Have you ever experienced 'Ableism'?

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Have you ever experienced discrimination because of your Autism or Asperger's Syndrome?

I would say I experience it on an almost daily basis, due to the nature of my job as i work performing customer interaction. Since there are no visual clues that I'm differently abled, I am expected to perform as well as an NT on any specific occasion.

I have experienced discrimination from the late 1960s when I was mistaken as having learning disabilities and later nearly every day as well as the relegation to lower social status. I do not think that there has ben one day I have not experienced some form of discrimination and or hatred. I know Asperger syndrome is a camouflaged condition but I do find that it has now become a convenient excuse. I also have social demands on me way beyond that put on allistic people.

In public school I was discriminated against by peers, but even worse by teachers and the vice principal. We almost had to sue to get me an IEP, and when we finally did they discriminated even more!

So now I'm online schooled.

I have been called ret*d before and asked if I was. I may have faced it at my last job because the office clerk wouldn't understand I take things literal, when they keep moving things, I won't know where to find it anymore, I have a hard time with reading between the lines, I cannot remember to do something he taught me weeks ago or months ago if it's not in my routine, I need to be reminded to do something because I tend to forget and it doesn't occur to me to look at my pad. Still the same old "What did I just tell you?" "How long have you been working here?" "You should know this already" "use your common sense." I put up with it than quitting because I needed a job and have a hard time getting a job.

In high school kids kept telling me "listen" or saying I don't ever listen or telling me to stop asking questions. They wouldn't understand I can't keep up with what is being said and I am trying to understand the assignments or what I am learning. Also kids would tell me to sit when I would pace. Then teachers in the resource room get on my back about me falling asleep in class because they wouldn't let me pace. They also wouldn't let me listen to music or play my Game Boy but yet they didn't want me pacing to keep my energy. They didn't want me on the computer either. I couldn't win.

I am also sure I got it a lot in childhood too if kids always got mad at me for my clumsiness and kids thinking I am stupid or selfish and them bullying me because I was different and being rejected. Yeah i would say I got it a lot growing up. Now as an adult it's not a daily thing anymore or all the time thing anymore unless I am around the wrong person like I was at my last job or in the wrong environment where everyone is closed minded towards differences.

From schoolteachers and students to employers and social services staff, I face nothing BUT this. It's like people never even consider that maybe what seems 'ordinary' and 'natural' to them, like functioning under time constraints or in a social environment, might make me want to kill myself. Trying to explain this to people generally gets you outright rejected and ignored. It seems people only want to help you if it's convenient and easy for them to empathize with.

no not at all...

I performed a social error at work that explained was occasioned by Asperger's, not yet officially diagnosed. While the incident was under investigation, I was offically diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. I informed them of this and that I was seeking cognitive behavioral therapy to manage it. When this was disclosed, my library director and City Risk Management made an appointment with a psychologist for a fitness for duty assessment, which I understand to be illegal under ADA. Then, before I could even go to my first appointment with this psychologist, they changed direction and exaggerated the original offense into something that could result in termination, and discharged me last month, though I was willing to negotiate and accept a demotion into a position that would not require contact with the public or management of employees. This is currently on appeal, then I'm planning to file an EEOC complaint if I am not reinstated.

I performed a social error at work that explained was occasioned by Asperger's, not yet officially diagnosed. While the incident was under investigation, I was offically diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. I informed them of this and that I was seeking cognitive behavioral therapy to manage it. When this was disclosed, my library director and City Risk Management made an appointment with a psychologist for a fitness for duty assessment, which I understand to be illegal under ADA. Then, before I could even go to my first appointment with this psychologist, they changed direction and exaggerated the original offense into something that could result in termination, and discharged me last month, though I was willing to negotiate and accept a demotion into a position that would not require contact with the public or management of employees. This is currently on appeal, then I'm planning to file an EEOC complaint if I am not reinstated.

No, I have not experienced discrimination because of my Asperger's.

Yes if you considered the hiring process is geared more and more to personality over skills. I have gone in to detail about this in the Working and Finding a job section

What people don't understand they are afraid of.
If someone doesn't "fit into a box" then unfortunately most people in society deal with THEIR issues (yes, the issue is with the person that has the predjudice and not the person challenging the ideal) by either:
1). Ignoring them (They consider that if they pretend that the perceived "challenge to the 'norm'" is considered to not exist, then it will go away).
2). Being hostile (Most people have an inbuilt program to conform, and whether or not they agree with the social consensus (majority opinion) they go along with it. If someone is outside of this 'norm' and a person accepts that person then there is a risk that other people may think they are also "weird" simply because they talk to or interact with that person).

Unfortunately many people on the AS are considered as eccentric or a de-stabilizing force to the social 'norm'.

I know that a lot of the things I do would not be considered to be "normal", and in fact a lot of those things would improve society if everybody did them. Even so, because they go against what the majority do it is considered as weird. And what is weird; people fear.

I've received it from my own father the summer that I was going into Grade 10. It was only one time, but it really hurt and angered me. I was angry that my parents wouldn't let me babysit. I was 15 and my sister was 12. My sister had been babysitting for 8 months at that time already. My dad said, "There are a lot of things that other people can do that you will never be able to do and part of it is because you have a learning disability." He also spoke those words as though I was a toddler. I said to him crying, "So you're saying that I'm useless. That's what I hate about myself."

My grades started to suffer the next year, and I decided that I was going to be a hippie. If I couldn't amount to anything, why should I even think about getting a job or gearing up for a career? I was also put into a college course called Adult Special Education Job Preparation at Kwantlen. I told one of my fellow colleagues in a very vehement and rebellious way, "I'm going to be a hippie forever!" -Don't speak too soon

I ate my stubborn words when I've signed out some records from the college library early in January the following year. I listened to Mama Cass first of all and than I listened to The Kinks and my walls of rebellion and and low self worth came crashing down around me. I blew my hippie ideology into the water and became the person that you all know me as today.

In other words, I started being myself again with one minor bump in the road that I've managed to get myself over once again 4 years ago after a different kind of phase.

I don't think I have... maybe I did, but if that happened I didn't realize it.

I'm not sure whether I have experienced ableism or not. I mean, I got a lot of crap from both my father and my peers growing up, but nobody, including myself, knew I had ASD at the time, and I wasn't construed as having a learning disability or any other kind, except there was some limited intervention in primary school for my motor skills and also for a speech impediment. The intervention was successful speech wise, but my motor skills are still nothing to write home about.

It had certainly been observed that I could be quite obsessive and repetetitive about things and my hyperlexia was plain for all to see, but high-functioning autism wasn't on anyone's radar back then. Asperger's wasn't generally known, nor even diagnosable until 1994 when I was 14, and general awareness in education or anywhere else was very low for some years after that, so I'm not sure it could have happened any other way. (I was diagnosed at age 30)

Most people don't know I have ASD, and I'm not in the habit of telling them unless they have a very good reason to know. I get treated poorly by some, but it's difficult to tell whether this is from them perceiving (what is actually, but they probably don't know that) autistic traits, or just them being as*holes. In situations where high social performance is expected, yes I do get treated harshly when I fail, so perhaps I have experienced ableism? I've worked to engineer much of this pressure out of my life. I seem to manage to stumble my way through low-pressure job interviews well enough to get hired, at least in the IT sector where quirky/eccentric/awkward people are tolerated better than in some others.

In casual social interactions, it helps that my social skills have improved markedly over what they once were, mostly just from trial and error and copying patterns I observe to work well. Not that my performance is perfect by any stretch, but I seem to manage, especially one-on-one or in smaller groups. I'm not very outgoing, partly due to pre-existing social anxiety and partly due to sensory and processing issues; but being distant, withdrawn and having a somewhat flat affect is tolerated to a greater extent around here than many other places, especially in men.

I think pretty much everyone has experienced it and it can be from at least one person or from a few people or in the past. Not everyone is going to understand and are going to expect you to be like them and some people may refuse to believe whatever issue you have with is genuine because they have never heard of anyone having that problem and they don't know why you would have that issue, especially if you don't know why you have it and they don't even know you have autism or some other disability.