Autistic people are...strong

This is a post for the flashblog in response to google's autofill suggestions to complete the query "autistic people are". Clearly they need some better ideas, since what is there now is offensive and horrific.

You know the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? Well, if that's true (which I will debate another time), autistic people are the baddest asses around.

Autistic people are born into a world that doesn't want us. Even if we don't have a diagnosis, we know from a very early age that who we are is not who those around us want us to be.

If we are not diagnosed, we go through torture, only they call it bullying and say if we don't want to be bullied we'll act normal. If we are diagnosed, we go through torture, only they call it therapy, and say it is to help us act normal.

And yet here we are. Here we are standing strong, together, saying we are people, we are worthy as we are, and we do not deserve to be hated just for being.

Autistic people are strong. We endure. We are resilient. We may take damage, yet here we stand, even so. We may have come through bruised and broken, but still we stand, and still we stand fighting.

Because we are strong.

We are so strong, that here we stand together against google and against a huge majority-we're only 1 in 88, after all, and many of our number old enough to have blogs don't know the word "autism" applies to them, or they don't have access to computers because of poverty or because they live in institutions. So here we stand, a tiny minority of the population, with precious few allies who belong to the majority, saying "you need to stop this".

Because we, Autistic people, are incredibly, amazingly, strong.