As the child of educated parents in the 1970s, television was out, but Sesame Street, with its research- based approach to equity in early childhood education, was allowed.
The street scenes in a fictional New York showed kids, monsters, the silly Big Bird who took everything literally, singing, dancing, managing to interact, all with a warmth and kindness that spoke to me. I remember wishing that Gordon and Susan could be my real parents – not only were they friendly, with open faces and big smiles, and I loved her Afro – but they were stylish too, something that drew me even then. In their world, which really felt real, everyone looked different, acted different, but everyone was welcome.
The regular short „One Of These Things is Not Like the Other“ thus upset me at a visceral level, even though I could not really name why, or talk to anyone about it. Of course I could see the pattern even before they started singing. Pattern recognition is one of my talents. But as the song reminded me, the thing that wasn’t like the others „just didn’t belong.“ Hearing that idea not only said out loud, but sung, with gusto, reinforced the feeling of exclusion, indeed of actually BEING the problem, that was perhaps one of my earliest memories.
For a show that was otherwise educational and fed my intellect, and where where some characters had blue fur and some had bald heads, this was hard to swallow, I had a creeping realization, at the edges of my consciousness that my parents didn’t understand me, that they couldn’t hear the television even when the sound was turned off or the electricity in the overhead wires, that indeed even mentioning these things was not welcome, was destabilizing.
In their book „Autistic Masking: Understanding Identity Management And The Role of Stigma“, Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose outline how autistic people are harmed by not being believed or listened to. „Epistemic injustice“ occurs when knowledge about us marginalizes and misrepresents our experience. This affects us in two ways – as epistemic injustice that dismisses or discredits our experience, and as testimonial injustice where we are excluded from participating in how we are talked about.
In other studies autistic people were percieved as odd in an unpleasant way after only a few seconds by neurotypical people even if the NTs didn’t know the people they were interacting with were autistic. More often than we realize, we are never even given a chance.
As someone whose early childhood diagnoses really didn’t explain the subtle and not so subtle ways in which my perception of the world was rejected as well as how I myself, my basic existence, was rejected, learning this in my 50s is hard. But, as with everything related to neurodivergence, late is indeed better than never.
And it is my hope that awareness of these issues, putting words to situations that we may never have considered, will help others feel better about the injustices they have suffered for just existing in the world.
Autismus Fortbildungen - Anne Kirkham 
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