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Authoring Autism On Rhetoric And Neurological Queerness

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Autism as Narrative Construction and Site of Rhetorical Control

Diagnosis as Storytelling Act

Autism functions fundamentally as a storytelling phenomenon where who gets to author its meaning determines material consequences for Autistic people. Through Diagnosis, Autistic people are “storied into Autism”—their bodyminds become narratively determined and knowable through Neurodevelopmental disability criteria. This narrative reorganization affects how Autistic people understand their past, present, and future. Someone retrospectively interprets their childhood through the lens of Autism Diagnosis while imagining “Autistic futures.”

The narrative control operates through a critical distinction: “Autism-as-modifier” typically comes from nonautistic people through clinical and parent-advocacy narratives, while “Autistic-as-modifier” represents autistically created meaning-making. This distinction reveals power dynamics in who controls Autism’s meaning. When Autistic people tell their own stories through “angry blog posts, video narratives, comics, memoirs, or extended middle fingers,” they diverge dramatically from professional narratives. Yet these Autistic narratives are frequently dismissed as lacking coherence, audience awareness, or reliability.

Nonautistic stakeholders (parents, researchers, therapists, clinicians) become authorized narrators while Autistic voices are systematically delegitimized. This narrative control enables concrete forms of violence: eugenics, institutionalization, forced medication, behavioral conditioning, and other systemic harms. The act of Diagnosis therefore represents not neutral identification but performative reorganization of identity, access to resources, and social positioning.

Racialized and Gendered Diagnosis Politics

Diagnosis operates differently across racialized, gendered, and classed lines. Autistic children of color receive diagnoses later and less frequently, with their traits misattributed to behavioral problems or social issues rather than Neurodevelopmental difference. Autistic girls and nonbinary individuals face systematic underdiagnosis as their Autism is attributed to personality traits or gender nonconformity. These Diagnostic politics reveal Autism as a racialized and gendered category applied unevenly to control different populations.

For Autistic people of color, Diagnosis becomes a tool for racial control. The cases of Kayleb Moon-Robinson and Reginald Latson illustrate how Autistic traits in children of color are criminalized rather than pathologized—leading to school disciplinary action, police involvement, and incarceration rather than Support services. Diagnosis politics therefore create distinct experiences where the same Autistic behaviors trigger different systemic responses depending on race, class, and gender.

The Rhetoric of Involuntarity: Clinical Construction of Autism as Non-agentive

Involuntarity As Rhetorical Strategy

Clinical discourse systematically constructs Autism as involuntary—both neurologically (one doesn’t choose Autism) and behaviorally (Autistic actions are presented as automatic, driven by Neurological malfunction rather than intentional choice). This involuntariness is not inherent but culturally inscribed through rhetorical strategies that contrast Autism with voluntary action, intentionality, self-knowledge, and communicative capacity. The rhetoric of involuntarity functions as rhetoric of dehumanization, denying Autistic people status as agents capable of meaningful choice and self-determination.

The logic of involuntarity operates through what disability studies scholars call demi-rhetoricity—positioning Autistic people as possessing only halved or residual rhetorical capacity. No matter how many mental-state terms Autistic writers employ, how well they demonstrate audience awareness, or how literarily accomplished they become, clinical literature locates some remaining domain of Autism-related deficit that “confirms” their fundamental lack of genuine communicative capacity.

Enforcement Through Behavioral Intervention

Involuntarity extends beyond neurology into treatment and intervention. ABA and other behavioral interventions physically enforce compliance through operant conditioning—discrete trials, reinforcement, extinction, and aversive consequences—effectively inscribing involuntarity onto Autistic bodies. These interventions work not to accommodate Autistic difference but to suppress Autistic traits and produce Neurotypical-appearing performance through “shaping” (breaking behaviors into tiny components and conditioning them infinitely).

The enforcement of compliance creates the very involuntarity it claims to address: Autistic people become trained to comply through fear, reward manipulation, and environmental control. This process generates what Yergeau calls “kakoethos”—bad character—wherein Autism functions as a marked stigmatic presence that permanently arrests one’s rhetorical ethos. Unlike temporary rhetorical failures that can be overcome through skill-building, Autism’s visibility marks the entire Autistic person as rhetorically deficient.

Violence of Involuntarity Logic

The rhetoric of involuntarity justifies concrete forms of violence: “involuntary logics wreaks violence, even when violence is wrought voluntarily.” This logic delivers Autistic people to psychiatric wards, forced medication, restraint, seclusion, and institutional confinement. The logics of involuntarity enable state and familial violence, with particular intensity targeting Autistic people of color (who face police violence justified through rhetoric of Autistic dangerousness), gender-nonconforming Autistic people (targeted by conversion-Therapy-style ABA), and Autistic people deemed “severely” disabled (subject to the most intense “treatment”).

Understanding involuntarity as rhetorical rather than Neurological opens space for recognizing Autistic resistance to compulsory sociality as agentive survival practice rather than symptom. When Autistic people refuse to comply, persist in stimming despite punishment, or “stim into Autistic futures” through resistance to behavioral normalization, they exercise agency—even when that agency is framed as involuntary defiance by clinicians.

Theory of Mind as “god Term”: Circular Logic Denying Autistic Selfhood

Unfalsifiable Circular Logic

Tom represents one of the most influential and pernicious frameworks denying Autistic rhetoricity and agency. Developed primarily by Simon Baron-Cohen, ToM claims Autistic people lack the cognitive module enabling understanding that others have unique mental states, beliefs, desires, and feelings—a capacity termed “mindblindness.” However, Yergeau reveals ToM’s circular, unfalsifiable logic: ToM modules are claimed to exist because Autistic people seem to lack them, yet the evidence for this lack is precisely the behavioral differences that ToM purports to explain.

This circularity creates a logical impossibility where Autistic Self-advocacy is foreclosed. Autistic people speaking about Autism can be simultaneously dismissed as “not really Autistic” (because they communicate effectively, they must have “recovered” or be “high-functioning”) and “too Autistic to understand the real burden” (because their Autism “residues” permanently). This creates an infinity problem similar to Zeno’s paradoxes: Autistic people perpetually approach Neurotypical rhetorical standards without ever arriving.

Modularization and Demi-Rhetoricity

Beyond social understanding, ToM encompasses mentalizing (attributing mental states to others), metacognition (awareness of one’s own thinking), self-awareness, imaginative play, and empathy. To “lack” ToM is theoretically to lack awareness of one’s own mind and others’ minds simultaneously—a totalizing cognitive absence that, while never empirically demonstrated in Autistic people, becomes foundational to clinical understanding.

ToM produces a modularized understanding of Autistic people, dissecting them into discrete components (social deficits, communication impairments, motor rigidity, Sensory issues) that can be individually “treated” or assessed. This modularization enables perpetual intervention: even when Autistic people demonstrate competence in one area, clinicians locate some remaining domain of Autism-related deficit that requires treatment. The phrase “that’s not real Autism” or “too Autistic/not Autistic enough” maintains the framework that true Autistic people cannot narrate their own conditions, while those who successfully narrate are deemed exceptional or “recovered.”

Intersection With Other Systems of Oppression

Demi-rhetoricity operates alongside and through racism, transmisogyny, and other systems of oppression. The case of Reginald Latson illustrates this intersection: a Black Autistic teenager stimming (rocking/self-soothing) in public was targeted by law enforcement, with his stimming interpreted through both ableist and racist frames as involuntary dangerousness rather than self-regulation. The rhetorical construction of Autistic involuntarity and dangerousness becomes justification for state violence, with exponentially greater force when applied to disabled people of color already targeted by racist policing and incarceration.

Applied Behavior Analysis As Rhetorical System of Control

Historical Origins in Gender Normalization

Despite claims to environmental modification and scientific objectivity, ABA operates through three key rhetorical strategies—environmentalism, recovery, and surveillance—that systematically pathologize and attempt to erase neuroqueer ways of being. Understanding ABA requires recognizing it not as neutral science but as a deliberately rhetorical system designed to enforce compliance and erase difference.

Crucially, ABA’s methods were first developed not on Autistic children but on gender-nonconforming boys in the 1960s-70s UCLA Feminine Boy Project. George Rekers and Ole Ivar Lovaas received $218,945 in federal funding to intervene in “sissy boys” and prevent “transvestism, transsexualism, and some forms of homosexuality.” The identical methodology was subsequently applied to Autistic children, suggesting that Autism and queerness have been clinically conflated as disorders requiring identical “correction.”

Environmentalism: Total Environment As Therapeutic Prosthesis

ABA appropriates disability rights discourse about accessible environments but inverts its meaning. While social model disability theory argues that inaccessible spaces create disability, ABA argues that the environment must be modified to make neuroqueer children Neurotypical-appearing. The “total environment” becomes therapeutic prosthesis—every moment, every space, every person becomes a teaching opportunity. Parents are trained as cotherapists responsible for capitalizing on “teachable moments” continuously.

Lovaas’s innovation was realizing that because children need 20-60 hours weekly of intensive Therapy, the clinic must expand into the home, making the entire domestic landscape a surveillance and intervention space. This contrasts sharply with crip theory’s “environmental justice,” which embraces disabled futures and makes meaning from cripped embodiment.

Recovery: Masking As Insurance-Funded Masquerade

ABA doesn’t claim to cure Autism but rather to achieve “optimal outcomes” (OO)—making Autistic children indistinguishable from nonautistic peers. The rhetoric of recovery gained power through parent advocacy and books like Catherine Maurice’s Let Me Hear Your Voice, which compared Autism to cancer and ABA to chemotherapy. Aversive punishments (electric shock, beatings, food deprivation, isolation) were justified as lifesaving interventions.

Recovery means masking, passing, and closeting neuroqueer identity beneath normative behavioral performance. The book details Kirk Murphy from Lovaas and Rekers’s Feminine Boy Project, where a gender-nonconforming child underwent decade-long ABA treatment involving physical punishment, withdrawal of parental affection, and behavioral monitoring through two-way mirrors and token economies. Despite this “successful” behavioral modification, Kirk identified as gay and eventually died by suicide at age 38. Recovery is framed as an “insurance-funded masquerade” where neural structures and Autistic impulses remain but are behaviorally covered by allistic-appearing performance.

Surveillance: Complete and Total Mastery

ABA requires constant monitoring through two-way mirrors, video recording, written logs, and detailed behavioral charting. Functional Assessment—recording antecedents, behaviors, and consequences—creates a panoptic environment where neuroqueer subjects internalize surveillance and self-regulate preemptively. This surveillance inculcates self-doubt and self-governance; once subjects appear capable of compliance, their refusal to perform normalcy is reframed as willful misconduct deserving punishment.

Surveillance in ABA is not merely observation but “complete and total mastery”—systematic cataloguing and expanding technologies to know and control neuroqueer bodies intimately. This surveillance extends beyond formal ABA into informal therapeutic spaces, rendering Autistic sociality perpetually subject to correction. Parental advocacy, not clinicians, championed ABA and secured insurance coverage through “Autism parity bills,” making ABA among the few covered interventions. This created perverse incentives where eclectic methodologies became repackaged as “ABA lite” or “real ABA” depending on insurance reimbursement pressures.

Neuroqueer as Neurological Queerness and Refusal of Compulsory Sociality

Neuroqueer Identity As Active Practice

Yergeau proposes that Autism itself constitutes a form of Neurological queerness—a refusal of compulsory sociality and normative developmental trajectories. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of queerness as futurity and potentiality, she argues that Autistic people embody queerly asocial relationality that defies normative social orders. Unlike antirelational queer theory, Yergeau positions Autistic queerness as relational in its defiance—“inherently relational in that it defies, reclaims, and embraces the expansiveness that countersocialities can potentially embody.”

The term “neuroqueer,” developed collaboratively by Autistic bloggers including Ibby Grace, Nick Walker, and Yergeau herself, describes individuals whose identities have been shaped by engagement in practices of neuroqueering—actively resisting and reclaiming neuroqueer difference. Crucially, neuroqueer is a verb, a movement, not a fixed Neurological state. To neuroqueer is to refuse compulsory neurotypicality, to “tic into Autistic futures” through resistance to normalization.

Intersection With Gender and Sexual Queerness

Neuroqueer encompasses the intersection of Autism and other neurodivergences with gender nonconformity, queerness, and asexuality. Rachel Groner articulates the paradox: “all people with ASD are queer and, simultaneously, there are no people with ASD who are queer.” Autism queers people by making them asocial and violating social norms, yet because this queerness is neurologically determined, Autistic people supposedly lack the agency to identify as queer.

Yergeau reframes this through neuroqueer identity as a mode of being-becoming characterized by persistent failure to arrive at normality, refusal to be contained by social categories, and embodied practices that frustrate dominant norms. Neuroqueer operates in what Yergeau calls “crip time” or “queer time”—temporal landscapes diverging from “straight time” (linear development from dependent childhood to independent adulthood). In crip time, identities are “always yet-to-be” rather than static or chronologically contained.

Neuroqueer Asexuality and Expansive Intimacy

Neuroqueer asexualities and demisexualities exemplify this resistance to normative categorization. Attractions may be secondary, fluctuating, context-dependent, or existing alongside multiple forms of intimacy (romantic, platonic, queerplatonic). The distinction between “crushes” (immediate, saturating) and “squishes” (mutually indenting, allowing resistance, time-dependent) illustrates how asexual communities expand linguistic and conceptual resources beyond allosexual frameworks.

Many Autistic asexuals face microaggressions within both disability rights communities (which historically fought desexualization) and queer communities (which may view asexuality as assimilationist), yet asexuality itself queers “already-queer ideas of the queer by exploding the variance of queer variance.” Questioning causality between Autism and asexuality (whether asexuality is “caused by” disability) perpetuates harm by suggesting self-identification is lesser if causally attributed to Neurodiversity.

Autism as Alternative Symbolic and Signification System

Entelechy and Embodied Invention

Rather than accepting Autism as the destruction of symbolism (as some psychoanalytic frameworks claim), Yergeau proposes Autism as an alternative symbolic and signification system operating through perceptual signification, embodied communication, and material relationality rather than cognitive symbolism. She invokes the concept of entelechy—a striving or motion toward realization that generates multiple divergences as residual effects—to theorize Autistic movements not as symptoms but as inventional resources.

Autistic movements (tics, stimming, perseveration, echolalia, echopraxia) are not merely involuntary behaviors but constitute rhetorical acts. A tic is not a symptom to be eliminated but a precondition for rhetoricity. Yergeau asks provocatively: “What if childhood shit smearing were read as Autistic communication instead of Autistic behavior? And might we think of shit—the actual, organic object—as a coagent unto itself?” She proposes that Autistic rhetoricity lies in embracing partiality, residuality, and deminess as inventional resources rather than deficits to be remedied.

Motor Schemas and Distributed Embodiment

Invention in rhetorical terms is “the process of making connections, rearranging materials (words, images, concepts) in unexpected ways” through embodied, multimodal practice. Drawing on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, Yergeau theorizes motor schemas as “moving patterns immanent within movement” that play across differential zones of the body. These sensorimotor patterns are distributed across interbodily sites rather than localized to the brain.

Motor schemas constitute embodied rhetoric not reducible to intentional action or symbolic communication. Meltdowns and other forms of dysregulation also constitute sensorimotoric schemes revealing power dynamics and discursive circulation. The author reflects on self-injury as embodied expression where “my hands hoist sharp objects” and questions “where, and in what, and in whom, is power located?” when disability is conceived through metaphors like “rhetoric as circulation of power through discourse—knife through blood through vein.”

Echophenomenology: Echoing As Meaningful Invention

Multiple Meanings Without Conscious Intent

Echophenomena—including echolalia (word repetition), echopraxia (movement repetition), echomimia (facial expression reproduction), echographia (written repetition), and echoplasia (shape repetition through sculpting/drawing)—are typically pathologized as “automatic, non-intentional behavior.” However, Yergeau reframes echoing as inventional and deeply meaningful communication that doesn’t require conscious selection or symbolic intent to carry multiple, context-dependent meanings.

Echoes are not merely involuntary but rather embody complex meanings that shift contextually and can signify entirely different things simultaneously. The author illustrates this through examples: Emma’s echolalic scripts like “city tree house” initially seemed meaningless but conveyed affect, Anxiety, and complex desires; Yergeau’s own echoing of Airplane! movie lines functioned as metonym for Anxiety, pleasure, ritual, smart-assery, and complex emotional states—not through conscious selection but through embodied, semi-voluntary repetition that differently “worked” across rhetorical situations.

Rhetoric Beyond Human Interlocutors

Importantly, echoes need not seek human interlocutors or achieve social success to be rhetorical. They may be purely self-directed, as Mel Baggs’s video demonstrates through hand-flapping under running water—synesthetic resonance with the water’s motion without requiring interpretation or social meaning-making. The resonance itself is invention. Echoes are multimodal and not constrained to single events—each echo can constitute discrete discursive units with multiple simultaneous meanings.

Drawing on Debra Hawhee’s concept of “invention-in-the-middle”, the author frames echoing as an interruptive, connective force neither fully active nor passive—“rhetorically fragile” yet nonetheless rhetorical. Echo creates what Yergeau calls “corporeal neologisms”—new meanings generated through repetition that reshape language’s possibilities.

Stimming, Meltdowns, and Embodied Rhetoric

Stimming As Self-Exploratory Practice

Stimming (self-stimulatory behavior)—including hand flicking, full-body rocking, knitting, hand waving, eye blinking, and head banging—is clinically differentiated from tics on the basis of perceived voluntariness, though both are “semivoluntary.” Yergeau describes holding back a stim as “holding off on scratching an itch” that never disappears but perpetually intensifies.

Historically, self-stimulation terminology emerged alongside sexualization of disabled and “feeble-minded” people; masturbation was conflated with stimming. Rather than pathologizing this, Yergeau reclaims stimming as play, focused engagement, and self-exploratory practice—“desirous and self-fulfilling.” Stims serve Sensory regulation, provide focused engagement, facilitate learning, and create embodied culture within Autistic communities.

Meltdowns As Communication

Meltdowns and other forms of dysregulation also constitute sensorimotoric schemes revealing power dynamics and discursive circulation. Rather than pathologizing meltdowns as dysregulation, recognizing them as communication about Sensory overwhelm, unmet needs, or profound affect. What does your body express when overwhelmed? What Support actually helps?

Stimming is rhetorically significant not because it achieves Neurotypical communicative goals but because it circulates affect, creates meaning, modulates environment, and performs the perversity of neuroqueer being. Autistic culture centers stimming as valued practice rather than pathology.

Autistic Life Writing and Counter-Diagnosis

Autie-Ethnography and Activist Resistance

Autistic people have produced substantial life writing and activism resisting pathologization across three decades. Yergeau distinguishes autie-ethnography from autie-biography: the former emphasizes intertextuality, testimony, witnessing, and activist resistance to oppression; the latter centers individual life narrative. The term “autistethnography,” proposed by Autistic philosopher Ibby Grace, applies to all Autistic storying regardless of genre or mode.

Autistic blogs, vlogs, self-published texts, and embodied practices (hand flapping, screeching, body twirling) constitute a vibrant Autistic culture. Archives like All the Weight of Our Dreams, Autistics.org, and Loud Hands Project preserve this work. Notable Autistic-authored texts include Temple Grandin’s Emergence (1986), Donna Williams’s Nobody Nowhere (1992), and contemporary works like Julia Bascom’s Just Stimming and Amy Sequenzia’s Non-Speaking Autistic Speaking.

Many Autistic activists do not speak or write in conventional ways—their rhetoric exists in ephemeral, embodied forms often unrecorded and dismissed as non-rhetorical. Despite clinical attempts to dismiss Autistic writing as lacking narrative coherence and audience awareness, Autistic people continue producing work that queers Diagnostic frameworks and theorizes their own conditions.

Counter-Diagnosis and Self-Diagnosis

Margaret Price’s concept of “counter-diagnosis” describes how Neurodivergent people queer Diagnostic frameworks by accepting, rejecting, mimicking, and contesting Diagnostic categories simultaneously. Diagnosis is temporally contingent, affecting how people retrospectively understand their past and imagine their future. The book explores multiple Diagnostic categories: official Diagnosis (clinically administered), unofficial Diagnosis (clinician’s informal Assessment), and self-diagnosis (claiming Autism without clinical intermediaries).

Self-Diagnosis is particularly significant as kakoethical (anti-authoritarian) resistance. By rejecting medical gatekeeping and claiming Autism through self-identification, Autistic people exercise agency over their own narratives and escape the permanence of official Diagnostic categorization. Many autistics have multiple Diagnostic histories, having been previously classified as intellectually disabled, having apraxia, schizophrenia, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, or other conditions before receiving Autism Diagnosis.

Allism and Inverting the Clinical Gaze

Autistic activists created the term “allism” (from Greek allos, “other”) to describe non-Autism, mirroring how “Autism” (from Greek autos, “self”) describes Autistic neurology. This counter-Diagnostic move inverts the clinical gaze: instead of treating Autism as pathology and neurotypicality as default, allism becomes a diagnosable condition worthy of clinical scrutiny.

Websites like the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical (ISNT) and blogs like Field Notes on Allistics satirize clinical language by applying it to Neurotypical people, diagnosing traits like “preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity” as symptoms of “Neurotypic Disorder.” This rhetorical move demonstrates how Autistic people queer pathologizing frameworks by turning them outward.

Disclosure As Charged Rhetorical Practice

Ellipsis and the Hidden Curriculum

Autism disclosure—stating “I am Autistic”—is inherently charged and paradoxical. That statement becomes subject to immediate scrutiny, doubt, and attempted correction by Neurotypical others. The text introduces “ellipsis”—rhetorical omission—as central to how Autistic disclosures are interpreted. Listeners presume something is missing from Autistic statements and feel invited to fill in gaps, often with pathologizing assumptions.

The “hidden curriculum” (terms from Judy Endow and Brenda Smith Myles) refers to unwritten social rules that Autistic people are expected to follow but allistic people violate without consequence. Importantly, Autistic people pointing out hidden curriculum violations is deemed socially unacceptable, while allistic people pointing out Autistic violations is normalized. This asymmetry reveals how rhetoric itself operates as a tool systematically delegitimizing Autistic communication.

Diplomatic Rhetoric and the Closed Fist

Disclosure also involves navigating what Yergeau calls “diplomatic rhetoric”—tactfulness, deference, complex forms of social deception—which operates as an inherently Neurotypical construction used to exclude Autistic people from rhetorical participation. Autistic people are stereotyped as blunt, literal, and tactless, lacking the diplomatic skills valued in communication.

However, Yergeau reframes this through Edward Corbett’s concept of the “closed fist” versus the “open hand” of rhetoric. While traditionally the open hand represented rhetorical inclusivity, Corbett reconfigured this during civil rights activism to show how the closed fist—direct, uncompromising, provocative—can serve marginalized communities excluded from traditional channels. Yergeau embraces this alternative: “I am not a good diplomat. I am, in the words of Cheryl Marie Wade, ‘the sock in the eye with a gnarled fist.’”

Intersectionality and Structural Violence

Autism and Race: Criminalization Vs. Support

Autism does not exist in isolation—it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Autistic people of color face heightened Diagnosis barriers, police violence, and incarceration. Black and Latinx children receive Autism diagnoses much later than white children and in smaller proportions, often misdiagnosed with ADHD, OCD, or Oppositional Defiant Disorder. This creates what Nirmala Erevelles calls “eugenic criminology,” where disabled children of color are pathologized as dangerous products of bad biology rather than as vulnerable subjects needing care.

The case of Kayleb Moon-Robinson, an Autistic Black 11-year-old criminalized for kicking a trash can at school and subsequently arrested for felonious assault, illustrates how Diagnosis becomes a tool for racial control and the school-to-prison pipeline. Reginald Latson’s case—a Black Autistic teenager targeted by police for stimming—reveals how rhetorical constructions of Autistic involuntariness and dangerousness become justifications for racialized state violence.

Gender and Sexual Nonconformity

Autism Diagnosis also skews heavily toward cisgender boys, with girls’ Autism frequently overlooked or attributed to personality traits or gender nonconformity. Gender-nonconforming and LGBTQ+ Autistic people have been targeted by conversion-Therapy-style interventions that treat Autism and queerness as interchangeable disorders requiring identical “correction.”

Contemporary practices continue this dequeering: children are given 40+ hours weekly of ABA to become “indistinguishable from their peers.” Medications like Lupron (chemical castration) have been used to control “aggression and sexual expression” in Autistic teens; mirtazapine has been studied for its potential to curb masturbation in Autistic populations. This history reveals ABA as fundamentally homophobic and transphobic, operating as a back door for enforcing compulsory heterosexuality and cisgender normativity under the cover of Autism treatment.

Practical Strategies for Reclaiming Autistic Agency

1. Reclaiming Narrativity Through Personal Storytelling

Rather than accepting clinical narratives about Autism, Yergeau encourages Autistic people to author their own stories through whatever modality works—writing, blogging, video, art, embodied practice, or combinations thereof. This reclamation of narrative authority constitutes a fundamental act of resistance and self-determination.

Implementation steps:

  • Reject medical gatekeeping: Your story doesn’t require professional validation to be true or meaningful. Self-Diagnosis, counter-Diagnosis, and fluid identity claims are valid forms of Autistic self-knowledge.
  • Experiment with form: Autistic stories need not follow linear, Neurotypical narrative structures. Fragmented narratives, perseverative focus, echolalic incorporation, or non-traditional formats can carry profound meaning.
  • Connect with Autistic community: Sharing stories within Autistic communities (blogs, forums, social media) creates archives of Autistic knowledge and culture, resisting erasure.
  • Name your experience in your terms: Rather than adopting clinical language, develop language that captures your actual experience. This might include neologisms, metaphors, embodied descriptions, or reclaimed terminology.

2. Recognizing and Valuing Neuroqueer Embodiment

Rather than seeking to eliminate or “treat” Autistic embodiment, Yergeau encourages recognizing stimming, echolalia, motor schemas, and other Autistic practices as inventional resources and sites of meaning-making.

Implementation steps:

  • Stim without shame: Reclaim stimming as a self-exploratory, pleasurable, regulating practice rather than a symptom to suppress. Notice what your stims communicate, how they modulate your state, and what they create.
  • Embrace echoing: Pay attention to echoed language, movement, or affect. Notice how echoes carry multiple meanings simultaneously, how they function as shorthand for complex emotional or intellectual positions, and how they create resonance with others’ words and bodies.
  • Use meltdowns as information: Rather than pathologizing meltdowns as dysregulation, recognize them as communication about Sensory overwhelm, unmet needs, or profound affect. What does your body express when overwhelmed? What Support actually helps?
  • Develop motor awareness: Notice your embodied patterns—how you move, rock, gesture, or arrange objects. These motor schemas constitute your embodied rhetoric; they’re worth attending to rather than suppressing.

3. Refusing Compulsory Compliance and Masking

The book emphasizes that Autistic resistance to compulsory sociality and enforced normalization constitutes a form of agency and survival, not pathology.

Implementation steps:

  • Recognize masking as labor: If you’re performing Neurotypical behaviors, notice this as a deliberate practice requiring energy and vigilance—not an authentic expression of self. Consider when masking is strategically necessary for safety and when it’s internalized demand requiring questioning.
  • Practice selective unmasking: Identify spaces (Autistic communities, safe people, private moments) where you can reduce masking and practice Autistic authenticity. Notice what happens when you stim, speak literally, maintain silence, or otherwise violate Neurotypical expectations in safe contexts.
  • Question “social skills” training: If you’ve internalized that you need to change your communication style to be acceptable, pause and ask: Who benefits from this change? What am I losing by complying? Are there alternative ways to meet my own and others’ needs without erasing myself?
  • Resist “indistinguishability”: The goal of becoming “indistinguishable from peers” represents erasure, not improvement. Instead, cultivate visibility and community with others who share neuroqueer ways of being.

4. Strategic Disclosure and Self-Advocacy

Yergeau frames disclosure as a choice involving risk Assessment and strategy, not an obligation.

Implementation steps:

  • Assess disclosure contexts: Before disclosing Autism, consider: Is this person/space safe? What might they do with this information? What access or accommodation might result? What harm might result? You are never obligated to disclose.
  • Develop disclosure scripts: If disclosure feels necessary or desired, practice language that feels authentic to you. This might be direct (“I’m Autistic”), metaphorical, embodied, or indirect. Your disclosure doesn’t need to educate or convince.
  • Notice ellipsis and fill gaps yourself: When others respond to your disclosure with presumed gaps or pathologizing assumptions, you can choose to correct them or let them sit. You’re not responsible for managing others’ understanding.
  • Create disclosure Support networks: Develop relationships with people (Autistic or Autism-affirming) who you can disclose to and who reciprocate with affirmation rather than pathologization.

5. Building Autistic Community and Culture

Rather than seeking integration into Neurotypical spaces, Yergeau emphasizes building and honoring Autistic culture, which exists through embodied practices, digital spaces, and intergenerational transmission.

Implementation steps:

  • Participate in Autistic spaces: Join Autistic online communities, attend Autistic-led events, consume Autistic media and writing. This is cultural participation and political act.
  • Practice crip/queer kinship: Recognize kinship with other neuroqueer people (Autistic, ADHD, asexual, gender-nonconforming, disabled) through shared refusal of compulsory normativity. These relationships are “lusts born of recognition.”
  • Document and archive: Create records of Autistic experience, culture, and resistance—whether through writing, art, video, embodied practice, or other means. This resists erasure and creates knowledge for future Autistic people.
  • Honor ephemeral communication: Recognize that Autistic culture exists partly in ephemeral, embodied, unarchived forms (in-person gatherings, transient digital posts, embodied performances). These deserve recognition as cultural practice even when not permanently recorded.

Critical Analysis and Contemporary Relevance

Impact on Autism Understanding and Activism

Yergeau’s work has profoundly influenced contemporary Autism understanding by:

  • Centering Autistic voices: Prioritizing Autistic Self-advocacy and self-determination over clinical authority
  • Theorizing neuroqueerness: Providing frameworks for understanding Autism as queer resistance to compulsory normativity
  • Documenting ABA’s harmful history: Revealing connections between Autism intervention and gender conversion Therapy
  • Expanding rhetorical theory: Challenging assumptions about communication, embodiment, and what counts as meaningful discourse
  • Intersectional analysis: Demonstrating how Autism intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class

Influence on Disability Studies and Queer Theory

The book contributes to broader scholarly conversations by:

  • Connecting disability and queer theory: Showing how disability oppression and queer oppression share mechanisms of normalization
  • Challenging medical authority: Exposing how clinical discourse constructs and controls marginalized populations
  • Expanding cultural concepts: Demonstrating how disabled communities create culture through embodied practices
  • Theorizing resistance: Analyzing how marginalized groups resist pathologization and reclaim agency
  • Intersectional analysis: Centering multiply marginalized Autistic people in analysis

Limitations and Areas for Further Development

While groundbreaking, the book has limitations worth noting:

  • Primarily English-language focus: Centers Anglophone disability discourse and communities
  • Written communication emphasis: Focuses substantially on written and digital Autistic culture
  • Limited engagement with other neurodivergences: Centers Autism with less attention to ADHD, dyslexia, etc.
  • Dense theoretical language: May be less accessible to newly diagnosed Autistic people or those without academic background
  • Limited discussion of class and economic barriers: Could more thoroughly address how class affects Autism experience

Resources for Further Exploration

Autistic Community and Activism

Key Texts by Autistic Authors

  • Temple Grandin, Emergence: Labelled Autistic (1986)
  • Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere (1992)
  • Julia Bascom, Just Stimming (blog and writings)
  • Amy Sequenzia, Non-Speaking Autistic Speaking
  • Jim Sinclair, “Don’t Mourn for Us”
  • Lydia Brown - Autistic activist and theorist

Academic Resources

Support and Advocacy Organizations

Key Terms and Concepts

Autism: Neurological difference affecting social interaction, Sensory processing, and behavior; represents natural variation in human neurology rather than pathology

Neuroqueer: Verb and identity describing active resistance to compulsory neurotypicality and reclamation of neuroqueer difference through embodied practice

Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): Behavioral intervention system using operant conditioning to modify behavior; historically connected to gender conversion Therapy

Demi-rhetoricity: Condition of being positioned as partially rhetorical, possessing residual communicative capacity but never fully or wholly

Theory of Mind (ToM): Claimed cognitive module enabling understanding others’ mental states; used to deny Autistic agency and self-knowledge

Counter-Diagnosis: Practice of accepting, rejecting, mimicking, and contesting Diagnostic categories simultaneously as resistance to medical authority

Self-Diagnosis: Claiming Autism identification without clinical intermediaries; valid form of Autistic self-knowledge and resistance to medical gatekeeping

Allism: Term created by Autistic activists to describe non-Autistic neurology; inverts clinical gaze by pathologizing neurotypicality

Stimming: Self-stimulatory behavior (hand-flapping, rocking, etc.) serving regulation, pleasure, and embodied meaning-making

Echophenomena: Repetition of language (echolalia), movement (echopraxia), or other expressions; functions as meaningful communication without requiring conscious intent

Masking: Deliberate performance of Neurotypical behaviors to appear non-Autistic; involves significant labor and psychological cost

Crip time: Temporal experience diverging from linear, normative development; embraces alternative temporalities and ways of being

Disclosure: Strategic decision to reveal Autism identity; involves risk Assessment and personal choice rather than obligation

Hidden curriculum: Unwritten social rules Autistic people are expected to follow while allistic people violate them without consequence

Kakoethos: Bad character or Stigma that permanently arrests rhetorical credibility; functions through marked stigmatic presence

Environmentalism: ABA strategy claiming to modify environments while actually enforcing Neurotypical behavior

Recovery: ABA goal of making Autistic children “indistinguishable from peers”; represents masking rather than cure

Surveillance: Continuous monitoring and data collection in behavioral interventions; creates self-policing that outlasts formal intervention

Motor schemas: Embodied movement patterns distributed across body and environment rather than localized to brain

Invention-in-the-middle: Rhetorical concept of interruptive, connective force neither fully active nor passive

Entelechy: Striving or motion toward realization generating multiple divergences as residual effects

Corporeal neologisms: New meanings generated through embodied repetition and practice

Optimal outcomes: ABA term for making Autistic children behaviorally indistinguishable from peers

Total environment: ABA concept making entire domestic landscape therapeutic space requiring continuous intervention

Diplomatic rhetoric: Neurotypical communication expectations excluding Autistic people from rhetorical participation

Ellipsis: Rhetorical omission where listeners presume gaps in Autistic statements requiring filling

Feminine Boy Project: Historical UCLA program using ABA methods to “treat” gender nonconformity in children

Eugenic criminology: Pathologizing disabled children of color as dangerous rather than vulnerable

Neuroplasticity: Brain’s capacity for change and adaptation; often deployed as rhetoric demanding normalizing intervention

Involution: Alternative to development emphasizing circularity, repetition, and refusal of linear progress