Divergent Mind

I wanted to like this book. I wanted to say that it was helpful in my life as a late-diagnosed autistic person. But it wasn't.

This book is geared towards late-diagnosed autistic women who are able to have a “normal” job, given sufficient sensory and social accommodations. (I'm not a woman, but since I spent my first 18 years of my life perceived in all my offline social spheres as a girl, my experiences from then are more like late-diagnosed autistic women's than late-diagnosed autistic men's.) I am unable to work, and so I found the suggestions largely irrelevant to my life.

I kept reading in hopes that the author might criticize the idea of productivity as one that harms disabled people whether they're like me or not, but such criticism never came. I found the author's treatment of the problems that undiagnosed autistic women experience at the hands of psychiatry lacking, especially with respect to race. Unmasking is something that has many more risks for autistic Black women and autistic women of color than for autistic white women.

The author's passing endorsement of training cops about ways autistic traits can look like disobedience feels especially ignorant, given the amount of young autistic Black men and women who have been arrested or assaulted by police who knew they were autistic. If this book were published prior to the Black Lives Matter movement's founding rather than in 2020, I might have let that slide. But it has become common knowledge in autistic advocacy that training cops about autism hasn't resulted in cops treating Black autistic people any better.

I'm frustrated by this book. It contains a lot of suggestions that are probably very helpful for autistic people who do work “normal” jobs, for making their workspace more comfortable. This book wasn't the book I thought it would be.