There are a lot of stories about autistic kids, and more often than that they are written by non-autistic people. Which is all fine and dandy, except a lot of neurotypicals have this strange obsession with fixing us. We must overcome our autism in order to become the heroes. I find that incredibly insulting, because I can’t overcome my autism. My autism is me, and I shouldn’t have to overcome myself in order to be important.
The plot to My Fair Lady reminds me of these kind of stories. There was nothing wrong with Eliza Doolittle; she was just different than Henry Higgins, and Henry decided it was his duty to fix her. He could have helped her find a job where she was allowed to be herself, But no. He decided she wasn’t good enough the way she was.
My Fair Cavelady is a retelling of this story, but told from the perspective of an autistic girl named Henrietta Higgins, who invents a brainwave helmet to cure her own autism. But when she gets the chance to use it on an autistic Neanderthal named Eliza, she wonders if it’s ethical to cure something that isn’t a problem to begin with.
My story has been published in Brave New Girls: adventures of Gals and Gizmos, The fourth volume of the anthology series (and the Second volume I have been a part of) which gives its profits to the society of women engineers scholarship fund.
I am very excited to read my copy, Especially because I have several friends in the book! Pick up your copy here https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-Girls-Adventures-Gizmos/dp/1072263165/ and get the ebook here https://books2read.com/Gals-and-Gizmos
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