Thoughts of My Own on the Language for Autism

A note on person-first language: I have heard you don't say "an autistic person" because you wouldn't say "the fat man" or "the short boy." Well, maybe I wouldn't, but that might be because I'm sensitive like that. Anyho, if that is the case I want to hear terms like "the man with racism" or "the girl with promescuity." Why don't I hear those? Because in this culture, those things are shamed, not just the behaviors, but the person doing the behaviors. Whereas obesity, sh...ortness, and other physical ways of being, we want to not shame the person (most of us anyways, I hope) but the way of being itself. But why is that? Is it because we believe these people are lazy or they'll never date the popular girl in school? Well, if you look at autism, you see that we have all these sorts of preconceived notions about them. They can't lie, they're good at math, they can't understand sarcasm. And it's this limited way of understanding that takes away their humanity. So what do we do? We detach autism from them, rather than our prenconceived notions about what autism is like for them. In our obsessive person-first language culture, we continuously associate autism with negative stereotypes-they'll ruin my marriage, they can't learn to communicate-myths perpetuated by society and various organizations such as Autism Speaks. If we view ourselves that way, it's because we've learned to hate ourselves because of discrimination and stigma. You think we'll learn to love ourselves by teaching us to disassociate with part of who that is. You insist on saying "person with autism" so we know that's not the only part of ourselves. This shows your neurotypical sense of superiority by implying we aren't smart enough to figure that out for ourselves. It is the stigma of autism, perpetuated by the stereotypes autism makes you think of, that makes us feel low about ourselves, and by not acknowledging that, you choose to be part of the problem.