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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

> It is a disorder in that our norms of society are not aligned around Neurodiverse brains

Reminder as always that over-simplifying autism to lean into the most high functioning description completely erases the existence of all of the severely autistic people out there who are barely able to function with their disorder.

Given the context of how I understand autism, and my personal experience with it, as a severe inhibitor in a normal life for the people who suffer from it, I find the whole quote you shared as despicable.

Further evidence that the autism you are talking about dismisses and denies the existence of many autistic individuals who are not as privileged to have such a high functioning variant.

Your empathy for autistic people stops at a certain level of capability, because you refuse to even recognize that they exist within your argument. It makes my stomach churn.

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You're over-reacting and trying to use your emotion as a bludgeon, in order to stand in for absent logic.

You're also falling into a semantic illusion that everything currently or formerly classified as autism is actually all on the same spectrum. In reality "the spectrum" is a modern theory and literally no other range for any disorder stretches nearly as far. Which is a red flag. See the fact that many people that would have been formerly diagnosed as Asperger's will now not be diagnosed with autism at all, but instead with a social skills disorder.

The existence of Asperger's, or the inclusion or not of formerly Asperger's patients into the general Autism spectrum category does not threaten the identities of other people with Autism.

Neither professionals nor patients should seek to use other people with impairments as their political pawn or psychological security blanket. It is morally wrong to demand the direction of their classification because you or they believe that it helps you. Get a life.

I'm sorry, but I'm not following how I'm leaning into autism with the highest functioning description of it. ASD has multiple stages with varying needs of assistance, I am trying to encourage society to help of all stages.

I truly want to understand more how that quote is despicable. As someone directly responsible for an individual with autism, I very much acknowledge that autistic people exist at several different levels of capabilities.

Your quote precisely claims that it is not "a deficit," which directly denies the reality of people on the lower end of functionality on the spectrum. Period.

There is a vocal minority, of which your source is a part of, who are trying to "normalize" Autism. In order for it to be "natural neuro-divergence" or "a super power" you have to intentionally omit the negative aspects of the medium-functioning, and completely deny the existence of the low-functioning.

Using woke language to try and assuage the insecurities of high functioning autistic people might make people feel like big strong social justice warriors, but I will die on the hill that they are actually doing grave harm to many disabled people. To use the parlance, they are being problematic. And they should be ashamed of themselves for it.

You're approaching this from a scientific perspective. The other approach is political/sociological. Neither of you are wrong.

I get that it can be demoralizing, but I'd suggest it serves your cause better to be able to point to high-functioning cases as success stories to mitigate the stigma, lest the rest of the spectrum be dismissed as retarded beyond redemption (hence, eugenics).

Thank you for sharing additional context. While I disagree with you strongly, I don't see much value in furthering the discussion here.

I'm sure we can all agree that there should be different definitions of autism. That low functioning, non-verbal people should not be sharing the same disorder as slightly awkward people.

Since we can agree on that I think we should all work together to change the definitions.

I frankly don’t care if you feel the need to call me/a huge swathe or people disordered and have something medically wrong with them because you lack sufficient creativity to imagine how we could treat people with severe mental health issues if we failed to do this. Severely disabled autistic people don’t give two craps about autistic erasure, I knew some over a period of time, they never talked about ideas how “Asperger’s” was fundamentally problematic or any such hot takes, frankly they couldn’t hold a conversation and mostly wanted people to take care of them and be nice to them and for them to be more independent. This is about you, not them.

All I hear is somebody calling me two insults, “disordered” and “privileged” who feels a sense of moral superiority for doing so. I never chose this label for myself, it was imposed upon me, I can’t choose to shed it, and I reject to being martyred for the sake of the severely disabled. I reject being labelled as having a neurological disorder without anybody looking at my Brain, taking my blood, doing any sort of objective testing, because some psychologist arbitrary deemed how I behave “deficits” through observation, an utterly subjective judgement. it’s some sort of moral obligation to believe I’m mentally disordered otherwise I’m hurting the severely disabled!

You know maybe we could help the severely disabled by volunteering or donating to charity instead of this nonsense??

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