Published on 12, July, 2020
I’m sure you guys can relate to being fed up with life to the Nth degree. To some degree I want to vent but also I want to make a point hoping at least some people here will agree with me. But I need to start with some background about myself first.
I was diagnosed as an adult. Autism was something that only got picked up during my degree and didn’t get formally diagnosed till much later. Prior to that I’d been home schooled, getting my A levels in a community college. I won’t say autism hasn’t effected my career but it didn’t stop me achieving well academically and getting a job in my chosen career as a scientist.
The one area where autism effects me most in my life is my social life, at this stage it's almost laughable to call it a social life really. I’m actually pretty extroverted. I love spending time with interesting people talking about interesting things. Unfortunately that window of people on my wavelength is pretty narrow and getting less accessible as time goes on. My interests are generally juvenile and nerdy. Obscure video games and anime, weird science and … well things out of the ordinary.
I’m very widely read and my enthusiasm for what I find interesting can come off as arrogant (because I appear to be an authority on everything) or creepy (because I’m generally unable to tell when interest transitions into discomfort for the people I’m talking with unless they express it verbally). I don’t see the line between interesting and disturbing because, well for me it isn’t there to the same extent.
I’ve been banned twice from activity groups and once by a geek themed bar ostensibly for being a ‘weirdo’ and making people feel ‘uncomfortable.’ This is why I’m now taking legal action. I’m not going to elaborate on against who or the specifics of the situation. But I do want to talk about the protection the law affords autistic people and why no one ever seems to have fought for it before.
Because believe me I’ve been reading a lot of case law and I can’t find a case like mine anywhere. The equality act says discrimination arising from disability is illegal. You can not apply the same rule to everyone and say you are not discriminating if the rule penalises people for things that are caused by their disabilities. Not unless you can justify it as a proportionate means of meeting a legitimate aim.
So for example in a school you can’t expel an autistic student for being disruptive unless you can demonstrate you’ve really looked at every alternative.
In fact it's actually illegal to have rules that unfairly penalised the disabled. An example in employment would be the Bowerman v B&Q case where the tribunal ruled that defining ‘unintentional sexual harassment’ as ‘grose misconduct’ without a provision to take autism in to account was discrimination.
If you have an autistic person who is unintentionally causing upset, as far as I can understand the law, you can’t just ban them on the grounds that’s what you’d do to anyone else. You have to have a process to assess to what degree autism contributed to the issue and if the ban meets the legal tests for being a proportionate means of meeting a legitimate aim for which the supreme court has laid down a 4 part test.
This principle has been tested in education and in employment but the equality act says it also applies to goods and services. If you ban an autistic person from a venue, event or other activity offered as a service to the public the same principal should apply.
As an autistic person I rely on fairly neich special interest groups to help me make friends and connect with people on my wavelength. They are basically my social lifeline. I suspect many autistic adults who like me are more or less independent but fairly isolated are similarly reliant on activity groups like that.
So why is it that I’m the first, as far as I can tell, to take a stand on this issue?
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, none of this is legal advice
I got an email yesterday confirming that one of the last milestones in the settlement agreement had played out. Very much in the favour of the other side. Extremely disappointed. These last few years over the pandemic have been a bit like a slow death for me. Watching friends I'd loved drift away and stop returning my calls. Watching as so many the the things and places I used to enjoy or take comfort in get closed down post pandemic, My favourite restaurant where I used to go with friends to have tea before we went to the cinema together, The club nights I used to hang out at. The local LARP meet up I used to randomly turn up to because one of the organisers was an old friend. Ironically the group I'm banned from is one of the few that's still going strong.
I'd always hoped against hope I'd go back some day. It kept me sane when I was literally suicidal in my early 20s. Now that seems almost imposable. I want revenge, not against any person, against the organisation. Against the idea that they were right. I hate the idea that they will now probably move on as if nothing had happened and write me off as some sort of crackpot. I'm working on taking everything I've learned and turning it into a resource. Something like the D.A.R.T. guide doug paulley wrote for people with physical disabilities experiencing discrimination but specifically for autistic people.
I don't think cases like mine are all that rare. I'm hoping by offering the next generation some support maybe we can flood the system with cases until we finally get a precedent set in court. Maybe that will make this longing and loss mean something.