My talk for the House of Lords Summit

I have recently been invited to give a 7 minute talk on a panel for reproductive and sexual health rights for disabled people, particularly disabled women and girls, at the House of Lords on a summit called: "Developing  New Future Leaders: Everybody Matters in Development". At first, I was panicked about it, as I didn't know what to cover out of all the various issues about autistic sexual health and reproductive rights. But, as always, with a bit of cross-posting on Twitter and various groups on Facebook, the autistic community came to the rescue. I tried to condense all their points in roughly 1000 words (which is around 7 minutes). I am sharing it below, for anybody interested.↓↓↓

Being an autistic individual in the world, one of the first things you learn about yourself is that you are wrong. Everything you do is wrong. You should be making eye contact. Even though it hurts. Even though you can’t look AND listen to someone at the same time. You have difficulty processing. From the very beginning of your life, everyone around you is looking for ways to fix you. Make you look less autistic. Make you look less like YOU. To this day, many popular interventions that target autistic children are compliance-based and focus on making them less autistic. A prime example of that is Applied Behaviour Analysis, which widely used to this day and has roots to the same principles as gay conversion therapy.

So what does that teach children? It teaches them that what they think is not right, appropriate or valid, it teaches them to ignore their own instincts, to comply to other people’s requests making them prime targets for ALL kinds of predators. On top of that, autistic people struggle to read body language, or understand non-autistic people, just as non-autistic people struggle understand autistic people. As a result, we often put ourselves in dangerous situations, because we didn’t see them coming. We are prone targets for sexual violence. About two years ago, someone in a Facebook group for autistic women I am part of asked: “How did you lose your virginity?” The post received about 100 responses. About 60% of the responses on that post said “Involuntarily”. That’s right. 60 out of 100 autistic women who responded in that post claimed that they lost their virginity by rape. And there are no official numbers on this, as there is little to no research on these topics at the moment.

Part of the problem is sexual education at schools. Education that is heteronormative and does not target the needs of disabled and autistic individuals. Many of us, perhaps particularly those of us who were identified as female at birth, don’t even know that we are autistic until much later in life, something which is rarely recognised still. Sexual education needs to address topics that are still often considered taboo and hard to talk about EXPLICITLY if it is it to help people (of all ages) who find it hard to understand inuendos and implicit meanings. Contrary to popular misconceptions, autistic people CAN and many of us ARE sexually active. Teach people how to give and receive meaningful consent. How can someone who has processing difficulties and delayed reactions keep themselves safe in a sexual relationship. How to manage their sensory sensitivities in a sexual relationship in a helpful way. Don’t just teach how people get pregnant or how babies grow but tell autistic people what to expect when getting pregnant, tell them about all the ways the body and the mind changes during pregnancy and breastfeeding explicitly, as well as how to best be prepared for it.

It also needs to cover the needs of all sexualities and genders, not just of those who are heterosexual. As a personal estimation, in lack of any research in the area,  I believe that at least a third of all autistic people are part of sexual and/or gender minority (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary). Educators need to know that. Services, such as gender clinics, need to be aware of that, as they are currently very inaccessible to this very large demographic. Parents and carers need to know that, as having your gender and sexual identity being unrecognised can lead to serious mental health problems, isolation and suicidal ideation or attempts. Accessible services, informative sexual education and supportive environments can go a long way into changing that. 

Finally, it is important to protect the reproductive rights of autistic and disabled people. Many disabled people often tell me that they are coerced into not reproducing, so that they won’t carry their “disease” to the next generation, as disability is still seen as subhuman. I hope that one day I will be the proud parent of autistic children, just I hope that I will be the proud parent of non-autistic children. Autistic and disabled people are also often seen as unable to be good parents or be parents at all. They are often at high risk of having their children removed from them, because of lack of autism understanding from social services. After all, in many non-autistic people’s minds, lack of eye contact is often one of the first signs of guilt and lying. Finally, autistic people also need to be supported on how to pursue a safely delivered abortion and be meaningfully educated and prepared on the consequences that, if this is something they choose to do.

Masking is also something that many autistic people learn and feel forced to do. If I am told all my life that I am always wrong and everything I do is wrong, is it any wonder that I, as a strategic and logical thinker who loves to solve problems, am going to look for examples of people I should be like and start to mimic them? The result of that is putting mask after mask on my behaviour until even I don’t recognise myself anymore. And everybody around me knows the mask, not me. And what’s worse, people force me to keep that mask on. Our partners, “friends” and carers convince us to think that our masks are who we are, that “flappy hands” (stimming to reduce stress or show excitement) make us look weird, that we need to try to fit in more. We often can’t even be ourselves around our loved ones in the privacy of our own home. As a result, emotional abuse experienced by autistic individuals is alarmingly common.

As a result, so many of us are left with lingering trauma. So many services and professionals don’t know how to approach and support us. Common autistic experiences, such as monotropic focus on particular areas and sensory sensitivities, are often ignored or misunderstood. Academic research about autism that is done on us not WITH us. We are often excluded from the research and policy making spaces and we are not heard even about topics on our lives and lived experiences.

I am an autistic PhD student doing research on autism and gender, because I believe that these issues need to be addressed. I am doing my PhD on a scholarship that is half the minimum wage (chronically underfunded area), which is my only income at the moment. It is hard, but I believe in the importance of what I do, so I do my best with what I am given. As do many of us, hours and hours of unpaid work and activism to support a community that in the eyes of many, doesn’t even exist. So I am here to tell you that we exist. We matter. And I hope that you take notice. Thank you.