Blind spot of the autistic community: Treating non-autistic people as if they are all the same

This is something I picked up on from watching autism videos on YouTube.

Below are two channels run by autistic people I found to be useful.

Disclaimer, I am not autistic. My writing may seem like it, the way I think may resemble it, but at heart I am neurotypical (non-autistic) — which is a huge strength, actually, being in STEM, but this is for another post. I am a neurotypical who is healing from past traumatic events.

The problem

What I noticed after having watched a handful of autism channels, plus read some blogs, is that they tend to treat all neurotypicals (non-autistic people) as a homogenous group. (Wait, are humans abelian?)

These are some of the ways the online autistic community talks about neurotypical people

• They all naturally know what to do in a social situation
• They find it easy to make friends and socialize
• It’s easy for them to go to a party
• They don’t feel stress from social interactions
• They all think and feel the same things

Which is completely ridiculous, because it doesn’t take into account the breadth of inner experience.

A neurotypical person may look completely “normal” on the surface, checking off all the checkboxes, and looking the same as the other people.

Yet you have to understand that behavior doesn’t define a human being.

There are plenty of neurotypical people who:

• Dislike being around other people
• Are drained by social interactions and would prefer to be left alone
• Are only pretending to be social for the sake of being polite

• Are asexual, or do not want relationships
• Struggle to read between the lines
• Need to be taught how to socialize (due to dysfunctional parenting in childhood, etc)
• Are socially awkward
• Don’t pick up on social cues well
• May look like a social butterfly, yet have severe doubts and angst about their standing in society
• Question social rituals like small talk
• Who ruminate over their actions and words
• Are poor at communication
• Know how to behave socially, but dislike doing it
• Have a disagreeable temperament
• Are bored by social events
• Are highly sensitive to physical sensations
• Are being severely bullied at school, or at their workplace
• Struggle with executive functioning and day to day tasks

Because the truth of the matter is that there is breadth in the inner experience, and not everyone makes their struggles vocal. Someone could struggle with something, yet never make it public, so you as a stranger never sees it. And you go on to assume that they are “normal”.

And people have thoughts, ten of thousands of them, that they keep to themself.

Not everybody likes to socialize. A lot of disagreeable non-autistic people think it’s bullshit and a waste of time. Some of them make this sentiment known, some do not.

It could be coming from trauma, it could not be. It could be unhealthy, it could be healthy. They could be evil, they could be good. They may discriminate against you, they may love you.

There is breadth in the human inner experience. You cannot make decisions based on their external behavior.

Not all neurotypical people are the same. Just like all neurodivergent people aren’t the same.

I understand where the autistic community is coming from, though.

These are some reasons that I can imagine would lead somebody to group neurotypicals as being all the same.

• Deep pain and hurt
• Traumatic memories of constant rejection or bullying
• Economic difficulties
• The draw of finding a community to fit into, and demonizing the common “enemy” (ironically this behavior is social)
• It’s simply hard to empathize with someone. It probably makes it harder when you have had negative experiences with the perceived group
• It is simply easier to persecute than understand somebody. It requires higher psychological maturity to do the latter
• The idea that not being able to socialize is different from simply not liking it — a neurotypical that struggles with or dislikes socializing has it easier than someone who is incapable of it (which is true)
• Lack of experience dealing with non-autistic people due to history of pain and rejection (which is understandable)

Though I cannot claim to perfectly understand since I am not autistic, I can see why someone would think this way.

And at the same time, I cannot unsee this gap. Starting yesterday, I could not help but notice this glaring blind spot in the autistic narratives I came into contact with, and it will be something I always notice.

The two channels I introduced earlier are hosted by intelligent, thoughtful people.

To me it came as a surprise that these two men would group 98% of the population into a small box and treat them as one homogeneous group. I am disappointed, to be honest.

It is similar to the disappointment of finding someone who says they like math, but it turns out they’re only memorizing what it says in the textbooks and don’t actually think or question anything (and tbh this is why I’m losing interest in the topic of autism altogether …).

You can read a similar discussion in the Reddit Aspergers community here

Apparently I’m not the only one who saw this, and it’s probably a pattern in other parts of the community too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aspergers/comments/r75dc8/neurotypicals_arent_inherently_bad_people/