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by DanBC 4847 days ago
The Autism tweets have potential to be offensive because they're ignorant about ASD.

Many people with ASDs have very poor oral communication skills.

There's a bunch of stuff there about people with ASDs having to pass - having to fake who they are to be more neuro-typical so they can get work and avoid bullying - which is potentially distressing if you've ever had to do it.

Your general point that this isn't as serious as sexist banter at conferences is a good one, and I accept that.

I'm still uncomfortable that she tweeted photographs of a bunch of people, labelling some of them as sexist, without being very clear which ones she was accusing. There's a bunch of guys in that photo who may hate sexism and may be working hard to avoid it (or who maybe don't care either way but are not actively being sexist) who are now in a widely circulated photo.

EDIT: About "Being good at something" - we don't say "Women are nurturing"; "men are good at reading maps"; "people with Autism are great at math" because it's stereotyping limiting reductionist nonsense.

1 comments

Fair point re the autism point though worth noting that she was talking to someone who was autistic and writes about it publicly (she replies to Maty in the comments below the piece on this).

Regarding the photo - agreed she needs to be sure she's not catching innocent people in shot and should probably be clearer who she is referring to.

One small thing (which I'm guessing was actually just you being brief rather than anything more):

It's worth noting that (I'm pretty sure) that she didn't label anyone as sexist.

She accused several people of behaving in a particular way supporting it with a detailed account of things she personally witnessed. That seems fair enough.

But she also seems (correct me if I'm wrong) to stop short of extrapolating that out to saying they're sexist. Many of us will have at some point said something, knowingly or unknowingly, that was racist / sexist / homophobic but most of us would deny being racist / sexist / homophobic. One doesn't necessarily extend automatically from the other and it's good that she didn't try to do that and stuck just to what she knew.