In 2021, Autistic Empire founder Sarah McCulloch spoke at Autistic Pride Online on the journey of developing autistic identity.
In that talk, she analysed the unfolding controversy about the film Music, released by Sia that year. A short extract:
“[w]e have substantial numbers of autistic people who deny that they are autistic but have an affinity for autistic people, so they get involved in the autistic community and autistic advocacy from the perspective of supporting autistic people, when really, they’re just promoting internalised neurotypical ideas about who we are and what we do, which is damaging to them as well as us.
…
So that was the majority narrative of the film. But what I would like to suggest is what if we shifted our perspective and saw Sia as an autistic person who felt some kind of kinship with the identified autistic people in her life, and made a film about being autistic, that reflected all of the contradictory, medicalised, and pathological framing and language that professionals use about us and *autistic people often use about themselves*, and then had a meltdown when publicly criticised for it? How would we have treated her differently then?”
Sia recently went on a podcast to says she has known she was autistic since 2021, so good to know that Sarah wasn’t the only autistic person to have noticed.
Welcome to your tribe, Sia.
You can watch the full 23 minute talk on the Autistic Empire YouTube Channel here: