Dear John,

This one is blatantly untrue and offensive, isn’t it?

But it needs saying. Here’s an example, which I touched on last time.
Star Trek is an utterly iconic TV series, especially for people with your type of autism. And part of the reason for that, as I hinted last time, is because of how good it is at representation. It has always been much better than society at large at including different types of people, and showing their skills.

The original series (TOS) included perhaps the best known and most iconic autistic character in all of fiction, who has been an icon to generations of autistic folks – Mr Spock. The problem is that to write the character, they made him half-human, half Vulcan.
You get the same idea in The Next Generation. The iconic autistic character is Data, an android; in Voyager you get Seven, who is part machine and has been part of an alien culture for most of her life, as well as the Doctor, who is actually a holographic projection of a computer programme. 

There’s a continual theme in a lot of fiction and culture that people who respond like you do aren’t really human, or are disconnected from being really human. Only recently, I heard a talk by a leading Christian counsellor, who said that humans can’t turn their emotions off and that’s a good thing because it’s part of how God made us. As an autistic trauma survivor, I can often turn my emotions off. As I remember it, you as a traumatised autistic person have trouble turning most of your emotions on! And that means that I heard the counsellor’s talk as being quite offensive. Of course, I can turn emotions like that off, but I’m learning not to!

There are loads of other examples. Last year I heard a talk by a bishop I respect, who talked about the normal way that people come to faith being through particular types of emotional encounter. That of course excludes you and most other autistic people I know, and if church was set up the way he was advocating for it to be, it would exclude you even more.

It’s like talking about people in a way that assumes everyone is white, or has had loving parents. It just isn’t true. And considerate people try to avoid doing it. But it still happens far too much.

All the best,

Future John