The medical model of autism has a surprisingly narrow idea of what social skills actually are. It’s not just about eye contact and small talk; it’s about writing, word choice, culture, social class, and other kinds of communication.

Behaviourist treatments also focus on the superficial appearance of social knowledge, not a deep understanding of what other people need or how they feel.

As a child, I understood concepts like justice and equality, but I didn’t understand social skills in the way I was expected to. If my parents and teachers had addressed the topic in a way that worked better for me, I might have learned some skills sooner.

ABA just taught me that social skills were an annoying set of context-free rules I had to follow: “quiet hands,” eyeballs boring into mine, coming to learn that other people were enforcers of “indistinguishability from peers,” not anybody worth getting to know for themselves.