Another point of view that anti-cure "Aspies" must

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Being gay is not a disability. THAT is why no cure is needed.

The answer is both - a cure for the problem should be sought but that also accommodation must also be sought. Sometimes they are the same thing, often they are not.

No, you can't. With the prevailing attitudes about disability, if there were a cure for autism, autistic people would not be allowed to get work, get education, get disability support, or get any accommodations if they did not take that cure. I am already required to go to therapy for my autism to be eligible for the help I get. If I refused, they would throw me out and I would not have the opportunity to go to school or get a job. Thankfully, the therapists I work with are just as anti-cure as I am, being mostly psychology grad students and not yet jaded out of their idealism.

The decision is yours as to whether or not to even be concerned about it at this point. I'm not concerned about it right now. To see why, see my comments a few posts up. ^^^^

Willard, succinct and wonderful as always. Loved the "radio shack" comment We have Tandy over here in Oz. Maybe I should pay them a visit.

Mics

Actually there's a good deal of research showing that "severe autism" and "high functioning autism" are not actually good categories if you're going by people's cognitive skills, among other reasons. People with so-called "severe autism" by typical measures, and people with "high functioning" autism by typical measures, are indistinguishable in cognitive pattern on certain tests.

There are genuine differences between autistic people but that one is not it.

Additionally, if there were no difference, then there would not be people who switch from one classification to the other (in both directions), as well as people who get classified in one direction or another primarily based on what time of day they're being looked at and which criteria are used.

On a personal level I know a good deal about how to recognize people with my own variant of autism, which is not one that has a name yet, but is the set of characteristics that gets me and other people like me classified as autistic. (There are many such sets of characteristics, some of which probably overlap and some of which probably don't.)

People like me tend to have: Emphasis on sensory pattern-based knowing/learning rather than abstract idea-based knowing/learning (including in how we learn language if we manage to do so, and this sensory way of knowing/learning continues throughout our lives rather than stopping at the age of 4 or something, so we become extremely adept at it), receptive language delays and a continuing lack of good receptive language unless we are actively putting forth effort (and those of us who learn expressive language may even learn it as a pattern of sound-based responses before we learn to understand a single word or even what words are for), frequent fluctuations in skills throughout the day or throughout the lifetime (including many who lose skills that we appear to have gained), relatively easy comprehension of each other's body language and actions (and even our use of word based language if we have it), tendency towards a hard-to-describe relationship to movement and thought that's still very specific (a big part of it being a discrepancy between triggered/involuntary/nonvoluntary actions and deliberate ones as far as ability to carry them out), a feel that language and ideas are killers of understanding, and a number of other traits.

As far as I can tell we are a minority among autistic people in general. But still I have met several people whose lives fit into this general pattern. And, those of us who do fit this pattern cross nearly all conventional classifications of autistic people. We are diagnosed with autism, atypical autism/PDD-NOS, and sometimes Asperger's (although usually the last is because the person is measuring language abilities purely in terms of delay, when some of us had highly idiosyncratic and echolalic language but spoke on time or early, which is technically supposed to throw you into autism or PDD-NOS). We are classified as high-functioning, mid-functioning, and low-functioning, none of which reflect our actual abilities -- and due to skill fluctuations as well as how well we manage to acquire the appearance of certain skills whether or not they are really there, many of us like me have ended up with some people calling us high functioning and others calling us low functioning. Some of us speak and some of us don't. Some of us work and some of us don't.

But our high level of mutual understanding of each other suggests that we have something in common with each other that is more important than any of those classifications. And that such classifications divide us into artificially separate categories when it is clear to each other that we belong in the same category regardless. My 'cognitive doppelganger' is (naturally) within this group of people, and we have as close to perfect understanding of each other as any human being could realistically ask for (we are not identical by any means but the shared understanding is unprecedented in either of our lives). We actually have very similar cognitive profiles, and very similar levels of self-care skills. But due to what we view as superficial appearances, I have usually been categorized as low functioning (even when I was regarded as highly intelligent) and she has usually been categorized as high functioning (even when she was regarded as highly incapable). I get my services through the state and her S.O. does the same things for her, so if her S.O. died or left her she would be in danger of her life unless she moved back in with family or something. And she depends on him partly because she would have a really hard time qualifying for the kind of services I get despite her diagnosis.

I really resent that people like me are forced to be in different categories from the people we care about, just because someone decides based on the most ridiculously superficial attributes which ones of us count as 'mild' and which 'severe' (which doesn't correlate at all with the way we view ourselves and each other). It's partly this that made it take over half my life before I found anyone who understood me on that level. I count myself very lucky that I have found the handful of people I have, who 'speak my language' in every way I never dared hope for even when I wished to know other people like me. It would be easier if more of us weren't encouraged to divide ourselves up based on autism/PDDNOS/Asperger status or high functioning/mild/low functioning/severe status. Especially because we're not all that common already even among autistic people, and most of us end up lumped in with people very different from us and divided from the people best equipped to understand us.

So from that standpoint I can say pretty clearly that there is plenty of proof even on a personal level that similarity in thinking and perception exists across all conventional categories. And I know there is scientific evidence in a broader cross-section of autistic people as well (I just co-presented with a researcher far more versed in that stuff than I am). In fact, there's no real evidence that all autistic people of the "same" so-called functioning level have the same kind of cognition either, but that just gets assumed, because politically (and this kind of diagnostic gerrymandering is pretty much always politically (as in who has the power) based, as you can see by the fact that the person who divides autistic people up like this doesn't question the diagnostic status of "high functioning" people who agree with him) the people who rant on and on about "LFA people not being represented by HFAs or not-really-autistics wanting no cure" are generally not interested in dividing autistic people up by the actual dividing lines between us and asserting that "HFA people can't speak for HFA people".

(Personally I find this "who can speak for who" thing tedious though, because the point of disability-rights points of view, including opposition to a cure, is partly to avoid being classified by our medical labels and instead act from specific ethical principles. What matters is that we share common oppression, medical labels are used largely to divide and conquer when they are spewed out at disability rights activists. Yes there are different experiences that need to be respected, but they're far more nuanced than these crude HFA/LFA divisions. Additionally, I am of the opinion that those of us the furthest from the norm are the ones who need to be protected the most from the kind of power-over that is used to divide disabled people from each other and allow parents and professionals to control our lives.)

I'm practically the opposite--logic, patterns, and cause-and-effect are big for me; things have to make sense and fit into bigger patterns, and I can't learn something if I don't know how it connects to everything else. I've read about and met autistics who have similar traits, with lots of different functioning labels.

I wonder if you could tailor an autistic person's education individually to them by matching up skill patterns to curricula? That would make a lot more sense than just sticking functioning labels on people. Support levels would be useful, I think, for the purpose of figuring out how much help a person needed; but at school and when working with therapists, cognitive profiles might be the ideal.

I'm the same way. It frustrates my husband to no end, but if I don't understand it I don't retain it.

It might be possible. The best educational environment I ever happened to be in, was of all things a very unconventional Catholic preschool. They had this huge bunch of activities everywhere, all of which involved learning of some sort. Most of the day, they let everyone run around doing whatever they wanted. (Although they still called my parents because they found my behavior really weird even for there.) If all of my education had continued along those lines, it would have been much better for me.

I am not very good at the kind of learning that is deliberately taught or even deliberately learned. I sort of soak up information from my environment without intending to, and that sort of information (and the patterns between it, although I suspect the two of us might mean different things by patterns) is the kind that sticks with me. The more deliberately-inputted kind of information either goes in one ear and out the other, or (when I had the kind of cognitive energy for it, which was probably roughly six years of my life) goes in one ear, gets parroted in a way that pleases people, and after a time goes out the other. So the only way to teach me something is generally to expose me to something without forcing my nose in it and hope I pick it up. Rather bad for conventional teaching strategies, at least if the goal is actual long-term learning. My suspicion is that if I were supposed to learn things like that, the situation would have to be so radically altered from traditional teaching that it might not even look like teaching.

(All of which is sort of off topic.)

Everything that I could say has been said, basically, but I still want to say that I disagree with the blog post, in rather the same way that everyone else does.

I have a friend. Her diagnosis is autism. Everyone looks down on her. She's a decent artist (her style's not my cup of tea) and dresses fashionably. She talks about her friends, and outings to various places. She wears makeup and has a slight "warrior chick" vibe if you look closely at her while she's standing.

I have sensory issues that prevent the wearing of fashionable clothing. I look awful. I don't talk about friends that much, because I don't have much to say that's normal. (I have plenty to say on subjects like writing, autism, lycanthropy, psychiatry... but not a great deal to say about friends and weather, except that I love the rain and the fog and the cold, which gets me laughed at.) I can't wear makeup.

I speak normally when I have something to say, and can easily discuss complicated matters. She has trouble modulating her voice and acts childish (of course, she's treated like a child, as far as I can ascertain). I'm perceived as higher-functioning. Then she's disrespected in my presence.

The other day, I was told I don't look like an Aspie at all. Fine, that's a valid position to take. I was told this by a Japanese woman (not to be racist, but we all know how they are) who didn't know about Asperger's until literally minutes ago when I started explaining it to her. Said woman knows me in one context only-- a context in which we can talk, one-on-one, in a relatively quiet area, relatively informally, about one of my special interests. Sitting next to each other, at that.

...She's never seen me pace.
...She wasn't there when I left four schools (the last one after less than a week).
...She has never seen me have a meltdown.
...She doesn't know how it feels when the feel of my hair on my back is unbearable, but wearing a top is worse.

(Note that I've gained skills since leaving the school I failed at after such a short time, my last public meltdown was months ago and the last time I've experienced any kind of sensory overload at all was more than a year ago. I don't blame her for her incredulity, and I'm only mildly-- and pleasantly-- surprised, though I am slightly offended that she finds having a life incompatible with having Asperger's. But really, I'm just glad her first introduction to it was so positive.)

Like everyone else here and not here, I used to be lower-functioning. My curebie mother has mellowed so far out on that matter that she's gone from trying to convince me to agree to chelation and homeopathy to explaining that I'm not the sort of person the curebies are talking about because I'm too high-functioning. Not that it's acceptable anyway, but I do have to point out that I was the sort of person that one curebie was talking about at one point. That has to give me at least as much right to speak for the children of curebies in general as any given mother. (In specific, of course not. For non-speaking children of curebies, no. For incontinent children of curebies, no. Let's just get those two things straight. *waves "impairment is bad" flag*)

I think if there were a "cure" for being gay, the result would be bisexuality. As in, adding attraction to the opposite sex without getting rid of the attraction to one's own sex. (And cure is it quotes because that's using the term loosely.)

(Edit to add) Come to think of it, something similar could be said about autism. An ideal "cure" (again, using the term loosely) would give someone the ability to use NT style thinking when they choose, but not get rid of their autistic thinking, so that they can also use their autistic thinking when they choose. Adding, rather than taking away.

But there are still plenty more people with autism that don't know it. I didn't know I had it until I was about 42. It just wasn't diagnosed when I was a kid. And I am certain my father has it and he has never been diagnosed. Ironically, in my case, it was a LFA girl that I met online that suggested that I get tested for it.

I think that the person's intelligence and autism are two separate genes. Its possible to have smart people who are autistic and dumb people who are NT.

Because it so clearly runs in families, the genetic link can't be denied. But then again, we also know that certain teratogenic drugs can cause autism. But the question is whether or not that drug induced autism is hereditary. Thalidomide is a teratogen that causes children to be born without all their body parts. Yet, there does not seem to be any evidence that the children of thalidomide babies have any significant increase in birth defects.

Its like I've already said: Autism is like a poorly running car engine - there is more than one way to make it do that.

But there isn't one, nor should there be. The LGBT community is completely fine with themselves. Why should we change just because the rest of society deems us 'wrong'?

And THAT could apply to many Autistic people as well.

It disturbs me a bit that, in the article, having a girlfriend is taken as a sign of success. As if a person not in a relationship would be less successful.
I wonder what the writer would think of asexual people.

Looking at the subject heading of this thread, I'm thinking, no, there are no points of view that "must" be considered. Just ones that it would be helpful to consider. Sometimes because those points of view have merit, and sometimes simply because it's a point of view that some of those one is speaking to hold. Yes, that does mean sometimes considering points of view that we feel are without merit. Simply because doing so helps us know our audience, and thus how to converse with them.

But it's not a "must" it's a what's useful, beneficial, for what one wants to achieve.

There's a reason I quite directly indicated that I'm using the word "cure" loosely. That includes, I'm not using it with the assumption that the "cure" is something imposed on one by someone else.

If someone chooses to broaden their horizons, broaden their repertoire of skills/behaviors and such, something that enables them to do so is the kind of "cure" that I think is a good thing.