One of the least kind things we can do is hand someone a mould of what we expect them to be and then look at them with confusion when they don’t fit it. Autistic people are handed a lot of moulds.
We’re assumed to be introverted and antisocial. We’re expected to be blunt, bad at reading people, and uninterested in the feelings of others. We’re imagined as being intellectually exceptional in narrow, specific ways, like savants who can’t make eye contact but can recite every train timetable in a country we’ve never been to. We’re pictured as young, awkward boys. We’re thought to lack warmth, humour or social fluency. These didn’t come from nowhere, and some of these descriptions may apply to some autistic folk, but they do real damage when they’re assumed to apply to all of us.
Where Stereotypes Come From
The picture of autism that most people carry around was assembled from research conducted on a narrow slice of the autistic population. Specifically, it was conducted on white, male, young, and wealthy boys in clinical or institutional settings. That skewed picture then became inaccurately generalised to all of us and formed the stereotypes we see today.
Historically, most autistic folk who didn’t fit the mould didn’t get a diagnosis. Autistic girls, women, and non-binary folk often never get diagnosed, or when they do, it’s in adulthood and after years of knowing they are different and not having the language to describe it. Autistic people of colour face compounding barriers to diagnosis and recognition, with many being funneled into the prison-industrial complex. Autistic adults were largely absent from research; to this day, autism is commonly assumed to be a childhood condition, and many supports are ripped away once somebody turns 18.
The idea that autism comes packaged with some form of extraordinary and narrow genius applies to a small minority of us, and yet it shapes how the general public imagines us. The absent professor, the mathematical prodigy, the person who can’t speak but can calculate the day of the week for any date in history. Most of us are not like this. We’re people with an ordinary mix of strengths, challenges, and skills.
Stereotypes simply things, acting as a cognitive shortcut, and without cognitive shortcuts, we’d be paralysed from the amount of information in our environment. The problem is that autism, like every human experience, resists simplification.
The Social Stereotype
Among the stereotypes about autism, the one I’ll be spending some time on is the assumption that we don’t want to connect. There’s a pervasive idea that autistic people dislike others; that we are, by nature, solitary, indifferent to relationships, uninterested in friendship, and in our own world. For some of us, that rings true. However, like any group of people, we span the full range of social motivation. There are deeply introverted autistic folk who find solitude restorative and don’t need much interaction with others. On the other hand, there are highly extraverted autistic folk who crave company, light up in social environments, and struggle if they feel isolated. Most of us sit somewhere between these poles, and it can differ depending on the day, the environment, and who we are with.
The diagnostic criteria for autism don’t actually describe people who don’t want to connect. They describe people who connect differently. There are three criteria related to socialisation and relationships, which are, in essence, (1) communicates with others differently; (2) uses and understands non-verbal communication differently; and (3) understands and conceptualises relationships differently. None of these specify that autistic folk do not want to connect with others.
Research has consistently shown that autistic people have a strong motivation to form friendships and feel a sense of belonging. We experience loneliness. We seek connection. It just gets misread.
Some of us express affection by sharing everything we know about something we love. Some show it through practical action over verbal reassurance. Some of us maintain a small number of intensely loyal friendships rather than a loose web of connections. We are often very social and very connected; we just don’t perform it in the expected manner, and it doesn’t get recognised for what it is.
Masking and Why Some of Us “Don’t Seem Autistic”
Masking and camouflaging add another layer to stereotypes about autism and socialising. Masking involves learning, often from a very young age, how neurotypical people interact. Through attention to detail, pattern recognition, and a great deal of cognitive effort, many autistic people can “pass” as neurotypical to be accepted and form the connections we yearn for. We might script conversations in advance, mirror people’s body language, count how long we are making eye contact, or suppress our natural responses, all to present a version of ourselves that becomes palatable to the expectations of others. This can be exhausting, but it can often work well enough that others don’t realise it’s happening.
For many of us who mask, we are used to these infamous responses we get when we disclose our autism. “You don’t seem autistic!”; “That can’t be right, you have so many friends!”; “But you’re so fun!”; or my favourite, “Surely it must be a mild case, I couldn’t even tell!” – as if a stranger’s vibe check constitutes a diagnostic assessment and assessment of support needs.
We are, collectively, very over these comments. However kindly intended they are, they reveal something uncomfortable: that the speaker has a fixed idea of what autism is supposed to look like, and we don’t match it. The implication is, at best, that our ability to socialise is evidence against our self-knowledge, and at worse, that the speaker has an ableist view of autism and sees us as “one of the good ones.”
Getting It Right
Stereotypes are our attempt to predict what a group is like based on limited information, and that function isn’t entirely without purpose; but when the underlying information is skewed, outdated, or drawn from a narrow sample, it fails, and the people stereotyped are applied to absorb the cost of it.
The kindest and most accurate starting point with any autistic person is to treat them as an individual. This can look like:
- Believing when people tell you who they are. If someone tells you they’re autistic, that doesn’t need to align with your existing image of what autism looks like. When you aren’t a clinician conducting a diagnostic assessment on somebody, you have no place to tell them whether you agree that they are autistic.
- Retire “you don’t seem autistic” from your vocabulary entirely. It is not a compliment. It communicates that autism, in your mind, means something diminished, and that the person in front of you doesn’t fit that image. It asks us to either defend our diagnosis or shrink ourselves to match your expectation.
- Expect variety. Autistic people are not a monolith. We can be introverted and extraverted, funny and serious, warm and reserved, academic or practical, socially fluid or socially awkward – sometimes all within the same person across different contexts. The variety between autistic people is greater than the difference between autistic people and neurotypical people. If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.
The stereotype says we prefer to keep to ourselves, but many of us are right here, very much wanting to connect. We spend considerable energy navigating a world that keeps being surprised by that. The kindest response to that is to stop being surprised.
