#alyssa hillary

[autisticarchive]

Who made the hashtag actuallyautistic? I can’t trace it down

This is a great question. Alyssa Hillary Zisk gives an account of it here.

"The short version is that the autism tag was and is an unsafe place for many autistic people because folks didn't get that autistic people were following and reading and might be capable of having opinions on what we were reading, the actuallyautistic/ actually autistic tags are safer for some autistic people, and thus they exist."

It seems like #acutallyDD (developmentally disabled) originated around the same time, possibly predating it. There's also a Dreamwidth community started in 2012 called Actually Autistic. Not sure if there's any relation, but it's worth noting.

[disabilityinkidlit]

Alyssa Hillary reviews the portrayal of autism in both incarnations of A Wizard Alone by Diane Duane:

Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series began in 1983 with the publication of So You Want to Be a Wizard.  With changes in publishers and long gaps between books, the series has some timeline issues, and some readers are finding the first books out of date.  Because of these issues, as well her concerns about the quality of her writing nearly three decades later, Duane started updating the first four novels in the series. She gets into detail on her reasoning on her blog. Duane then ended up revising all nine currently published books in the series. The sixth book and focus of my review, A Wizard Alone, received the most changes, primarily around the representation of Darryl McAllister, a young autistic African-American wizard introduced in this book.

Prior to and while working on the rewriting of A Wizard Alone, Duane noted that she intended to make significant changes to the portrayal of Darryl and his autism—quite a bit has been learned since the book’s publication in 2002, both in terms of the science and in terms of Duane interacting with Autistic people directly. On Tumblr, Diane Duane interacts with fans and their posts, and these active fans include many Autistic readers.

[read the full review at Disability in Kidlit]