Every now and again I come across a quote from an autistic educator and public speaker Chris Bonelli, who wrote “When we teach social skills to autistic kids, it needs to be like teaching French. When we teach children how to speak French, we’re not forcing them to become French. We’re teaching them how to communicate with French people, and function well in French society. We don’t force them to get rid of their own identity and invent a new French identity for themselves. So when we offer social skills classes for autistic children, we should NOT be trying to turn them neurotypical. We just need to teach them how neurotypical people communicate. We just need to teach them how neurotypical people communicate and how to function socially among them. Their authentic autistic self doesn’t have to be compromised or destroyed in order to do this.”
Now, I haven’t got any issue with the quote itself, but I think I could offer something in the way of personal experience to broaden the context and look at the reverse side of this communication “coin”. I am a late-diagnosed middle-aged autistic woman, and my experience of learning social queues can be summarised accurately by Friends character Phoebe Buffay "I never got to be in a club. I didn't go to high school. But three of us would meet behind a dumpster to learn French. Bonjour." (French here and throughout is the shorthand for neurotypical communication)
Yet another seemingly irrelevant anecdote that’s actually pretty relevant somewhat.
A couple of decades ago I worked as a hotel clerk at a swanky five-star hotel in Rome, Italy. I was tasked with the privilege of checking in this really famous Parisian journalist. This glamourous French lady arrives, and I greet her in Italian. She shakes her head. English? Non. Russian? Uh-uhm. The lady only speaks French. I drew a deep breath summoning up all the courage and every French lesson I had in the middle school. I manage (miraculously) to check her in in French. Then I fall at the last hurdle. I misgender the work “key”. "Et voila! Ici e le votre cle”, I proclaim. She frowns in a grimace of deep displeasure, “C'est LA cle!”
I smiled politely and apologised. But within me a hot lava of shame and indignation raged. Despite having a wide range of languages at my disposal I was still chided for not being good enough at French. Do you see the parallel yet?
The moral of the story
Do neurodivergent children benefit from learning about the neurotypical culture and communication? Yes, definitely. But should the onus of learning about the other culture be put solely on the neurominorities? No. Absolutely not.
Every day of my formal schooling and working life I “spoke French”. Every now and again I would slip and make an error. Actually, I would frequently make errors, many of them. But when taking into account the effort of speaking “Normalese” with the fluency that would please my interlocutors, I can’t help but wondering how on earth I pulled any of it off at all! All I can tell is that I pulled some rabbits out of hats for years and it cost me dearly in the way of my mental health and self-esteem.
What I am driving at, is an acknowledgement that communication is a two-way street. May we politely request that “The French” exercise some clemency towards us while we are doing our best to speak their language? Could “the French” learn a little about our culture and be curious about how we communicate?
“But we try to accommodate everyone it’ll be so hard and time consuming!” Yes, yes, it will take time, and yes it will require effort, but compared to hours, days, weeks, and years of masking to please others, isn’t it just a reasonable amount of reciprocity?
Yes. Yes, it is. We are worth it. Whether we speak “French” or even speak at all.
Vive la Difference!