No, Autism is not “trendy” now. It never was and never will be.

This is a mentality I see a lot, especially from parents of autistic children.

They think that autism has become a “trend”, overcome with low support needs, late/self diagnosed, high masking women. They have this specific vision of the blue-haired, left wing white woman preaching about being "neurospicy", screaming over them as they try to advocate for their children. Heck, one particular parent took it upon themselves to create this image with AI to post to their social media, for some reason... I don't know if it was supposed to be a gotcha or what.

They think that this movement has blown up so much that now, general society believes that is what autism is, and has just forgotten all their previous stereotypes and notions of savant geniuses and nonverbal children. No longer do they envision Sheldon Cooper or Rainman, or their uncle's cousin's wife's brother's son. Now they envision these blue-haired white "neurospicy" women.

This is quite evidently not true though. While yes, general awareness of “neurodivergence” is spreading, it's not nearly to the extent that a lot of these parents seem to believe. And all the while it spreads, I see just as much pushback from doctors and clinicians who think we're "overdiagnosing".

So why do these parents believe that autistic people like their children are being erased entirely? Why do they now think that everyones vision of autistic people are the "emily"s of the world?

I believe this is an instance of how social media algorithms can skew our perception of reality.

They feel this outrage towards this “trend” of lsn late/self-diagnosed autistic women, and so they comment on their posts, engage with their content, watch it all the way through.

This pushes more of that type of content onto their algorithm. The algorithm sees them watching this content, engaging with it, sending it to friends, commenting on it, and thinks "wow, they must really like lsn late/self-diagnosed autistic women." And then their whole for you page, or explore page or recommended posts are all those same types of posts.

They also continue to interact with other people on the internet who are also just as outraged, who stitch videos and share similar opinions. People who can't shut up about how much this movement has blown up, about how "trendy" autism is now, about how many "fakers" there are. That becomes all they see.

Their social media then becomes majority late/self diagnosed autistic women, and other parents who are outraged.

And you can see how this can lead to an echochamber of social media content.

And especially in the modern day where people are spending so much time on social media, it’s easy to have your perception of reality skewed, and forget that the real human population is much more diverse than that. You see social media filled with this population of specific types of people, and forget that there are so many more people in the world who just aren't showing up on your social media.

This happens to people on my side of this community too. It has happened to me.

I’ve had moments where I’ve been pulled back to reality and realised that people don’t care as much about autism awareness/acceptance in real life as they do on social media.

I don't remember if I told this story here before, but it's one that still hits hard for me.

I used to be on the comittee of my university's Korean Culture society. As Autism awareness/acceptance month rolled around, I thought it would be a fun idea to run a session were we watched extraordinary attorney woo, and I could talk a little about the perceptions of autism in korea to make it a little more educational and whatever.

I was so excited for this session, but I was very quickly let down. By several people, including people I considered close friends. I won't go into details, but let's say I went home that day feeling very trampled on. Feeling twice as invisible as usual, and with this sobering realisation that people did not care.

I existed so long in this autism community online that I forgot that most people don’t really care, unless they are directly affected.

People might smile and pretend to care for a while but they don’t really.

Autism awareness/acceptance month that year ended up being a rough one for me. It's main theme seemed to be me just realising no one cares, and that there's nothing we can do to get them to care. We can post things on social media about it, but at the end of the day, if they don't care, they'll scroll on. We can't force them to listen.

And of course the algorithm also doesn't help with this.

But it goes to show that even us late/self-diagnosed autistic people get into similar echochambers. I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, like I'm calling autism parents "stupid" for getting stuck in these mindsets.

But again, if you step back into the real world, "touch grass" if you will, you realise that the world is so much bigger than all of that, and that your social media is not an accurate representation of your immediate social circle in real life.

Before I ever realised I was autistic, I can say for sure that I knew absolutely nothing about autism. I honestly don’t know how I would have defined it if someone asked me. Maybe I might have made some comparison to savants, at a stretch I might have said it affects their ability to socialise, but otherwise I would have had no idea.

It’s only thanks to me discovering that I am part of this community, that I learned all that I now know about autism.

When you’re involved in the community, you’re bound to know more than those who aren’t. I can say theres plenty of other conditions or disorders or illnesses out there that I know next to nothing about because I don't have them, or immediate family don't have them, and therefore I have no reason to need to know anything about them.

I honestly don't expect everyone to know everything there is to know about autism. Some more understanding would be nice, but we still don't have that. We still have people who think autistic people are unempathetic geniuses, believe it or not. Those people do still exist, in the real world, on a side of social media we rarely see.

So, to any parents who think that us lsn late diagnosed "tiktok" autistic people are “hijacking” autism, or that we’re taking over the community, that we’re stealing public knowledge away from high support needs people like your children...

Remember that social media creates echochambers. It’s feeding you what it thinks you want to see. Go outside, and see the real world again. (something I think we could all do with sometimes) /gen

And advocate for your children by speaking up for them, rather than speaking over us in anger. I promise it will do more good than rage will.