The Other Side Of Stereotyping Autistic People, We Are Not the Friggin’ X-Men!

So, is autism a superpower? Is it even, the next stage of human evolution? No it isn’t. Thanks for reading.

Oh alright then, I suppose I’ll have to elaborate. Autism has been pathologised for as long as it has been known to exist, often thought of to be as bad as potentially fatal diseases even though autism does not kill people. But there’s another, equally wrong point of view. That autistic people have amazing abilities and spectacular superpowers. When people think of autistic people they often think of Rain Man (do you know I’ve never seen that film, but according to Wikipedia Dustin Hoffman’s character is a savant). Mercury Rising (a terrible film, not just for its depiction of autism, but terrible in general) where the autistic child is a genius at cracking codes, and Cube is another one that comes to mind, where a character heavily implied to be autistic is a genius. In real life people may think of Daniel Tammet, an autistic guy who can learn new languages in a very short time and is excellent at mathematics, or Kim Peake, a “megasavant” with exceptional memory (though his autism diagnosis is now disputed, he is still thought of as an autistic savant by the general public.)

So isn’t this good? Instead of being thought of as awful, autistic people are thought of as brilliant? Isn’t this something to be celebrated?

I remember being diagnosed with autism in 2010. I am not a genius. I had heard that autism was supposed to give you amazing skills and talents. So I thought I had been dealt a really cruel blow, because I thought I could have had the type of autism where I had amazing abilities, but instead through terrible luck I had the “bad autism” with no special abilities. It puts terrible pressure on autistic people if we are “supposed to” be geniuses. It puts terrible pressure on an autistic person who just wants a quiet life where not much happens if they are “supposed to” be a savant.

Now back to the idea that autism is “the next stage of evolution”. This idea I’m afraid misunderstands both autism and evolution. Evolution does not have stages. A human being is not more “evolved” than a rat, or a fly, or bacteria, all of these lifeforms reproduce and pass on their genes successfully. None are “better” in evolutionary terms than the other. Autistic people reproduce, and so do neurotypical people, so neither is better in terms of evolution.

But is it true that autistic people often can do things that NTs (short for neurotypicals, I’m not typing it out every time!) can’t? Yes, but the reverse is also true, Nts often have abilities that autistic people don’t. Autistic people tend to have what’s called a “spiky profile” where the gap between what we are good at and bad at tends to be greater. So autistics find it easier to be very good at a small few things, but very bad at the rest, but NT people find it easier to be good at, but not excel at, a large number of things. (I should point out that not all NT people and not all autistic people are as I have described, but as a general rule this is the case.) And there have been many, many times in my life where I would have found an NT skillset useful, because it is. Which brings me to my main point.

Autistic skillsets and NT skillsets are complimentary to each other. If a person who’s able to learn a wide amount of tasks is needed, a neurotypical person might be better. If a person who can excel at a small few tasks is needed, an autistic person might be better. So no, autistic people are not amazing, unless NT people are amazing too, so either we’re all amazing or none of us are, depending on what way we look at it.

I thought it might be interesting to finish this out by talking about some weird abilities I have. They don’t make me a genius, but they’re just odd and sometimes a bit funny.

I have absolute pitch. I can identify musical notes or by extension the notes coming out of household items such as hairddryers without using a musical instrument for reference. I can also remember what key a song was in in my head, even if I haven’t heard the song in over twenty years.

I have very good conversational memory. A few months back a friend was telling me a story, and I informed him that this was the third time he told me and that he told the story differently each time!

Now for an unusual mild disadvantage I have. My ability to recognize faces isn’t the best. Most of the time I’m able to recognize faces okay, but people who look nothing alike look the same to me, sometimes this has resulted in my saying a big enthusiastic hello to complete strangers!

So no, autistic people are not the X-Men. The “positive” side of stereotyping, is still stereotyping. We’re just people, and that’s more than enough.