Chloé Hayden

It is more so a color wheel, a color spectrum of autism.

If you are autistic, and only if you are autistic, comments of, oh, but everyone's a little bit autistic are not welcome here, you can happily leave, then you are on this color wheel.

Your hex code of autism represents your strengths, your struggles, your likes and dislikes, your habitat, where you are in your life at the moment and how society perceives you amongst a million other factors.

Just as no color is more or less than another color, no autism is more or less than another autism.

So how do we start to unlearn what we know and relearn what we need to know

The answer is embarrassingly simple.

Listen to autistic people.

For so long, we haven't been heard, we haven't had voices.

Our voices have been silenced and shut down and cast out.

We cannot afford to do this anymore.

We need to see the voices so we can be

We need to see autistic people in media.

We need to see them on TV shows, in movies.

We need to see them in leading roles.

We need to see them giving TED Talks.

We need to see autistic people behind the cameras.

We need to see them as directors, in writers' rooms, as teachers, as doctors, as politicians in positions of power, because autistic people are good as hell at doing that.

We need to make sure that we are seeing BIPOC autistic people, we need to make sure that we are seeing high-support-needs autistic people, we need to make sure that we are seeing non-speaking autistic people and every other minority group of the hex codes of autism that are not currently being represented in all of these positions too, so that it isn't just Sheldon Cooper and manic pixie dream girl autism that we grow comfortable with, but all hex codes of autism.

because I'm tired of being the first.

I don't want to be the first.