What Can Social Work Teach Autistic People?

My personal and familial connection to autism, and my professional complicity in the autism discourse, has ignited my passion to explore counter-narratives about autism. My encounters with the professional lexicon used to identify autistic individuals took place in social work spaces, a vocabulary called person-first language, which instructs society that"...disability should be spoken of as something that comes along 'with' people... [and] conceives of disability as a troublesome condition arbitrarily attached to some people, a condition (unlike gender, race or ethnicity) that is only significant as a remedial or managerial issue" (Titchkosky, 2001, p. 126). According to person-first language, disability, or autism is at once something which afflicts individuals, and is not understood as a part of identity. While formerly working in a social work capacity at an agency funded to provide services to autistic people and their families, my first education was the political importance of "person-first" naming .I was taught to refer to service users as "people living with ASD", and not as "autistic people".