In search of a truce in the autism wars
spectrumnews.org
spectrumnews.org
That being said, if I had the option to "correct" most of my personal atypical genetic "variations," I would do so.
Colorblindness? Yep, I don't want that. Congenital flat feet? I don't need those. IBS? No thanks. Hair loss starting at 17? Nope! Weird neurological symptoms no doctor has ever been able to fully diagnose? I would pay almost any amount of money to make those go away.
Edit: read it wrong, sorry!
On the other hand, eye corrective surgery does not correct to 20/20 unless your vision isn't very bad (to your fighter jet pilot reference, it says your vision must be correctable to 20/20). There is also a lot of side effects to corrective surgery. One is you suffer from dry eyes for the rest of tour life. You can also get halos at night and have permanent damage to night vision. This is on tip of the fact that corrective surgery is not permanent, age will revert the issue.
If I had a choice between the two, I would much rather take naturally good vision with colorblindness versus bad vision without.
At least 2 of those are autoimmune conditions which can be greatly improved with the auto-immune protocol.
Do you know what the point of not wanting for example IBS or Chrohn's (which I have) is?
SURPRISE It's not to be forced on a restrictive diet SURPRISE
Yes, diet makes it work. We know. That's like the majority of treament.
The point is, you don't want to have to go on a weird diet.
For people with mild autism, a closer analogy would be an aspect of your personality. Do you like to travel and explore new places? Imagine it was a major aspect of your life, to the point that you'd get uncomfortable staying in one place too long. How would you like it if someone told you that you should be cured of that, and you'd be better off able to settle down and be "normal"? Do you feel that you would still be you after that kind of change? If it helps, take the exact same question and reverse it. If you were told you had to be "cured" to love travelling to that degree, would you consider that a major change to your personality?
I'm purposely not speaking for severe autism here. I think the big problem with this debate is people arguing past each other, both sides saying "autism" and meaning wildly different things. I really wish they had different names.
Sure, it's easy to see the difference between a very mildly autistic person and a non-verbal, highly interesting impaired person who can't possibly live alone. But when you fill in the population of all the people between them, it becomes clear that there's no natural place to draw a line.
If all humans can be placed somewhere on the continuous spectrum of autism, then that's just a measure of humans. Just like how height or weight are continuous but normally distributed measures, autism is beginning to be seen as a normally distributed measure (more research required though).
Granted, how autism is measured is not at all the same as how something like height is measured. As we continue to advance with social media, digital tracking, etc, we may find a window into how to measure autism empirically, but who knows.
If/when that occurs, then yes, you could at least talk about standard deviations and start drawing borders between highly/mildly/average/low/lowest autism that a person has.
But, again, we're a long ways away from this.
If you disrupted class in the 1980’s, you got taken out of general population, and put into special education with a high ratio of teachers or aides, and received a proximity of attention as needed, and that was your generalized clinical marker for genuine problems. The consensus of the elementary grade day-care center we call kindergarten through fifth grade in public schools resolved who was incapable of participating at a reasonable level.
Meanwhile, being a weirdo with eccentricities and preferences wasn’t something that demanded medication and diagnosis and labels and highly precise rules for what’s normal and what’s not. You could be awkward. It wasn’t a big deal.
Now, that is no longer true. People are keeping score starting at five years old, boxing kids into limited futures of medication and unrelenting demands for strict behavioral protocols.
So, what changed? The schools. The doctors. The kids didn’t change. The adults did. The trend was to demand more from children, and thus force them into tighter constraints in adulthood. The trend was to try and force a society to do more with less, and to weed out the weak.
Kids have to do homework in kindergarten, and that is bullshit. They shouldn’t have homework until middle school, really. They should just be kids. They shouldn’t have anxiety about grades when they’re little. They should be permitted to exist as tiny little humans, getting a first look at a gigantic world. Up until age ten, they should just be exposed to what it means to be a person. By ten, their personality is developed, and with puberty around the corner, a few short years to tighten up the basics would work, if public schools were competent. Big if.
But, when it comes to “spectral autism” the premise is a joke. If you can brush your teeth, comb your hair, tie your shoes, and iron and fold clothes but choose not to then you aren’t autistic. If you’re capable of working at McDonald’s but choose not to then you aren’t autistic. If you could theoretically wait tables or tend a bar, as a capable server but choose not to then you aren’t autistic. If you can drive a car across town, you aren’t autistic.
Ain’t no spectrum about it. Either it’s debilitating pathology or it isn’t. People aren’t suffering from syndromes at unprecedented scales. The rules of society changed in the late 90’s, and judgement is passed with greater scrutiny than ever before.
My personal example is I was diagnosed with autism in the early 1980s. And it really was warranted. I had serious difficulties with school – I had problems speaking, dressing myself and tying my shoes (amongst other things). I got into rages and fights. And my personal relationship skills with anyone outside of my family were zero. But I also had a pretty decent IQ, and I learned to manage the overstimulation and emotional tsunamis. Then I was able to survive.
There was also a high-IQ program in my school district, filled mostly with people 'on the spectrum' (not generally as disadvantaged as myself though), and the teachers involved with that helped me through school generally. But I couldn't go to college, it was just too much.
Life since hasn't been easy but I've been able to work as a technician and take care of myself. So I don't fit in either of your camps, and lots of other autistics don't either.
In our opinion the problem is that regular school is just not flexible enough to accomodate children like him. So we are going to enrol him in a Montessori school where he already knows people from the playgroup. The headmistress told us that they accept him and they will employ a therapeutic education teacher for him and two other childrens who are also special.
We will see how it works out.
Being socially awkward is neither sufficient nor required for an autism diagnosis.
> If you can brush your teeth, comb your hair, tie your shoes, and iron and fold clothes but choose not to then you aren’t autistic.
None of these are symptoms of autism.
"Choose" is an awkward word here. There are autistic people who will do alk these things, have a slight road bump on life, and it will all fracture apart. Then they will self-isolate for awhile and eventually emerge and try it again. There's a sort of category of people who can do these things, want to do these things on a genuine and honest level, but can only manage them with great difficulty.
I do agree with the general notion that todays conception of autism was generated out of thin air due to the hypercompetitiveness of society. The entire concept of a "spectrum disorder" is a bit odd. I also notice how nobody seems to be correctly measuring if this new paradigm is actually helping the patients. The amount of stigma that exists now that did not exist in the 80s towards the exact same kind of person is incredible. Many of these people would manage, with difficulty, completely unassisted.
I sometimes wonder if the mental health field has damned the people they call autistic while believing they're helping them. The insistence on labelling peoples psychological quirks as a "disorder" it hurts people in profound ways.
This happens to everyone, including neurotypicals. It's what used to be known as a nervous breakdown, and more recently is labeled as acute stress disorder. Sure, the level of stress resilience can differ greatly among individuals, but that's the point: it's a difference in degree, not in kind!
I would argue it's messier than just variation in magnitude - there are different groups of behavioral changes that happen under different levels of duress.
I know people who, under heavy stress, aggressively clean everything, even if it's just been cleaned, as a coping mechanism. I also know people who fail to clean anything under mild stress, and lots of somewhat odd subsets.
I would suspect you could pattern match these and get subsets which will be more commonly comorbid with some autistic traits, but the patterns can matter for what you can predict about other often-comorbid things, as well as which coping mechanisms may or may not work.
There was a different name. Aspergers.
The low functioning with autism by the way tend to be happier than the high functioning. So from the perspective of the person being curee I'm not certain being low functioning would make them want to be cured more.
Arguing in absolutes only serves to enflame both sides.
(I appreciate that this is extremely difficult or impossible for the most severely impaired people, but the original article involves people with autism who are more articulate about their condition)
I believe there already is research as to whether or not autism is best understood as a medical condition (e.g. correlation with stress disorders, physical disorders, etc).
There is no reason we can't acknowledge "Hey we should find out the biological/environmental reason this is happening" while also not patronizing the people whom it pertains to.
Same for any form of attention deficit, depression, other involuntary but mostly benign deviances.
We must all become more accepting of each other and broaden the range of “acceptable behavior.” I was at Starbucks yesterday and overheard 2 friends dissecting everything they didn’t like about other people for over an hour. The subjects of gossip didn’t seem to have wronged them in any way. Why is this a normal thing in America? Do we have nothing better to do than judge others?
Judging is a natural, normal, unavoidable thing we all do.
That's kind of what you're doing right now. We use judgement all the time but the definition of acceptable criteria is not universal nor static. You can work to change the narrative but you can't fix the game.
Hmm... I hope someone more knowledgeable than me in biology jumps in to lend their thought, but I'm extremely skeptical of takes like this - another one I see a lot online is that somehow homosexuality has "evolutionary explanations." It doesn't jive with my understanding of how evolution works.
Statements like that seem to imply there is some sort of intelligent force or plan behind evolution, when instead it is "directed" by noise, not "reacting to" noise.
As far as I know there's no way for evolution to "sprinkled a bit of autism" across a population for an increased chance of population survival - I don't see how such a mechanism could exist.
That's not to say that autism doesn't somehow improve society or populations, maybe it does, I don't know. But I don't think we can point to evolution as the mechanism.
Consider a gene that promotes compassion, selflessness and sharing. While it may lower your individual fitness, groups with some individuals with this gene may fare better as a whole.
Same as autism. For example, say autistic people see connections that other people don't. Having a low rate of "different thinkers" is positive for the group as a whole, even if the individuals may be disadvantaged in other ways.
This doesn't mean that any particular individual will have a higher rate (although most will).
One hypothesis for the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire is that Christianity provided social services that improved reproductive rates by a couple of percentage points. Maintain that over a particularly stressful upheaval in the social order and you don't need many generations to significantly outbreed your rivals.
Social services, and perhaps this might have some impact:
"In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin, “Human Life”), which reemphasized the Church’s constant teaching that it is always intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence."
Not strictly autism, but sickle cell anemia is a disease caused by carrying two copies of a recessive gene. If you have two copies of the recessive gene, you suffer from a debilitating illness. If you carry one copy of the normal gene and one copy of the disease causing recessive version, you have increased resistance to malaria, which has killed more humans than everything else combined. So evolution definitely does contribute to the prevalence of sickle cell anemia. Almost everyone in the US we suffers from sickle cell anemia is of sun Saharan African descent, where malaria is especially relevant.
While autism certainly isn't as simple as sickle cell anemia, there does exist the possibility that genetic components which contribute to autism can also contribute to other, more positive traits with fewer risk factors.
As for your question: invite the kid and take their needs into account? Is it really that hard to grasp? I don't get it. Some kids have an allergy. Some kids have lice. Some kids have tamper tantrums. Some kids have farts. Some kids have skin infections. Some kids pee in their pants. Some kids have ADHD. Some kids have.. well I guess you get the point by now.
Try out the children playing at your (or their) premises, see if they get along with each other without too much hassle. Make clear rules. Explain things in a positive way. If it doesn't work out, be honest about it to the parents. Don't make it as if "you want to do your kid a favor". You're doing it for selfish reasons because you cannot handle the kid. That's fine (though not ideal), but do say that. Cause that's actually what you're really saying in a kind of nice package which is as fake as you can make it.
You just related a story where you sat and judged two people for over an hour! You tell us why you did it if you want to know why people do it!
The autistic people you know are the lucky ones. 80% of people with autism have intellectual disabilities(low iq) and as many as 50% are non-verbal.
It's more than not wanting to be someone perceived as quirky or strange.
That's because diagnosis is geared to those people. Adults who cope relatively well in most situations don't know they have autism, don't seek a diagnosis, and there isn't a dx service available to them if they do know what to ask for.
It's kind of a corollary to the No Free Lunch theorom, really. The genes that cause autism in one configuration are probably vital in most other configurations and turning them off willy-nilly would likely be bad.
Why is that? I never checked but I would be surprised if the prevalence is higher than in other western countries. So what is it? Is it better diagnosed or just wrong (wrong diagnosis, self-diagnosis, pidgeonholing bc it's cool to be non-average,...), or maybe there is an issue that people in Europe wouldn't admit that they are on the spectrum and the prevalence is actually on the same level as in the US?
It sucks for parents and adults with more serious spectrum disorders as getting the help you need is subject to constraints and schools try to push kids out who start to do well.
By comparing the two he appears to be suggesting that hikikimori are just introverts, and as such proof that Japan does in fact have a cultural obsession with extraversion.
It's not the assertion that Japan is a largely extraverted country that I took issue with (though I would say it is debatable), it was the (it seems to me) equating of introverts and hikikimori.
I just wanted to point out that hikikimori are not introverts. Introversion is not a mental illness. Hikikimori may very well be, depending on the individual.
I find that most people have a poor understanding of the introversion/extraversion spectrum and wrongly attribute things like social anxiety, timidity, lack of confidence agoraphobia etc. to introversion.
Then again I may have misunderstood the point of his question and read too much into it.
Hikikomori sure as hell isn't extroversion. It's going to encompass a lot of introverts. And it is considered at the level of an offense against society.
> No one there is considered strange for being a bit stiff and un-expressive.
While you may not be expected to express your emotions, Japan has lots of public "rituals" that you WILL comply with or be labeled "strange". (The late evening salaryman drinking party, for example.)
Maybe it's not "extroversion" toward strangers, but Japan is extremely uptight about your interactions within your "in-group". You will interact and you will show proper deference, etc. Attempting to duck these public rituals or not interacting at them with gusto will very quickly get you approbation.
That's extremely hostile to introverts--probably more so than even the US where there are areas where people will simply leave you alone.
There are autistics that clearly have something severely wrong with them. They flap their hand, frequently have extremely low IQs, and are not going to be able to effectively participate in society in any meaningful way. You don't need much any expertise to diagnose these people, other than to know that autism exists. Her expertise came in diagnosing people whom I think many would challenge the diagnosis of. It seemed anybody who exhibited less interest in social interactions or engaged awkwardly, and had 'quirks' was designated as being "on the spectrum."
There are radically different different rates of diagnosis in the US by state. Though there are going to be some biases between states, this does seem at least reasonably strong evidence against any sort of genetic, environmental, or other factor. It's obvious that "autism", whatever it may be be, does exist but I think the sharp differences in diagnostic rates are probably simply down to the clinician choosing to diagnose (or not) people who do not clearly exhibit as autistic. It'd be interesting to have 10 clinicians each independently diagnose the same 1000 children. I expect you'd see some fairly sharp differences between them. Go figure, another aspect of psychology that's not replicable.
It's not, since there are strong environmental differences between states, and probably significant differences in population genetics.
There may be clinical biases, too, but there existence dish by open our the other factors.
It's absolutely mind boggling how the bible of psychiatry can be so dominated by politics and have very little actual connection to replicable science or empirical data.
Autism is right on the edge of this phenomena, as it's a disorder that arguably isn't a disorder and its harmful effects mostly attributable to society's reaction. I would argue it still counts as a disorder in the same way a hypothetical condition which prevented someone from speaking Spanish is only harmful if the person lives in a certain type of culture (Spanish-speaking) is still a disorder.
We only have to put up with this until there's a screening test. Then the problem will take care of itself, like the way Tay-Sachs is disappearing.
Some people's only real purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others; the people who raise a severely autistic child are in that camp.
Fuck that noise.
If women have a right to terminate a pregnancy within whatever time limits society imposes, should society also impose motivation limits? That sounds like a very slippery slope.
So we closed the institutions.
For the last forty years or so, we have had a growing problem of those with severe mental illnesses becoming homeless. Progress?
Would you rather be homeless or in jail if given the choice?
Perhaps we can find a third option where safe and supportive communities are provided that have various levels of minimal removal of agency.
My ex husband had severe handwriting issues. He was a cis het white male with a serious career. He was able to use his favorite pen, among other things, without needing a label -- like dysgraphia -- to qualify for accommodation.
Both of our sons were labeled as having dysgraphia. They needed the label to get accommodation in public school.
We eventually pulled them out and homeschooled. I have formal diagnoses for some of their issues in part because of the time they spent in school. But I don't have formal labels for everything, in part because I no longer needed a formal label to accommodate a thing while homeschooling.
Their dad did everything in his power to insist his problems were not like the problems his children had. I saw this in other parents who had children with labels.
I recently posted a thing to HN that got no traction. Some years ago, Microsoft did a study designed to investigate limitations without using words like disabled or handicapped. It found that about 60% of respondents had difficulties with day-to-day tasks if you just asked about tasks without using stigmatizing labels, like disabled. In contrast, only 15% to 20% of people self identify as disabled.
Findings:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090423084415/http://www.micros...
People who self identify as disabled get very up in arms about "normal" people using, for example, "Spoonie" language. So both those who self identify as disabled and those who don't are equally touchy about such things. They want some clear dividing line that may not genuinely exist.
I'm "Twice Exceptional." I'm gifted and disabled.
Various groups, such as gifted students or men able to claim male privilege, are able to get a lot of accommodation for their preferences with a non stigmatizing label. Their position of privilege gets them the best of both worlds.
I strongly suspect that a lot of people use privilege to demand accommodation for mild to moderate disabilities while side stepping the stigmatizing label of "disabled."
I think there's a lot of other stuff going on, more than I'm going to fit into a single comment. But, in a nutshell, if we lived in a world that more consistently let you go with your personal preferences without needing a justification, we wouldn't battle nearly so much over such labels.
(Yes, I know: Sometimes it's important for things to be done X way. But it often really isn't and what happens is privileged people wind up free to do whatever and underprivileged people get their lives turned upside down on silly excuses, basically.)
You've reminded me of all the "kitchen gadgets" that are mocked for uselessness when really they're accomodation devices, but for marketing purposes they absolutely cannot be described as that.
Also, would you say that I'm not in a state of health because I'm allergic to nuts?
Yes, definitely - wouldn't you? It's a flawed behavior of the body that causes disadvantages, for some people it's life threatening, so it's definitely a health issue; If that would be easily and permanently curable without side effects, then it would and should be cured en masse as a common healthcare procedure.
It's not worth mourning about a nut allergy because (as far as I understand) there's not much that we can do about it, so one might as well as just accept it as the way things are. However, if it could be easily and permanently curable without side effects, then not doing so would be an intentional choice to remain permanently unhealthy.
However, for the original discussion about autism, it may be relevant to consider the analogies (and differences) to the hotly debated issue regarding cochlear implants for deaf children. Both sides have a lot to say and I'm probably mangling their opinions, but in essence there's a situation where certain types of deafness can be "fixed" (albeit imperfectly) by cochlear implants; but many in the Deaf community don't want to be "fixed" to become more like hearing people; and in order for hearing/speech centers to develop properly the procedure needs to be done in childhood as early as possible, before they can decide for themselves. So there's a rather emotional debate on whether deaf kids should "be fixed" if they parents prefer that they would not (because e.g. they want their kids to be a full part of the Deaf community, using ASL instead of spoken English as their native language) - and if that raises a lot of questions regarding what should be considered states of permanent unhealth, then the mental issues would be even more contestable and contested.
This is yet another example of how our toxic modern culture turns everything into an "identity". Some people are less healthy than others. That's potentially sad, potentially not a big deal.
Neither way is there any excuse for this faketroversy.
Thus i think the puppet is insulting to severe autists as well as less severe autists. It is typical neurological thinking to see somebody different as less than human.
Then it leads to retaliation which in misunderstood and whole thing may lead to escalations and at worst bullying. That is more then inconvenience.
The teachers just didn't get that I had a right to be free of harassment. They didn't punish the harassers, but they did punish me when I fought back. So they were implicit in the harassment and this was a deadly part of the curriculum.
Dealing with bullies is hard frustrating long term work. Forcing victim to be silent is easier and gets "result" faster. Moreover, they can convince themselves that they at least made victim act well behaved. It is just easier and more comfortable to blame the victim, really.
No matter what you do. You always lose. The only escape is withdrawal. Temporary or permanent.
Yes people will take offense. The performance needed for effective apology or "show of responsibility" is not something autistic person can easily do. It requires skills they don't necessary have. It requires knowing what you have done wrong and they often don't know. It requires being good in politics.
Also, when you tell people diagnoses, they may discriminate. They may start avoiding you and may interpret everything you do as autism - meaning you will be dismissed and your opinions ignored even when they would not otherwise.
On other side, the issues in communication are not just about not understanding super subtle cues, but also in the communication overall becoming abusive - think senior developer micromanaging junior with all the negative consequences on junior that micromanagement has. Or insisting on my way and claiming everyone else is incapable or blocking the project unless everything is my way. Or treating junior with contempt every day or repeatedly claiming that colleague done shit job when colleague is not present because of basically disagreement.
Simple apology wont make people forget those and moreover, autistic may be utterly confused over what it is that come across as micromanagement and contempt to junior.
The harm is done, the cause is inability to put himself from other peoples shoes, but they will interpret it as hostile action and proceed to protect themselves by attacking your credibility back.
Well, Bernard Crick's definition of good politics is "ethics done in public". One can obviously quibble with that (ethical negotiation is generally informal and goal-directed in a way that political activities or processes can't feasibly be), but the basic point stands - what exactly is wrong with expecting people to be ethical?
The issue is that taking responsibility for what you did involves clearly communicating that you have a disability or at least that you have specific social problems. If you don't do this the lack of communication WILL cause confusion and harm where it otherwise would not have happened. Communicating you have a disability is NOT a "get out of jail free card" its a way to explain you have some differences and when you act a bit differently it's not because of any ill will towards other people. It's about helping people to help you to learn how to interact with people more harmoniously.
Yet being open like this does cause stigma and patronization. Disclosed I was disabled to a job placement agency once in the efforts of clearly communication. I am closed and cautious about disclosing disability but I've had so many good experiences with public servants I trusted them. Huge mistake. I wanted try to get a job the same way as everybody else with no preferential hiring or special recruiters involved. I got assigned two case workers. Neither of them sent my resume to anybody but a disability recruiter. The jobs they found for me were bad fits for my skillset because they were more concerned with finding me a "disability job" than something I could do well.
I eventually got what I wanted by searching for a job on my own getting hired after a single interview with no disclosure of my disability. I do my job well. Yet now the lack of communication gets me in trouble at work.
Also, people do not see inside other people. Not just that, but when you are causing someone harm, you not meaning to will become irrelevant after certain treshold. That person will move to protect himself or his friends will mve to protect him.
Given how little we know about the inner mental states of sociopaths (as opposed to their outward behavior), I don't think we can simply assume that they're closer to the neurotypical ideal than autistics. (There's even some speculation that they may essentially be "emotional Reptilians", with an emotional palette that's essentially restricted to relatively basic drives - and that their consistent manipulation of others is in fact driven by the resource-acquisition drive.) There may even be multiple dimensions of viable empathy-signals; one kind may be especially cheap for neurotypicals, whilst a different kind may be cheap for the autistic.
I mean, it might be that they do have a core TOM in addition to the stimulus-response stuff - but one that fails, because by default they're generalizing their own mental states/emotional ranges to others, not the neurotypical's or for that matter the autistic's. (Thus, even their TOM defects would be - at least to some extent - a consequence of them lacking certain drives. Including, of course, the uniquely-human drive to "truck, barter and trade" that makes people willing to engage constructively with others, even when pursuing entirely-selfish goals.)
The puppet was used because it would be almost impossible for a child of the right age to act the part.
Therr is this fallacious thinking amongst autistics that 'normals' just breeze through social events without stress or angst. That's completely wrong; most people find social engagement tiring and difficult ( hence the resort to alcohol or drugs as a 'social lubricant' ). We just don't have a diagnosed excuse for avoiding it or acting in a manner seen as rude.
That's simply not true.
(Pedantic note 1: If you're super-duper-literal about what you said, and take it to refer only to people who actually have the ability not to autistic, rather than speculating on what would happen if autistic people had the ability not to be, then it might be true. Though I'd guess it still isn't; I bet there are some not-autistic people who would like to be slightly autistic.)
(Pedantic note 2: I suppose it's possible, for all I know, that autistic people who say they wouldn't want to be "neurotypical" are actually lying. But I don't see any reason to think they are.)
How can you objectively claim to prefer autism over non-autism if you've never experienced the latter?
It's like me being completely content with my mechanical Ford Mustang and refusing to switch to a computerized car on the grounds that I'm happy with my Mustang and it's impossible for me to imagine what driving a computerized car could be like. I've never tried a computerized car that has lane assist and anti-lock brakes, mind you, but I'm just afraid I would like it less than my trusty old Mustang I've used my whole life.
My point is that austistic people who choose to deliberately stay autistic without experiencing what it is like to be non-autistic are making a biased choice (likely rooted in fear of the unknown).
The objective course of action is to experience being non-autistic for a few years before deciding whether you actually like being autistic...
For one, I don't see how that's justified. There are plenty of diseases we can't uncure?!
And then, the choice to try out non-autism is already a decision to be non-autistic, even if only temporarily.
> My point is that austistic people who choose to deliberately stay autistic without experiencing what it is like to be non-autistic are making a biased choice (likely rooted in fear of the unknown).
Well, yes, obviously. And how is that relevant, when noone claimed they were making an unbiased decision?
> The objective course of action is to experience being on-autistic for a few years before deciding whether you want to "uncure" yourself.
More subjective experience doesn't make the decision objective, just better informed. And in any case, it's still besides the point, because noone was making claims about how objective or how informed the decision is?
When someone says "Plenty of people don't drink alcohol, and are happy with it, and have no interest in trying alcohol", it's simply a non-sequitur to respond "But the objective course of action is to experience drinking alcohol for a few years." Yes, the decision would be better-informed, but being better informed is not a prerequisie for being happy with what you are doing, nor does the fact that you could try drinking alcohol have any relevance to the assertion that some people just aren't interested.
I could be wrong -- it might be that hairdressing would suit me much better than I think, or that having the extra money would lead me to make decisions (earlier retirement? moving to a larger house? a generally spendier lifestyle?) that would be bad for me. But I have, or think I have, a pretty decent idea of how my life would be different if I were a hairdresser or $1M richer, and I can compare that against how things are now and make a reasonable guess at whether the change would be an improvement.
It doesn't need to be a matter of X being objectively better than Y. Would I like to be obsessively interested in fashion, celebrity gossip, and sport? Nope, I'm happy being a geeky intellectual type. It's entirely possible that those other folks are happier than I am (for the avoidance of doubt, I genuinely mean that and can think of some fairly plausible mechanisms that might make it so); but I'm used to being the way I am and have no wish to change in that way, and it would be a big upheaval in my life if I did.
Would I prefer to be autistic? Nope, I think it would be a nuisance and in any case I've grown used to being how I am. But I can (or at least I think I can) imagine being autistic and feeling much the same way about becoming not-autistic as I now feel about becoming autistic.
Severe autism is a big disadvantage in life and I think it's defensible to say that even if some severely autistic people wouldn't want to change that's a mistake on their part. But there's a whole spectrum, and over at the not-so-severe end any shift has both advantages and disadvantages, and I think it's very reasonable for someone to say that they wouldn't want to give up the advantages to get rid of the disadvantages, and that in any case autism is part of who and what they are and taking it away would mean taking them away and replacing them with someone else.
Incidentally, I think it's also perfectly reasonable to say "I like the car I'm driving now; I've had it for years and grown accustomed to its foibles; it's nice of you to offer me that extremely different car with a bunch of features this one doesn't have, but they don't sound very useful to me. I'll stick with the one I know I like, thanks." Someone who says that might turn out to be "wrong" in the sense that if you gave them the new car they'd eventually be glad you did, but so what?
That is definitely not true. I know people who consider their autism a strength, something that gives them different ways of focusing and understanding. For myself, autism gave me a lot of problems as a kid, but as an adult I've learned to cope with it very well. It doesn't really bother me anymore.
Your comment is symptomatic of the ongoing problem with the autistic community: high-functioning autistic people and the parents/caretakers of low-functioning autistic people refuse to acknowledge that the other exists. You have neurotypical people telling perfectly functional, happy adults that they're broken and need to be cured, and then you have those some adults acting like a kid who can't speak or dress himself at 11 years old isn't really a problem. It's maddening.
For example, why are some people so afraid of autism? Is it bigotry against people like me who stim every so often and avoid eye contact? No, it's fear of a condition which leaves victims nonverbal and stimming to the point of self-harm. That is the fear which drives some nontrivial number of anti-vaxxers. Yes, their fears are utterly unfounded, but using the language to prevent people from even focusing on what they're afraid of is wrong.
I'm not sure how useful that would be. It's hard enough to agree on a diagnosis of autism at all. Agreeing on finer gradations would be all but impossible.
And I'm concerned that "gradations" would lead people to think of autism as a 1D scale, when, as I'm sure you'd agree, it is anything but! Each individual experiences autism related challenges (stimming, difficulty in social interactions, sensitivity to noises, intellectual disabilities, mutism) to different degrees (and, as the article point out, these also vary day to day), and they also receive autism related talents (superior memory and ability to focus) to different degrees. And all of these are not all that correlated with each other. You'd need a 20 dimensional vector to truly establish "gradations".
Instead, it might make more sense to establish for each individual in what, if any, areas of life they need possible assistance.
How do you know that? You aren't an autistic person, what gives you the right to suddenly speak for autistic people?
>This is yet another example of how our toxic modern culture turns everything into an "identity".
Google literally defines identity as "the fact of being who or what a person or thing is". Ergo a person with autism can have autism as apart of their identity. You can't just act like something someone is born with isn't apart of their identity.
Yeah, not everything someone is born with is worthy of making a fuss about, but I think things that do actively impact a person's wellbeing and interactions with society (developmental disorders, disabilities, race(?), etc.) are worthy of having a discussion about how to deal with them.
I know almost any autistic people is capable of living just as fulfilling of a life as anyone else, the bigger issue for me is people like you looking down on those who have slight deviations from established ideas of "normal" - but who are none the less capable of living fulfilling lives, contribuing to society, and interacting with others.
One might not speak ill of a tyrant one has no prospects of escaping.
Okay some people can't speak for themselves, what gives you in particular any authority to speak for those who can't? Even then, that doesn't deal with the matter of those who can speak for themselves.
This is DEMONSTRABLY untrue. I highly recommend actually hanging out with and chatting with autistic people.
I choose that phrasing for a reason. Because I know that some people choose beliefs based on how hurtful an idea might be, not on it's logical merits.
There is no link between how a person irreparably in a given situation, describes that situation, and how anyone not in it, regards it. Almost every comment fails that most basic understanding. That is my point.
There is no real debate. Only a lot of modern people without the fortitude to realistically consider unpleasant things. Feels before reals, indeed.
Your phrasing was quite confusing: it could mean either that no one who is autistic would choose to remain autistic if they had the option of choosing to not (which has been debunked) or that no one who is not autistic would choose to become autistic if they had that option. The second may or may not be true, but what does it prove? I'm not white. I don't think I'd choose to become white if I had the option, because I wouldn't be me any more, and that's valuable to me. Does that mean I think being white is inferior in any way? Certainly not! It just means that people generally wish to remain themselves, and that doesn't prove your point; in fact, it argues against it.
As someone not autistic, I look at people with autism and I say, oh, you have autism. They look at me and say, oh, you have food allergies. That's it. Sure, both are medical conditions, but I don't find a need to pity them for their medical condition any more than they find a need to pity me for mine and talk about how they wouldn't want to have allergies and how surely I must wish to stop having allergies.
Bullshit.
Don't you dare presume to speak for people other than yourself, or people whose position on the subject has been explicitly disclosed to you. You do not get to extrapolate from that to speaking for anyone else, let alone everyone else.
EDIT: Yes, I am taking the parent comment utterly literally. In context, I think that's appropriate.