WP tagline like saying Homosexuality is Not a Disease

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I like your line of thinking: that AS is, ultimately, a social construct.

Like homosexuality. Homosexuality was invented less than 150 years ago, and was "revolutionary" in that was used to refer to a person rather than an act.

Before homosexuality was invented sexual acts between people of same sex were seen as more or less of a problem depending on the sex,class, status, etc of the person.
Attention was focussed on the "act". And acts did not define a person. A "homosexual", for instance, did not exist before 1875.

The invention of homosexuality was part of a movement which began to separate people up into groups, identify them, by their actions/behaviours on a spectrum/dichotomously ( an example of black and white thinking in fact, unlike the four humors which had served medicine till then).

The consequences have been enormous across the whole of society. And the results are still coming in.

Last edited by ouinon on 31 Dec 2007, 4:12 pm, edited 7 times in total.

I think there is a big difference from "not being a people person" and having life impairing social anxiety. Or enjoying the feeling of a soft and fuzzy blanket as a "stim", compared to biting the inside of your mouth until it's raw and bleeding because you couldn't stop. A difference between not being good at sports, and being unable to catch anything that's thrown to you most of the time. I get the feeling that some people on here have the idea that a diagnosis of AS is given out because we're "not like other people" or we don't get satisfaction from socialization like others do, or because we enjoy doing weird things to sooth ourselves. But it's my understanding that in order to get an official diagnosis, your symptoms have to actually impair your ability to lead a normal life. I don't think that this means we get a dx just because we don't look or act or feel like everyone else. For the most part, I think that if someone gets an official dx they probably have some actual issues. I'm sure every neurotypical has experienced every symptom of AS at one point. Was clumsy. Got into an ongoing mood where they wanted to be left alone. Etc. Etc. But this isn't what makes a disorder. I just hear so much on here about people talking up their AS like it makes them cooler than all the normal people. It's beginning to p*** me off.

People are going to hate me for saying that.

I don't see how black people or women are comparable to someone with a mental disorder.

If your ability to live life the way you need to is not impaired, and you think you're just "diverse", then tell the doctor who dx'd you to go screw themselves.

I think calling it totally a social construct is a bit misleading. IMO many mental illnesses and abnormalities have fairly arbitrary labels and boundaries, but the behavioral traits and the underlying neurological differences relative to most people used to define those boundaries are definitely not social constructions.

Not clear in what way these symptoms supposed to prove anything about Aspergers, because they are both explainable within frameworks of anxiety and/or OCDs.

What, actually, IS the difference between those? Isn't that what it means being no good at sports?

Not so much because really not like others, but because it is currently socially convenient/useful to stigmatise/make an example of poor socialisers.

Normal life? What is that? Are we talking the TV version, or the one in Edward Scissorhands? Simply being a woman could be said to impair your ability to lead a normal life. How many women dare go out alone after dark in a city? Simply being black can impair your ability to live this so called "normal life". Being gay in the early 1900s meant suppressing your sexuality or living in fear of ruinous exposure. Where is the normal life there? WHO in fact actually has this "normal life", which itself is nothing but a construct?

EVERYbody has problems; sensory processing/integration difficulties for instance, anxiety, tics , motor-skills impairment, poorly developed proprioceptive systems resulting in less reliable/solid connection to body, etc etc, and it doesn't make an identity. It is just differences and difficulties.

One person may have A,B, and C, another B and C. A third might have B, C, and D. A fourth A, C, and D, . Another A, and D. Yet another A, D, and E. To draw lines around them and say that having two out of the first three makes you "something" is not an impartial act. It is political.

There's no reason to identify someone by their difficulties, except when a particular kind of "difficulty" becomes of crucial importance to society, as exemplifying something which isn't working, then people experiencing those problems most acutely may suddenly receive a lot of attention. Labels and research. Discrimination advances by justifying itself.

That's what low self-esteem sounds like. Like women in the 70's; what am i saying? women in the 21st century, who get together and villify men, put down men, try to persuade themselves that despite women still only earning on average 75% of what men earn for the same work women really are the equals of men, by saying they are "better" than men.

Last edited by ouinon on 31 Dec 2007, 4:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Before long people with the label of aspergers may find themselves excluded from posts of responsibility, management, and decision/policy making, because of a "scientifically proven" "lack of empathy", and "a tendency to black and white thinking".
People without a spouse/partner and children ( there or on the way) will look less appealing to employers. They might be "aspergers".

Again, it's not those who get labelled/diagnosed that the label is mainly for. It is "encouragement" ( rod/stick) for anyone capable of "getting it together" enough to have children. (The developed nations are looking at disaster unless can get seriously large numbers of children up and running within the next 20 years! or institute other possibly more far-reaching changes in social organisation.) The term Aspergers will teach children that "real" health is "being good at people skills", that healthy human functioning is "bonding", active sex-lives, and the "right" clothes and correct gender signals/body language to achieve that......

Last edited by ouinon on 31 Dec 2007, 3:25 pm, edited 6 times in total.

I don't like the original quote about "NTs" supposedly lacking respect for any diversity.

But I also really, really, really don't like the idea that somehow disability and diversity are incompatible things, that in fact disability is not a form of diversity because diversity is only for differences that are supposedly more trivial than that and only for people who all function roughly the same way.

ouinon, you've once again articulated better than I did what I was trying to say!

For others who'd like to explore this concept further, please do read what's out there:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=asperg ... =firefox-a

@ Odin particularly:
I am, by no means, doubting the very real cluster of neurologically generated difficulties and advantages that someone with an AS label has. What I am endeavouring to say is that society may well have very recently latched onto it and created another way of separating and undermining a whole group of people in the interests of social control (and underneath that, justifying its discrimination). This means, as ouinon has well said, that society and its official agents can use that label against AND in favour of us.

Given the history of society's behaviour towards different, atypical groups, I am extremely loathe to imagine that their use of such a label is or will be favourable.

Society seems to revel in finding yet more 'out-groups' - ok, so now we don't pathologise homosexual people, we are not allowed to call people in wheelchairs names etc. So, we invent yet other 'baddies' - currently, Islamic fundamentalists, smokers, overweight people, people who wear hoodies, people who wear their britches round their knees...it gets ridiculous, and obvious.

In 10 years time it'll be Christian fundamentalist suicide bombers or Radical Mormons against Islam, or people who eat saturated animal fats or two car families or families with more than 3 children or people with diabetes or the latest anti-establishment youth movement ...

I'm sorry you don't like what I said. But my reading of social hisoty is that the very fact that there are strenous attempts to redress the grievances speaks to the history of overwhelmigly NT lack of respect and value of diverse populations.

I am not at all sure what you mean about disability and diversity and that you don't like the idea that they might be incompatible. But I think that's me not reading your paragraph right!

Forgive me, but my brain doesn't seem to be taking much in this evening. I'm not sure what your argument is. Though I don't myself see any particular talking up of AS on this thread - although you're right: some people who come to WP do seem to think that AS is way better than NT.

This is exactly the "knotty problem" /issue/hypocrisy/glitch which started me on the road to thinking about Aspergers as social construct like Homosexuality.

I had read nominalists thread, "Ideologies of Oppression", and although could get my head round adultism, sexism, heterosexism etc as being ideologies which justify discrimination and oppression based on the supposed superiority of one group over another, I just couldn't "get" the disability one. It just kept reforming in my head as justified treatment of "differently"/"less" abled people based on real "deficiencies"/difficulties.

And i just couldn't seem to shake it.

But when i began to get handle on Aspergers as a social construct like Homosexuality I began to see where the problem lay for me about "disability" vs "diversity". It was also Donna Williams' points at the Awares conference, about "autism fruit salad", which put me on the track. " Is there such a thing as Autism ?" she called her paper.

The problem was in my treating Aspergers as something real, rather than a label being applied to a certain group of behaviours so as to artificially "form" a "character"/personality with them. Like Frankensteins monster. Take bundle of bits and put together to resemble a person. It's an illusion. But subscribing to it gives it life. Believing in it makes it breathe and walk. And it frightens people.

I am so glad to have understood this about diversity and discrimination.

Thank you, Anbuend , for your many excellent clarifications at several points on this thread.

Last edited by ouinon on 31 Dec 2007, 4:47 pm, edited 7 times in total.

Not really all people that is the problem its society, not all people are supposedly lacking respect for any diversity... Like sticking everyone into 1 bag, like society does, someone does something or a select few then the hole lot are to blame... just remember that not all people are the same & looking at it like that destroys anyone who has diversity... Normally it is just people been mislead extrovert's mostly go on what other people say, or read once from someone who heard it...

Basicly this is what he is talking about...

Social Darwinians sought to explain crime, alcoholism, poverty, prostitution, homelessness, and, of course, insanity as the price paid for the inheritance of “defective germ plasma.” That is, all society’s problems were seen as genetic. The way to solve them was through eugenics, a systematic attempt to increase desirable and decrease undesirable genetic traits in the population. To illustrate, British scientist Francis Galton13 promoted these ideas in two basic ways. “Positive eugenics” encouraged the healthiest and most intelligent to marry and procreate. “Negative eugenics” included the institutionalization, castration, and sterilization of those, including schizophrenics, who were considered “defective” or “undesirable.”

I don't know how to say this politely. Oh well, this is an autism forum. Anyway, that's not an apology. If you're going to apologize, please say that you're sorry for what you said, not for what I think about what you said. If you're not going to apologize, then please just don't. But there's no need for fake apologies, which is what the above sounds like.



It's only overwhelmingly NT (if you mean NT to mean non-autistic, which is a non-literal meaning of it) because there's more NTs than autistic people. But autistic people have also been part of all that, and I suspect that an overwhelming amount of autistic people (compared to the total amount of autistic people) have been part of it as well. I suspect this because I've seen so much prejudice in the autistic community that there's no way we're immune.



I'm talking to the other person there. The one who kept saying that somehow, having trouble doing something was different than "just diversity," which read like an interpretation of diversity as all meaning things that don't cause any difficulty, which is not my definition of diversity nor the disability community's.

I wish we could get underneath or beyond, even for a moment, this 'mental disorder' label and leave it to one side.

Before 1994 there was NO Aspergers Syndrome. People like me, my father, my grandmother, her mother and brother et al were just a bit eccentric, very clever but, you know, a bit too 'sensitive'. But definitely not mentally disordered or pathologised as AS folk have been increasingly over the last 10 or so years.

As far as I'm concerned, AS is a different variation of neurological presentation. It has its own strengths and weaknesses. Now that society is increasingly hellbent on 'teamwork' and 'social skills' etc (can't be faffed with making a whole long list here but I'm sure you get what I mean), people who have been assessed with this variant are finding that they are identified as 'suffering from a disorder'.

I agree that no one has to accept any diagnosis a medic or psych chooses to slap on you! But often we have to play the medical game in order to get various accommodations and support.


In fact, we could probably get along quite well - without the medicalising and pathologising BUT WITH a bit more understanding of what AS neurology actually is. After all, my forebears managed rather well without being singled out as anything but the slightly more favourable 'genius eccentrics'!


I drew the comparison between AS and black people/women to illustrate, I hoped, that the largely NT world does make discriminations against (and sometimes for) groups of people that it first of all labels (usually to the detriment of the group) and then perceives to be outside the norm. Nothing more than that - but as ouinon pointed out: this drawing of lines around outgroups IS a political act, a social construct, and can be very dangerous.

As you'll have gathered, I do not believe that AS is a mental disorder. Neither do I conceive AS as 'better than'. It is what it is.

Last edited by lupin on 31 Dec 2007, 4:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Eeek, Anbuend! All I said was that I was sorry that you didn't like what I said. I was sad and sorry because your post got me wondering if you were upset or annoyed- you said you didn't like what I'd said but you didn't explain why. I wouldn't want anyone here to feel upset or angry or offended. And I felt sorry that I hadn't explained myself so well. I was just saying I felt sorry about those things. I wasn't faking anything or trying to be smart or whatever. It was just a straightforward literal expression about being sorry and sad.