Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm an autistic adult that is only partially verbal/cannot hold a job due to my autism and I have experienced a lot of infantilization as a result. It's affected me to the extent that I've begun to feel ashamed of having a sexual identity at all, and subconsciously comparing it to sexualizing a child. It's affecting my ability to be intimate with my partner. Does anyone else feel this way? How have you managed it?
You know if you type in 'autism' and 'sexuality' or some similar combination of keywords into google you get mostly 2 kinds of result. Research papers which by and large say that autistic people have sexual needs which they find much harder to meet than NTs. The other kind is articles written for people working with autistic people largely about how to try and stop them having sex. I think this is partly exacerbated by the fact that much of the material is focused on dealing with autistic children. Too many professionals dealing with autistic adults just slip into the same mode of thinking they adopt for autistic children. I think one way to prevent internalising this sort of infantilisation is to challenge it robustly whenever you encounter it. Remind yourself that it is they who are thinking wrongly about autism not you.
Maybe write down a concise paragraph on a card that explains what you think of professionals tendencies to infantilise your sexual needs and insist on handing it out to them when they behave in a way that makes you that you're being treated as if you shouldn't have those needs.