The Autists: women on the spectrum

School is an artificial environment in which society has decided that children should be able to function. It’s loud, crowded, and unpredictable, and students with a neuropsychiatric diagnosis are often bullied. Refusing to go doesn’t appear all that strange. Why would anyone want to be part of such a setting?

Parents of autistic girls who keep it together at school speak of difficulties simply getting school representatives to believe in the diagnosis. The teachers don’t see the girls breaking down at home after the end of the school day.

Among American autists with a university education, 85 per cent are unemployed.

What distance must I maintain between myself and others if we are to together construct a sociability without alienation, a solitude without exile? ROLAND BARTHES, HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER

I remember the doctor who said that on a suicidal-ideation scale from one to ten, I was a two — and I remember that a brief disappointment ran through me. He was right, but I wished he had assessed me as just a little more suicidal.

A computer might be amazing at doing calculations, says Jonna Bornemark, but it has no judgement. Yet the capacity for judgement exists in every human being. It’s a hidden bank of knowledge that we have forgotten how to tap into. We have instead come to equate judgement with subjective opinion, which may vary from individual to individual.

Often, I haven’t even realised that I’m being perceived as unforgiving. Instead, I think I have just been clear, if perhaps expressing myself a little too forcefully in my eagerness to stress my point and make myself understood. But neurotypicals are so easily hurt.

The rigid criteria that are used in the name of rational organisation assume that all employees are the same. And the more you assume that all people are the same — and thus interchangeable — the worse the conditions become for the autists, who are different from the majority.

Some doubt the power of fiction to touch us to the core and influence our feelings and behaviours. They have never seen an autistic girl watch the same episode of a tween show on repeat, memorising each line so she can speak to her friends in the schoolyard.