Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. It's possible to save these lives—all we need to do is get everyone to agree that it's worth the effort. This book is a must read for all women who have or suspect they have autism, parents of girls with autism, partners, friends or relatives of girls and women with autism.

I think it's a wonderful read for anyone interested in disability and gender, regardless of whether they're autistic. Any girl or woman who suspects herself to be anything other than perfectly pretty, nice and odourless inside and out risks not being a girl or a woman at all. None of us could ever be as pretty and nice and odourless inside and out as good girls and nice women are supposed to be, as we are supposed to be by definition. Anyway I found it hard to read, but that's not to say it wasn't good, because it certainly wasn't bad. SGJ [my masked persona] is the personification of my internalized ableism, and as such she perpetuates harm not only to me, but also to my fellow autistic people who cannot or do not pass as neurotypical, and who do not or cannot let it go when autistic people as a class are harmed or erased or insulted.Corvus Atlantic’s commercial fiction list which includes women’s, historical, romance, sci-fi, crime and thriller. The author’s reinterpretation of scientists who thought mothers were cold to their autistic sons, as unobservant males who couldn’t see mothers who were well-attuned to their sons’ strong preference for increased physical distance and decreased conversation, was eye-opening. many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it.

Having previously only considered it as an issue with my perception of self, I had somehow never made the connection between my internalised ableism as a concept and how that extends into action against myself. The letter to Frau V speaks to Limburg’s experience as a disabled mother and the child of a mother who did her best to advocate for her daughter in a society that offered absolutely no recourse to the kind of help and support she and her child needed.

This notion, that the mother-baby dyad, standing apart from all others, is an ideal template for child-rearing, is a collective delusion quite specific to our culture in the Global North, and it would be better for everyone if we collectively snapped out of it. An autism diagnosis in midlife enabled Joanne Limburg to finally make sense of why her emotional expression, social discomfort and presentation had always marked her as an outsider. I've only known I'm autistic for about a year, and I'm really starting to dig into some deeper ideas about how people relate to autism and how we fit into this world that doesn't make space for us.