31 Mar 2020

Online week of #Gaut

See this post in:

3 mins

It’s so far! Autism Week 2020 has been going on for a few days now. Unfortunately it is a bit a different week than normal for autism week. Where normally actions are organized throughout the country and people come together to talk about autism in all its facets, we are now forced to stay at home.

For most autistic people this is not the problem, sitting at home and dealing with people very little. What is a problem for most autistic people is to break the normal structure. This is a problem in itself and I don’t want to go into too much detail now, but it does lead to the activities we see online. People who have been looking forward to their part in autism week want to continue that now anyway. So we don’t cancel anything, we just move it!

The Week of #Gaut

And that’s why we’re moving the actions to 100% online! And we are doing our best to pay as much attention online as possible to this week of #Gaut. Now you’ve seen the #Gaut hashtag pass by a number of times. This hashtag follows the international hashtag #OurGoldenMoment and refers to the color gold and autism in the name. This brings us to the hashtag #Gaut.

This week various online actions and activities will be held by different organizations. For example, the NVA has online actions. For example, last Saturday that Rienke was gaming for the autism fund, or they have a reference to a number of bloggers about their autism which can also go on.

Also, fellow blogger Gewoon Autastisch has made a very handy overview of online activities in this Week of #Gaut! Here are several people and projects mentioned that are certainly interesting to keep an eye on.

My Week of #Gaut

I hope that this week I will be able to write a lot about autism, explain more and more about it to the people around me. I also want to support and promote other people’s projects as much as possible. So if you have something I can confess, let me know!

Why is the colour of autism gold? Why #Gaut?

The chemical symbol for gold is Au. This symbol has been picked up by the neurodiversity movement on the internet and baptized to the “Autistic Union”. Abbreviated to Âû. With this also the color gold was adopted as the basic color for autism. The Dutch word for gold is goud. And from that it’s a small step to Gaut

People on Twitter and other social media started including the letters Âû in their name to let others know that they are part of this union. With this they try to indicate that they are open to talk about autism and are willing to answer questions that people have.

So that’s why we choose gold as the color for this week!

I think it would be great to show everyone his or her beautiful side of autism on the different social media platforms. Like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. If we do this en masse with the hashtag #OurGoldenMoment, #Gaut and/or #AutismeWeek2020 we can show people how autism can be. Different from what is written about us in the textbooks. You know, the textbooks written by neurotypical people, people who didn’t experience autism firsthand. This is not an attack on them, but a moment to show us.