What Is With The Tags "actuallyautistic" (which Always Seems To Hint At A Snobby Tone To Me) And The

What is with the tags "actuallyautistic" (which always seems to hint at a snobby tone to me) and the term "allistic" lately? Allistic bugs me because, besides grammatically being nonsensical, as an autistic myself, is seems to imply that non-autistics have ALL the pieces of their brain but I DON'T. Why are these terms so popular lately?

“Actuallyautistic” is a tag for people who are themselves autistic to post in and draw support from.

The tumblr autistic community developed this tag because the autism and autistic tags were full of parents and siblings, many of whom expressed opinions that made people feel unsafe and in some cases could make people actively unsafe. In order to build community together, there was some conversation on tumblr that resulted in the actually autistic tags being developed.

There are other tags that also follow the “actually*” format, including actuallydisabled and I believe actuallyadhd.

As for allistic, it originally developed on some list serves a long time ago, though the oldest is a satire website. All in allistic has nothing to do with amount or percentage of brain. It has to go with word parts. Autism comes from “autos” or self, so the person who coined the word snarkily said that non-autistics must be focused exclusively on the other. Allos is other, so they coined “allistic” as a term to mirror autism in construction.

There is some amount of debate over the term. Some of the arguments against it say that it reinforces the misconception that autistics are self focused because of the construction. Another has to do with it creating some false barriers between autistics and other people with developmental disabilities. The argument for includes one about needing to be able to have a word for not-autistic that doesn’t frame not-autistic as normal, in much the same way that trans people have cis to describe people who are not trans.

However it is wide spread, so a lot of the stuff we reblog contains it. As far as I know we do not have a stance on the word itself, and I do not anticipate us having one. That said we strongly support coalition building with other people with developmental disabilities, mental health disabilities, and the disability community as a whole.