Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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The author did an awesome job explaining how it feels to have autism rather than explaining what autism is. Det var en super interessant vinkel at tage at det den manglende villighed til efterleve feminitet på samme måde som neurotypiske der gør folk utilpasse.

this is of course a very black and white way of putting the more complex argument of limburg's, and it plays out in a more nuanced way in society; this was a revolutionary idea to me.The author’s reinterpretation of scientists who thought mothers were cold to their autistic sons, as unobservant males who couldn’t see mothers who were well-attuned to their sons’ strong preference for increased physical distance and decreased conversation, was eye-opening. I love the premise of this book, I love the letters from Limburg that make these historical women current and therefore bringing their differences and ‘weird’-ness into the modern day where perhaps they would have been better understood.

Her letter to Frau V, the (possibly autistic) mother to Fritz, one of Hans Asperger’s autistic patients, reaches far into the culture of motherhood over the past decades and I found it very affecting. The book touches upon eugenics, psychodynamics, nazism, mum-shaming, being weird and different, social isolation, and of course, not dressing well. I was also grateful for the nuance she brought to the topic of “autism mothers” and felt both understood and rightly challenged by her words.

By ‘Autism mums’ I mean non-autistic mothers of autistic children, many of which are wonderful (thankfully mine included), but they (‘autism parents’, not just the mums of course) often overshadow autistic voices, attempting to speak for us instead. Even as Limburg refers to the work of non-binary activists within the text, she fails to acknowledge her non-binary and trans male siblings who have lived a lot of the same formative experiences as cis women.

Anyway I found it hard to read, but that's not to say it wasn't good, because it certainly wasn't bad.I imagine this book would have been a thousand times more compelling if it was a memoir of the author's experience as a late-diagnosed autistic Jewish mother. For the longest time, I have felt disappointed at the lack of writing that directly addresses autism and feminism in an in depth way, despite it so desperately being needed but this book filled that void for me and did an incredible job at it. My one complaint about this phenomenal book is that while it deals exclusively with the intersection of gender and neurodivergence, Limburg at no point acknowledges that many non-binary people, especially those who were assigned female, as well as trans men, will be able to identify strongly with the experiences being ascribed to women here, despite not being women themselves.