This is what [allistic] privilege looks like.

Upon first attempting this, I was angry and couldn’t see what I was typing because my glasses were off due to the tears burning my eyes and streaming down my face. I tried and tried to stop them. I wrote 1723 words’ worth of how I felt after this ordeal. Tears dried and glasses back on, I’m starting over. Verbosity never helped anyone, save for the insomniacs who fell asleep because of it.

Slightly before 6:30pm, my Twitter account was locked. I was redirected to a screen explaining my account had been reported for harassment. Oh. I clicked the button to go to the next screen. The person with whom I’d chatted yesterday had truly reported me for harassment. A lot had happened. Eleven tweets was the total count needing to be deleted. The first tweet I needed to delete?

I’ll try to place the rest in order. She blocked me before I could block her (I thought muting her would be enough; it usually is), and I didn’t expect anything to come of this. I’ve redacted the @mentions to the original person(s) (OPs) with whom she took offense (or whatever it is you call disliking when someone disagrees with you) for privacy purposes. I did not redact her username, because 1) these tweets were posted publicly on a public platform, and 2) it’s not like deleting them means they’re fully gone, anyway. I should not have to delete my tweets just because someone couldn’t handle my disagreeing with them. I removed them because I wanted to regain access back to my account…then I learned I wouldn’t be able to do more than direct message people until 6:35amish.

Allistic means non-autistic; for a full glossary of my terminology, see the respective post.

This was the initial tweet:

When I replied, it was when she’d told the OPs to stay in their own community. To this, I replied:

I linked to Michelle Sutton’s post, “The Autism Community and the Autistic Community”. I continued on to explain more about the differences to stress who has the right of way in a particular community (i.e. those personally experiencing via living as the minority), to reiterate the points of the post linked.

“We are like your child” is often a controversial statement within the autism community, but what a lot of the members of that community fail to realize is that we grow up (if we beat the odds of our caregivers/peers murdering us[2. Another controversy is “Please don’t kill us”, which shouldn’t even be a thing. “Autism mom” advocate Polly Tommy, among many other allistic people, sympathize with parents who kill their autistic children. Blame is often placed upon the autistic children when they’re murdered or survive an attempted murder, simply because they’re autistic.], and the odds of suicide[3. Autistics hold some of the highest suicide rates. 66 percent of autistic adults admitted to contemplating suicide. Autistic children (aged 1-16) are 28 times more likely to attempt suicide than their allistic (non-autistic) peers.]). We grow up, and we reflect on things we experienced. I can search Google for “ABT abuse” and find article on article by many autistic adults who had to undergo it as a child. I experienced similar therapy, but am not OK discussing them considering my PTSD and the horror I faced, and the constant backlash BS I continue to face because I blog openly about my autism.[4. When I blogged about my autism on a more frequent basis, for every three kind comments I received, a fourth would be some sort of death threat or other epithet because of assumed stigma surrounding autistics, based on stereotypes from armchair psychologists. If they didn’t end with “you should just kill yourself to save the world the trouble”, they told me how I should be in jail so my family won’t have to worry about me harming others or “blowing up a theater”.][5. When an aunt found out I’m autistic, she started making up rumors about me related to college and how I was stalking a cousin, claiming her other daughter had tried to “help” me get over my “issues”. (She hadn’t; she doesn’t understand the tragedy of fearing her parents to death or the emotional distress of eating disorders or the blacking out courtesy of PTSD or any other related tragedy because she grew up in a butterflies-and-sunshine environment compared to mine.) Upon my confronting her, I was given platitudes and supposed to be OK with all she said because she didn’t expect me to find out. (Because it’s okay to start rumors and spread lies about a person so long as they don’t find out.]

“Professionals” and caregivers/parents don’t expect autistic children to remember things, or to be smart enough that we understand what is being said about them, but we do—and it causes a lot of damage and makes us feel like burdens.

The link in this tweet was to a blog of the same phrase.

Moving on.

After this, she misconstrued my explaining as “hecklering” [sic]. After my initial tweet reply which linked to the differing communities blog post, she’d apparently thanked me for sharing it. I found it ironic, because I wasn’t defending her—and assumed she hadn’t read the post, obviously. I don’t know why, but she never reported these tweets:

No, actually, I hadn't finished replying with everything I'd sent. I'm not victimizing myself, just sharing that there are two very different communities and hoping that, later on, when you're open-minded enough to stop martyring yourself, you'll realize your own damage.

— freya j. (@thefreyaj) October 21, 2017

But you can't put things out there into the world and expect to never be disagreed with, corrected, criticized, or generally replied to, lest you wish to live life forever disappointed. Such is the price of speaking out.

— freya j. (@thefreyaj) October 21, 2017

After these, she called me a “little sossidge” and said, “You need to get some help for all that hate,” to which I replied

Ah, see, I don't have hate. I have sympathy for you and your child, however. But hate? Gee wiz, despite your condescension, I definitely don't feel hate neither toward this topic nor you.

— freya j. (@thefreyaj) October 21, 2017

I’m not sure what she said between the tweet above and my next tweet, as she blocked me and I cannot see it on my personal account, and her account is now private (learned via an account I created for an upcoming web series last year). I was doing other things during this time, too, and I think this is now the time when I switched out my laundry and refilled my water bottle. So it’s possible I did continue on with the following, after (or I just took seven minutes t to carefully articulate my thoughts):

I pointed this out because she had accused two autistics of speaking for all autistics. She replied with something along the lines of how I seemed to contradict myself and wasn’t part of the original discussion, to which I replied:

She said she wasn’t the one who butted in, but I was.

To take a page from your book: pic.twitter.com/YhVSiAze7A

— freya j. (@thefreyaj) October 21, 2017

I got up and did other things again, ’cause I’ve been doing that a lot more lately. I do a lot of writing, but I had towels I needed to fold. She reiterated that I butted in.

Ah, but the glaringly obvious difference is that I don't accuse people of heckling/harassing/etc. me when they disagree because I'm too butt-hurt to deal.

— freya j. (@thefreyaj) October 21, 2017

She said I must feel embarrassed for having butted in and that she was going to report me for “harassment” (I assumed because I disagreed with her/wouldn’t submit or whatever?). This is where the first tweet above comes in:

Again, she called me a “little sossidge”, this time saying I was the one who was butt-hurt.

You can call me cutesy names, but the condescension and ignorance is not lost on me, and it doesn't make you appear OK/a concerned mom for using them.

— freya j. (@thefreyaj) October 21, 2017

She said something along the lines of me being condescending and ignorant, so I tweeted the following and called it a day:

😂🤣 I notice now that you're just throwing what I say back at me in an attempt to insult me (nice deflecting), so I'll leave you be so you can sit and stew.

— freya j. (@thefreyaj) October 21, 2017

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And I was blocked for “harassment”. Because I disagreed? Because what, exactly?

1. At no point did she once ask anyone to stop tweeting her/to leave her be.
2. Every single tweet, if someone didn’t bloody agree, they were refuted against.

Even the most innocent of tweets were reported and pressed for deletion, while the ones wherein her innocence could be questioned were not.

It started because, ironically, I explained that the autism community does not have place to determine the well-being/livelihood of the autistic community—that they haven’t the right to speak over them/against them when their health and existence and bloody humanity is in question. It’s not about the autism community and what they want.