WP tagline like saying Homosexuality is Not a Disease

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News flash: You don't have to have sex to be gay any more than you have to have sex to be straight or bi.

However, sexual orientation seems to have more elements of choice in women than in men for whatever reason (not universal ones even there though, just more of them, and no, any choice that does occur doesn't have to mean that "a person was really bi to begin with").

Last edited by anbuend on 30 Dec 2007, 9:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

Should perhaps explain that i am referring to this film not because i want to talk about blindness but because the story makes a useful analogy!!
Same goes for the threads reference to homosexuality, the nature of gayness isn't the subject of this thread so much as the social construction of homosexuality ( the concept invented in the late 1880s, "describing" a sexual dysfunction,) which shows remarkable similarities with that of aspergers/autism, and had a not entirely dissimilar purpose, ( Keeping people breeding).

The phenomenon was even similar in that hundreds of thousands of words were written attempting to classify the different kinds of homosexuality; for instance there was the effeminate kind, and the masculine kind, and i can't remember anymore which one was supposed to be the most aberrant, or the most incurable. It was argued about by learned people! Much like people argue about the differences between Aspergers, HFAS, and other Autisms now.

What you guys are forgetting is that sexual preference is not a choice, what you’re talking about is a person’s experimenting with they sexuality, they is a difference with someone who is experimenting & a person that is attracted to the same sex, they simple do not get any sexual desire for the opposite sex... It’s not a choice it's how they are as a person.

It's like saying a person who does not like theory work has a choice to do or not do, in the end they just find theory work boring & frustrating...

Like the saying goes keep your conversations small & people will listen to you without getting bored, but go on long without the person been interested the person will either move away to another conversation, or just sit they boring away not listening...

Might find conversations boring like people going on about football none stop, but in the end listening to them, they talk like they own the team & think they play better than the players they are saying suck..

What you guys are forgetting is that an As person is talking to you & probably does not talk to much people, & in the end your giving them the same cold shoulder NT's give them, that is why an As person is frustrated at you for not understanding the As thing they say to you, when they say you should understand with having As.

Sorry went on into other threads but wanted to stick it all together.

As for what has changed in the past 45 years is when an introvert / autism / As person asks for help these days instead of looking at them as a person, a disorder that was made in 1944 that really hasn't changed just different wording, the NAS has only just launched it's adult work / education / treatment campaign... & basically 45 years of advertising has failed, most people I talk to don't even know what Autism is let alone As... It's only people who have autism children or people around them...

If any other Advertising company / charity ran 45years & people did not know what the word means, then that company in general has failed... A doctor said to me the reason As people come to this mental health centre is because they got nowhere else to go...

The thing is, it can be a choice. And not just in people who "were bi already". I am a lesbian, and have had a fair bit of contact with the lesbian community. Among lesbians, there are two main ways of experiencing lesbianism (well, there are a lot more, but in terms of choice these are the main two).

One of them is that they were always a lesbian but took awhile to find out. That's how I experienced it, I was always very attracted to women and only minimally attracted to men, I dated a boy once but found girls that went to the same school as us more attractive than I found him, etc. I identified as bisexual for a long time because I'd dated him. And then one day I made a list of who I had been truly attracted to. It was a very long list, but it was very lopsided, a huge number of women and one or two men. So I decided I must be a lesbian. (And before anyone repeats the "can't get a man" crap, I was routinely hit on by men and even dated one, given that even being autistic, having large breasts goes a long way.)

My experience is the dominant view you will hear about from the queer community, because of a couple things. One is that a lot of people who discriminate against us say that we are this way by choice as a way of saying, "If you don't like being discriminated against, choose to be straight." Another is that the queer community has always been (and still is to a large extent) dominated by gay men, who of all gay people seem to have the most tendency for something that looks like it's completely inborn and unable to be changed. So a lot of the views shaping what gay is thought of to mean, have been formed because of what is normal for gay men. They don't seem to apply to women nearly so often.

Anyway, my experiences fit the dominant view so I fit in with all that stuff where being gay is an innate trait that you find out about and then you "come out" first to yourself then to others about. That's the way gay people are currently told pretty forcefully to look at ourselves from within the gay community, until it seems to people like there is no other way to look at ourselves.

However, I know a number of women this simply is not true of. They wanted to be lesbians and the way they describe it often takes the form of "I became a lesbian when...". They have been lesbians for a really long time and could not possibly be described as experimenting. But they view themselves, before choosing to be lesbians, as having been straight. And they do not view themselves as simply "bisexuals who are able to choose". It's not that simple. They made a choice and they are no longer interested in men at all. They don't view sexual preference as inherently innate. They view it as something a person can choose, and they celebrate the choices they have made. They view it not only as a sexual preference but a certain kind of focus on women in a whole lot of aspects of life.

And their existence of course completely screws with people's heads and people write them off all the time as people who were lesbian or bisexual anyway before they "came out" as lesbian, because some people can't imagine sexual preference changing, especially by choice. But if people can develop tastes for all kinds of other things they didn't originally like, why is it not possible at least for some people to choose their preferred gender for romantic and sexual attachments?

And why is it not considered possible to support gay people's right to be gay without saying that it's not ever chosen and is always a fixed innate trait? People should have a right to be themselves if who they are is innate, and they should also be free to make choices about their sexual preferences. These choices should never be forced on someone and it is very wrong to do so. Why is it more wrong to force a choice if the thing is "not a choice" than if it can for some people be a choice?

So, no, I'm not coming from some kind of homophobic myth-land here, I'm coming from the reality of what lesbians are, which is not always what anyone (including gay men and people believing stuff that is based primarily on the experiences and political positions of gay men, even if it's promoted throughout the queer community) expects or wants. Lesbians happen to include people who were always this way (whether we knew it or not) and eventually figured it out, and people who were not always this way in any sense but eventually thought about it and decided to be this way and worked at becoming lesbians. And I think there's some scientific correlation to this too by the way, sexual orientation seems to be more frequently and obviously purely biological in men than in women. (And I appear to have some of the apparent biological markers currently thought to point to lesbianism in women who are biologically inclined this way, which seems to have to do with fetal testosterone levels. I imagine that if these markers are real, their existence would be more mixed in women who choose to be this way rather than have a strong sense of always having been this way.)

This doesn't make sense. First of all, since the diagnosis is mostly made in childhood lack of sexual relationships isn't a part of the diagnosis. Other conditions like schizophrenia are more associated with not wanting social contact. The "quirkyalone" movement is addressing some of the bias against singles but that in itself doesn't addressed the essence of what an ASD diagnosis entails. Secondly since Autism is considered to be genetic, it's actually discouraging some families from having kids in the fear that they'll end up having another kid with the condition. Thirdly homosexuality was not invented in the 1800s--it was actually acceptable in ancient Greek times apparently so there wasn't a marrying conspiracy going on. Though I could see this as a reason for it being taboo in Leviticus. If you're going to make a connection with homosexuality, I'd look more about how the gay pride movement let them assert power by defining themselves and not being ashamed of who they are.

When I was pregnant during a time of great population growth, I was harangued by Zero Population Growth on how irresponsible I was for 'bringing a child into this world! Now they are trying to PROMOTE population growth by haranguing those who chose to not reproduce!
I swear! they never stop trying to manipulate folks!

I work in health care 'Government Programs' which is Medicare in the States. We are just seeing the 'baby boom' of the post WWII generation move into retirement age and the 'baby bust' generation (when the Boomers were having children much later and much fewer) is those what are trying to administer the medical providing, process the claims, account the billing, and educate and explain the process. When you contrast the numbers of those in the Boomer generation and those in the Bust (or Gen X) you see the potential for the number needing the care being upside down over those available to give the care.

I have a controversial yet very insightful opinion that is why there is such reaction to abortion being legal and safe in certain segments of society that sees their numbers diminishing and other segments of society 'over populating' and thus just changing the societal fabric just by virtue of them being more people of one segment over the other.

just some ideas your post inspired me to jot down, oui-non. Your posts always prompts discussion!


Merle

Thread going in 3 or 4 different directions at once! Programming is really a team venture these days though I agree with you that it can be very creative. Getting the job in the first place would be the hurdle that requires more communicating I would think and depending on the group maybe politics to stay in the job though you'd hope it would be based on productivity. There's a lot of discussion based on new-age business authors such as Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind) and Tom Peters about global employment trends. Pink is apparently now touting an advantage in business for those with dyslexia. But this really would deserve a thread of its own to discuss...

The person didn't say homosexuality was invented in the 1800s. They were saying that the word was invented in the 1800s and then used to scare people. Which might be accurate.

the diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome today is now made in childhood, however there were Aspergians long before anyone knew WHAT it was, and many wrong diagnoses were made or even none at all. Surely you don't think that autistism started when medical science first classified it in the 1930's and 1940'?

Merle

The original argument was that the concept of autism is some kind of conspiracy to pathologize singleness so that people will get married. My point was with the original kids studied by Kanner and Aspergers their lack of sexual relationships would not have been a factor in defining the diagnosis.

Autism goes back before 1920s ( Probably the german papers have not been translated or been lost. )

introvert goes back to whenever they said opposites attract.. All the other name's are not wrong they just different words

Carl jung

Talked alot on Introverts in 1920...

Before Jung came on the scene in the 1920s introversion was used practically synonymously with autism or schizophrenic tendency. Dr. Whitmont states that old textbooks of psychiatry commonly referred to a schizoid person as an introverted or autistic person.

The bias may be gone in some psychiatric circles, but as Whitmont states in his book The Symbolic Quest, the bias against the introversive personality in society continues.

(skiz-oyd): Socially isolated, withdrawn, having few friends and social relationships, resembling the personality features of schizophrenia, but in a less severe form; no loss of touch with reality.

Imagine what effect it has on children when the quiet ones in the class, the ones that don't often talk to others or when they do it's about something no one else has heard of, the children with slow, considered delivery, with interests not linked to the TV, who are clumsy or dress different, who look into space past you when talking about something, who are sometimes brilliant, sometimes incredibly "stupid", turn out to have a medical condition, something called Aspergers, which is a kind of Autism . And are on medication, in therapy, disappear, etc etc.

When it was "just" classic autism with the visible difficulties it was disturbing maybe but not that surprising that they should have medical label, but when it's people that "look normal", you don't know any longer who might be, including yourself. Like when the new "science" of Sexology in the 1880s explained that homosexuals were not just all those effeminate types but that there were also "masculine" ones, oh scary! How do you know who is, and who isn't one? Attention is paid to increasingly subtle details. ...

By teenage years children will be well schooled in thinking that "being like that, or that, or that and that" is a sign of a medical condition, not just another way of being. Remember what you, or most children around you, thought about homosexuality when a child. How for most it was absolutely taboo. That it is still one of the main reasons for suicide among teenagers.

Think what you might have felt if found yourself behaving "in those ways". You wouldn't just be a radical intellectual poetic clumsy shy type, you would think that there was something wrong with you.
And you might talk harder, laugh harder, drink more, drug more, docilely do what friends are doing, so as not to stand out as abnormal. I'm talking about almost half the class here!

Imagine how many are now , in adulthood aswell, taking all this very seriously, and genuinely believing,( as many do on here too ), that the behaviours described in the dx are aberrant, signs of a disorder.

The label itself serves to suppress certain behaviours, and to "encourage" others, in the POPULATION at LARGE. It is NOT "us" so much that are the targets, not "us" that society is concerned about, but everybody else! "We" are just being used, to carry/wear the scary costume.

PS; thank you Anbuend, and Merle, for clarifications on several points.
That's an interesting idea, about another possible expression of panic about aging population, Sinsboldly. There is def a backlash about abortion "rights".

Last edited by ouinon on 01 Jan 2008, 9:53 am, edited 2 times in total.

I would say both AS and Homosexuality are "neutral abnormalities," that is, they are significant deviations form what is typical but they are deviations that are neither good nor bad (unlike, say, Schizophrenia or Bipolar, which are negative abnormalities and thus mental illnesses).

Homosexuality is not a matter of choice.

I think I understand your viewpoint though. Extrapolating from there, it can be argued that one can choose to have Aspergers by choosing to live in society.

I'm going to refrain from saying what I would like to say to you, simply because I hope you are just profoundly misinformed. Homosexuality is not a CHOICE, it is a predisposition. Do you think people CHOOSE to be gay so they can enjoy the spoils of being flamed, abused, discriminated against and treated sub-human? Our culture has come a long way, but it is still falling sadly short of where it needs to be. People who favor those of the same sex are born that way. They can't shut it off, not truly. I know there are religious righters out there who believe that homosexuality is failure to deny satan, but that is ridiculous crap.

It makes me sad to think that there are still people in the world who think this way.

Now, regarding the OP, eh, I dunno.

I would like to see more acceptance of neurodiversity. While I want therapy for my non-verbal child so he can get talking (for the sake of improving his own frustration levels and helping him mainstream better) I see most autistic therapies as somewhat cruel. Why force people to make eye contact when it is so uncomfortable for them? Why not just have others (NTs) come to accept that not all people feel warm and fuzzy about eye contact and get over it? In that respect, I agree. It's, in my opinion, like forcing gays to be straight. You can "fix" the behavior, but the real person is still there beneath the lies. No one should be forced to live a life of lies and deny who they are when their "problem" isn't hurting anyone.