¡HannaH!

These people are basically saying “yeah Data isn’t ideal if he’s more of an android than a human and he should have more human-like emotions so he can be accepted” and as an autistic person who highly relates to Data, it makes me so upset.

I was told at a young age that me being autistic was a terrible thing, so i resented myself FOR YEARS and tried to be as neurotypical as possible. But a lot of people saw through the mask and it made it difficult for me to find friends.

In a conversation with Worf while advising him on a personal crisis, Data says, "The Starfleet officers who first activated me on Omicron Theta told me I was an android– nothing more than a sophisticated machine with human form. However, I realized that if I was simply a machine, I could never be anything else; I could never grow beyond my programming. I found that difficult to accept. So I chose to believe that I was a person; that I had the potential to be more than a collection of circuits and subprocessors. It is a belief which I still hold."

Everything about the way he describes this proves his sentience. If he were truly a machine without conscious, he would not find it difficult to accept anything. The world would be just as it is and pass through him without any sort of judgement. Instead, he chooses. He believes. The only reason he still believes that he is not yet enough to be accepted as a conscious being is that it was conditioned into him by the officers who first interacted with him, based on their own biases, which... that's practically the autistic experience. It's the Double Empathy Problem in a nutshell. Neurotypical people who default to the assumption that everyone else experiences the world in a generally similar way to them will attribute incorrect assumptions about the feelings, wants, needs, and beliefs of someone who processes things differently than they do.

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