Horseshoe, Not You,
Been wanting to write this for a while, might as well be now since I have a word for it.
So there's this thing marginalized communities act out in front of the bigger audience : the good, clean rep.
If it concerns a condition where cognitive reality overlaps with organic reality, and it involves a kind of disability, sickness, or other malady, the social narrative pushes them to the side.
That in turn helps other things take hold.
So I'm gonna rant on some examples of it here.
Autism
After my diagnosis, one of the first documentaries I watched about autism concerned a nonverbal autistic girl, whose story was told like horror and inspiration at once. She was assumed to be unable to learn to read, so was never taught. Then one day, she got up typed about being sick. Much awe and amazement in the narration. That she said she was on fire didn't result in a pivot to autoimmune diseases.
Autism is often comorbid with a number of other problems.
Muscle issues, temporary or complete inability for the brain to translate language into the mouth muscle movements, digestive issues, balance issues, and a whole variety of psychological issues that may direct or indirectly start or get worse from it.
Many of the hidden autistic people, those who need assistance living and cannot go make videos, have symptoms of these conditions attributed to autism, and treated with psychological methods, and autistic people who need a lot of assistance to survive have those conditions get worse due to these addition
Wikipedia has a neat article on it with easily digestible information that I have never encountered either in professional settings nor in the autistic community. There are hundred of stories linking in physical conditions, some going into detail like how all autistic brain are low key inflamed.
Autistic brains being constantly inflamed has been proved years ago, but we do not get treatment.
Andrew Wakefield was a scammer whose continued success is build heavily on parents who testify their kids got worse after vaccines. Those parents are not lying, they had autistic kids that weren't so obvious, who got worse because the vaccine caused an inflammatory reaction. In the brain, most likely.
Thanks to Wakefield's popularitiy with the right, the autistic community took the stance that not only is the vaccine as cause false, anything at all linking autism to anything physical is wrong.
Any autistic people who may notice that hey, some of my supposedly autistic traits are improving with medication, they don't come with a community to tell this to, and holy hell the doctors hate hearing this so, so much how dare you exist in a way that proves the entire medical world is embarrassingly treating a physical condition like it's hysteria? GASP.
So they stay too sick to really gather for a unified voice. Likely to die. Especially during hospital visits.
On Youtube and other visual platforms, the autistic community is represented largely by the most socially adept autistic people, talking to allistic people about weird but otherwise functional they are, and how neither else is wrong with them but their social weirdness. Videos on comorbities are usually made by people other than the autism channels.
The most commonly accepted comorbidities are the prarimly psychological ones : ADHD and depression, as they fit the narrative of autism as a psychological difference best.
The right does not like the idea that vaccines aren't the cause, just a revealing factor, because that means you can't get rid of the personality weirdness, you can only make life better for an autistic person who is then going to be able to make more coherent demands.
Ideally, people who diagnose anyone as autistic should immediately start screening them for related conditions.
Barring their efforts, the autistic community should pick up the slack and start passing around detailed lists of overlaps. They rarely do.
Neither the doctors nor the breadtubers are motivation consciously by an ideology, just by eh, discomfort. Which leaves a big empty spaces for fash nonsense.
Aspie supremacy does not like that Asperger is discontinued. Not only do they think they are separate from the icky dysfunctional autists, they believe they are a superior lifeform that should lord over or get rid of everyone else. These people the encourage the exclusion.
It can be subtle, less effort, just a favorism. But it can also be hella powerful. At 88 million, The Predator is the highest budget movie featuring autism, and it overtly promoted aspie supremacy by portraying it as the next step in human evolution, with super mad sciency extraterrestrials coming to earth to harvest it.
Backlash to The Predator was severe about the autism misportrayal, but often neglected to mention the subplot of less savory mentally disabled people heroically throwing themselves into lethal situations (and dying from it) to protect this superior child with no established motivation. A lot of reviewers did not seem to think that important.
The recent backlash against the autistic Barbie is a different example of the ick, since on side she's too visibly autistic for some autistic people, while some parents complain it's not enough suffering. So much of the rep discourse is centered on the ideal of how the autism is presented to the wider allistic world, about being clean for it, but, I haven't seen much people asking Mattel to just make more autistic Barbies.
The good, competent, confident autist who can neatly articulate their differences, strong in their attitude, is a wall for some, an aspiration for others, a protection against shame. Either way the sick autists are by the same, huddling, and I have no power to change this.
If anything I have to be careful bring up that some of my autistic symptoms improved or even vanished with prednison, because this might be received as conspiracy fuel from either side of the isle.
And at the end of the day, I can only note it down.
