Reading Am Peata Bàn as an Autistic Person: or, The Animals Did Not Need to Become the Same

A quarter-turn into autism—advocacy, solidarity, race, intersectionality, and the gestalt truth that freedom does not require sameness but relation across all our differences.

There are a handful of writers whose work I read not simply because I want to learn something new, but because they remind me that scholarship can still be an act of care. Michael Newton is one of those writers. Every essay in The Virtual Gael feels less like a detached historical commentary than an invitation back into a conversation that has been unfolding for centuries—a conversation carried through language, story, song, memory, and the ordinary lives of Gaelic people who rarely imagined themselves becoming subjects of history.

As someone whose mother’s family came from the West Highlands of Scotland, I read his work with a particular sense of recognition. It is not nostalgia that draws me. I have never wanted a romanticised Highlands populated by heroic ancestors and simplified traditions. What I value instead is Newton’s remarkable ability to hold historical complexity without allowing it to become sterile, and cultural affection without allowing it to become sentimental. His essays are deeply researched, politically attentive, and quietly generous. They refuse both mythmaking and cynicism.

That combination is rarer than it should be.

Good scholarship preserves facts. The best scholarship preserves ways of thinking. Newton’s work continually demonstrates that Gaelic culture survives not because it is carefully archived behind museum glass, but because people continue to think with it. Old stories remain alive when they continue generating new questions. Folklore becomes more than an historical curiosity when its structures still illuminate the present. Tradition endures not by remaining unchanged, but by remaining capable of surprising us.

That is why I find myself returning to The Virtual Gael so often. I rarely finish one of Newton’s essays feeling that I have simply acquired new information. More often, I discover that something has quietly rearranged itself. A familiar story has become newly inhabitable. A historical detail has opened onto an unexpected pattern. A piece of Gaelic tradition has found another way of speaking into the present.

His recent reflection on the folktale Am Peata Bàn (”The White Pet”) was one of those pieces. I sat down expecting to think about a nineteenth-century Gaelic tale. I finished it thinking about something else entirely.

His recent reflection on the folktale Am Peata Bàn was one of those pieces. I sat down expecting to think about a nineteenth-century Gaelic tale. I finished it thinking about something else entirely.

Not because Newton is writing about autism.

He is not.

Nor because the folktale somehow anticipates contemporary disability politics. That would diminish both the story and the historical world from which it emerged. The tale deserves to be encountered on its own terms, just as Newton presents it.

Yet something unexpected happened as I read.

The further I followed the animals through the story, the more I found myself recognising relationships rather than characters. Ownership. Dependency. Unequal vulnerability. Different forms of usefulness. Collective action. Freedom imagined not as individual escape but as a way of inhabiting the world together. These were not exclusively Highland concerns, nor merely nineteenth-century ones. They were relational patterns that seemed capable of travelling.

Some ideas remain bound to the circumstances that produced them.

Others retain their coherence as they move between worlds.

Halfway through the essay, I realised I was no longer thinking only about Gaelic folklore.

I was thinking about autism.

Not because the folktale had become an allegory for autistic life, but because its underlying architecture had become visible in another landscape. The questions Newton was asking about class, exploitation, and communal freedom began quietly layering themselves onto questions I have spent years asking about autistic language, advocacy, solidarity, and community. The story remained entirely itself. Yet it had begun illuminating something else.

That is the gift of a living tradition.

It does not merely preserve the past.

It continues generating thought.

Before I try to describe the story, let me encourage you to do something else first.

Go and read Newton’s essay.

Then come back.

It is not especially long, and it rewards reading in full. Any summary I can offer will inevitably compress both the folktale and Newton’s thoughtful interpretation of it. The original is richer—historically, culturally, and politically—than anything I can reproduce here. My purpose is not to review his work so much as to think alongside it.

The story itself is deceptively simple.

A white lamb overhears its owner planning to slaughter it for Christmas dinner and decides to flee. Along the way it encounters the other domesticated animals of the household—a bull, a dog, a cat, a cock, and a goose. Each has its own reason for leaving. Each understands that usefulness offers only temporary protection from becoming expendable. They escape together.

Their journey eventually brings them to a house occupied by robbers. Working collectively, each animal using only its own body and its own voice, they frighten the robbers away, occupy the house themselves, divide the stolen wealth equally, and settle into places suited to their different natures. When the robbers attempt to reclaim the house, they discover that the animals’ strength lies not in any single member, but in the coordination of many different capacities. Unable to overcome that collective resistance, they retreat.

That is the scaffold Newton builds his interpretation upon.

It became the scaffold for mine as well.

What happened next surprised me.

Not because I reached a new conclusion, but because the same recognitions kept returning. I would finish one paragraph of Newton’s essay, pause, and realise that my attention had drifted somewhere entirely different. Then I would return to the text and discover that the next section generated another recognition. The folktale remained firmly rooted in Highland life, yet its relational architecture kept travelling.

It began to feel less like reading an interpretation and more like watching the same pattern reveal itself through another landscape.

The first thing that kept returning was advocacy.

Much of contemporary autism advocacy quietly assumes that every movement eventually requires representatives—that legitimacy emerges through identifiable spokespersons capable of translating the experiences of the community into language the wider world will recognise. Over time, visibility becomes credibility, credibility becomes authority, and authority gradually becomes representation. The people most able to produce coherent public narratives become, almost accidentally, the people understood to be speaking for autism.

The animals in Am Peata Bàn never organise themselves that way.

They do not pause to determine which among them is best equipped to negotiate with the robbers, explain the situation, or represent the interests of the collective. The lamb is not appointed because the story begins with the lamb. The bull is not appointed because of strength. The dog is not appointed because of loyalty. The cock is not appointed because it can announce the dawn. Their success depends upon something quite different. Each contributes according to its own body, its own capacities, and its own way of acting in the world. No single animal becomes the authorised voice of all the others.

Representation is replaced by coordination.

That distinction lingered with me because autistic advocacy often struggles precisely here. Public conversations become organised around those autistic people most capable of navigating interviews, writing books, speaking at conferences, building online audiences, or translating autistic experience into forms that non-autistic institutions already know how to recognise. None of this is inherently problematic. Those voices matter enormously. The difficulty begins when visibility quietly transforms into presumed representativeness, as though eloquence itself confers authority to describe the whole.

The folktale refuses that movement. It imagines a collective that succeeds precisely because nobody attempts to become everyone else.

That recognition gradually opened onto another.

Solidarity.

Calls for autistic solidarity have become increasingly common over the last decade. The impulse is understandable. Autistic people continue to encounter exclusion, misunderstanding, coercion, violence, and institutional neglect. Of course there is value in collective action.

Yet solidarity is often imagined as agreement.

Agreement about language.

Agreement about identity.

Agreement about politics.

Agreement about theory.

Agreement about what autism is, what it is not, who belongs, who speaks, what counts as liberation, what counts as harm.

The result is frequently a strange paradox. A movement organised in the name of neurodiversity begins demanding increasing conceptual uniformity from the very people whose lives are marked by neurological difference.

The animals in Am Peata Bàn are never asked to become alike.

The bull does not need to bleat.

The lamb does not need to crow.

The goose is never expected to guard the house like the dog.

Each remains fully itself.

Their solidarity arises not because they discover a common identity, but because they recognise a common relation to power. They occupy different places within the farmer’s household. Their daily lives differ. Their usefulness differs. Their treatment differs. Yet all exist within the same structure of ownership, where affection, productivity, loyalty, or familiarity provide only temporary protection from disposability.

The household does not erase their differences.

It organises them.

That distinction feels deeply relevant to autism.

Perhaps solidarity begins not by asking what all autistic people have in common, but by asking how different autistic lives are organised within many of the same institutions—schools, medicine, employment, welfare systems, policing, family life, citizenship—even when those institutions encounter each of us differently.

That thought naturally led me toward intersectionality.

One of the quiet strengths of Newton’s reading is that he never collapses the animals into a generic category of “the oppressed.” Their differences remain visible throughout the tale. The lamb is not the bull. The bull is not the goose. Each occupies a different relationship to labour, affection, usefulness, and bodily expectation. Their common condition does not erase the specificity of those relations.

Intersectionality asks us to make a similar move.

Autistic lives are never organised by autism alone.

Race.

Gender.

Class.

Language.

Colonial history.

Citizenship.

Religion.

Sexuality.

Additional disability.

These are not identities waiting politely beside autism to be acknowledged in turn. They shape how autism itself is recognised, interpreted, punished, accommodated, diagnosed, celebrated, or denied. Autism never arrives first, followed later by race or gender. It arrives already entangled with them.

An autistic Black child does not encounter the school as an autistic child who also happens to be Black. The school’s understanding of autism is already racialised. A trans autistic woman does not first experience autism and later experience transmisogyny. The institutions she encounters perceive those realities simultaneously. A nonspeaking autistic adult is not simply “more autistic” than someone who lectures internationally. They occupy profoundly different relationships to communication, dependence, credibility, and institutional power.

These are different relationships to the same household.

Not different amounts of autism.

Which is why another recognition kept returning as I read Newton’s essay.

Race.

Many autism movements emerging from the Global North genuinely aspire towards inclusion. I do not doubt the sincerity of that aspiration. Yet structurally, whiteness often disappears into normality. The white autistic experience quietly becomes autism itself. Its assumptions about diagnosis, family relationships, self-advocacy, disclosure, education, policing, healthcare, and public visibility become the movement’s unstated centre of gravity. Other autistic experiences are then welcomed as diversity—as important additions to an architecture that has already been built.

That is not usually the result of malice.

It is the consequence of universalising one relationship to the household.

The folktale offers another possibility.

The lamb’s experience does not explain the bull’s.

Nor the dog’s.

Nor the goose’s.

No single animal becomes the measure through which the entire household is understood. The structure only becomes fully visible when every relationship to it remains distinct.

Reading Newton’s essay, I found myself wondering whether autistic movements sometimes struggle for the same reason. We become preoccupied with deciding whose account is the account of autism, rather than allowing multiple relationships to the same structures of power to illuminate one another. The movement asks for one representative voice when the task may instead be learning how many different voices can become mutually consequential without ever needing to become the same.

As I sat with the essay, another recognition slowly emerged.

Perhaps this one was inevitable.

I began thinking about gestalt processing.

Not because the folktale is “about” gestalt language processing. Of course it’s not. The story itself seems organised as a gestalt. No single animal explains what happens. No individual action carries the narrative. The meaning does not reside in the lamb, the bull, the dog, the cat, the cock, or the goose considered separately. It resides in the relationships among them—in a whole that possesses properties none of its parts could generate alone.

The victory belongs to the gestalt.

That observation felt strangely familiar.

Much of my own work has been an attempt to argue that gestalt processing is not simply a therapeutic concern. It is not merely a description of how some autistic children acquire spoken language, to be discussed within speech pathology before quietly disappearing from broader autistic discourse. It is a way of understanding how coherence itself can arise through relational wholes before those wholes become analytically available.

Yet that broader architecture is almost entirely absent from contemporary autism advocacy.

Gestalt processing, when it is mentioned at all, is often confined to clinical conversations about echolalia, Natural Language Acquisition, speech therapy, or early childhood intervention. The people discussing autistic identity, community, solidarity, politics, representation, and liberation frequently proceed as though none of that history exists—as though autism can be understood entirely through individuals, traits, diagnoses, identities, or rights without ever asking how autistic people may organise experience differently in the first place.

That omission has consequences.

If a community is approached analytically from the outset, the natural question becomes: whose account is correct? Which definition should prevail? Which framework best explains autism? Which advocate speaks most accurately? Which political vocabulary should become normative? Debate gradually becomes organised around selecting the proper parts.

A gestalt approach begins somewhere else.

It asks what relationships make the whole coherent.

The question shifts from Who best represents autism? to How do these different experiences become mutually intelligible without requiring one another to disappear?

That is a profoundly different political imagination.

It also helps explain something that has puzzled me for years. Many of the loudest calls for autistic solidarity emerge from spaces that seem almost entirely unaware of the intellectual lineage surrounding gestalt organisation itself. Gestalt psychology is now more than a century old. The broader traditions from which it emerged—and the many developments that followed across psychology, linguistics, perception, philosophy, systems theory, and, more recently, language acquisition—form a remarkably rich body of thought. Within autism, that lineage eventually informed work on echolalia, delayed language, and Natural Language Acquisition, yet even there it is often treated as a specialised therapeutic framework rather than part of a much larger way of understanding mind, relation, and meaning.

The irony is difficult to miss.

Movements calling for autistic solidarity frequently overlook one of the oldest intellectual traditions concerned precisely with how wholes arise from relationships among differentiated parts.

Perhaps that is why so many conversations feel as though they are perpetually negotiating the boundaries of belonging. The community becomes occupied with deciding whose account should stand at the centre, whose terminology should prevail, whose politics should define the movement, whose experiences should become exemplary. The task becomes adjudication.

The folktale imagines something quieter.

The animals never determine which among them is most representative.

They become consequential to one another.

From a gestalt perspective, that difference is everything.

When I closed the essay, I found myself returning to where I had begun.

Not to autism.

To gratitude.

There is a particular generosity in scholarship that does not insist upon its own conclusions. Rather than narrowing the world towards a single interpretation, it enlarges it. It trusts that careful thinking, historical fidelity, and intellectual honesty will continue generating recognitions long after the reader has left the page.

That is the gift I find again and again in Michael Newton’s writing.

I began by reading about a Gaelic folktale collected in the nineteenth century. I finished still thinking about Highland folklore. I also finished thinking differently about autism.

Not because the story had changed.

Because I had.

Perhaps that is how living traditions continue their work. They do not remain confined to the worlds that first gave them shape. They travel—not by abandoning their own integrity, but by revealing patterns capable of illuminating other lives, other questions, and other struggles. The old story remains entirely itself, yet somehow continues speaking into the present.

As someone who spends much of her time thinking about language, gestalt processing, and autistic community, I found that deeply encouraging. It reminded me that good ideas do not become smaller when they cross disciplines. They become more alive.

There is one image from Am Peata Bàn that has remained with me.

The animals never become the same creature.

They never discover a common voice.

They never appoint one among them to speak for all the others.

Each brings a different body, a different history, a different capacity, and a different sound. What they discover instead is that difference need not prevent solidarity. Quite the opposite. Their freedom depends upon remaining distinct whilst becoming consequential to one another.

Perhaps that is the lesson I carried away—not only for autistic advocacy, but for every community trying to resist the temptation to confuse unity with uniformity.

The animals never learned to sing together.

They learned to make enough noise, in their own voices, that nobody could own them any longer.