The Autistic Community Is Actually Many Communities
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
All the talk of "community" last week has reminded me of something I don't think we talk about often enough. We often talk about "the autistic community," or similar things like "the queer community," almost as a euphemism. We talk about "the community" as simply the set of all people in the world who are autistic. But if we define a community as a group of people who are actually in contact with each other in some meaningful way, then it becomes obvious very quickly that there isn't one autistic community. There are a whole lot of small ones.
What Is a Community?
The small found family of queer autistic people in Andi C. Buchanan's book "Sanctuary" is one example of a community. It is a relatively small handful of people who live in close quarters; they willingly share duties and time in order to maintain their communal space. This is one of the smallest, most tight-knit examples of a community.
A community can also mean:
A group of friends, living near each other or maintaining regular online contact, but not synchronizing their lives as closely as a found family.
A group of people sharing professional interests and activities. For example, a research community is the set of academic researchers who are actively working on a particular topic, and who will read each other's work, see each other at conferences, etc.
A group of people who are in regular contact because they share some other interests. For example, Ravelry is an online knitting community. An in person knitting community might form around a particular knitting store that holds workshops and craft nights and invites the regular customers to get to know each other.
A more loosely connected group of people who are affected by an issue, or who are working together for a common goal.
These are off the top of my head. Maybe you can think of other kinds of groups that are communities.
You Belong to Many Communities
Unless you are extremely isolated, you probably belong to many different communities. You might belong in one community because of where you live, one because of your career, another few because of your hobbies, another few because of political beliefs or activism. You might belong in particular groups specifically because you are marginalized - for example, if you are queer, you might have sought out and joined a group of queer people. You might not feel close ties to every group that you belong to, but you probably belong to many.
Not only do you belong to many groups, but you may have noticed that each group you belong to has slightly different norms. A certain kind of behavior or language might be standard in some groups and a different kind might be standards in others.
This is especially noticeable for marginalized people. People of color learn to "code switch," talking one way when they're around other people of color, and another when they're interacting with white people. Autistic people often have to mask their autistic traits to survive, and might selectively stop masking around other autistic people, resulting in markedly different behavior.
But to a lesser extent this happens in any community. You might join a knitting community and find that people use certain words to talk about knitting, or that they have certain opinions - that one type of knitting pattern is the best, or that one type of knitting needle is inferior to others. The group might share inside jokes about knitting, or jokes about things that happened when the group was knitting together. When try to reference these opinions or in-jokes in front of people who don’t knit, they won't know what you're talking about. Even if you join a second knitting community, you might be surprised to find that this community’s set of shared opinions is different from the first!
Autistic communities are like this, too.
Because we're starved for good language to describe ourselves and good examples of how to treat each other, every autistic community will come up with its own versions of these things. There is overlap between different communities, and hopefully they all try to learn from each other, but nonetheless the language and norms that each group comes up with might be different from others. If you come into contact with an autistic community very different from yours - for instance, a group of autistic Silicon Valley programmers meeting a group of non-speaking autistic people who have been institutionalized - you might be startled at the differences in values, language, and priorities.
There is a lot that we all have in common, despite this! We're all autistic! We all want basic human rights and good treatment! But it can be challenging to work across these differences. Part of the challenge is about privilege (are white autistics making room for autistics of color to speak, for example?) but part of it isn’t; part of it is what naturally happens whenever two different communities come together.
It's also a thing that ableist people can and will use against us. When an autistic person asks to be treated better, they'll be told that they "don't speak for all autistic people." It's important to remember that while communities differ, all autistic people are people who want and deserve human rights. The differences are not absolute. They're more about method, style, nuance, and intersectionality.
Can you think of a time when it was hard for you to navigate the difference between two communities? What did you do about it?