Why I don't identify as #ActuallyAutistic

I have an official diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome

3 generations

But I don’t identify as #ActuallyAutistic 

I have described myself as being “in the middle of three generations of women somewhere on the Autistic Spectrum”


This is as much as I will commit to, as I don't want to be pigeonholed into any particular views


I find that #ActuallyAutistic lacks both the specificity and the authority that the word "Actually" implies


I'll leave it at that for now, but hope to learn more when I get to the UK


I am aware that the word "Actually" may have different connotations for Britons than it does for Australians.


But here is how I described myself in my thesis, "Odd People In" in which I used the word Neurodiversity for the first time. 


There is one sentence in particular that I have redacted and wish I hadn't written.  I intended to be ironic, but its raw bitterness does show that I never thought autism was the benign difference some want to make it out to be.

Situating myself (p22, Odd People In)

My answer is complex:

·      A locus of the historical forces of ethnicity, class, disability, and gender of course.

·      A partial self, always in the act of inventing itself.

·      A moving point on a sliding scale between free will and neurological determinism, between essentialism and social constructionism.

·      The daughter of a woman with Asperger’s syndrome.

·      The mother of a daughter with Asperger’s syndrome.

·      “Somewhere on the spectrum” myself, somewhere between low-functioning normate under-achiever, and high-functioning autistic survivor-against-impossible-odds.  And a bemused observer fascinated with this latest classificatory schema imposed on an infinitely complex reality.

·      Deeply ambivalent as I live out the contradiction between feeling the victim of my mother’s deficit, and yet wanting to be the protector of my daughter’s right to difference. A contradiction that doesn’t automatically lead to an altruistic politics. 

·      Deeply ambivalent as I live out the contradiction between feeling the victim of my mother’s deficit, and yet wanting to be the protector of my daughter’s right to difference*. A contradiction that doesn’t automatically lead to an altruistic politics. XXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXX XX XX X XXX XXXXX.

·      Somewhere between a divine spark embedded in universe full of meaning and purpose, and a biological machine, engineered by the purposeless but necessary operations of physical laws.

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*   The autobiographical chapter following should make this point more understandable