Marginalized people under pressure often turn that pressure on each other instead of on the systems producing it. That’s internalized oppression, and its sideways form, lateral oppression. Autistic hazing is one case: undiagnosed or masking autistic people project ableist attitudes onto those who are openly neurodivergent. It works much like internalized homophobia, where someone suppresses who they are and turns contempt on people who are openly gay. The resentment a masking person feels toward the openly autistic is not character; it is the cost of their own repression, billed to someone else.
Paulo Freire, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins help explain how this works among neurodivergent people. Some of them go further, into dangerous ideologies: unrecognized neurodivergence leaves a person with alienation they can’t account for, and toxic belief systems supply a simple explanation or a scapegoat. Internalized oppression and late diagnosis trap autistic people in those beliefs; solidarity and early recognition offer a way out.
Autistic Hazing and Internalized Ableism
In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes how the oppressed internalize the values of their oppressors and, in turn, act as “sub-oppressors” in their own communities. Autistic hazing follows the same pattern. It usually shows up as contempt for stimming or for asking for accommodations, the very things the masking person has been trained to suppress in themselves.
In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde wrote about how marginalized people turn their anger inward, or on each other, instead of on the systems oppressing them. Among autistic people, that looks like the masker who criticizes or shuns someone who’s openly autistic, enforcing neurotypical standards inside their own community.
The Allure of Dangerous Ideologies
Without a diagnosis or a clear sense of their own neurodivergence, autistic people are often left isolated and misunderstood. That alienation makes them ready targets for ideologies that offer easy answers or someone to blame. Incel (involuntary celibate) ideology has spread among some autistic men, drawn to online communities with a simple story: women are to blame for their lack of romantic success. Rigid social norms and the communication difficulties many autistic people face sharpen the sense of rejection, and some adopt these misogynistic beliefs to explain it.
Far-right extremism and white nationalism pull in autistic people the same way: online groups offer people who feel shut out a community that explains their struggles as victimhood and conspiracy. Autistic people, who often struggle with social inclusion and with ambiguity, are especially exposed to the black-and-white thinking these groups sell.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes colonized people taking on the colonizer’s values and rejecting their own culture. Some autistic people do the same with ableism: they mask, and then look for ideologies that validate them by scapegoating someone else. Those ideologies seem to offer answers, but they dig the person deeper into exclusion and isolation.
The Impact of Delayed Diagnosis
Late diagnosis makes people more susceptible. Many autistic people grow up not knowing why socializing and communication are hard for them, and they draw bad conclusions about themselves. Without a diagnosis, they don’t have a framework for their experience, so they read their struggles as personal failures and come to believe they’re defective.
bell hooks and Angela Davis have written at length about how internalized oppression isolates, and how systemic forces fracture people and communities. For undiagnosed autistics, late diagnosis deepens that isolation and keeps them away from people who could help them make sense of their lives.
Many undiagnosed autistics go looking for validation and take it where they find it, even in exclusionary or extremist communities. Those communities recruit through alienation. They blame society’s failures on a particular group rather than on ableism, social isolation, or inequality.
Unmasking and Solidarity: Lessons from Internalized Homophobia
The LGBTQ+ experience of internalized homophobia is a useful parallel. Unmasking, letting one’s autistic traits show, is a kind of coming out. Both mean rejecting norms you absorbed and finding strength in accepting yourself.
Audre Lorde argued that claiming one’s identity is a personal and a political act, a challenge to structures that demand conformity. Unmasking is that kind of act. It also makes solidarity possible, and solidarity is the counter-story to ideologies that live on isolation and internalized oppression.
Resisting Dangerous Ideologies Through Community
Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought shows how systems of oppression based on race, gender, or disability interact. That interaction can leave marginalized people more exposed to harmful ideologies. A neurodivergent community that deals with those intersections is harder to pick apart.
Early diagnosis gives people a way to understand their neurodivergence, so they’re less likely to seek validation in exclusionary or extremist spaces. Places where autistic people can unmask and explore who they are without fear of rejection or judgment build a community on acceptance rather than exclusion.
Neurodivergent people also need allies among other marginalized groups. Angela Davis and Mia Mingus have argued for an intersectional approach to liberation, with communities working together to take apart the structures that keep oppression going. For autistic people, that means seeing the shared roots of ableism, sexism, racism, and other discrimination, and building coalitions for more inclusive and just systems.
What Acceptance Could Change for Everyone
Dealing with internalized ableism and autistic hazing could change more than the autistic community. The LGBTQ+ movement widened acceptance of sexual identities; the neurodiversity movement can do the same for narrow ideas of “normal” behavior and cognition.
Pushing for early diagnosis, accommodations, and self-acceptance can make schools and workplaces fit neurodivergent people better. Seeing its links to other justice movements is also what lets autistic people resist lateral oppression instead of practicing it.