Filed under: Nomenclature

What is allistic? Is it neurotypical?

first published:

Allistic specifically means not autistic, period.

Quoting this article? Don't forget the citation.

I know the answer
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I spent much of my life trying to be normal, and normal is a loaded word. I also happen to be a researcher, a former math teacher and statistics professor. I wanted to be normal for a long time, in a mathy way. When I say that I wanted to be more normal, I meant that I wanted to be somewhere closer to typical values on measures of social and cognitive functioning.

I no longer strive for things I cannot obtain. I’m just clarifying what I meant when I used to say that I wanted to be more normal. What I really meant was that I wanted to be not autistic. And we have a word for that today: allistic (see also McCracken, 2021).

I definitely don’t want to be allistic anymore. In fact, I find being around a lot of allistic people exhausting in the ways that I find being around lots of non-disabled people, or in majority-White communities similarly tiresome. I have a favorable bias for autistic people, and it is explicit. Let me be clear.

But let me also finish this nomenclature article about allistic as a term, because it’s important to distinguish it from neurotypical, okay?

Neurotypical is more broad, and describes someone who is, in a clinical sense, within normal limits on social and cognitive measures. The opposite of neurotypical is not autistic. The opposite of neurotypical is neurodivergent.

Who is neurodivergent?

Autistic people are neurodivergent, but we have company. Other neurodivergent folks have ADHD, OCD, and some other stuff going on within social and cognitive realms. I have ADHD and I am autistic, and like many people with both of these aspects of our nature, we use the shorthand of AuDHD to identify that.

Who is allistic?

Everyone who is not autistic is allistic. Some allistic people are neurodivergent, others are neurotypical. What they all have in common, by definition, is that they are not autistic.

The take-away I hope to leave you with is to avoid referring to all the not-autistic people as neurotypical, because they probably are not. They are allistic though.

Reference

McCracken, C. (2021). Autistic identity and language learning: Response to Kissine. Language, 97(3), e211-e217. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2021.0038

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by Erika Sanborne

Autistic, award-winning educator, researcher and founder of Autistic PhD | Meet the author.