Person With Autism or Autistic Person?

— A Debate in the Autism Community

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PERSON-FIRST LANGUAGE standardizes shame, severs soul from spirit [but still, if I’m a
person, well-versed in my personhood, I’m only a person the way a mannequin qualifies as 
person: deferred to houseparty wallpaper, wallflower in reverse-bloom], so I switch to second
-person. You rehearsed [but still, you small-talk so small you go molecular, vanish into a nothing
person at worst, person-with-nothingness at somehow worse]. You carry your nothingness like a
purse on your person: pursed lips & prop-smile. The audience applauds, but any reasonable 
person, uncoerced by politeness, could (with good intent!) mistake you for that mannequin:
person cursed by silence. So you embody wallpaper, abstract into escape hatch [but still, I’m a
person, my twenty-first birthday and I’m lonely. It’s so lonely, being more concept than
person: a botched birth, impending hearse]. Person With implies a Person Without, implies
person nursed into personhood: prop severed from stage, the half-hearted miracle of me, a
person immersed in my standardized shame. My nothingness. Yeah, it’s humiliating to be a
person, unrehearsed, but I can’t sever mind from body. I’m the saddest-weirdest-nothingest
person who traversed into this houseparty, and goddamnit if I’m not that mannequin, that 
person unearthed from the periphery. I carry him home, and he’s heavy at first [but still, he’s a 
          person].