Yes, there are lots of autistic people who are interested in maths and the ‘hard’ sciences. There are lots of people not on the spectrum who are too. Whenever you look at a large group of people and decide that they must all have identical interests, you’re not simply analysing their brain type; you’re drawing crude caricatures of them. This is no different from ‘Women are horrible at maths and sciences’ and ‘Men can’t empathise’ and ‘East Asians are all maths geniuses’. These categories of people are far too broad to attach a single group of interests to them, as though they’re all clones of the same person. Yes, some men struggle with empathy, but not all do. In fact, I would say most don’t struggle with it. Do some women struggle with maths? Of course, but many men do too. (Not to mention that a lot of women’s struggles with maths stem from stereotype threat and negative attitudes towards women doing ‘objective’ subjects at school, rather than women’s innate ‘inferiority’ at such tasks.) There are some East Asians who are brilliant at maths, but there are some who routinely fail their algebra exams. No one group can be characterised with such broad stereotypes. There are commonalities between autistic people, but assuming that they all have the same interests and aptitudes is grossly unfair and misleading. 

This stereotype can be incredibly damaging to those of us whose strengths lie in other domains. There are lots of autistic people who are stronger in language than they are in maths, and prefer art and literature to the sciences. People who don’t fit into the ‘maths/science/technology genius’ stereotype may be seen as ‘not being autistic enough’ because they can’t make fast calculations in their head, programme robots, conduct clever science experiments or memorise the periodic table. This might especially be hurtful to those of us who lean towards artistic and literary works, or people who choose to study the humanities rather than the sciences. There are people on the spectrum who would rather be poets, historians, journalists, novelists and painters, and those interests don’t make them any less autistic than those of us who want to become engineers, computer programmers, accountants, IT specialists or pure mathematicians. Even within our own community, some brains work differently. That’s just people in general, really. We’re not all alike.

In our system, there’s a tendency towards having people who tend to fall between the ‘humanities vs science’ divide, each approaching it in their own particular ways. There are some collective tendencies, though; our mathematical struggles affect everyone. It’s sort of obnoxious, actually. Maths is definitely not our strong point. There are many things that we understand conceptually, but it’s difficult for us to actually get things right if we’re sitting down to try and work out a particular problem. Quite a few of us are technophiles, but at the same time, we don’t know how to write software, and the majority of us (save Darwin) have little time to be poking around in the command line when a GUI does the job. And we straddle the boundaries anyway, as we’re pursuing a social science degree and have interests in combining scientific rigour with humanistic thought and analysis. It’s a lot more complicated and less hierarchical than people imagine it is. 

There were a lot of indicators, but we didn’t know what to make of them. Everything we had heard about multiplicity was negative, and we, like most other people who have been exposed to media stereotypes, thought that you had to completely lose your memory when two system members switched between each other, and that most ‘personalities’ were outsized caricatures. This meant that we weren’t certain what we were supposed to make of certain types of behaviour we exhibited, both within our own thoughts and when interacting with other people: strong internal disagreements about particular interests; feeling more comfortable when using voices; always being in ‘character’ when by ourselves or interacting with our closest biological family member (and feeling more comfortable in character than as ‘”my” real self’); others noticing that we had rather dramatic ‘mood swings’ that made us seem like different people. Since we didn’t know we were plural, we didn’t have division of labour and we had people who were less skilled in certain areas managing tasks they probably shouldn’t have. 

Yes, individuals can contradict themselves, but this was more profound than that. I personally contradict myself in little ways all the time, and I experience emotions such as ambivalence, but that’s different from my having a disagreement with Hess, Darwin or Richard. There was also a high degree of internal consistency within each mental state that we noticed. It was also interesting going back and looking at our old Livejournal entries from 2004-2006: there were about four or five different writing styles, each reappearing at certain times. Some of it looked like me, some like Hess or Yavari or Richard or Carmen. (Noël and James weren’t here then; they joined us in 2008 and 2011 respectively.) 

We started realising, in the fullest sense, that there was a strong possibility that we could be composed of separate conscious entities at the end of 2005 and throughout 2006. We had come across another plural system in one of the autistic communities that we belonged to on Livejournal, and they had linked to Astraea’s Web, one of the most popular go-to pages about healthy multiplicity/plurality. We realised that plurality didn’t need to be inherently disordered, and that we didn’t have to have memory losses or stereotyped system members in order to be valid – and that there was an explanation for our behaviour that made sense. At the end of 2006, we finally realised that we weren’t able to maintain the illusion that we were a single consistent individual any more, and decided to finally come out to ourselves as plural, and to tell the people we trusted the most with the information. There were many people whom we told about our plurality who weren’t surprised by the revelation: they’d noticed that we’d acted rather differently from one another, but in a consistently different way, not simply erratic behaviour. Things seemed to make sense: the internal disagreements, the consistency between each ‘state’, the strong identifications with people and events that matched our subconscious perceptions of our individual selves. We set ourselves the task of working out who we were, and organising our system so that we were able to co-operate and live a healthy, fulfilling life together.  

Now, things are rather different. We’ve been openly plural to our closest friends – and many places online – for nearly seven years. We generally co-operate and share responsibilities based on individuals’ skills, passions and interests. It’s much easier to delegate tasks. We’re aware of who we are, and can live with it without feeling horrible. We’re now able to convincingly ‘pass’ as being nonplural around most people, because we’re aware of our differences and can sand them off when interacting with people who don’t know about us. It’s actually more of an automated process that we started creating after we worked out we were different people, but I think that’s the best way of wording it. (It does present a drain on our energy; we can keep it up for a little while, but we will eventually grow frustrated with it and want to retreat so we can just act like ourselves again. It’s similar to doing the faux-NT thing.) But when we’re at home or in other spaces where we can interact with people as we are, the differences are more apparent. 

We’re proud to be who we are, and we’re glad that we’ve come as far as we have. We wouldn’t be where we are without each other, and we’d not change our plurality for the world. 

We’re considered “high-functioning.” We’ve got a high tested IQ. We were expected to be able to engage in independent living after we graduated from high school. But then again, there are some tasks of daily living that we struggle with, and I wish we could get help with them. We can’t cook as often as we want to during the academic year. (It’s been easier for us over summer break, but then again, we don’t have homework.) But because we’re “high-functioning,” we can’t, at least not from official sources in our state. A lot of agencies and medical specialists define “functioning level” on IQ test scores, which are really questionable once you look at the matter more closely. 

Thing is, IQ scores don’t determine how you can deal with activities of daily living. They can’t! Just because you know how to arrange blocks in a certain way, answer a bunch of math problems, match vocabulary words up with their meanings, or choose the correct pattern on a multiple-choice test, doesn’t mean that you It just means that you can take a particular set of tests well. I don’t even think that it measures intelligence, and I’m tired of government agencies using an IQ score as the sole (or primary) determiner of functioning. Also, IQ scores are known to produce “false negatives” in some autistic people: they may be considered “intellectually disabled,” simply because their brain type isn’t compatible with the structure of typical IQ tests. Amy Sequenzia, an autistic activist, poet, and self-advocate, mentions that she was given an IQ of 25, which is considered severe intellectual disability. And yet she’s able to express herself in a way that someone with an IQ of 25 should theoretically not be able to do. People who have severe ID and actually fit the profile struggle with both oral and written communication. They have a hard time doing most everyday things required of people. Sequenzia is non-speaking and needs assistance with tasks of daily living, but she can also understand and interpret abstract concepts, write about her experiences, and look at her experience in a metacognitive way. These are all skills that go against the definition of intellectual disability. These tests can also produce false positives; there are also people with “gifted” IQs that struggle to manage daily-living tasks (Hi!). They may be able to solve complex intellectual problems, conduct innovative scientific studies, or write beautiful essays about the human condition, but laundry, cleaning, dressing oneself, and time management might be incredibly difficult for them. But because they’re seen as “too intelligent” to need services, they’re left behind. We haven’t even tried accessing support services because I know we’re going to be turned away “because your IQ is too high.” 

What makes the matter worse is autistic people who rank their own worth based on IQ or “functioning labels.” I think many of you know the kind: people who see themselves as being worth more because they have an IQ of 150 and are brilliant at a “hard” science, unlike those ~other~ autistics who have an intellectual disability and struggle more with certain tasks of daily living. Sorry to say, it doesn’t work that way. There are people who might have an “average” IQ score and be great at tasks that someone with a higher score might not. It happens all the time. There are folks with IQs of 170 who have a really hard time keeping their house up and managing stuff like bills, while people with scores of 100 can do it just fine. And it’s really ableist to claim that someone’s worth more because their IQ is higher, or that they’re worth less because it’s lower. By that logic, people like the Unabomber and the Boston Bombing Brothers must be WONDERFUL, right? I don’t think so. People’s worth shouldn’t be determined based on their functioning label or IQ. That just plays into that eugenics bullshit that still hasn’t been completely excised from disability discourse. 

There are plenty of folks with physical disabilities and high IQs who qualify for services. Why doesn’t the same principle apply to people with developmental disabilities that affect other aspects of their lives other than their ability to do well on standardized tests that may or may not be accurate predictors of their abilities? And why are we using functioning labels/IQs as a means to determine how much we value people anyway? 

I personally do think in language. Words are very important to me, and I can be sensitive to how they’re being used. That’s not to say that I prowl about policing how people talk, except if they’re saying things that are blatantly offensive (racial slurs, deliberately misgendering people, overt misogyny, etc). I used to be a prescriptivist, but I’ve moved away from that over the past four years. I will, though, have a strong reaction to it, even if I can keep from letting the other person know that that strong reaction exists. Your language is how I read what you’re trying to communicate. I’m not saying that I can’t read interverbal or nonverbal communication, but the language you use is the clearest signal for me. Richard is similar to me, but he’s better at recognising subverbal meanings than I am. (This makes him a lot more tactful than I am, because he can detect underlying meanings that I can’t always pick up on.) 

Noël, however, doesn’t, and tends to conceptualise his thoughts as a series of patterns, images and textures, which he later translates into language. He can usually pick up on those cues that I can’t, since his way of interpreting things involves picking up on patterns and senses that he has, rather than noticing the explicit words that someone uses. I may just take people’s words at face value, while he doesn’t. There are images and patterns and signals that he finds, and the words are a frame for those ideas that he has in his head, rather than the means of thought themselves. When he communicates with me within our headscape, he tends to send conceptual ‘bundles’ of communication, with intermittent verbal messages. This is in contrast to me, because I tend to just send words his way if I’m not trying to get a large amount of information to him all at once – in which case, I send out an information packet. 

James is somewhere in between, as are Darwin and Hess. They don’t have the same verbally dominated thinking style that people like Richard and me have, but they are still more verbal than Noël is. Darwin tends to use a lot of images and patterns and symbols. Hess is a combination of words and images. Hess and I tend to use words when communicating with one another, but he changes his communication style when dealing with other people like Darwin, Noël and James, whose thought patterns are less dominated by words than either Richard’s or mine are. 

So, yeah, we have a wide variety of ways that we deal with thought patterns, but then again, that’s what plurality means, doesn’t it? It’s interesting to see how our being differentiable relates to our being autistic and what that entails when it comes to our thought processes. 

We know there are other systems who are more forthcoming than we are, but I think that everyone has their levels of comfort. Even in spaces devoted to neurodiversity, there are different levels of understanding when it comes to experiences outside the particular type of neurodiversity that a community belongs to. (And even within a community — for instance, look at the tension between autistic people with different functioning label, or people with Asperger’s labels versus people with ‘High-Functioning’ Autism labels.’) Someday we’ll be more able to have confidence about being openly, well, us, but that day isn’t today. Not yet. Would we like to be more open? Absolutely. But I don’t feel as though the atmosphere makes it that easy yet. 

One thing that’s interested us—well, Hess and me mostly—is the absence or presence of certain aspects of connected speech in native English-speakers. We’ve been perseverating on it for about a year.

There’s a technical name for the phenomenon (‘yod coalescence’), but that term for it rubs against me like sandpaper so I’ll call it liaison like the French word for a form of connected speech that occurs in spoken language (although in French, I gather the liaison is default, rather than something that may or may not occur in speakers). I also call it assimilation. It’s usually a plosive (‘spitting’ or ‘exploding’ letters like d, t, p, k, etc, but the only plosives affected by this are d and t) or sibilant (‘hissing’ letters like s, z) before a ‘y’ sound that this happens to. And the ‘y’ sound is generally in a common word (especially ‘you’); I don’t think proper names are affected by this.

For example, in a sentence like ‘Did you go to the station?’, a lot of people (a majority, I think) will insert a ‘j’ sound (unless they’re trying to place strong emphasis on something, or are speaking very slowly), so it sounds a bit more like ‘Didjoo go to the station?’ It happens when a d sound at the end of a word comes before a y sound. There are some people who don’t insert that sound, including me. (Nor do Richard, James, Noël or Darwin.) Hess, however, does, as do Em and Carmen. Our default voice does unless the speaker wants to insert some of their own pronunciation habits.

Another thing that people do is…inserting a ‘zh’ (as in ‘pleasure’ or ‘leisure’) or ‘sh’ sound when an ‘s’ or ‘z’ (sibilant) sound comes before a ‘y’ sound. Like, when people say things like ‘as you know’, it becomes ‘azhoo know’, with the ‘z’ sound turning into a ‘zh’. Or ‘I’ll miss you’ becomes ‘I’ll misshoo’. I don’t make these sounds. Hess does. Most of us don’t do this except for him and Em. Front voice has this tendency, although individuals can circumvent it. This is common, but not as common as people doing it with ‘d’ sounds.

It also occurs with ‘t’ sounds, so a phrase like ‘next year’ becomes ‘next cheer’. This is fairly common, although there are still quite a few people who don’t join up these sounds. I pronounce phrases like ‘next year’ without the blend, but there are a lot of people here who would use the ‘next cheer’ pronunciation.

I tend to see these speech patterns as having textures—speech with the extra ‘j’, ‘sh’ and ‘zh’ sounds is the ‘rough form’ and speech without it is the ‘smooth form’. I prefer the smooth form sonically, and Hess prefers the rough form. Hess has different names for the phenomena, but these are mine. Hess, Yavari and Liz noticed the different styles when we were very young, and they collectively prefer the rough forms, which they saw as the more ‘typical’ ones.

People who don’t liaise ‘d’ and ‘y’ sounds are highly unlikely to assimilate sibilants and ‘y’ sounds. It’s an anecdotal correlation I noticed. I’ve heard some exceptions, but they’re in a minority. It doesn’t work the other way about; there are loads of people who won’t do it with sibilants, but with d’s and t’s. Of course, this is all anecdotal data; I’d have to conduct an actual study, but this is arcane enough that there’s really not much practical interest in it.

The distinctions are still there in song. Sometimes singing will flatten out some variances, but you can still hear the ‘rough form’ in some people’s singing voices. For instance, Imogen Heap has the ‘rough form’ and it’s quite apparent.

There are a few patterns we’ve seen that are related to regional or cultural accents. People from the Southern United States strongly tend towards the rough form as opposed to the smooth form. I have heard the smooth form from people from this region, but it’s less common. People who speak African American Vernacular English will nearly always assimilate at all points unless the final ‘d’ is dropped in a word. In conservative Received Pronunciation (the archetypical ‘posh’/'Oxbridge’ Southern English accent), you rarely hear the rough forms, except perhaps with ‘D’ sounds. (In Conservative RP, it actually goes a bit further, as you’ll hear people not assimilating even within words! Like people who pronounce issue as ‘issyoo’ as opposed to ‘ishoo’, or education as ‘ed-you-cation’ as opposed to ‘edge-you-cation’.)

Non-native speakers of English tend not to have these linking sounds, unless they’re Dutch, for some reason.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about social interactions with people, both on and off the spectrum, and how we, as a system, process these interactions. For the purposes of this post, I’ll just say ‘non-autistic’ to refer to people not on the spectrum, rather than ‘neurotypical’, since there are people who aren’t autistic, but don’t consider themselves neurotypical (eg, people with ADD, bipolar, OCD, etc). 

While we definitely do have non-autistic friends that we really enjoy being around, it’s still harder to interact with them in person than it is with autistic people. It doesn’t matter how close they are to us, or how much we trust them. They feel a bit ‘opaque’, even if they’re clearly interested in spending time with us and enjoy our company. You’re never quite sure what they’re thinking. We’re better at picking up basic emotions in people (usually, telling the difference between a negative emotion and a positive one) than we used to be when we were younger, but there’s still this veil that’s up that we find hard to see past, no matter how much we learn social skills. It’s still a matter of intellectually realising what people want, rather than moving based on intuition. 

Autistic people, wherever they fall on the spectrum, are much easier for us to read intuitively, and it’s easier to pick up that they’re upset. It’s not just an intellectual interpretation of their emotions, unlike what occurs with most people who aren’t somewhere on the spectrum. I’m not saying we can understand ALL autistic people’s emotions immediately or with accuracy, just that it’s easier by far. They’re also easier for us to open up to; they’re more likely to get more candour earlier in the relationship than others. When befriending non-autistic people, it generally takes us longer to come to trust and feel comfortable with them. 

I think that the social-skills deficit that autistic people have is basically a difficulty interacting with people not on the spectrum, while interacting with autistic people involves more intuition, since they have more expected patterns of social behaviour (for them, anyway). 

Online, it feels as if that’s levelled a bit, and it’s easier to read people off the spectrum, with the same level of readability applying to people on it. We have misinterpreted some things that other people on the spectrum said online, and it’s actually more likely for us to misread autistics online than it is in person – the likelihood matches what would happen with members of the general public – because a lot of the social distinctions that are more apparent offline aren’t as much online. There is an area where such things are a bit less level, though: we’re still likely to be more candid with other autistic people than we are people who aren’t. 

Sometimes we have guilt over perseveration, since we would get snapped at if we talked about them too much growing up. Over the past eight years, we’ve tried to become more comfortable with the idea of being perseverative autistics, but it’s not been easy, since old habits—and old messages—die hard. We’ve noticed that people who weren’t exposed to constant interventions are often more comfortable going on and on about their interest sets in a way that we aren’t, particularly. Even if we’re alone and trying to enjoy a perseverative interest, there’s a big wave of guilt, as though people are going to osmotically work out that we’re perseverating and Being Weird™ and need to Stop It Right Now. Yes, that’s irrational, I know, but it’s still an issue. 

Individuals within the system can have perseverations separate from ones that the whole system can have at once, or have zero interest in whatever someone else is stuck on at the moment. For instance, Hess and I both have a particular focus on some aspects of connected speech in spoken English, but James, Darwin and Richard aren’t interested and won’t join the conversation if Hess and I talk about it. Conversely, James and I were stuck on typography—well, are, since it’s a constant interest that rarely abates, and we’ll go on about it—and Darwin and Noël didn’t participate in those conversations. Some of us tend to be more taken by perseverations than others, too; Hess, Yavari and I perseverate more intensely and repetitively than Richard or Noël do. 

We often discuss our perseverations amongst each other, rather than monologuing to outside people about it. That’s not to say that we never monologue about a special interest, but it has to be within the context of a pre-existing conversation. It’s one of the reasons why our plurality is something that we consider beneficial, as it allows us to have a safe space to hold conversations that might bore other people to tears. We do have some friends outside the system with similar perseverations—albeit with some different nuances—but apart from those people, we try and not drive people bonkers with the Special Interests Du Jour, especially if they’re obscure or really only of interest to us and similarly focussed people. Before we realised we were plural, we used to talk about these interests to people around us, particularly family members and friends, and they just got really tired of it quickly. I mean, we felt really bad about it, but there wasn’t any way to express it to anyone who was actually interested, and our system didn’t really have communication until our late teens (before that, we acted differently to one another, but we didn’t communicate as such). 

This is one of the reasons why James believes that our plurality—well, in the form it presents now, even though there’s always been variability in our behaviour—arose as a means of dealing with being autistic and isolated (as well as other stresses and traumas), but I don’t know if I fully agree with him. It’s a hypothesis, though, and we’re allowed to disagree. 

I don’t think we’re quite at the point where we need an extension, but we’ve had a harder time writing stuff that isn’t just personal reflection or writing about our own lives. It’s not necessarily an ‘expression’ problem right now, as talking to people and writing journal entries is going just fine. But writing papers? It’s a lot harder right now. It’s one of those periods when it’s easier to identify what’s going on within, but it’s harder to describe things that are outside us, and consist of lots of labels and terminology and ‘widgets’ and loads of things that are just layers and layers that obscure the people and events underneath them. That kind of thinking isn’t very easy right now. There are times when it’s not so hard to think about these things, these terms and labels and abstract concepts that are so far divorced from the concrete realities that people actually live, but right now, it’s very hard. 

And then that leads me to the silly stereotype that people who sometimes have problems with this sort of thinking are ‘less intelligent’ or ‘less thoughtful’. That’s not really the truth as there are different sorts of ‘intelligence’ and there are times when someone can understand these concepts, just not with the sort of expected language that people expect you to use flawlessly. (Hello Social Theory.) I often feel as though there are bits and gaps missing when working with such language, as it’s easy to understand the underlying concepts, but making some of the words join up with the ideas they’re trying to express doesn’t always work, and it’s embarrassing when you’re trying to explain your opinion on something and the language doesn’t sync up properly. It’s got us in a bit of trouble on an exam once, even though we understood what was being talked about, but a lot of times, the words were not there even though the ideas were. 

These are the times when I wish I could just telepathically transmit my intent and have it automatically translated into words instead of muddling about trying to tease things out and getting a bit scrambled. 

Admittedly, there was a phase when we had doubted whether we were autistic or not, when we were in our late teens, but I think that was a combination of frustration with some of the infantilization we encountered from biological family members and teachers, and some of the noxious stereotypes we’d seen of autistic people. (In fact, when we did come across someone who we knew to be on the spectrum, we deliberately distanced ourselves from them, because we saw some of our younger behavior in them and found it embarrassing.) We hadn’t known too many people on the spectrum at that time, either, whether it was online or off. Another factor in our distancing ourselves may have been our exposure to early social interventions, so we had had some autism-specific social training that people who were diagnosed later on didn’t have. When we started joining Asperger’s/autism forums online, the majority of people we’d met had diagnoses in adulthood or were self-diagnosed. They may have been aware of their social differences, and may have had some things pointed out, but they probably didn’t have treatment that was specifically intended to modify the behavior of autistic people. 

Because we were subject to early intervention, we had a lot of social-skills training, including roleplaying social situations, speech therapy (we didn’t have any specific speech impediments, but it was more a matter of what we were saying, rather than issues with pronunciation or grammar), worksheets about social interactions, observational learning, and other techniques designed to teach us how to communicate with non-autistic people without seeming so conspicuous. Also, one of our system members was incredibly interested in acting, which allowed us to pick up some other social scripts. We’ve also learned a lot of social interaction over the Internet, especially after our late teens. We can come across as eccentric, but it’s not as blatant as it has been in the past. Those of us who are working on our degree are specifically interested in studying people, too—which is why we’re social scientists.

In public, we generally “pass,” unless we’re under extreme stress. It takes some effort on our part, admittedly, but it’s very much programmed into us. Because we do “pass,” people will sometimes get exasperated with us when one of our limitations does come up—for instance, our struggles with self-care, or the occasional social gaffes, or our sensory issues, or being provoked into a meltdown. They’re not sure what happened, because we’ve absorbed the social scripts well enough that it’s not immediately obvious that we’re autistic. I often wonder whether people who were diagnosed later in life tend to “pass” less than people who were identified as autistic, or at the very least neurodivergent, in early childhood. This isn’t a defense of ABA or other forms of early intervention that devalue autistic existence as much as it is an academic question. 

In my opinion, our ability to “pass” is both a good and bad thing. It makes it easier for us to move throughout the world without immediate judgement from NTs, but at the same time, it sometimes masks many of the actual difficulties we go through, regardless of our ability to superficially handle social situations in a way that could pass for non-autistic.