What we have in common with the LGBT community

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I recently read an interesting article:

Dealing with the Stress of Being in the Closet

It's written from an LGBT perspective, but it struck me just how much their experiences have in common with ours.

Notably, this:

In the news is the idea that autistic people are serial killers and mass-murderers. Many of us are scared. We're not killers--but we don't know who will believe us when we say that. We are just as compassionate as anyone else--but we don't know how to make people understand it. Some of us cannot hide our autism, and so we are vulnerable. Others can choose to hide, and do--as a survival strategy. But it's stressful, inauthentic. It means that the friends we have are only friends of the persona we present to them. Being "in the closet" about being autistic is painful, isolating, and lonely.

LGBT people have had the same thing happen to them, in a slightly different way. They are accused of being rapists, child molesters, morally dissolute. In reality, they are just as unlikely as straight people to commit sex crimes--but when they try to tell people that, those who are convinced that they're all pedophiles and rapists won't believe them. Just like autsitic people, they've been killed because they are who they are, and being in the closet is a survival strategy--with the drawback that it's lonely and painful.

We even have a common history. Both LGBT people and autistic people have been killed by the Nazis, targeted for sterilization in the eugenics movement, psychoanalyzed, castrated, endured "therapy" with aversives, and been rejected as being unfit parents, fired from jobs, expelled from schools, and evicted from housing.

I think we can learn from the LGBT rights movement. They've survived; so can we. Things are much better for them now than they used to be for them--who's to say we can't use the same strategies in the disability community?

I'm one of the people for whom the closet isn't an option. My name in Google brings up my diagnosis, and even if it didn't, my behavior is visibly odd. I have a medical record including two hospitalizations. Honestly, I'm relieved that the decision has been made for me. I'm out, whether I like it or not, and so far, I think I like it--not because I don't suffer discrimination, but because it means I'm free to be myself and to advocate for other autistics. The danger of prejudice isn't even new to me--as a survivor of child abuse, I'm used to living with fear.

Whether to be open about being autistic, or whether to pass it off as some other disorder, or pretend you don't have any disorder at all, is your decision to make. Maybe, for safety's sake, you want to keep it secret--you don't want people to think you are a potential killer. On the other hand, maybe the drawbacks of being in the closet are too much to take--you can't live with having to pretend you are not disabled, or disabled in some other way, because the loneliness is just too much for you. Either way, that's okay. Just remember... sometimes, the risk is worth it. Sometimes, the risk of being known as autistic is better than the reality of having to live an inauthentic life, to leave behind those who can't hide, and to constantly pretend that you are not who you are.

What's your decision? Will you hide, or not? If you can't hide, how do you feel about that? Can we learn from the LGBT rights movement, how to survive being in the closet and how to defend those who are out?

I agree with you, though I wouldn't pin it down to just the criminal side of things. My friend was originally afraid of telling me (he had told no one else) that he was autistic because he feared I would change how I acted, and how I treated him.

Back then, I made the mistake of telling him that I was going to speak to him differently. While what I meant was that I would not speak sarcastically around him (as he had told me sarcasm was sometimes hard to identify), he thought his fears had come true. We resolved it soon after though and he was very happy. I do realize the damage that could have been done, had we not spoken about it again.

Oh, the irony of this stereotype.

When you look at pedophiles, there are two subtypes - those who are interested in both adults and children, and those who are only interested in children.

The ones who are only into children are disproportionally men attracted to boys. Which is probably where the stereotype came from. But these guys aren't interested in adult men, only boys. It seems to be based on a desire to fall in love with a child version of themselves.

The ones who are into both adults and children are predominantly heterosexual men, interested in women and girls (and sometimes boys as well, based on opportunity). I don't have good data on the percentage who are interested in adult men, but it's not any higher than the general population of men.

There are also women abusers, but they're less common. I haven't heard of any exclusively child-attracted women - most female abusers are either followers of a male abuser (who picks the victim) or heterosexual women interested in both men and boys (and occasionally girls).

So, no link with LGB there. Although pedophilia is a sexual orientation in a sense (they have no control over their attraction to children, and being in the closet is just as unpleasant for them as for GLB folks), it's completely separate from attraction to same-age same-gender people.

Oh, and as for the T - I've never heard of any transgender pedophiles. It's probably no more common than expected by chance.

And as for me, I pretty much tell everyone I'm autistic within about 5 minutes of conversation.

I can see the connection you are making. I have found that I really have a great deal of sympathy for the LGBT community. And have done what I can to help further their civil rights in terms of fighting certain legislation in my home state of Mississippi.

And I understand now, what it feels like after receiving my diagnosis, what it feels like to hold something in for fear of how others might receive you. I only told a handful of people about my diagnosis...and while they were nice about it. It was almost as if they either didn't want to believe it...or they just wanted to say "okay, I get it, but can you start acting normal now?" As if it was a choice I made to be AT.

As a member of both communities, I can vouch for this. It's scary coming out as either at first.

For both being autistic and being part of the lgbt+ community, I usually just don't bring it up unless someone asks or it comes up. I don't hide it, I just don't bring attention to it on purpose. The only instance where I hide it is with my dad; I'm too scared to tell him I'm asexual. Other than that, I don't really care about telling people.

When I first got diagnosed last year I immediately made that connection with a community that I previously thought I had little in common with. It is very frustrating to see them making so much progress while we seem to be going backwards.

Hmm idk. Being bisexual I can hide/chose not tell people, but I've always been 'out', in that I've never modulated discussion based about sexuality (but I'm not sure I'm really capable of that kind of code switching). But, being trans is something I rarely talk about (and have yet to mention in this forum because the internet is like, the one place I can have people not wrong pronoun me, but I feel like it's important to this discussion).

I can't stop being autistic or hide it at all. I'm very very obviously autistic (I am much closer to the stereotype of classic autism than HFA). and I suffer regular discrimination because of that. Some of it is active aggression (getting eggs and rocks thrown at me), some verbal aggression (I get called the r word a lot by people in the street, and people who're asking for money are more likely to crowd me because I look 'simple'). But most of it is subtler, it's I'm walking in a shop and a worker there will come up to me and do the small children and puppies voice and say like, 'Oh are you alright there darling' - more meaning I think should you really be here alone. Or, cashiers taking my card off of me when I take a little bit of time to put it in the card reader without asking and, handing my change to whoever is with me rather than to me. And, for example things like an old lady came up to me in the street and said 'Jesus loves even you', and stuff like that.

So, I think the response to very obviously autistic people (who are assumed by strangers to have intellectual disability) is in my experience more one of infantilisation than of danger danger (although some people do move their kids out of my way, because the idiot is an unpredictable animal I think (this is heavy sarcasm/jokish thing, I don't think this).

I think in this it is sort of analogous to how the L, G and view the T (the b in a precarious place where it's poorly acknowledged often, and we face discrimination from the L & G, and straight people because we're assumed to be 'part-timers' or something I'm not too sure why).

In my experience the L & G (b sometimes) are... made uncomfortable by trans people and our inclusion in the acronym. They don't necessarily want to be associated with the T at all, and in fact I've had cis gay guys explain to me because it makes them look freaky when they've tried so hard to be accepted as normal. (also being lgb doesn't mean you at all understand the T which leads to more prejudice).

In this I mean, a lot of 'high functioning people' or people who can hide their autism/aspergers (whatever they wish to call it), don't want to be associated with the 'low functioning people', there's very often cries of 'Oh but I'm not like *those* people, I have high functioning autism'. And things that wouldn't at all be okay to a person with 'high functioning autism/aspergers' are suddenly fine to do to a 'low functioning person'. And I just feel like on this forum, and in the autism community more generally, there's a lot of... dislike of the 'low functioning people'. Like, we're pitied. We're what you don't want your kid to be. We're what you're so glad you're not. We're the ones who need to be cured. Or we're sources of massive 'oh wow, you're so *IMPRESSIVE*' which is also annoying and offensive.

I don't really have any coherent thoughts on this. But parallels between all discriminations can be drawn, because all discriminated people are discriminated against... if that makes sense?

Every oppressed group has oppression in common. However the nature of their respective struggles will differ depending on how much political power they can harness and use effectively. Gays learnt to be effective politically and did not expect straights to lead the fight for liberation for them; I don't see anything similar coming from the ASD community. The opposite, in fact.

Gays first had to reject the projections of the straight community and refuse to internalise the stigma, oppression and prejudice the straights promoted. The ASD community is light years away from being at that stage, and some days on WP I doubt from what I read that we will ever achieve self-advocacy, self-representation and so make political progress as a group.

On better days I consider it might be possible, but only if the internalised stigma stops dominating the minds of so many on the spectrum.

The history of the liberation of India from the colonial oppression of the British is instructive in terms of how the realisation of power brought about change. Mahatma Ghandi realised that the British had not just colonised India as a country; the very minds and consciousness of the Indian people under the British Raj had been colonised. And he realised that passive resistance was a power that the British could not take away, and he led by example. He did not sit around and say, "Poor us, poor India, the British will not give us a fair go in our own country, this is the most terrible thing that could ever happen to anyone, we have no hope, because the British will not change their ideas and behaviour to suit us".

Gays realised that straights were not going to accommodate their right to live as gay people as an act of good will and/or understanding. They made themselves highly visible, they organised, they said "We're here, we're queer, and we're not going to be invisible just because you think we should be. We're loud, we're proud. Get used to it".

Where is the ASD liberation movement? It doesn't exist. Instead the advocacy is left to parents, to experts, and most of that is driven by their self-interest, not ours. It relegates ASD people to the status of powerless children (politically) - who need olders and "betters" to speak for them. This saddens me greatly.

"We're here, we're weird; get used to it"?

There may not be a large, organized autistic liberation movement, but we do fall under the larger umbrella of the disability rights movement, especially the mental-health and developmental-disability aspects of it. I think we can hook up with both of those most easily of any part of the disability rights movement, since we have most in common with them, especially with those who have intellectual disabilities, because they have the same problem with people talking over them and trying to "advocate for them" without giving them a voice. And of course, many autistics have ID and/or mental illness in addition to autism.

I'll admit that the disability rights movement has not come as far for people with mental/developmental disabilities as it has for people with physical disabilities. It's just easier for an able-bodied person to see, "Hmm, that person can't walk; they might want a curb cut so they can get their wheelchair onto the sidewalk," than to see, "Hmm, that person can't talk and it looks like there's not anything going on in their heads; they might want a cognitive interpreter to help them navigate the world." Still, we're making some progress. We're not automatically institutionalized anymore. Some places are learning to accommodate for autistic students; some employers are learning that we can contribute just as NT employees can. Slow and steady.

But every movement has to start somewhere. In our daily lives, we often have chances to inform and advocate for the spectrum. Sometimes, when someone's in trouble, we can send a flood of e-mail or even stand around with picket signs. It's not impossible. When I look at the autism rights movement, it's like I'm looking at a baby taking its first steps, and imagining the day when the child will be able to run a marathon.

You said this back in 2014. Do you still feel that the autistic community is going backwards, and, if so, how?

"It means that the friends we have are only friends of the persona we present to them. Being "in the closet" about being autistic is painful, isolating, and lonely. "

This quote from the original thread post really rang true. I got bullied so badly, I made up a fake persona to survive highschool. Basically, I was acting all the time. And only in the past 5 years or so have I started to do a U-turn and become more genuine. But I found this topic very interesting, as the only long term friends I've ever had have been mostly gay or lesbian. And I'm straight.
I think I could relate to them because we both got bullied. And like you said, we were both "closeted" in our own ways.
fascinating topic

This is why I try to treat openly "queer" types as allies -- we're likely to have common enemies.

Yeah it makes total sense. And purpledragonflies I was acting since I started since the start of high school. To an extent I still am. In that sense, I might make a good stage actor, because a lot of days I'm acting the whole time. Also really liked how OP 4 years ago brought up the Nazis.

I totally agree with this. I also feel that all of us who defy the norm, when we insist on being included and treated with respect, everyone gets a little bit more freedom.

I've been thinking about "acting" in some stage setting recently, too. why not, right?