS/HFA is part of human diversity but LFA has no value”. It’s the Carleys of the world cringing at the very idea of sharing a label with people who wear diapers (the joke’s on them as many “aspies” wear diapers too). It’s any and every way that the value and contributions of “AS” and/or “HFA” people a put above the value and contributions of “autistic” and/or “LFA” people.

Aspie supremacy is disgusting and despicable. I understand that all of us absorb certain cultural values but that is what makes aspie supremacy more dangerous than general autistic supremacy.

Autistic supremacy can do damage but it’s limited damage. They have neither power nor numbers on their side. They can rage on the Internet. They can cause damage to the few people around them offline. Even if one decided to cause as much harm to everyone around them as possible it would be tragic but in no way equal to the harm done autistic people all the time. Usually the most harm they do is getting people to believe that most autistic activists are like them. They just don’t have the power to do wide-scale harm.

But aspie supremacists… where to start. Their ideas are essentially very similar to the ableist society we all live in. A society that values “high functioning” whatevers over “low functioning” whatevers where the further you are from the norm the more “low functioning” they call you. Have you ever wondered why some of the people who hate autistic activists the most are often just as willing as the aspie supremacists to put AS/HFA in one corner and LFA in the other? To say “Maybe aspies are part of human diversity but Real Autistics ™ are defective?”. It’s because the aims of aspie supremacy are very close to the views of those in power. And to someone like me it’s a fricking slap in the face, and worse.

I am far enough from the norm that even my talents and objections do not keep me away from the idea of “LFA” and out of grave danger that puts me in. My body has permanent and life-threatening damage, the kind most common today in places where there are no doctors or vaccines, and all but forgotten in America. That’s because medical professionals have not seen me as a valuable enough person to treat. Once while I was beginning to go septic I heard one medical professional tell another I had the cognitive functioning of an infant (something I don’t believe of even people with the lowest IQs). I had no way to contradict him because I can’t speak and was too weak to type or do anything but squirm and wail.¹ I have heard professionals say out loud that my life was not worth saving, that I really wasn’t a person, nobody home.

This means I am vastly more in need of being seen as an equal than people closer to the norm are. This is the part that neither aspie supremacists nor anti-autistic-activist types ever seem to want to get: On average the further from the norm you are, the more it is literally a matter of life and death that your value be seen as equal with the people with the most power. (I know there is life and death stuff for those closer to the norm too but we are talking averages.) So aspie supremacy is a threat to my life in a way that general autistic supremacy is not. Aspie supremacy is telling those in power, “You are right about those auties/LFAs/whatever, but not about us aspies. Why don’t you just let us in to that big room full of valued people, and close the door in the face of those who need the protection of that room even more.”

Also, anyone who argues that aspies should be protected from institutions (of all shapes and sizes), aversives, unproven medical treatments, and the like, but that LFAs “need” those things? That it’s a tragedy when someone kills an aspie but understandable (and perhaps even preferable) when someone kills an LFA? You and anyone who listens to you is doing the exact same thing. The more vulnerable you are to the worst of the ways we can be treated, the more protection you need from the idea that it’s all worthwhile or understandable for you if not for the more normal ones. This too is reminiscent of aspie supremacy in different clothing. It’s all more and more devaluation and it’s endangering the rest of us.

I know that to many aspie supremacists it doesn’t feel like that’s what they’re doing. It feels like they are just stating common sense, that aspies have more valuable skills, more logic, less dysfunction, whatever, than other autistics. But that’s because having a bit of relative privilege renders them unaware of the full consequences of their actions. They don’t realize that they have things backwards — the more devalued you are, the more you need equality, the more you need to be considered another important part of human diversity, etc. Not the less. And “less” is what aspie supremacy ends up meaning to those of us who (even when we have some very valued skills in a few areas) are more vulnerable to devaluation and all of it’s effects. Including the lethal ones.

¹ Edited to add: When I say this I am not meaning to imply infants should be devalued. Generally when a medical professional makes the rapid judgement that someone “has the mind of an infant”, it’s a code word for “nobody’s home and we can do whatever we want”. This does say a lot about how infants are devalued.

“I don’t want to be associated with that other kind of autistic people,” goes the standard whine line. “You know… Those Ones.” The crazy drooling retarded low functioning diaper wearing nonverbal ones who can’t take care of themselves and need to be on welfare. Which one of those or many other pejorative categories depends on the individual variation in the snobbery. (What is it? Snob not otherwise specified? Not like those other snobs.)

I’ve written a lot of posts on this blog about aspification and snobbery of this very sort. It’s been sitting around in the autistic community for a long time. And now it’s coming out of the woodwork. I might link some of those posts once I get to my main computer, just for a refresher. But this is some of the most blatantly hateful and snobbish stuff I’ve seen in a while.

What I wrote to someone earlier:

And some of us might rightly find it insulting to be referred to as the ones that others had to be oh-so-tragically “lumped in with” (you know, “crazy”, “low functioning”, “retarded”, “autistic”, or other categories that people seem to do their darndest to distance themselves from).  Like we have disability cooties or something from the way some people behave, and like having the medical people put us in the same category as our “betters” is such a terrible threat (and like it changes anything about who any of us really are).

And it’s true. It’s insulting. It’s insulting to me. It’s insulting to anyone who bears the characteristics that any individual aspified snob might throw at us. And it ought to be insulting to all of those who don’t have disability cooties At the moment either. Anyone with any decency should be appalled that people are upset, not over anything that is really going to harm autistic people as a whole, but at the idea of being thrown in with the rest of us.

It’s especially interesting to see that one of the people most widely quoted as divorcing himself from people who wear adult diapers (like me) is someone who has never seemed to hesitate to use my writing (both with and without permission) but apparently can’t stand the thought of sharing a label with people whose underwear differs from his in certain key aspects, or with people who self-injure. I guess nobody had better tell Carley that lots of people diagnosed with Asperger’s are incontinent and/or have severe self-injury. He might want to create a divide within Asperger’s to wall himself off from such people in.

Funny but I have never minded as a person who has had both such characteristics, sharing an autism label with people without those characteristics. Anyone who delves deep enough into either science or personal experience of autistic people will find that the characteristics related to perception and cognition are the ties that bind us together, regardless of the more superficial characteristics that people divide us up by. Of the autistic people who seem to have the most similar experiences on those deep deep levels to mine, include people diagnosed as high or low functioning, Asperger and autism and PDD-NOS, with IQ scores from 20 to 160. The same can be said of those who most differ from me. The reason is the diagnostic categories are neither deep nor penetrating nor accurate. They divide those with the most in common and connect those with barely anything in common in such haphazard ways it should be obvious that they are falsity of the worst kind. And the same goes when people pick these singular outward traits and hold them up as the ultimate dividing line. Like many autistics I have been saying this since I first got a good hard look at what the categories meant. And surely the deep down bones-level traits are those that matter.

People often get the idea from the media that I prefer to be called low functioning. I don’t. I don’t think that such labels can ever capture the intricate and beautiful complexity that exists within all of us. Nobody should be reduced to such a term even when they do the harm to themself by self-applying such terms. But as a person who has received that label from several doctors without even knowing it, I will stand up and resist the way it is used, and will tell people that when they speak of what they want to do to people with that label then they mean me since I have worn that label. (It is not for them to say they make an exception for me, because when people with that label are mistreated I am mistreated because the label is forced upon me whether some random guy likes it or not. It is forced on me by doctors and by people who yell out of car windows alike and is not so easily repelled.). Such things do not fit into soundbites.

Anyway just let it be known that I totally and completely divorce myself from any person or community who shuns people like me or like any other random autistic person who doesn’t meet the standards of aspified perfection. This is not the way to celebrate human diversity and it is not the way to gain status for yourselves by throwing the rest of us to the wolves. We may share an official diagnostic category (in places where the DSM is recognized), people may finally be forced to acknowledge the sameness that many of us have believed in all along, but (thank God) we don’t all share such a terribly harmful set of ethics. And thankfully it’s okay to reject crappy ethics even if it’s not okay to reject people for having unsuitably proper characteristics.   

(“Better? Fuck better. We don’t exist for the beautiful people of the world, Ted. We’re there for the oddball. The rebel. The outcast. The geek.” A line from the movie “The Specials” that just came to mind. As it always does when I am confronted with outrageous elitism.)

Anyway as much as this is a rant against snobbery it is also a call to remember what is important. Look to that beautiful shifting central set of attributes that make us alike and different. Stop using the periphery to divide us. And just as we remember the central attributes that matter, we need to look to the central values that bring us together to assert that we are of equal value no matter how we seem to differ, that we all matter and are valuable, in a deep down way not a surface feelgood way. Because we need those roots to sustain us while other people are fleeing and pointing fingers at those they don’t want to be lumped in with. And because it’s too easy to get blown away by the ethical storms that surround situations like these.

There is so much beauty in those deep levels of who we are, and it’s so easy to forget it when people are going on at great length about how inappropriate it is to see our connections when we could be dividing on the basis of things as surface level as the fabric of our underwear or our IQ points. Yes those things can make a huge difference in how we are treated and what lives we lead, but isn’t that fact something we are trying to change, rather than intensify the oppression?