Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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Det er 4 kvinder som forfatteren identificerer som “werid sisters” som blev udstød pga der unormale opførsel.

This book is a must read for all women who have or suspect they have autism, parents of girls with autism, partners, friends or relatives of girls and women with autism. I hope that in future editions of this book, the author can at least make a note acknowledging that she’s really mostly talking about people who were assigned female. Acceptance isn't about being celebrated: it's about being unremarked and unremarkable, the opposite of uncanny.

Even as Limburg refers to the work of non-binary activists within the text, she fails to acknowledge her non-binary and trans male siblings who have lived a lot of the same formative experiences as cis women. Within the first few pages, this book identified and articulated feelings and experiences I had not yet been able to name, process, or articulate myself.

By ‘Autism mums’ I mean non-autistic mothers of autistic children, many of which are wonderful (thankfully mine included), but they (‘autism parents’, not just the mums of course) often overshadow autistic voices, attempting to speak for us instead. I could honestly gush about this book for ages, so I'll stop myself now and just finish by saying that I would recommend this to anybody.Det faktum er at det breve gør at der bliver skrevet til dem i stedet for om dem, hvilket er forfriskende. Jeg vil helt klart anbefale denne bog til enhver som gerne vil vide mere om autisme fra indeperspektiv, og som gerne vil reflektere over hvad det vil sige at vokse op som autist og pige i vores samfund. CW // the holocaust, eugenics, state-sanctioned murder of disabled people, suicide, bullying, miscarriage, pregnancy (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics! I enjoyed the bits with the author's experiences, which is what I expected when picking this book up. Being around me doesn't always feel like being around a fellow human being, and that discomfort rarely brings out the best in people.

This heartfelt, deeply compassionate and wholly original work humanises women who have so often been dismissed for their differences, and will be celebrated by ‘weird sisters’ everywhere. Yes, we do have to say so every time, because every time we see another woman's body objectified, it is by implication an attack on our personhood, and when we are attacked in this way, we have every right to re-assert that personhood by refusing that objectification. Topics of interest: Autistic mothers, letters to people in history, the children in Asperger's wards, the uncanny, and what it feels like to exist in between worlds. And, as I've been saying, if you are not a woman or a girl, then you might as well be anything—any manner of kickable monstrosity. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.The book wouldn't have been something I'd pick up if I'd have known that it would have a text bookish feel to it, but I'm glad I did kind of pick it up. I imagine this book would have been a thousand times more compelling if it was a memoir of the author's experience as a late-diagnosed autistic Jewish mother. Having previously only considered it as an issue with my perception of self, I had somehow never made the connection between my internalised ableism as a concept and how that extends into action against myself. this is of course a very black and white way of putting the more complex argument of limburg's, and it plays out in a more nuanced way in society; this was a revolutionary idea to me.