When Internalised Ableism Turns Sideways
Internalised ableism rarely stays internal for long. If it’s not examined, it eventually turns outward, and very often it turns outward toward other autistic people - particularly those with greater support needs.
This is where lateral ableism begins - and it’s a major problem in our community and shutting out so many autistics.
Most autistic humans grow up in environments that communicate one message with relentless consistency: be less autistic. The instructions may be delivered in many different ways, but the underlying demand is unmistakable.
Make eye contact. Sit still. Don’t stim. Don’t talk too much. Don’t talk too little. Don’t be difficult. Don’t be intense. Don’t react too strongly. Don’t withdraw. Don’t interrupt.
The specifics may vary depending on the environment, but the lesson remains the same: safety depends on performing neurotypicality - being a neuronormative person.
Many of us learned to survive by masking. Masking is indeed a survival strategy. It allows autistic humans to navigate environments that were never designed for autistic bodyminds, and in many cases it can protect us from immediate social or professional harm. But masking is something we do. It is not what we are. This is something missed by many.
Masking isn’t an autistic identity. It’s a behaviour that emerges in response to pressure. Autistic people mask because environments and societies demand it, because belonging often depends on it, and because the cost of not doing it can be exclusion, punishment, or isolation. When masking is discussed simply as a social skill, the framing hides its origins. Masking doesn’t usually develop through curiosity or experimentation, but through correction and for many of us, coercion.
Autistic children learn very quickly what happens when they move, speak, or regulate themselves in ways that others find unacceptable. They are corrected, disciplined, mocked, excluded, or subtly punished until they begin editing themselves. Over time, those “edits” accumulate. What later gets described as “good social skills” is often simply the residue of years of behavioural policing.
And masking is never free.
Every time an autistic human suppresses our stims, scripts our conversations, monitor our tone, filter our reactions, and force our nervous system to tolerate sensory input that may be painful or overwhelming, energy is being spent. Masking isn’t merely effort. It’s an accumulating debt. The more we perform normalcy in order to survive, the further we move away from the signals of our own bodyminds. Over time, that growing distance between what a person needs and what we perform becomes one of the central pathways into autistic burnout.
When masking leads to social acceptance, however, something complicated can happen. Acceptance begins to feel conditional, and over time it can begin to feel earned. A quiet hierarchy starts to take shape.
Someone who has spent years forcing themselves to learn social scripts, suppressing stims, enduring sensory pain, and disciplining their behaviour in order to be tolerated can easily arrive at a powerful belief: I worked hard to learn these skills. I pushed myself. I figured it out.
Once that belief takes hold, the presence of autistic people who cannot mask in the same way can provoke discomfort. The language surrounding those people begins to change. They are described as not trying hard enough, as “using autism as an excuse”, as making autistic people “look bad.” Their visible needs are reframed as character flaws rather than neurological realities.
This is lateral ableism. It’s ableism moving sideways within the autistic community itself.
Some autistic people cannot mask. Some lose the ability to mask over time. Others can mask temporarily but pay catastrophic costs when they do. Masking is not a measure of intelligence, effort, morality, or character. It’s not a subtype of autism, nor is it something people engage in for enjoyment. It’s not a tagline in a reel or a social media profile. It’s a survival response to pressure.
Internalised ableism, however, encourages a different interpretation. It suggests that the autistic people who can mask well are better representatives of autistic humanity. They appear more respectable, more employable, and more acceptable. Their voices are perceived as serious, reasonable, and trustworthy. They are understood as the kinds of autistic people that institutions and audiences are willing to listen to.
This dynamic has profound consequences for whose voices are amplified.
The autistic voices that become most visible online are often those who can produce content constantly - day after day, reel after reel, in formats that are polished, highly produced, and easily shareable. Even when addressing painful subjects, the material must remain digestible. Difficult experiences are softened. Complex realities are reframed into hopeful narratives. Hard truths are packaged into something that can circulate easily on social media.
Producing that kind of content requires something many autistic people simply do not have: sustained energy.
It requires consistency, executive bandwidth, and the ability to maintain a stable public presence. It requires being able to appear coherent, articulate, and emotionally regulated while speaking in front of a camera. In almost all cases, it requires masking, even if not readily discernible on camera. In my work as an autistic peer-support coach I have had many influencer and activist clients who arrive in deep burnout from this cycle.
The mask may not be the traditional neurotypical mask, but it’s still a mask.
