I recently did a program on learning to socialise as an autistic adult 'taught' from a neurotypical experience, and it really twigged me to something that I've also been seeing a lot on here. At least once a day I see some post that's along the lines of 'Autistics need to learn XYZ!' And the ones that aren't just thinly veiled ablism (which is like... 3%...) are coming at it sideways.
Let's take the 'Autistics NEED to learn how to make small talk' posts that keep popping up. Before taking this program, I was definitely one of those people who thought Small Talk was actually a code for Cruel Psychological Torture. Turns out I was totally wrong! It's just that neurotypicals are fucking deranged define Small Talk as something completely different from what literally every autistic person I have ever spoken to on the topic would say it is. What they call Small Talk, we see as A Conversation.
The examples given on how to improve your small talk skills were things like 'Ask how ABC made them feel' 'Relate what they just said to an experience of your own' 'Make sure your questions are open-ended so they can expand their answer into more detail.' And I was getting more and more confused as it went on.
That isn't small talk! That's a conversation! It's a chat with a friend over coffee! Apparently anything that isn't a deep, emotionally involved discussion about world changing ideas is considered to be Small Talk to NT people, whereas ND people see Small Talk as standard social scripts of 'Brr, cold enough for ya, Jim?' and 'I really like your hat.'
The only good thing that came out of that program was that I learned I'm actually not bad at any of those skills, it's just that there are two different dictionaries being used to name what those skills are.
