How Society Forces Autistics to Become Inhibited & Passive
A “deleted scene” from my book Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
Eric, a Black queer parent in his forties had to spend years looking for a psychiatrist who would even entertain assessing him as Autistic.
He knew he wanted the potential legal protections that a diagnosis could afford him, particularly the option to take qualifying exams for graduate school in a quiet, private setting. He’d found test-taking environments to be completely destabilizing and distracting his entire life — so much so that he’d barely even gotten into his graduate program. Yet for all the exclusions he had repeatedly faced, Eric’s neurodiversity was something that white-dominated institutions around him always refused to see.
He tells me, “A former therapist said to me, trust me, if you were Autistic, you’d know by now. And I was telling him that I did know, I had known for a while, but I needed it recognized officially! You learn to get by because you have no support, then you are denied support because you’ve found a white-knuckled way to get by.”
When Eric looks back on his life, he sees the experiences of a marginalized and unheard Autistic everywhere. He has always been obsessed with horses, collects…
