Beyond Acceptance: a rallying cry for Neurodivergent liberation

For Autism Acceptance Week 2024, we are answering with content around the theme of Beyond Acceptance. To launch this work, El Dewar has written a rallying cry to demand true Autistic liberation and representation, beyond just being accepted.

Autism Acceptance Week has the best of intentions: that the non-Autistic community should accept the humanity of Autistic people and, as such, treat them as fellow humans. 

And yet, this puts Autistic people in the all-too-familiar and uncomfortable position of explaining and promoting our humanity. Exclaiming that “we are people, just like you”. Asking the neurotypical majority to accept out humanity as equal and synonymous to their own so that we are not (as has commonly happened in the shameful history of Autistic pathologisation) put in cages for being difficult to understand, given electric shocks for emotional regulation, beaten, or forcibly deprived of our prized possessions. All this in the pursuit of enforcing compliant mimicry of neurotypical behaviours—being “just like you”. 

Taken in the context of this horrifying legacy, acceptance begins to feel like a less appealing table to be offered a place at. Acceptance in this context is a one-sided compromise, a plea for begrudgingly given humanity. It says, ‘you can sit here, but don’t make a sound, don’t rock the boat, don’t look different, don’t sound different and above all else do not act different’.  

There is the argument that acceptance is a necessary stepping stone, something we need to achieve before we aim for greater liberation. But where is the cut-off point? If people don’t know Neurodivergent people and particularly Autistic people exist by now, then perhaps we need to accept that they are wilfully not looking for us. 

Every time we promote acceptance as an end-goal, we give ownership of our humanity (a fundamental and inalienable right) to someone else. When we ask society to kindly please accept us, we allow them to barter and negotiate our essence and being. When this request for our essence, our souls and our humanity is made we leave room for the answer to be ‘no’. You can come to the table, but you must leave your soul at the door. Around the world countless numbers of children are being hurt – emotionally and physically – by the hydra-headed monster that is ABA, PBS, EIBI etc. 

I don’t want you to accept me, I refuse to give my humanity to you to twist and warp and model in a fashion that sickens me. I don’t want you to accept me as an ‘almost human’, just out of kilter with the step of your normalisation. I don’t want to read another story of the most vulnerable members of our community dying because adequate care, support and understanding doesn’t exist for them. 

I want liberation. I want our communities represented, leading, developing and creating. I want us to be messy and loud and proud. I want us to have opinions and debates and discussions – for we are not a monolith or a hive mind. I want us to take our humanity and forge it, whether as individuals or en masse. 

I want us to reclaim our humanity and wear it as a badge of pride. We will never gain our human rights whilst we give our humanity away.  

So, I ask one thing this Autism Acceptance Week: don’t settle for acceptance. Take your identity, take your essence, take your humanity and bask it in. Take back your own humanity and demand better. Demand a real place at the table. Demand recognition of your humanity, of my humanity of the humanity of the most lost and vulnerable members of our community. Do not ever settle for acceptance, demand our liberation.