Do you still believe in the Autistic Community & Culture

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I've been participating in a real live community. I like doing that but even there I can feel like not wanting to talk and feel like an outsider in some ways. It can be nice being around them especially these two people who have been real nice to me. I think it might be the only social thing I've ever wanted to do.

Sorry to sound pessimistic, but I don't want to see something like that. It annoys me when other groups do that. Use the most common on the news now: gay pride. Why is that a point of pride? Would you not be proud were you hetero? Why make that your personal identity, as though it is your core defining characteristic above all your other characteristics, making it the eidos of You? Same thing goes to any hypothetical hetero pride movement, or an aspie pride movement, etc.; none of it makes rational sense to me.

I am me. I'm defined by how I live my life, not whether or not I have Asperger's. I'm a vegetarian, but I'm more comfortable around hunters who share my interest in firearms and can engage in "gun talk" than vegetarians that make their entire self-identity revolve around their diet. If you're an omnivore then you probably know the type of annoying activist vegetarian that I'm talking about...

I've found WP extremely useful for self-discovery. When I joined I had just stumbled upon Asperger's on the Internet by accident, and this place answered so many questions for me. It's given me much clarity in understanding Asperger's and how it relates to me. I'm very thankful for for that. It's more of a resource for me than a community.

I don't consider myself a part of any community. (In fact it's one reason I moved to Amish country, to reside inside a community that would not try to make me a part of that community.) I think by definition you're not going to see aspies do these sorts of things. Being the center of attention in a crowded pride parade surrounded by large crowds of strangers, coming together for large crowded social events...sounds very NT to me! Even if I did want to make Asperger's the center of my life, I don't think that I could enjoy participating any of those things.

The idea that autistic people are asocial and nonautistic people are social is a complete myth. So is the idea that more social autistic people are less autistic. If that were true, then there would not be autistic people of all subtypes who travel from all around the world just to spend a week with other people who understand them. It's much like the myth that cats are asocial.

From what I've read of aspies (not sure about other types of autistics) they tend to have anxiety around crowds, even if they do want to be social. Some don't, and some that do are are able to get over that. But even though the asocial presumption is not universally true, it seems to me that the odds are still stacked against getting a large group of aspies to march in a parade, for example.

Well regarding the idea of people with AS, HFA (or some other form of autism, sorry the bombardment of alphabet soup is sometimes too much for me being asocial, I know that the stereotype of the person with autism is that they are asocial. But I would say that stereotypes are very rarely encountered. Even Mr "average" is unlikely to be found as for many human parameters the SD is large.

I would like to say that I agree with LabPet that few autists are hermits who have no desire to have social interactions. If we use a little of the terminology of the transactional analysis brigade we can define a social interaction as being a stroke. I know for a fact that some people need and want more strokes per year than others. I suspect that if a decent survey was done of people with AS that their average number of strokes required per year would be lower than the average NT's number of required strokes. Also I suspect that the social thermostat in the average autist is set differently to the typical NT. All people have a comfort zone for social interactions, at one end they have a area outside their comfort zone where they need social interactions (strokes) while at the other end they need solitude (no more stroking).

I will admit that I do have enjoyable "social interactions", I would like to say that much of what the transactional analysis experts have said on some subjects (including autism) is wrong. At least one person from the TA camp seems to have endorsed the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis, a hypothesis which I view as equally wrong and equally distasteful. Thomas Harris claims that the autist is in a state of "I am not OK, you are not OK" as a result of having too few strokes as a child. He also claimed that this caused the child to be in a world of their own and thus have autism.

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Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man !

Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.