If my friend, who restored my faith in humanity, had been spending the rest of the day saying “We love our friend with autism” instead of “we love our autistic friend” (yes, we’re strange people), I’d have been annoyed instead of amused. That’s my own little ear cringing thing, but the high emphasis on Autism Is Seperate does make me wary, and can start down roads to very uncool attitudes.

A friend of mine, several years younger than me, wanted to tell me about this story. So, OK, I let him and very sarcastically said “Oh. My. You. FIgured. It. Out.”

And he’s like “yeah, whatever, because you SO CHOSE to have your senses turned up that high, and to not be able to read people, just to make everyone else miserable” and rolled his eyes. So, at least some people don’t have their heads up their posterior.

Where I originally part with Phil is that all of the debates are always around false dichotomies. That’s not the case. Some people don’t simply say that they want their children to have more skills and be able to function better in a societal setting. There is a “him/her” and an “it”, sometimes. The “him/her” is athletic, intelligent (but not too intelligent; this person must be the high within standards but should not branch out of them), charismatic. “He/she” is blanketed by “it”, a disease that makes the person act differently and not function as well as others, even denying “him/her” human existence. “It” needs to go, in this construction. There is no room for so much as a touch of eccentricity; it’s bizarre, it’s strange, it doesn’t look good to the neighbors. Only a “real” kid will do, and in that “real” kid there is no room for autism of any functioning level.

Online, I haven’t gotten this as much as in person, where I get it quite a bit. In fact, I have received an entire lifetime of that, and in spades.

The other thing I would hope is that autism would stop being considered strictly a medical condition and talked about in those terms. It’s really not. It’s broader than that and should be considered as such. And the more you use those terms, the more you might as well be playing right into the hands of those who want eradication in entirety, as there will be an alienating difference that will be simply removed when convenient. Any civil rights movement fighting against scientific terms will lose, and I’m not optimistic myself.

(That is, by the by, one of the better things that happened in terms of homosexuality; the discussion there floated largely into the realm (though not entirely) of morality. It is easier to argue against a statement based in moral terms than in scientific terms, because of the way that works; “functioning” is, in effect, a normative statement (which then can be made into a scale of more or less, depending on the object), and while that is normally a good thing in biological terms, it can be applied in such ways as to make psychological differences “disorders”, pretty much regardless of what the condition is).

Otherwise, the rest is very much right in principle. Good statements, both of you!

Cliff

Thank you.