Manifesto on Autistic Liberation

Breaking out of our prison remains impossible if we do not know we are imprisoned. How can we bend the bars to our cells if we can not see them, feel them or hear our empty cups banging against them? To hold us captive in conceptual jail, our thoughts must be controlled, our emotions manipulated, and our spirits traumatized for generations. System builders, associative thinkers, advanced pattern perceivers and paradigm shifters are a threat to our conceptual captors, to the institutions that profit from ignorance as a virtue, profit from our collective subjugation, profit from conformity at all costs, profit from early interventions causing cPTSD, profit from our service and continued war-time community building in the face of autistic annihilation offered as a cure.

There is a reason exceptional pattern perception is simultaneously pathologized in the form of an ASD (autism spectrum disorder) diagnosis and the largest indicator of intelligence in an IQ (intelligence quotient) test. If the power structure cannot use our gifts to aid their domination and control, they will work to destroy and discredit our strengths so that we cannot use them, even for ourselves.

I intend to destroy the illusions that that keep the barriers to autistic self-knowledge in place, autistic needs labeled as “special” and autistic gifts simultaneously coveted and rejected by the neuro-majority. I intend to eviscerate the socio-political and pseudo-psychological underpinnings of the anti-autism movement, the adherents of which, must bow to the gods of the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual) and have faith that underneath all the autism, there is a “normal” person in there. I intend to see autism removed from the DSM and ABA (applied behavioral analysis) outlawed in my lifetime. I intend to build upon the understanding of neurodiversity as biodiversity and the wisdom of philosophers and activists who have taught humanity about oppression, marginalization and human rights to highlight the concept of a neuro-cognitive minority, beautifly developed by Nick Walker in Neuro-Queer Heresies, and how it applies to the oppression, marginalization and systematic, multi-layered institutional failure of autistic people.

Autistic people tend to work on unified theories in whatever field we happen to find ourselves in. Unified theories excite the imagination of system builders, associative thinkers, advanced pattern perceivers and paradigm shifters. I am an autistic philosopher poet and will not be focusing my energy on being understood better by the neuromajority. I appreciate autistic writers who do and will not be disappointed if this liberation project has that effect. This effort is to help autistics better understand ourselves: a gift to myself and my neurokin.