Well Said!

  by Helen Said, Autistic advocate, Melbourne Australia As the Autism rights movement evolves, people are exploring the impact of Autistic masking.  Autistic masking is often described as hiding behaviours, personal tastes or interests that might "out" us as Autistics, or copying other people's behaviours, personal tastes or interests in order to "pass" as neurotypical. Masking is often linked to suicidality or mental ill health and vigorously opposed by Autism rights advocates. I often hear people talking about heavy masking and the impact this has had on their lives - people becoming exhausted from the effort of masking and not knowing who they are beyond the mask.  As an Autistic, I have never been a heavy masker, and I think this is because I grew up in a proudly multicultural household. At the time of writing, there has never been any research into the needs or experiences of Autistic adults from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds. Thi...

By Helen Said, Autistic Advocate, Melbourne Australia I first met the remarkable Ali France at a Labor Enabled conference in Queensland in 2019. As someone from the western suburbs of Melbourne, what struck me was that her name is pronounced Ay-Lee (rhymes with Hailey, not like the Muslim Ali families that live around here) and France is pronounced the way the Queen would have said it. As an Autistic who gets patterns stuck in my head and doesn’t listen to radio or watch TV, this has been added to my social scripting, but I won’t go into that. For me, Ali’s disability is entirely more predictable. Disability is a part of life. Since we all hope to live a long life, we should inevitably expect disability sooner or later. We would all hope disability comes later rather than sooner, but that is not to be for everyone. For many of us, we experience childhood, adulthood, disability then death, but for others, disability is inserted into the equation a lot earlier and becomes part of o...