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Community voice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Especially hard to find if not a Caucasian cisgender boy, an activist said
In short
In the last round of the 2024 Sydney symposium, participants spoke about who gets recognised, from masked adults to late diagnosed sisters, and what a full room changed for them.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Near the end of the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, a participant who described themselves as an activist said the most striking thing about the day was the number of people in the room. They had never seen so many autistic people together before. Autistic people, they said, are part of a minority community and are hard to find, because so many mask. “Especially if you’re not a Caucasian cisgender boy. It’s so hard to find you guys,” they said.
Others in the final round described neurodivergence going unrecognised for years, and the different routes by which people had come to be seen.
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Sources the story draws on
- Estimate of autism's sex ratio reaches new low (opens in a new tab), Spectrum (now The Transmitter, Simons Foundation), Sarah DeWeerdt, reporting Loomes et al. in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
- Autism in Australia, 2022 (opens in a new tab), Australian Bureau of Statistics (Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers 2022)
- Patterns in reporting and participant inclusion related to race and ethnicity in autism intervention literature: Data from a large-scale systematic review of evidence-based practices (opens in a new tab), Autism (SAGE), Steinbrenner, McIntyre, Rentschler and colleagues; record on the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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