Grace Walker with her mother Sophie
As Greta Thunberg returns to her home town of Stockholm, many are assessing the impact of the 16-year-old schoolgirl’s recent European tour on climate change policy. Did she really make a difference, or were the power-brokers simply trying to look down with (rather than down on) the kids for a brief moment? And how long in London in particular before the beast of Brexit roars back to chase all other thoughts away?
In our house we’ve been doing our own assessment of the visit. While Greta inspired my 17-year-old daughter to join the school strike for climate change in March, her presence then and since has had a deeper impact too. Because Grace, like Greta, has autism. Watching both girls this week in particular I truly understood the definition of resonance: when something vibrating at the same natural frequency of a second urges that second into further, sympathetic motion so that both sound together loudly.
My daughter, a young woman with Asperger syndrome, has felt discordant for so much of her life – out of tune, out of step, out of reach of society and its unreadable mood music. She has lived a life of daring since she was tiny – defiantly herself in a way that has made mothering her a privilege and also a heartache as time and again she went out into a world that refused to make space for her. She has defended and embraced her diagnosis – received at the age of eight, after five years of skirmishes with ‘experts’ who weren’t sure that females fit on the autism spectrum.
She has dared every day to be different in a school system that primarily rewards conformity. She has rejected the trap and trappings of gender-stereotyped young womanhood and held out for true friends who would value her regardless and to whom she would give her fierce loyalty. She and I have gone out every day with sword or shield depending on what the battle brought. And we told each other that one day, she would be seen for her glorious self. So when Greta stands up and is acknowledged and heard by popes and politicians to applause that’s heard around the world, the effect on Grace is profound.
Sitting beside me now as I write this, my daughter says: “Greta makes me feel like my voice could be heard. It made me so happy to see this brilliant and positive role model for girls with autism who feel that they can’t be heard over old ableist straight white guys. And the fact that she uses her fixation on the planet – all of the knowledge that she built up as part of having autism – to do good things for everyone shows that autism isn’t a weakness and it shouldn’t be treated as one. If anything, it makes you stronger.”
She can’t stop smiling.
To see the single-mindedness of autism, for so long stereotyped as mindless repetition or antisocial compulsion, recast as positive willfulness is electric. It is a leap towards all of us understanding difference as not just something to be tolerated but to be embraced. Greta demonstrates the value of different minds to progress for all of us; that when society makes space for visionaries and innovators and the vulnerable turned activists, we are all better off. Greta’s future is on the line and by forcing us to recognise that she brings us together to recognise and consider our joint future.
And in this individualistic society, where leadership has become a reality TV competition for two-dimensional ‘authenticity’, she stands for a very different and necessary kind of leadership where self and purpose become one, and then just one of very many. Leadership is not about deciding what kind of person you want to look like, but about what you want to get done. And understanding that getting it done requires a movement of millions.
There has been a backlash against Greta, too. Though devastating, it’s useful. It’s a reminder that while we can take a moment to celebrate progress, be it shifts in attitudes to climate change or to people with autism, we have to quickly take a deep breath and be ready for the next push. The personal attacks on this young girl by (predominantly) men of the establishment and media; the shameful, monstrous pile-on by populist right-wing pundits, shows how many neurotypical broflake bullies there are still to face down: the ones still calling difference weird, showing the lack of empathy they wrongly assign to autistic people, the ones clinging, snarling and defensive, to the status quo while deriding single-mindedness in activists for change.
Greta’s fight is our fight, for the reaction to her shows how hard the ones used to privilege will dig in to protect their own power. Her fight is our fight against the misogyny and sexism still rife in politics and culture, and the destructive fear of young women who challenge a culture that tells them to be quiet, to be decorative. To submit.
Autism may not bring skills or feel like a gift for every person who lives with it, as many of those diagnosed, and their relatives and carers may tell you. Nor is autism the beginning and end of Greta and Grace’s definition. But its place at the heart of a political debate marks a clear difference that challenges us all now to see the limits of the group-think that has been holding us all back for centuries. And as this off-kilter world threatens to spin increasingly out of control, our clear-eyed uncompromising young women may be the only ones brave enough to grasp it.
