Autistic Barbie

Mattel has launched Autistic Barbie. Because children with autism should be visible, including to themselves.

‘Every child deserves to see themselves in Barbie.’ So goes Mattel’s blurb.

It is a theme of our times: being visible, seeing ourselves, coming-out into the light. Launched in the domain of what is called ‘sexuality,’ it is now a general possibility with multiple pathways.

And everything gives way before it. There can be no objection to coming-out. It can only add to the supply of what is good.

In is a lie, destructive of health and happiness. Out is truth, promoting of health and happiness.

But while we busy ourselves with one or other mode of coming-out, we overlook the usefulness of coming-out, not to us who do it but to those who seek to manage us who do it.

Because coming-out implies a number of useful effects.

First: Coming-out implies that there is something in, something that shrinks from the world, something there – not discerned by the senses or the sciences but divined by new-style experts appointed by fiat for the task.

These experts – psychologists, educationalists, therapists of various kinds – describe for us our modern soul, our ‘identity.’

In doing so, they arrogate to themselves a power to invent characters for people that are allegedly defining but that do not necessarily manisfest themselves at all. There is something there, though there is no sign of it. The more there is no sign of it, the more there it may be said to be.

Second: Coming-out implies that there is an essential in-ness, an essential invisibility, about what is there. This can denigrate any or all visible evidence of a situation or condition – its possible causes as well as its symptoms – as inessential or beside-the-point, not linked to what is there with any necessity.

Third: Coming-out implies that strategies that elicit what is there are neutral in themselves and acceptable in their outcomes, for they merely uncover a truth and uncovering a truth can only be true.

Fourth: Coming-out implies that in whatever mode what is there ventures forth, with whatever attributes it roams abroad, it cannot be offensive or destructive but only healthy and right. The power to dismiss existing evidence of a condition is matched by the power to promote manufactured evidence of a condition.

As a device for the insertion and normalization of any number of effects, the conceit of coming-out could not be more useful.

And Autistic Barbie is a case perfectly in point.

Autism in its true form comprises exclusion from the conditions for involvement in human life, as I have argued in What Autism Is and What Autism Is Not.

The US CDC reports that 1 in 31 American children now receives a diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder by the age of 8, an almost four-fold increase since the beginning of the century.

This epidemic of autism points to the poisoning of children on a scale heretofore unknown. And social and political strategies to address autism typically exacerbate its destructiveness, amplifying the most anti-human characteristics of autism under the aegis of its inclusion.

But laundering autism through the rigmarole of coming-out neutralizes what is a crime against humanity – more than neutralizes the crime, actually washes it in a kind of virtue.

First: As what must come-out, autism is framed as something there, where its there-ness is prised away from the many ways in which autism is painfully evident to the senses and to the sciences, and made the province of pronouncements by experts in the fields of education, psychology and various therapies.

Autism is thereby grafted onto the modern soul, with all the specialness, the truth, that that involves, transformed from a physical and social harm from which our children suffer to a divergent form of identity from which our society can only benefit.

In this regard, that Mattel’s first autism-themed doll is Barbie and not Ken is significant. Autism is a condition that disproportionately affects boys. But submitting autism to the device of coming-out works to counter this empirical fact with the dubious claim that girls keep in their autism more than boys do.

The much-touted phenomenon of autistic ‘masking’ presumes that the essence of autism lies not in any evident phsyiology or behaviour but in a mysterious thereness, inside and unseen.

Second: As what must come-out, autism is taken as currently not out, not to be seen. Consequently, the ways in which autism is to be seen are downgraded as superficial, merely contingent characteristics.

Mattel’s trite gestures towards a visible autism – its new doll wears flat shoes and a loose dress, and its eyes are slightly crossed – are apologetically presented in its blurb as inessential to the condition, as indeed any discernible sign of an essentially invisible autism must be.

The often distressing manifestations of autism are thus side-lined; they are not authentic expressions of autism but only contortions of something good and true.

Third: As what must come-out, autism is subject to strategies that can only be considered neutral, insofar as they draw forth what is there.

The most draconian management regimes – for example, the prescription of sedatives or amphetamines to support attendance at school – are merely devices to ensure that those with autism can be seen in standard settings.

Autistic Barbie is not sold with a blister-pack of Ritalin. But her accessories are on a continuum with it. She comes with a fidget toy and a tablet and headphones – devices that embed the preoccupied exclusion native to sufferers from autism, hyperbolizing their zoned-out disaffection under the guise of promoting their visibility.

Fourth: As what must come-out, highly disfunctional autistic behaviours are to be accepted, even encouraged, as a welcome inclusion of diversity.

This is particularly pernicious. For, the truth is, autism is un-includable, its defining characteristics destructive of human community. We may fashion an autism-themed doll and ‘expand what inclusion looks like in the toy aisle,’ as Mattel’s blurb has it, but the world is not a toy aisle and it cannot include what is anathema to it.

We must pity those who suffer from autism. We must try to allay their distress. We must seek to improve the quality of their life and the lives of those who care for them. But we cannot include those whose situation is defined by a fundamental exclusion. There can be no ‘autism-friendly’ community.

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In response to a recent article of mine, a mother wrote to describe being attacked from behind in the supermarket by her 10-year-old autistic boy, kicking her and screaming at her after a small reversal of fortune.

But for the coming-out brigade, there was literally nothing-to-see-here-folks in that supermarket on that day.

As a visible autistic event, a 10-year-old boy kicking his mother is no more essential to autism than are flat shoes or a loose summer dress.

Kicking and screaming are to be dealt with, of course – did this boy not take his daily dose of sedatives? But they are dealt with as blockages to autism not as manifestations of it. For, deep down inside is a beautiful ‘autie,’ if only distressed 10-year-olds and their worn out mothers and the experts who administer them and the society they try to live in would let it come-out.

Meanwhile, the massive research industry seeking to winkle out the genetic provenance of autism rolls on with blithe refusal of the autism epidemic, a quasi-scientific gravy-train in endless profitable pursuit of the autistic soul.

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In Limits To Medicine, Ivan Illich described the diagnoses of medical institutions as opening up a space of personal and political innocence where there ought to be investigations and recriminations.

When those diagnoses are pegged to a something there that must come-out, this space of personal and political innocence becomes a space of personal and political virtue.

The project of making autism visible recasts as a terrain of general salutation what ought to be a terrain of culpability and responsibility. Insofar as there are objections, they are directed not at autism’s prevalence but at obstacles presented to autism’s prominence.

This reframes the appalling reality of autism as something good and true, by which the merits of a society are measured not to the extent that they cause it but to the extent that they celebrate it.

While we continue playing their game of coming-out, there will be no freedom from autism.

We should dispense with their label ‘autism,’ and its manufacture of personal and political innocence. We should forsake their project of coming-out, and its manufacture of personal and political virtue.

Our children are not autistic. They are on strike. Unwittingly on strike, of course – their strike-action is in fact comprised of an unrelenting, unmitigated, un-includable unwittingness.

Nonetheless, they are on strike. Mounting a perfectly reasonable, perfectly healthy resistance to what is an increasingly unreasonable, unhealthy regime. A regime that reengineers their physical lives from before their first breath. A regime that reengineers their social lives forever thereafter.

What we call ‘autism’ is a sustained campaign against the dismantling of human horizons by inhuman means and ends.

The only thing Autistic Barbie is good for is suppressing this campaign, producing personal and political virtue where there should be personal and political outrage and redress.

But Mattel’s blurb gives the game away – ‘Every child deserves to see themselves in Barbie.’

Because anyone who knows anything about it will tell you this:

Children with autism cannot see themselves.

Children with autism cannot see Barbie.

Children with autism cannot see themselves in Barbie.

Sinéad Murphy is author of Effective History (2010), The Art Kettle (2012), and Zombie University (2017), and co-editor of Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns (2022).

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