January 13, 2026
“Cognitive rigidity” and autistic people’s sense of justice
In the wake of the publication of his 2015 book NeuroTribes, author Steve Silberman frequently and memorably referred to a “strong sense of justice” as being so commonly noted among autistic people that it was “practically diagnostic.” In the years since, this observation (in which Silberman was not alone, but among its more prominent proponents) has transmuted into a conception of “justice sensitivity” as an inherent feature of autism itself, or as an innate character trait of autistic people.
I think there’s a lot to criticize in this idea of “justice sensitivity” as an inherent feature of autism rather than just common among autistic people, from the risks of portraying people of any neurology as inherently more moral, to the implication that autistic people are immune to prejudice or racism or incapable of acting unjustly ourselves.
However, I’m also becoming concerned with the narrative taking hold among some of the autistic community that says that autistic justice sensitivity is entirely a fabrication, or that it’s actually nothing more than a manifestation of our cognitive rigidity.
While I think it’s obviously a mistake to frame it as an essential feature or neurological trait of autism, I don’t think it’s either of those things, either, and in writing it off completely, I think we’re making the mistake of considering autistic people only collections of autistic traits, of neurological deficits, and not as people, who have personal histories, experiences, memories, characters, temperaments, values, feelings, or even the capacity for awareness of wrong done to ourselves and others.
I don’t believe “justice sensitivity” is an inherent trait of autism; I also don’t believe that it’s just our cognitive “rigidity.”
I think it’s one possible set of responses to our environments and experiences that we as humans are capable of having, one way in which our personal values can develop in response to our own histories and experiences and the way they interact with our predisposition to certain cognitive traits, personalities, and temperaments.
You know, like real people’s do.
And I suspect it’s one that we may be somewhat more likely to have than non-autistic people or people without some kind of history of marginalization, because of the ways our experiences differ from theirs from our earliest childhoods, and the interaction of these experiences with traits that are documented aspects of autism.
We’re subjected to absolutely rampant injustice compared to non-autistic children. We’re subjected to lower standards in healthcare and medical research. We can be deprived of our basic needs on the whim of an authority figure much more easily than non-autistic or non-disabled people can be. We’re often disbelieved about our most basic needs, our abilities and inabilities, our discomfort, our physical pain—to the point that one research study on pain reactivity in autistic vs. non-autistic children cautioned in its conclusion that “Clinical care practice and hypotheses regarding underlying mechanisms need to assume that children with autism are sensitive to pain.”
It has been considered perfectly acceptable to electric-shock autistic children into behavioral compliance within my adult lifetime, and while cities and states in the U.S. progressively ban conversion therapy on LGBTQ+ minors as ineffective and unacceptably damaging, effectively the same therapy developed by the same people is still considered the “gold standard” for treatment of autistic children.
We have feelings. We have empathy. “Strong pattern recognition” might be an oversimplification, but there is documentation of patterns of perceptual functioning in autistic people that are enhanced compared to those of non-autistic people in some respects, and other research has suggested we display more moral consistency across contexts, including in response to strangers and even when costly to ourselves. We’re also often noted for having longer and more detailed early memories, so we may well remember these experiences more vividly and with more specificity on average.
I also wonder about whether we might be less susceptible to just-world fallacies than non-autistic and non-disabled people on average. We have more reason to know that people in positions of social power or authority can do terrible things to you for no real reason than most people do.
Why would it be even a little bit surprising, given all this, that we might be particularly easily sensitized to witnessing injustice against others, on average?
I hate seeing other people mistreated just for being who they are, or just because someone else decided they could, because I know how that feels. I have since I was a tiny child. It is physically painful. I’m not capable of looking at rank injustice or abuse and just going “That’s fine,” or “That’s got nothing to do with me.”
This probably has to do with my experiences as an autistic person, as well as other things about me as a human in a complex interplay of reactions over time.
Almost just like a real person.
It’s not even like justice sensitivity only occurs among autistic people. Why does anyone become a civil rights activist, anyway? Lots of non-autistic people have looked at the injustice of the world and decided they could not simply tolerate it, whether they’re directly impacted or not. Why does anyone decide to work with or on behalf of a group of people they themselves don’t belong to? Why does anyone dedicate their life, or even give it, for the cause of justice?
Is it just their rigidity when a non-autistic person does it? Or is it a complex response to personal experiences, early perceptions of the world, having witnessed injury against someone they cared about, religious or spiritual convictions, the influence of role models, and other factors that all contribute to the formation of deep feelings about what justice requires?
I think there’s a serious danger in deciding that justice sensitivity in autistic people is “just our rigidity” of shoring up still-rampant prejudices that almost anything autistic people do is just a mechanistic imitation of non-autistic capabilities. (Non-autistic people have actual strengths, for instance, while we have splinter skills.) Where it’s fake whenever we do it. We could never genuinely identify with real people experiencing injustice. We don’t have real thoughts or feelings, because nothing that happens to us matters. We’re just walking embodiments of autistic deficits, after all, not conscious, complicated beings being affected by the things that happen to us in complex ways over time.
(///sarcasm)
I think we should critique the idea of autistic people as possessing some kind of essential superiority in moral perception, and that this is a topic that deserves more critical study; I think it could reveal a lot about autistic vs. non-autistic experiences of empathy, identification with those we perceive as different from ourselves, marginalization, ethical consistency, unpredictability, and social hierarchy. I’m curious about how culturally bound this phenomenon may be.
But there’s a real danger in setting up a standard in which autistic people’s powerful moral perceptions or identification with others can never be seen as meaningful or genuine, in which even our objection to our own dehumanization and mistreatment can never be considered credible, because that’s “just our rigidity.”
January 7, 2026
Sound tracks
For the start of the new year, I decided to put a dent in my long movie watch list while I still have my evenings free, and started off with Rabbit Trap, an intimate little folk horror starring Dev Patel from just last year, followed by Touch the Sound, a 2004 documentary about Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie… and I can’t get over the resonance of these two passages about what it means to have a physical relationship with sound:
“Everything will be let go, in the same way that all your music will disappear, but yet no sound is lost. They live on, but what happens to them, I actually don’t know. It’s the equivalent of a life.”
-Evelyn Glennie, Touch the Sound
*
“What happens when a sound dies? Where does it go?”
“I don’t think a sound is ever alive to begin with. It’s the vibration of an event. The invisible shadow of an energy exchange. Sound is memory. carved into the air. It’s a ghost. Just a scared, lost creature, desperate for somewhere to hide, if only for a moment, before it fades away. And when you hear a sound, you become its home. your body is the house that it haunts.”
-Darcy Davenport, Rabbit Trap
(Side note, but you might enjoy Rabbit Trap if you also liked Dev Patel’s other movie The Green Knight, or horror movie The Strings from a few years ago.)
December 24, 2025
Last dusk
From my last evening walk in NYC for the year, right after the snowfall a few days ago.
December 17, 2025
Paging Dr. Mohan
HBO’s The Pitt is one of those shows that I think both demands and deserves a viewer’s full attention, not put on as background noise for folding laundry. And yet this past week I put it on in the background to rewatch while I folded laundry, and even so, find myself appreciating certain characterizations more deeply than I did on my first watch.
Most of the conversation around neurodivergent representation in the show has centered on Dr. Mel King—kind, even-tempered, and compassionate, but also blunt, literal-minded, and easily overloaded by conflict and chaos. She has an autistic sister who lives in a residential facility nearby, and who she speaks of often, leading many viewers to overlook that Mel herself is fairly obviously autistic. I could say a lot about why audiences fail to recognize autistic characters when they don’t conform to two-dimensional stereotypes or openly identify themselves as such in extremely circumscribed and clinical terms, but I think it’s one of the major ways in which the “autistic character as teaching tool” era of representation has failed.
And I think she’s great—possibly even the best-written intentionally autistic character since Holly Gibney of another HBO production, The Outsider.
(I maintain that among the best-written autistic characters ever on television was LOST’s abrasive, unexpectedly lovable con-man Sawyer, although I’m quite certain that was fully unintentional.)
I particularly appreciate that she’s allowed to be very noticeably autistic, and not just fully competent, but genuinely good with people—that the creators did not lean into the trope of autistic people as lacking empathy.
It’s very rare, and very enjoyable. She represents a staggering leap forward in the writing and representation of autistic characters on television.
But the deeper into this rewatch I get, the more I feel the character actually most important to me is Dr. Samira Mohan.
The very first character trait we’re given with which to associate Dr. Mohan, in the first act of the first episode, is that she’s too slow. She tells Dr. Robby that she knows other doctors call her “Slow-Mo,” that it hurt her feelings until she learned to embrace it. She doesn’t see enough patients per hour. She listens to entire life histories. She costs the hospital time and money. She has the highest patient satisfaction score of anyone in the ER.
Dr. Robby is on her case about it constantly; we don’t hear him compliment her work to her until the 12th episode: “Mohan’s on fire,” he exclaims in the adrenaline rush of the aftermath of a mass shooting.
I also work in a profession that values alacrity, though actual matters of life and death are thankfully very rare (though not non-existent), and which necessitates near-constant multitasking. I feel too slow for what’s going on in the room a lot. And I know it isn’t even necessarily true! The work gets done; the show goes on. I’ve developed a lot of strategies and efficiencies in my work flow. I know I’m not even unique in feeling this way, though I do occasionally feel uniquely targeted for it. In the course of a rehearsal process a couple of years ago, our director had gone to the general manager and production manager with a concern that my multitasking ability wasn’t up to snuff. Notwithstanding that it wasn’t true—not only was I doing a stellar job, I was being appropriately supported by an ASM who knew me well—it is a bigger challenge for me and something I’ve always had to work harder at than most people.
“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” said our fight choreographer for the same production (for whom I was constantly fighting with the director to get sufficient rehearsal time). I wrote that down on a Post-It note that I still keep stuck in my planner.
In a stage management community meeting about upcoming rule changes around overtime pay in some of our contracts, the question arose as to how claims for OT would be regarded if a stage manager were perceived as simply taking too long at things. Attempting to assure us that all stage managers have strengths and weaknesses and that’s just the cost of doing business, the presenter said “So for instance, someone who’s neurodivergent might take longer to write reports, because that’s what their weakness is.”
“I’m neurodivergent,” I commented, “and I take longer to write reports because I’m good at them, not because I’m not.” I could take less time to write less useful rehearsal reports and make more mistakes, but sometimes good work just takes the time that it takes.
Am I actually too slow, I’ve often wondered in a fast-paced process, or should there just be three of me here?
I’ve also always felt slower than my fellow stage managers as far as my career progression. I suffer constantly from trouble keeping good ASMs around, because I’ll get one show with a stellar assistant before their opportunities for career advancement quickly eclipse my own. Partly I know that I’m weak at networking, but I’ve also had to turn down offers of work because I simply couldn’t pivot fast enough to a new production without a break.
I’ve often felt that the time I take to listen to someone or to understand a problem is perceived as passivity or lack of urgency.
And I don’t get the impression that Mohan is autistic, or deliberately coded as neurodivergent in any particular way, in contrast to Dr. King—and that’s actually important to me, too, and says a lot about the kinds of representation we can and should be able to expect. Because autistic people aren’t experiential black boxes, fundamentally and irreparably incomprehensible and uncomprehending of the experiences we share in common with our non-autistic fellow humans.
Well-written autistic characters like Mel King are important and necessary. They also shouldn’t be the only way we can ever see ourselves in others.
I know there are higher-stakes story lines afoot this coming season, but I’m excited to see what’s in store for Dr. Mohan—whether she’ll decide that maybe emergency medicine actually isn’t for her, or find her niche in the ER with a case that demands her particular approach.
December 9, 2025
Neurophototherapy, art, unmasking and not masking
I’ve never really identified with the narrative around masking and unmasking in the autistic community. When I was just starting to encounter autistic writing seriously considering the possibility, and then the probability, that I was autistic, the community was more likely to talk about “passing” or “camouflaging,” terms which implied to me more ambiguity, more negotiation with an environment or with a social context, than mechanistically pretending to be non-autistic by relentlessly suppressing autistic traits in favor of constructing a neurotypical persona in the way I tend to hear younger and more recently diagnosed people describe now.
We often tell parents that autism isn’t a shell surrounding a “normal” child. There’s no non-autistic child hiding under an autistic mask.
In my case, there’s no authentic, autistic me hiding under a neurotypical mask. “Masking,” the way it seems to mostly be meant now, is not something I’ve ever had the bandwidth to do.
But I’ve enjoyed artist Sonia Boué’s work for a long time, and finally got around to reading Neurophototherapy: Playfully Unmasking with Photography and Collage this weekend.
One of the ideas Boué presents in the book that I found particularly resonant, though perhaps not entirely in the way she intended, is that of “working with safe things.”
I love collage art, and I struggle with it, in much the same way that many of us do with our sticker collections and actually putting stickers on things, with using up, cutting or gluing all the beautiful images and little scraps of things I find and save. I feel like if something doesn’t turn out the way I hoped it would, I’ve destroyed it.
It had never quite occurred to me to just use the color copier sitting beside me on my desk to make some copies to play with without risk. That not just in the emotional content but the actual materials I gave myself to work with, I could make it safe to experiment more freely.
“Throughout this book, Sonia Boué writes of Neurophototherapy as a dialogic practice, a practice of making connections – between the individual and the world, between old and current selves – and the little board book felt like an invitation to dialogue. It also recalled a past self, a pre-masking preschooler who often acted on the impulse to get very, very close to books she loved…”
Like Joanne Limburg, who writes the first of two guest essays in the book, I had nurtured early hopes of artistic talent that were eventually subsumed by the necessity of being the smart girl. For reasons both complicated and not, I felt like I needed to throw the majority of my time and energy into high level academics, and it’s not that I was “masking,” but it’s also difficult to exercise the kind of freedom and disinhibition necessary for art when an extreme amount of the cognitive disk space you have available is going to math and chemistry and AP English papers. Especially, probably, when you’re autistic and switching gears/changing activities is specifically something you have trouble with, and also that even when all of your time isn’t being taken up by homework and extracurricular activities, you’re exhausted by school.
I was also struck by Limburg’s statement “I wondered if perhaps neurophototherapy, which is a practice of unmasking to oneself, specifically required conditions of privacy in which to work.” I’ve often wondered whether elements of autistic learning and growth particularly require privacy, whether there are in fact neurodevelopmental reasons why we just don’t thrive under conditions of intense scrutiny.
And it all left me thinking that maybe we just need more ways of talking about all the ways in which autistic people get lost from ourselves, or get separated from who we were as children, or are transfigured by circumstance or necessity, that aren’t necessarily masking.
“One of the cruelest tricks our culture plays on autistic people is that it makes us strangers to ourselves,” Julia Bascom wrote in her foreword to the Loud Hands anthology. And I think that there are actually a lot of different ways that happens, and paths by which we can start to find our way back, that aren’t accounted for by the narrative of masking and unmasking.
November 3, 2025
Records I’ve owned more than once: Ten Years Together
My parents being of the generation they are, I grew up with this album in the house, of course. Peter, Paul and Mary were actually one of the first concerts I was ever taken to, when I was eight.
I bought myself a copy in college–our debate society’s hall had a turntable, donated or left behind by another alum, so a couple of us bought a few LP’s to have around from one of the record stores downtown, though I don’t actually remember if I found it at Wuxtry or Schoolkids or a sidewalk merchant’s table. I got us that one, and also the Moody Blues’ On the Threshold of a Dream.
And then of course I had to leave it behind when I moved to NYC. I hope it’s being enjoyed there still. I didn’t own a turntable for a long, long time. Money aside, there was just no space.
One year as I was getting ready to leave a friend’s Thanksgiving gathering, already the last person to leave, I noticed that she had a copy, and we put it on, and wound up talking until 3:00 in the morning.
But finally some domestic musical chairs left me with a little extra room, and I spent part of a workshop stipend on a cheap portable turntable from Barnes & Noble, when they’d decided to start carrying music again.
And told myself that whenever I next ran into a secondhand copy of this, I had to buy it.
Which I did a couple weekends ago when I took a little adventure up to Peekskill, NY, on one of my last days off before I started rehearsal for a new show. In a used book and record store called the Bruised Apple.
Yes, it really was $4.50. And it’s in almost perfect condition.
September 27, 2025
Blogging “A Ring of Endless Light”
So in addition to blogging a Willa Cather novel in the summertime, I also try to get around to one of the books of either the Austin Family Chronicles or the second generation of the Murry-O’Keefes. I’ve been alternating between them, one of Vicky’s books for one of Poly’s, rather than reading straight through each series in succession, which has brought out some really interesting parallels between them.
I didn’t get around to this year’s book earlier in the summer the way I wanted to–The Song of the Lark was long (Cather’s longest book, as it turns out), and some other issues took up a lot of the second half of my summer (roommate upheaval, trying to organize a little independent research project that’s taken a lot of reading unto itself, taking my landlord to court)–but it’s still happening! Posts for A Ring of Endless Light will be appearing at the tag here.
August 30, 2025
Summer’s end
Ran into Emily #2 right as I was going out for an evening stroll, so we walked around the Reservoir and caught this view just as the sun was going down over the West Side. Neither of our iPhone cameras really did it justice.
August 22, 2025
Unconvincing reframings and renamings of PDA
Those of you who follow me on other platforms know that I’ve been pretty openly critical of the label of PDA (for Pathological Demand Avoidance) and the ideas behind it. One common response to criticisms of the PDA community has been to promote relabeling the phenomenon, often as either “Pervasive/Persistent Demand for Autonomy” or as “Rational Demand Avoidance.” But this recent article, arguing for such less overtly-pathologizing terminology, to me serves instead as an excellent example of why I maintain that the name is actually the least-bad thing about the framework of PDA, and why I think simply substituting euphemisms won’t help, and instead serve to further obscure rather than illuminate important things about autism and about why autistic children may adopt the behaviors of “PDA” as coping strategies.
“PDA describes autistic children exhibiting obsessive resistance to everyday demands and requests,” explain authors Robert Naseef and Stephen Shore. But autism already, by definition, involves difficulty with everyday tasks and activities. The problem with the label of PDA isn’t that it’s unnecessarily pathologizing or dehumanizing (although it is); it’s that it’s obscuring the fact that an autistic child obsessively avoiding a task or request probably has some kind of fundamental difficulty with that task.
In the first example given, for instance, “Twelve-year-old Calishea frequently melts down when asked to clear the dishes from the table after dinner, rinse them off and put them in the dishwasher. After a brief period of whining, she slams her silverware on the table, stands up, knocking her chair backwards, and shrieks as she stomps out of the kitchen.”
We’re meant to assume, I suppose, that Calishea has no actual difficulty completing this task, that she’s reacting to the demand and not the task itself. But is that true? To clear the table, rinse the dishes, and put them in the dishwasher is a hugely complicated sequence of motor tasks which also include multiple potentially distressing sensory elements (the clatter of dishes, the sight or tactile feeling of soggy or partially eaten food, the growl of the garbage disposal, the feeling of water on your hands or trickling down your sleeves) to demand of a child with a disability that’s coming to be recognized as inherently having movement and motor planning components (and has been widely recognized for a long time as having sensory ones).
(It’s also a task with which I had immense trouble and frequently resisted doing, albeit not as dramatically, when I was exactly that age.)
So there’s a way in which I think “Rational Demand Avoidance” is getting closer to the issue—that many children are avoiding/refusing tasks rationally to avoid distress. But I also think that to say a child “rationally” refuses tasks that make no sense to them actually refracts into about three separate possible underlying issues, and to conflate them and then let that be the end of the story seriously risks obscuring real distress and important deeper mechanisms of autism.
-There may truly be people who are refusing tasks they’ve logically determined have no purpose or meaning in their lives, and are logically deciding to bear the consequences—like failing out of college—of those decisions.
-I suspect, however, that when we’re talking about children, who particularly may not have language for or the ability to describe why they find a task too difficult or distressing, that this is an excuse. I don’t mean that these kids are lying with the intent to deceive, but that an excuse is often what substitutes when someone can’t tell the truth. And far more than that a child has actually done a fully informed calculation and determined logically that a task like washing the dishes doesn’t make any sense, I suspect most kids who are offering a statement like this are substituting an explanation they can find for one that they either don’t have the language for, or fear won’t be believed.
(Mine was often that I was “too tired.” And I was. I was tired. But I wouldn’t have had a chance in hell of successfully explaining why.)
-In the chapter on autism in Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon, researcher Michael Wigler says “There is probably an interplay between personality and the deficit. You and I could have similar deficiencies, but we would make different choices. It sounds odd that a two-year-old may be making a choice about what he can and can’t handle, but they probably do. You could have two kids that grow up in the same impoverished environment, and one joins the priesthood and the other becomes a thief, right? I think that can happen internally.”
In a chapter that I otherwise found disappointing in the extreme, this is an observation that I thought was really astute about the complexity of interactions that may determine why autistic children can follow such different developmental trajectories. Mel Baggs described similar dynamics in “About the way autistic people put our skills into different areas,” as far as autistic people engaging in cognitive tradeoffs to access different skill sets in response to different environmental demands, or allocating energy to different skill sets at different times.
I think that in a significant number of cases, even if a child does understand the logic or necessity behind a request, it may require an amount of bandwidth or motor planning that they do not have access to, and so a child is rationally, even if they can’t explain why, making tradeoffs to conserve bandwidth for more vital tasks.
I think autistic children are often intuitively making decisions about worthwhile use of their energy or bandwidth in ways they could never logically explain, either because they lack the words or because the act of explanation itself would require a level of verbal bandwidth they may not have.
*
Likewise–why does an individual exercising “persistent drive for autonomy” need to exercise such intense control over their environment? Aside from that an adult is in no way obligated to change their living environment or routines just because someone else says so and they may be correctly asserting their rights to live as they wish in the face of undue interference (though obviously there’s a lot of nuance here for someone who doesn’t live alone), once again, given what we know about autism, is it possible that someone has set up their living quarters or arranged their daily routines in order to enable them to function the way they need to by circumventing movement, executive functioning, or sensory challenges.
And the thing is, even if someone doesn’t know why they need their environment to be a certain way in order to function at their best, only that they do, even if they don’t know anything about what the research shows regarding autism and movement disorders, even if they can’t explain any of this—they’re still right. Their insistence on maintaining certain environmental conditions or routines isn’t just coming from nowhere; it is grounded in things we already know about autism.
And if it is actually necessary that someone change their habits or living environment, because they are posing an unacceptable health or safety risk to themselves or others, then better understanding those mechanisms stands a better chance of enabling a solution or workaround that accounts for those core challenges.
*
I remember years ago now when I was in a discussion with a parent in a comment thread, who complained that her young adult autistic daughter “just wouldn’t do what she was supposed to.” When I asked what she meant by that, she listed chores like doing the dishes and laundry, picking up her room, etc.
Okay, I said, is it possible that she’s experiencing some kind of sensory, transitioning, visual processing or motor planning challenge to tasks like that?
No, she insisted. Her autistic daughter didn’t have any of those.
I don’t think we need another term to say “autistic people just won’t do what they’re told” when what we know about autism at this point already offers myriad plausible explanations for why some seemingly socially capable autistic kids strenuously resist seemingly simple tasks and requests (namely, inertia, difficulty with transitions and starting/stopping/changing activities, sensory challenges, motor planning challenges, and intolerance of unpredictability).
“PDA can be mistaken for defiance or oppositionality because it presents as ignoring or avoiding tasks that are asked of someone.” But why is a child so strenuously avoiding a basic request? Don’t we have any obligation to this child to investigate whether any of the well-documented characteristics of autism known to render it a disabling condition could be at play here, and whether compromises, adaptations, or workarounds become possible if a child is enabled to name and understand those issues?
Chavisory's Notebook 