What Is the Autistic Community?
A Rhizome, Not a Throne
People often talk about the Autistic community as if it were a place you could pin on a map. A tidy little collective with a spokesperson, a style guide, and a press office. This fantasy is comforting to institutions that like clear lines of authority. It is less comforting (and far less accurate) to Autistic people. Autistic community is a living, breathing testament to humanities social complexity. Rather than social spaces, we create a wide canvas of AuSocial culture within which we exist.
The Autistic community is not a single thing. It is not a hierarchy. It does not have a pope, a prime minister, or a universally agreed Slack channel. What we have is something far more interesting, and far more powerful; a rhizome.
A rhizome, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, has no central trunk. It grows in whatever direction it needs to. Shoots emerge here, then there, then somewhere unexpected. You can cut part of it away and the rest keeps growing. It spreads through connection rather than command. That is what Autistic community and AuSocial culture looks like.
Blogs, Substacks, WhatsApp groups, Discord servers, mutual aid funds, local meet-ups, academic papers, podcasts, Facebook pages, kitchen-table conversations between exhausted parents and newly self-recognised adults. None of these need permission from a central authority to exist. Each node is partial, situated, imperfect; and vital while remaining independent. Together, they form a living network of meaning-making.
This is not a flaw. It is the point.
No Central Authority, No Final Word
One of the recurring tensions in Autistic spaces is the question of who gets to speak for the community. The uncomfortable answer is; no one does. And everyone does. Sadly, though, even AuSocial culture has suffered at the hands of western domination, with many multiply marginalised voices being pushed to the margins of the forward facing rhizome.
In terms of our AuSocial community, each Autistic person speaks from somewhere; from their bodymind, their culture, their class position, their race, their gender, their access to diagnosis or lack thereof. When we forget this, we drift into subjugation. We start mistaking proximity to institutions, platforms, or professional status for moral authority.
A rhizomatic community resists that drift. It allows multiple truths to coexist without demanding total consensus. It accepts that contradiction is not failure but evidence of life. The goal is not uniformity. The goal is connection without domination. AuSocial culture within the rhizome takes a relativist position with truth being filtered through lived experience rather than delivered from the top of a hierarchy to those at the bottom.
This matters because Autistic people have spent our lives being spoken about rather than listened to. Recreating hierarchies inside our own spaces, even well-intentioned ones, risks replicating the same dynamics we are trying to escape.
Language Wars and Cultural Growth
Few things ignite Autistic online spaces faster than language. Identity-first versus person-first. Asperger's versus Autistic. Functioning labels, spiky profiles, reclaimed words, contested terms. These debates can be exhausting, and sometimes genuinely painful. They can also be generative.
Language is not decoration. It is infrastructure. The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how services treat us, and how the public imagines our lives. Cultural development requires friction. Arguments over language are signs that Autistic culture exists at all, that we are actively negotiating meaning rather than passively accepting definitions handed down to us. AuSocial culture in the absence of conflict would be more cult-like than cultural. Growth as a community requires debate and challenge in order to fuel it's growth.
But there is a risk here. When language debates become the only terrain of struggle, they can consume energy that might otherwise be directed at more immediate dangers.
While we argue over terminology, people are being denied healthcare. Autistic adults are being discharged from services at arbitrary ages. Children are being subjected to coercive “interventions” that prioritise compliance over wellbeing. Disabled people are navigating a hostile benefits system that treats need as suspicion. These are not abstract harms. They are material, systemic, and often life-limiting. The growth of any AuSocial culture must also make space to challenge the material oppression of it's participants.
The challenge is not to silence language debates, but to hold them in proportion; to remember that cultural refinement should sharpen our collective response to injustice, not replace it.
Conflict Is Not the Enemy, Erasure Is
A rhizomatic community will argue. Constantly. That is not a pathology; it is a feature. What matters is not the absence of conflict, but how we metabolise it.
When disagreements lead to reflection, boundary-setting, and the creation of new spaces, the rhizome grows. When disagreements are weaponised to exclude, shame, or declare others illegitimate, the network shrinks. Because domination is dangerous. Thus the western colonial influence on AuSocial culture must be dismantled.
We do not need a single Autistic voice. We need many voices speaking in chorus, sometimes harmonising, sometimes clashing, always resisting erasure. Co-existing spaces allow people to move toward what nourishes them and away from what harms them, without demanding allegiance or purity.
That movement, choosing where to root, where to connect, where to step back, is itself an act of autonomy.
Our Power Is Collective, Not Centralised
The real power of Autistic community and the growth of an AuSocial culture has never come from unanimity. It comes from accumulation. From many people saying “this is happening to me” until institutions can no longer pretend it is isolated. From stories shared, patterns recognised, and solidarity formed across difference. We are many minds with many voices.
A rhizomatic community is harder to co-opt, harder to silence, and harder to destroy. There is no single leader to discredit, no headquarters to shut down. When one node burns out or is attacked, others continue the work. We are drops in an ocean rather than a body in containment. To eliminate AuSociality requires the elimination of a vast collective, not a central trunk.
The task ahead is not to collapse our diversity into a single narrative, but to cultivate conditions where multiple Autistic spaces can thrive side by side, exchanging nutrients, sharing warnings, amplifying one another when it matters most. We are not a single organ, we are organisms in a symbiotic relationship. Nourishing one another without total dependence on any one part of the rhizome.
Community, in this sense, is not sameness. It is relation. And relation, tended carefully, is how we survive; and how we change the world.
The strange thing about rhizomes is that they look chaotic until you realise they are quietly reshaping the landscape beneath your feet. Autistic community has been doing exactly that for years. The work now is to keep it growing; wide, tangled, unapologetically alive. So, what is Autistic community? It is the growing presence embedded within human collective existence. Not a single thing, but a deeply connected network of multitudes.
Check out my little corner of the rhizome over at NeuroHub
I also have a Neurodivergent Pride Store with ausome clothing and accessories!