Everything Wrong with the Autism Representation on Wattpad

ii. Infantilization

Autistic people have been treated like children since the beginning of time. That much is obvious knowledge. Non-autistic people, who either work with autistic people, have autistic family members, or just flat out don't understand what being autistic is like, give in to the stereotype that autistic people have child-like brains (no thanks to the information dumped into their drinking water by Autism Speaks) and can't comprehend or understand what the world is like or how humans interact with one another.

So, because they have this mindset, they write autistic characters out to be child-minded, without the ability to create concrete thoughts and actions, without feeling. They are written to either be filler characters without purpose and are just written to bring about diversity of some kind, or are written because they have just a basic knowledge of autism and don't understand what we actually go through and experience, which in comparison to a neurotypical (or non-autistic person), isn't as much as they've been taught to think. So many non-autistic authors write the "character's autism" in such a way that makes the audience feel bad, and paint this picture in their audience's mind of a person who has learning disabilities and can't comprehend basic human needs, or doesn't know how to feel in a human way. Because so many stories are written like this, the neurotypical assumes that this is how actual autistic people are and how they want to be treated,

which only harms us even more.

Autistic adults are not children.

Autistic adults do not think like children.

Autistic adults think like adults, regardless of their other co-morbid disabilities. How they think may come across in a different way because who they're communicating their thoughts to is not able to see inside their mind,

but the logic is still the same.

Stop treating autistic people like babies who need a revisit of the basic understanding of humanity and start treating us like people who can make their own decisions and who have concrete trains of thought who simply just want to live in the same world as you in comfort and in sanity.