I’d shared an article, Why Social Skills Training Does Not Help Autistic People, on Facebook without additional comment. One of my friends commented to ask what kind of training is acceptable, and shouldn’t socializing be reciprocal? Why shouldn’t autistic people (like me) be taught [neurotypical] social skills?

This was my response.

With few exceptions, neurodivergent people have been doing 100% of the mental and emotional labor when it comes to communicating with people in general. (Some of us are lucky enough to have people who are close to us and we can be our authentic selves with. Others don’t even have that.)

Much of our energy as kids is spent trying to learn the “rules” of neurotypical society, even if we don’t know why we’re different at the time, just that we are different, and we’re made to feel that in most interactions. There’s much talk on autistic Twitter about how there are no adult autistic folks who don’t have C-PTSD or subclinical traits of PTSD, because everyone and everything has always told us that who we are is wrong.

But the kicker is that y’all don’t follow the rules you make. (This is the generic collective “you.”) Lying is bad, but you’re often punished (socially, if not otherwise) for telling the truth. It’s socially acceptable for neurotypical people to completely dominate conversations by talking only about sports or celebrity gossip or the latest TV show, but even if we’re not interested in any of that and we waited patiently for a chance to talk, no one gives us the same patience when we want to talk in-depth about genealogy, a book that never hit the bestseller list but we’ve read a dozen times, geology, or any of our other actual interests.

In short, “social skills” in neurotypical society are often hypocritical. If everyone had the same social skills “training” as a class in school, maybe it might even the playing field. Look at all the assholes in politics, no matter what team they play for. They’re most likely neurotypical, but they’re toxic whenever they say anything!

I don’t think it’s an autistic thing to say something rude like, “You’re fat.” [This was an example my friend used.] Heck, many of us are so involved in social justice that we’re against fatphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, racism, etc. Sure, if a friend asks if those jeans make her butt look big, we’re most likely to answer truthfully, but we’re not going to randomly point out that someone is fat unprompted. (See also: those asshole politicians insulting their opponents and making ad hominem attacks instead of addressing the actual issues involved.)

You also indicated things like training people how to do job interviews, but that’s something again that all students would benefit from — life skills beyond what FACS teaches them already. But the interview process is inherently ableist and not even a valid indicator of how good someone is going to be at any given job — unless they’re specifically applying for a position that involves the interviewing process. We’ve known that interviews are pretty useless for most jobs since before I took Industrial Psychology in the ’90s, as it was in my textbooks. That’s something where society needs to change.

The biggest challenge we face when you talk about reciprocity is that a majority of autistic people you talk to are already devoting a LOT of mental energy to trying to perform neurotypicalism even before their first contribution to a conversation.

(Is that enough eye contact? Too much? Did it get creepy? Try not to twitch, because people think that indicates deception. What does my face look like? I think I’m smiling, but is it enough for them to tell I’m smiling? “Yeah, it’s rough out there. My husband had to clean the snow off my car for me. And those roads…” Was that too much information? I know that it’s polite to talk about the weather before talking about anything meaningful, but did I make it too personal? Oh God, I didn’t catch what she just said. Is she…waiting for a response from me? Did she ask me a question? Oh phew, she was just taking a breath. Wow, she really needed it. How long do I have to keep nodding and making active listening noises while she gushes about this reality show I’ve never seen and don’t care about? Oh! I understood that reference. I know exactly what to say when it’s my turn to talk again! Remember what you want to say. Remember what you want to say. Remember what you want to say. Wait, okay, someone else just joined us. “And I’m Karistina, nice to meet you, too.” Wait, now we’re talking about something completely different? But I never got to say the thing I wanted to say. That’s annoying. It was really good, too! But now it’s too late to bring it up. Sigh. Oh, they both like the same college football team, which I know nothing about. I’ll just nod and smile when it seems appropriate, and hopefully they’ll talk about something I actually know about in a little while. Hmm. It…doesn’t seem like they’re going to stop talking about the most recent game. Well, they have to sometime, right? Oh… they’ve turned their bodies in a way that makes me look pathetic, because I’m not part of the group anymore. I did want to ask her something, but I guess I missed my chance…)

That’s a huge block of text, but that represents about 2–5 minutes of “conversation” and my brain’s internal monologue. And I only got to say the niceties before I became the “other,” the “third wheel” — or sixth, or seventh. It’s happened to me too many times to count, waiting for my turn to speak, but never getting it because no one else is into that whole “taking turns” thing. Then being physically excluded from the conversation as those doing the most talking step closer to each other and lean in, angling away from me. And they don’t even notice what they did to me.

And as I have begun using makeshift AAC by typing on my phone or laptop when my selective mutism kick in, people are just completely hostile about having to wait for me to type something and “forcing” them to read it. You know, like at the ER when I can’t talk because of how much pain I’m in. The nurse made me cry, calling me silly and stupid. I reported my experience to the hospital system. Despite them telling me they would “address the problem,” I couldn’t get them to follow up with me when I requested their patient relations people text me instead of call me, as I’d already established that spoken words aren’t always available to me. Their whole system of redress is inaccessible to me because they couldn’t be bothered to communicate the way I needed to communicate.

Neurotypicals owe us a lot of reciprocity because we’re so traumatized by every previous interaction we’ve had ever. It’s not that we’ve never tried to meet you halfway. It’s that we’ve tried as hard as we can, it’s never enough, and you blame us for your failure to even try to understand us.