Amazon thinks all autistic people are children
It is damn near impossible to find books about autism that are written by people who are actually autistic, much less one written by a woman.
There are precious few societies, if any at all, that are built with neurodivergent people in mind. We’re expected to dance the dance of the neurotypical, right down to how we walk, talk, dress, do our jobs, and carry ourselves throughout every moment we spend in the company of others. At the very least, I should be able to sit in my calm, autistic home, curl up under my cozy weighted blanket, and enjoy a lovely book from an author who gets me, you know?
But when I do find a book by an autistic author, it’s usually written with neurotypicals in mind, employing the same sort of basic, gentle hand-holding as a black person might use to teach a white person about racism, or a trans person about gender identity. Thank you for the millionth definition of what a “stim” is, but it feels like scholarly articles and YouTube videos are my only reprieve from the kid’s table, which just doesn’t seem right.
And speaking of kids, these books are almost always directed at mothers of autistic children. In fact, society is apparently so primed to inextricably link “autistic” with “child” that almost every book on my Amazon Kindle reading list is specifically marketed as a parenting or…
