How can it be the Wrong Planet?

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There are many millions of aspies on this planet.
In the USA, there are about 2,000,000 aspies. In the UK, there are about 500,000. Even tiny Israel has over 50,000 aspies living in it.
How can a planet that has so many aspies be a wrong planet for us???
Just because we are a minority group? (but so are so many others...).

Don't we live in a multi-cultural era, in which the Autistic Culture is one of many minority cultures?

Wrong Planet???
Of all the planets I am aware of, Earth has the *LARGEST* aspie community!

I am happy to be an aspie inhabitant of mother Earth.
For me, Earth was, is and always will be the Autistic Planet

i always thought it was a reference to the feeling of not belonging- like saying' its as though they are speaking another language' type thing.

i used to wonder if i was an alien when i was about 10, as i felt so alien to my family, and my life.
also, we all live in NT communities, rather than all together, so we all still feel, and are, isolated, from 'others'.
i still dont fit in, and i could be ina room with 100 aspies, and i might feel one of them, but id be aware that just outside teh door, we would still be existing in an unfathomable, alien world.

ASDs are more of an outlier than a minority, statistically speaking. The top-end figure of 1 in 100 has most likely always been here as long as modern humans have been (I highly doubt that it'll be higher than this any time soon); it adds up to a lot when you count them all, but it's statistically insignificant when one looks at it on a local level.

You have 99 people without an ASD, and then you have 1 person with an ASD.

Of course, it's the right planet, as there's not many others around that have a liveable environment for a human, even if they are a social outlier. Not to mention that "we" are born here.

Took the words right out of my mouth. That is exactly what it is a reference to. As a child, and even up to about a few months ago, I refused to believe I was different, which just made life more painful.

i think there are less.
the number you quote is about 1/150 people.
i was told by my psych (possibly out of date now with all the "new arrivals" etc) that autism affects 1/166 people, and of that number, 1/100 autistics are asperger syndrome. that makes AS about 1/16600 people.
maybe that is not correct, but i am sure there is no one else in my whole life i saw who is like me.

"brotherhood" of anything is foreign to my psyche.

I was told AS was more like 2-5/1000

Yes, I think it is a name based on a subjective experience, one common to most/many AS, of feeling as if we are on the wrong planet.

As this is clearly not, and can not be, true, because there are too many of us, ( as KenG points out ), or simply because we are human like NTs, there is a protest inherent in the name, which expresses the injustice of our feeling like this. Because I believe that it is society/social norms which contribute most, ( if not exclusively ), to this experience of disorientation/exclusion/displaced person.

I think that is why the name has such a rallying-call effect, a rousing element to it.

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I interpret "Wrong Planet" as a passive acceptance of the social norms which marginalise us.
A) I find no element of protest in a name like "Wrong Planet".
B) We don't need any protest. We need productive activism.

"Wrong Planet" was true as long as Asperger Syndrome was unheard of. It was true as long as the Autistic Community didn't exist. Nowadays, it is rapidly becoming anachronystic.

What about the word "queer"?

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I'm not even sure what "queer" means...
I believe it means one of the following:
1) A homosexual person (either male or female).
2) A person who does not conform to gender stereotypes. (without necessarily being homosexual).
3) A person who does not conform to societal stereotypes. (without necessarily being no.1 or no.2).

Which one is it? (or is it something else?)

Are you saying it's time to rename the forum? Or just stop using the phrase elsewhere? I like WP as it is, it's fun, but I don't use the expression elsewhere, since it doesn't really express how I feel (although at one time some of my friends were saying "some of us are from Pluto" in response to the Mars/Venus books - they weren't on the spectrum, either).

Unfortunately I still think Wrong Planet works as a good descriptor of how other people treat us. We are not yet welcome in this world.

50 years ago it meant someone who had something wrong with them, ( or a thing which had something wrong with it ).

The word used to be a criticism, a derogatory/disgusted description of something, a word people used for things, or people, that they found strange, ( in a negative way), or unpleasant/disturbing, particularly about homosexual people for a certain time.

But it was taken by the gay/trans/bi etc community and transformed into an expression of pride in being different. Hence queer politics, queer pride, etc.

I think the name Wrong Planet represents something similar, a turning on its head of our painful subjective feelings of being in the wrong place. Although it can sometimes seem like a club for miserable people accepting a "victim" status, I think it represents a similar response, of taking something which we are accused of/suffer from, and refusing to be ashamed of this experience/way of being.
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Last edited by ouinon on 14 Feb 2009, 1:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

Trying to figure out what percentage of autistics are Aspies is kind of ridiculous because they still don't have any uniformity in diagnosis.

Besides which, the criteria overlap to the point that anyone diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome is about 90% likely to also be diagnosable as "Autistic Disorder". Maybe 100%, if the criteria are used loosely.

And then there's PDD-NOS, which in some areas makes up most of Spectrum diagnosis, and in other areas makes up only a few percent. It is popular maybe mostly because it sounds less like autism.

Some psychologists will diagnose Asperger's in any verbal autistic person regardless of self-help delays. Others will diagnose autism in the case of what would be Asperger's to others.

In any case, the spectrum is not easily divisible into categories; so it makes more sense to ask "how many autistic people" rather than "how many Asperger's". Get three independent adults who can use spoken langauge, one diagnosed AS, another PDD-NOS, another Autism, and I guarantee you will not be able to tell the difference unless you take their childhood histories.

I think that the Wrong Planet website is a place filled with wonderfully diverse and interesting people, good conversations, and valuable resources. Wrong Planet for me is a place where we Aspies can be free to be ourselves, which is quite unlike that other part of planet "Earth" where being ourselves is considered as being one of the worst things we can be.

Most homosexuals and lesbians prefer to call themselves gay, queer, or dyke, rather than homosexual, "homo", ( however affectionately diminutive ), or lesbian, because however positively it is used, "homosexuality" remains a medical term. It was invented by doctors, to describe disorder/disease/"perversion".

In the same way the words autism and aspergers, even when shortened to the "affectionate" diminutives "aspie" and "autie", remain medical terms, invented to describe "disorder/disease" ( if not perversion ), and this is why I like the name Wrong Planet, because unlike Aspie Village, Autscape, Aspergia, Aspies for Freedom, etc, it is not based on any word invented by the medical establishment to separate/isolate/"dissect" a difference.