This is written to the #autistic community, as well as to the non-autistics among us. My apologies if this offends, I'm just trying to be informative to anyone and everyone about this topic.
I'm just gonna say to everyone that the "actuallyautistic" tag initially strikes many #autistics as gatekeeping or exclusionary. This happens all the time.
There's no way for anyone to know intuitively or by inference that it is actually intended to protect and include all autistics, whether self-self-assessed, professionally assessed, and regardless of so-called "levels" of autism.
At first glance, I think most people would interpret the tag, which says the tag users are "actually" autistic, as claiming authenticity and distancing themselves from the self-diagnosed in our community.
This is why this discussion arises so often. It's confusing. I've seen this come up constantly on twitter in years past. And it comes up here on Mastodon, too.
Of course, the history is that the often abusive and misinformed parents of autistic children were aggressively and hostilely invading into online discussions (especially on Twitter) among and between autistics, disagreeing and talking over us, talking down to us, arguing over their insistence of "severity" levels of autism, telling us we weren't autistic, that we're not qualified to discuss autism, that we don't represent autism, that we're frauds, assuming all of us are just pretending to be autistic, that we don't know what it's really like to be autistic, and in various ways and forms invalidating us.
These often were full-on attacks upon our community on Twitter. Some of these "autism parents" or "autism moms" made this a daily affair, acting as if "parent activists" who are out to set the world straight with their presumably "correct" perspective on all things involving autism.
Often their views were shockingly ablest, invalidating, erasing our voices, forcing outdated and ignorant misconceptions upon us.
So the #actuallyautistic tag was created to declare autistic-initiated discussions to be just for autistics (including self-diagnosed). Allistics could ask questions by using the #AskingAutistics tag, or if they entered an #actuallyautistic discussion they were expected to be respectful of autistic viewpoints.
It's actually a good idea to describe this history often, not just for autistics, but for all the well-meaning non-autistics who want to communicate with us.
Because... to repeat, the tag comes off as gatekeeping. It sounds as if intended to gate-keep. Any reasonable person might take it that way. And it is gatekeeping in the sense of giving non-autistics a warning to respect autistic spaces and discussions. But it isn't to keep out self-identified autistics.
I just posted this question less than an hour ago, but I can now delete that. I was asking for multiple reasons. One of which was that it seems like there's an implication in there, but I didn't want to just assume that.
@obrerx@actuallyautistic@allautistics thanks for this. I adopted the tag years ago as one that welcomes all of us who self-identify, it’s important to see how it can read differently to others. Am currently using #AutisticElder hoping to connect with others like me who’ve lived long lives undx. There must be many families like mine in which nd is obvious over generations but only the younger ones are dx. So much to learn from each other. So much to heal.
@obrerx@actuallyautistic@allautistics hey thanks for this clarification - I’m autistic and as a ripuke don’t like gate-keeping in any way, but this appears to aim at clarification, so hopefully lots of people will read this :)
@obrerx@actuallyautistic@allautistics This has really cleared this up for me. I had no idea that some viewed it as a way to seperate professionally- diagnosed and self-diagnosed autistic people. Really glad you tooted this. I only knew it as a tag to seperate non -autistic voice from autiatic voice.
@niamhgarvey@obrerx@actuallyautistic@allautistics Stumbling onto the tag not long after I joined Mastodon, having self-diagnosed about 10yrs ago & been officially diagnosed more recently, it struck me as welcoming, for those of us who by any means arrived at the relieved realization that this is who we are, that there's a reason the rest of the world seems weird, & there are others like us.
Okay, so, the way my mind works can be a little odd sometimes. 😅
@liscarey@obrerx@actuallyautistic@allautistics Are you asking me what I do professionally? If so, I am currently a writer, writing books for adults and kids about being autistic.
Previously I was a nurse but cannot nurse now do to physical disability.
@guppegroups Is it possible to set a description for a group? That would be very useful to avoid at least some of the confusion (obviously doesn't help with the hashtags, only the group).
(I guess the answer is no since there's also no admin for individual groups who could have the authority to set the description but it doesn't hurt to ask).
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