Everyday ableism and hate speech: a tale of three encounters in one day

When trying to understand autism and autistic ways of being one will quickly come across the controversies that exist between various “stakeholder” groups and positionalities, with autistic voices often at odds with those of non-autistic parents and practitioners. Once thought of as a rare disorder, the concept of autism has expanded in recent decades to encompass a wider range of people. Much academic work in this area along with practice models are dominated by a medicalised and psychological framing of “deficits” in one’s actions in the world and interactions with others. Such a framing can lead to the stigmatising of autistic people as less than fully “human” in their sense of self and membership of society, rather than as ways of being. This framing has also led to autistic people being “spoken for” instead of at the core of decision-making processes regarding autistic people, as individuals and as a community.