 In the age of social media content, the online autistic communities are getting more and more popular by the day equally. The exposure of mainstream individuals to said content is becoming a lot more prevalent. It's undoubtedly going to land pretty poorly for many outside of that community. I mean, terms like neurodivergent and internalized ableism and sensory joy are all going to seem a little bit absurd or at least a little bit strange to the majority of people. Autistic creators receive a plethora of negative judgments and comments by general Joes outside in the mainstream communities. The autistic community is becoming more and more polarized by the day with lots of infighting, lots of disagreements. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. Autistic creators are stuck in a little bit of a paradox, being criticized for presenting themselves as stereotypically autistic on one hand and not autistic enough on the other hand. But I think even as an autistic individual or a disabled individual, you will understand this concept quite well. It happens both in the online world and in real life. The first point of contention is this idea of infantilization versus normalization. If you don't know infantilization means it's basically the act of treating or referring to an adult as a child, as an infant, or treating them that way. It's something that we experience both in the medical setting, in social settings, both in friendships, familial relationships. How lucky I am to be loved by such a simple, honest, simple man. But in the online spaces, this idea of sort of widespread infantilization usually comes in the form of criticising individuals for displaying traits that many deem to be child-like. You may be thinking, well what's so bad about trying to reduce the perception of autism being child-like? And a lot of people may agree of you on that front. The thing that I've realised on TikTok is autism is highly presented in an infantilising way with traits that are often child-like and associated with QT terminology, making it appealing and like a club where people submit applications to. The problem is autism isn't commonly like this at all and it shouldn't be rebranded into a safe haven for quirky behaviour. I think it's a lot more nuanced than that. When autistic people express themselves, they want to try and paint a realistic view of what they are like and try to encourage others to feel not so much shame that it's a very common experience for a lot of autistic people in their daily life due to their autistic traits. You may see individuals posting about TV shows that they like, which do particularly have a very very strongly geared demographic of young people, but it is something that some autistic adults find to be their special interests, something that sues them, something that brings them joy. You all know him and you all love him, feel like he's the most important character we have in the show Bluey and it's all about the key word of the video, neurodevelopmental condition. Another really really prevalent thing which people do pick up on quite a bit is when autistic people show themselves steaming on camera, something that is very heavily characterised in terms of the autistic community as being a pretty repetitive, self-regulatory, stereotypical behaviour. It's something that everybody does to a certain extent, you may find yourself sort of as a neurotypical person, biting your nails, the skin around your nails or pen lids or twizzling or bouncing your leg up and down, these are very very common things that people do and they do provide us with input which can be quite regulating for us. But in the autistic context, steaming are these very repetitive things, you might see people who like visual stimming, having their hands flicking in front of their face, you might see people flapping or rocking. For me, a really really big one that no one really notices is that I very much changed my head position quite a lot because I really like that vestibular balance-based input. On the other side of the coin you have people who are trying to sort of reframe autism into being something which is a little bit more mature, a little bit more akin to sort of social normative values and these individuals mostly get quite annoyed or quite upset when they are portrayed online or in the mainstream media as being somewhat childlike when they're not. I can understand the sentiment there and people with a perhaps less progressive, more kind of conservative mindset might find themselves in this camp. When they see people who in their eyes are somewhat infantilizing autism as perhaps being sort of age-regressive in certain ways, they might become slightly disturbed by feeling like this is the representation that their group is having. There's a fine balance, I think. The balance there is that every autistic person is different. For me, I have some things which are pretty sort of mature interests that are considered to be age-appropriate in people's eyes or socially normative. I also have some things that I do like which, you know, to be honest, a lot of individuals on the earth enjoy, which are generally geared towards children like Pokemon. Obviously, there have been communities which have off-shooted from each of these different sort of groups, created more sort of mature content, more sort of in-depth. There's a lot of progression in that sense in those communities, but it comes down to the same idea that just because most people like it who are adults does not mean that it's age-appropriate necessarily, and do we really need to be applying what is age-appropriate to certain activities that people do? If people enjoy something and they want to share it online on their own profile, which is something that everyone should have the capability to do to a certain extent, obviously, then what's the harm? When you look at the autistic community, you have to remember that everyone is very, very individualistic. You're not really going to get one autistic person who's the same as another autistic person. As long as we have a clear idea and everyone's sort of being themselves, I think that's okay. It doesn't really matter which way you go on this. People are always going to have something to say. You present yourself stimming, people are going to say that you're infantilizing autism and that this is sort of a bad representation or you're trying to like farm views. On the other side, if you never show stimming, people are going to be like, oh, are you actually even autistic? Do you actually even have any autistic traits, any stimming, any sensory differences? There are massive amounts of people who will sort of call you out on this, but there is a significant amount of people, especially when videos or pieces of content tend to become more popular and have a little bit more outreach into the mainstream spheres. Warning. Yep. It's fake disorder cringe time once again. Sorry, Gabby. I know it's your birthday when we came to the trampoline park to celebrate, but honestly, mommy couldn't figure out how to make sure you were jumping neurotypically. And it would be very ableist of you to jump on the trampoline when that's obviously a neurodivergent stim. Come on now, dawg. Come on, man. Perhaps the biggest issue that a lot of autistic creators that I've talked to, including myself, have online is that when you speak about autism in general, or when you speak even about your own autistic experiences, people are always going to disagree in some sense due to the nature of autism. You might find that in a lot of my videos, I have caveats at the start which say not all autistic people are the same. You may not identify with every single part of this kind of concept. And this is something that is pretty much replicable in all of the autism content which is online. To create content which isn't solely about your experiences, you need to be somewhat general. And when you are general, you are inevitably going to cut out other people's experiences. Meaning that every single time you're going to be constantly reminding people that this is, you know, you don't necessarily have to identify with all of this or any of this even to be autistic. It doesn't even matter if you are talking about your own experiences. Even if you highlight that you are generally talking specifically about your experience with any said autistic trait or any autism experience outside in the big wide world. People are going to point to the general findings or the general norms that autistic people follow. Although not particularly bad, not particularly sort of harming your ability to create, it surprisingly does get a lot of people commenting. Everyone likes to think that they have the best sort of conceptualization of what autism is because everybody has, or at least autistic people have, their own lived experience. You can try as you very much can to talk about autism in general and people are going to highlight individual differences and you can highlight individual experiences and people are going to talk about general differences. And this isn't necessarily just talking about autistic creators. This can mean anybody. This can mean any social circle. The last point of contention, you can talk about autism negatively and people will get upset at you or they will say that you're trying to victimize yourself. You're trying to grift. You're trying to appeal to the masses by painting yourself as a very damaged victimized individual. But on the other side, if you talk about autism positively, you isolate a whole bunch of people who have negative experiences with being autistic. You also encourage the sort of mainstream mob coming over and saying that you're glamorizing autism as some form of like fashionable label. It's not beautiful, it sucks and it shouldn't be glamorized or diminished into some pretty colors and Pinterest images. Everybody has their own lens. Everybody has their own experience and way of thinking about their experiences. I know some people who see it as a complete negative thing. I still follow them. I still listen to them. I see some people who have a complete positive regard for autism. It's a superpower and our kids be like, oh, daddy, I've got a superpower. I'm the same as Tom Stokman, you know, and it's really cool to hear they're not autistic. They're not disabled. They've got a superpower. So and some people who kind of sit somewhere in the middle, like myself, where I see it as more of a difference. I see it as quite individual. Some people need very, very high supports constantly sort of around the clock. I've worked with some of these individuals and some people find that it is somewhat annoying. It's somewhat kind of holds them back and some people have an even more sort of positive view where they see, you know, the real positives and they take that for what autism is. And they see the negatives as sort of being a little bit more in the background, but still sort of there. Whatever frame you take, whatever stance you take, when you're delivering autism content, you're undoubtedly going to get some people who don't agree with you and saying that you're doing autistic people a disservice for any view that you may have, which might differ slightly to their perspective on autism. There are people out there who very strongly sort of enforce a particular way of looking at autism. They do so in a very sort of social dogma like fashion, where anybody who doesn't use the right language, anyone who doesn't have the right opinion or perspective is immediately going to be labeled with all sorts of horrible words over the family, Morty. And if you tell your mom or sister, I said any of this, I'll deny it. And they'll take my side because I'm a hero, Morty. And now you're going to go and do whatever I say, Morty. People very much overrate the influence that influencers have. I don't think that we necessarily have the power that a lot of people think we do. I think we can offer some insights for people to think about. We can provide some arguments in a sense, unless we're like telling people what to do or like shaming people or like criticising people for having different opinions in a very non-constructive way. In the same vein as we kind of overrate the influence of autistic influencers, autistic creators, we also underrate the ability for other people to make their own decisions. Like I don't think that I think there's probably a very minority of people who are just immediately convinced by anything that they see. I think a lot of people take into account other content that's being created, their own experiences. I think when we put sort of influences up on a pedestal and say that, you know, their word is so impactful, we're very much undermining the ability for individuals to make their own decisions, their own opinions, have critical judgement. A lot of these things will be applicable, I think, to a lot of the social conversations that we may have outside in the big wide world. I haven't been outside in days and I'm not looking forward to it. Oh God, natural light. I'm joking, I'm joking, not really. Do you see these paradoxes being replicated in the online spaces that you're a part of? It's been lovely to have you here. I hope you'll join me for another. You can hang around if you want. Probably just going to chill for a bit. But alternatively, you could, you could check out this video. It's a pretty good one. Yeah, pretty spicy.