Opening of the Way

No one is saying that Autism is an illness.  But then really, that does not mean anything.  We could say that mental illness is not an illness.  Some times ~mental illness~ is used to make allowances for people, even to get them off for crimes.  Other times ~mental illness~ is used to indict someone, even to convict them of crimes.

Autism can and does work exactly the same way, and it is used in these ways regularly.

So why would anyone want to pin a label on themselves?

And why do we want to call for "diversity" when there is no proof of difference, no benefit obtained by claiming the difference.

I walk into a café, one guy is talking with his friend, two women are talking to each other.  Another guy is eating food.  I am intending to read a book.

Which one of us needs to call for "diversity" in order to be accepted as legitimate?

Remember, the first best line of defense when you're legitimacy is attacked, is the middle finger.

Some people will attack your legitimacy, but packaging it as For Your Own Good.  Again, the middle finger, or harsh toned direct words, will usually solve that problem.

But some people need lessons in respecting people and their privacy.  So if the middle finger does not work, I will usually go into Marine Corp Drill Sergeant Mode.

Face 2 face, people do not try to mess around with me.

And so what is this Neurodiverstiy Movement, and things like the Autism Self Advocacy Network?

Well, it's the Autism version of the Recovery Movement.  It's the survivors of abuse, who have decided that they can build for themselves an adult identity, by taking the place of the doctors, and abusing survivors themselves.

Nick Walker, he rejects the high functioning versus low functioning dichotomy, but why does he feel a need to call for a ~neurological difference~ identity at all?


Walker asks how we deal with Autistic people?  Well in the work place and in community service groups, one finds all sorts of people, with all sorts of communications styles.  So how do you deal with them?  You deal with them no differently than anyone else.  You just have to be tolerant.  I don't mean tolerant of their category of difference, and I don't mean making presumptions about them.  I mean just tolerant of them as they are.


I want to tell a brief story here, decades ago, for a while I had an autistic girlfriend.  Or rather I should say, I had a girlfriend who had been convinced that she was autistic.

I was only a year older than she, and she told me about the institution she lived in.  It was only by happenstance that I met her.

She was not different from anybody else.  She was just as communicative and engage able.

In those days I did not know anything about Autism, other than as shown in that movie RainMan.  And I thought autistics did not talk at all.

This girl was nothing like that, just like everybody else.

I still though did come to feel that it would be a mistake to keep seeing her.  The issue was simply that I thought it would be taking advantage of her.  Its not that she was disabled in any way.  It was simply the disadvantage, the compromised personhood which she was experiencing in living in the institution.  She was at a huge social disadvantage, and this did come across.

Overall I would say that she was guileless.  Her feeling were right there on the surface.  I see this as a positive.  But I also know that she would have a hard time in adolescent girl culture.  And then no tight or revealing clothes, no high heels, no makeup, no bombshell hair.  She would be targeted.

But this does not mean that there was anything wrong about her, or any reason she should have to accept a ~neurological difference~ label.

There was however one thing which stood out.  And I have seen strange issues related to this in girls before.  She had strabismus in one eye.  In my view, particularly with a girl, that will change how people react to her.

Why did the parents send her to this school?  Why did the parents have her ~accessed~?  Were the parents embarrassed by her, as comes across in many autism narratives?  Was she being targeted in a Muggle Bully School?

She should not have had to have been institutionalized.  A well run communal home would have been better.