Member-only story

Discovering the Special Needs Parent-MAGA Connection

Why didn’t I connect the dots earlier?

Noisy Skin Bag
8 min readNov 25, 2024
Photo by Natilyn Photography on Unsplash

If you are not a member of Medium, you can read this story for free here.

Recently, I was mindlessly scrolling TikTok when a particular familiar creator appeared on my For You Page. Over the course of the past year, I had endured several unpleasant interactions with her, none of which, explicitly involved mainstream US partisan politics. The first time I encountered her profile, I immediately clocked her as an Autism Mom™ posting the usual associated fare. Her offspring got zero privacy. She relentlessly dehumanized him, while downplaying his abilities, exaggerating how things like stimming are “bad”, and sporting a bit of a martyr complex. She seemed endlessly controlling over her spawn’s tiniest deviations from established social norms. Until a few weeks ago, the comments were pretty predictable and entirely unnoteworthy for the situation.

People largely either told her how “good” and “brave” of a mom she was or dared to disagree and got dogpiled about being “too high-functioning” to have a real opinion or fake-claimed. Her and I had butted heads in the past about topics like alternatives to guardianship and meeting sensory needs.

A new plot twist

--

--

Noisy Skin Bag
Noisy Skin Bag

Written by Noisy Skin Bag

I am formally diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and OCD, and have informal diagnoses of PDA and 2e. I share my experience navigating the disability landscape.

Responses (1)