2017 in media representation my thoughts

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The big event in 2017 was the explicitly autistic lead characters in TV shows like "The Good Doctor" and movies like "Roman Israel Esq". It will continue in January with a female lead character in the movie "Please Stand By". 2017 also saw more stories of autistics achieving things and not just being burdens.

I have always fought against the idea that autism is trendy but it is getting pretty hard to argue against that now. This development has caused a lot of angst and criticism. All the characters are an expansion of Rain Man, genius/savants, no moderate or severe representation, the characters are a checklist of traits that most autistics do not have or have at any one moment, no older adult representation to speak of.

I agree with the above criticisms but since this is a day to look back I am going to try and put some perspective on this. The amount of progress in a short period of time is amazing. 2 years ago while there were characters with traits explicitly Autistic characters were the exception rather than then the rule, the networks were afraid the audience would turn away from a character described as Aspergers or Autistic. I speak as person who was not identified as autistic until in my mid 50's because my brand of autism was not recognized so all of this flawed as it may be is miraculous to me.

I thank all of the self-advocates, allies professional, and amateur who did the work to make this progress possible. I understand that all this media attention is not helping and in some ways is hurting 99 percent of us. This will take time to be noticeable to the average autistic person. But without the past work to change attitudes, most of us would be in an institution, dead, mis or not diagnosed (professional or self).

Actually, I don't feel good about my aspergers-autism becoming something new and "trendy" in TV and movies. It doesn't give me a good feeling. If I were LGBT (and I have had curiosities about it before), I wouldn't really like to talk about LGBT stuff with most other people at all. It seems that TV and movies try and make it too obvious sometimes. I don't oppose LGBT. As an analogy for aspergers-autism, I just don't think my neurology defines who I am or should be other people's business.

I know we both disagree much on that, but that's how I really see things.