Grievance Parenting Is Not Advocacy
You Can’t Separate Autism From an Autistic Person
It’s World Autism Acceptance Month, and hostility toward autistic people is still being dressed up as advocacy.
Recently, I saw another content creator post about how much she hates autism and how terrible it has made her life.
She is not autistic.
Her young son is.
Then a whole bunch of other parents joined in and started talking about how much they hate autism, too.
During Autism Acceptance Month.
I left several comments explaining that they were not talking about an abstract concept.
They were talking about human neurology.
They were talking about the way millions of autistic people exist in the world, including children.
I explained that this kind of language does real harm.
It adds to the shame, stigma, bullying, and dehumanization that autistic people already face.
Nothing I said was getting through.
One man argued that he has every right to say he hates autism and it has nothing to do with my autistic children, and that I was just taking it personally.
Another parent told me to shut up and said no one cares what I think.
That reaction says everything.
A lot of grievance parents frame their hostility as advocacy, but it’s not advocacy to publicly speak about your child’s neurology with disgust, contempt, resentment, and blame.
Get Lia Diane’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
That is not love.
That is not protection.
And it is definitely not advocacy.
It teaches the world to see autistic people as burdens, tragedies, embarrassments, or lives gone wrong.
Children absorb that.
Autistic people of all ages absorb it
The truth is that autism can’t be separated from the autistic person.
When someone says they hate autism, they are attacking a core part of how autistic people exist, perceive, process, and move through the world.
That includes their own children.
So no, I do not see this as harmless venting.
I see it as prejudice.
I see it as cruelty.
And I see it as one more reason autistic people grow up surrounded by messages that tell them they are too much, wrong, broken, or unwanted.
At a certain point, this stops being awareness and starts becoming a public performance of parental grievance, where parents get sympathy and autistic people pay the price.
When parents publicly bond over how much they hate autism, they are not advocating for their children.
They are humiliating them, devaluing them, and teaching the world to do the same.
Follow Divergent Soul on Facebook for more posts and discussion.
Originally published at https://substack.com.
