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.
(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?
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 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.
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.
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.
This is DEMONSTRABLY untrue. I highly recommend actually hanging out with and chatting with autistic people.
That's simply not true.
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.
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.