The Autistic Community Is Actually Many Communities

We're starved for good language to describe ourselves and good examples of how to treat each other, and every autistic community will come up with its own versions of these things.

All the talk of "community" last week has reminded me of something I don't think we talk about often enough. We often talk about "the autistic community," or similar things like "the queer community," almost as a euphemism. We talk about "the community" as simply the set of all people in the world who are autistic. But if we define a community as a group of people who are actually in contact with each other in some meaningful way, then it becomes obvious very quickly that there isn't one autistic community. There are a whole lot of small ones.