WP tagline like saying Homosexuality is Not a Disease

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Been thinking.
The more i think the more it seems to me that there is nothing wrong with the behaviours called aspergers.
That all of this medicalisation is a smoke screen for discrimination against certain ways of being.
When i read the dx list of criteria now I just keep thinking " but what's wrong with being/behaving like that?" There are far worse behaviours widely considered normal, if regrettable. Why are we being picked on, sidelined, by a medical term?

The tag line for site is "Aspergers is not a disease". At one point i was arguing that if this is so then is hardly useful to identify with the word Aspergers at all. Just begun to wonder whether is like the situation for gays at beginning of 1900s, after the word "homosexuality" had been invented, to refer to a sexual "pathology".
Now only totally unreconstructed types, some christian fundamentalists etc, think homosexuality is an illness anymore .
Gays still don't like the word though, with its associations with medical pathology . And even the word "gay" has been partly superceded by "queer" ( pride) which breaks down the artificial group "lines" set up by the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual". People are mixtures in varying proportions of many kinds of sexuality and gender.

When i first joined WP I thought it was wonderful to find that i had some kind of medically recognised condition to explain so much of what has has gone wrong in my life. Now I think it is just discrimination , against ways of being which have been pathologised to give people an excuse for finding our behaviour difficult or disturbing. Something to justify them.
And i am feeling appalled and sad.

What did it feel like for the gays labelled "ill" in this way? I wonder how many believed it. That their way of being was pathological, I mean.
I seem to remember reading that for some it was in fact a relief, at least for a while; it made it, bizarrely, seem more acceptable.
They were supposed to get it "cured", by going for therapy, hypnosis, behavioural etc. But what if a "cure for homosexuality" in your lifetime seemed unlikely; were you supposed to suppress all symptoms, all your spontaneous homosexual impulses , because were "signs of illness"? Were sickness.

Last edited by ouinon on 05 Jan 2008, 12:10 pm, edited 17 times in total.

very good points there. It is something i too have also been wondering about. It is a possibility that may happen one day. Howevwer homosexuality and As or autism are entirely different things. With homosexuality it is someones chouice but with as/autism it is not anybody choice to have it.
Some good points made though

um... I don't think homosexuality, being gay/queer, is chosen, not usually anyway. I believe there is still some debate over how much is nurture and how much "nature"/genes, but choice doesn't come into it much!!

In a way I think it is good that NTs are seperating us as "Aspies" because then they know who we are. I think if they are using it is a bad thing then that is bad, but otherwise I have nothing agaisnt this label.

But then most/many people will think, with official justification, that they aren't like that at all.
Like people happy to separate off homosexuality because meant that "they" were "alright", whereas sexuality is much more fluid and continuous than that. As has been discovered , people do NOT divide neatly up into gay and non-gay.
It's more complicated than that. I am feeling very sunk by all the posts which subscribe to the term Aspergers, which contribute to its power, by chipping in, as with astrology descriptions; "that describes me", " I do that too", etc.

Unless it's like women's consciousness raising, in which all spoke about what had suffered because of being woman. Which also unfortunately in some/many cases contributed to a hardening of gender categories. "Men are like this, women are like that..." etc

But perhaps it's a necessary stage/step. Perhaps have to go through this before can dismantle it. Like gays had to. Gay bashing, etc.

PS: not sure why you think it's a good thing that people "know who we are", apart from it being impossible. Sounds scary more than anything! Like the jewish people exposed in germany by the system of papers based on family trees to prove no jewish blood etc.

Well the reason why homosexuality is not considered an illness anymore is because a bunch of gay people crashed a big psychiatry convention (think it was APA) around 1972 and had a big protest. The organization had a vote to remove it from the DSM which was something like 5000 yes vs 3000 no. There are several books that have shed light on how something gets classified as a disease in the DSM--stuff like if someone's wife suffered a symptom they wouldn't put that in there because they didn't want their wife to be seen as abnormal. So some conditions could be more arbitrary than others and could legitimately seen as discriminating against a variation of an imaginary norm. In some sense I feel that the label of Aspergers is "safer" than a DX of schizophrenia or bipolar or some of the other things people were misdiagnosed with before ASDs were well known.

What is the purpose of the term aspergers? What does it achieve? Does it subjugate, silence, disempower a group of people who might be more difficult to control otherwise?
Does it make them into better consumers ?

Does it serve the purposes of any group in particular that a certain segment of society be seen as literally unable to see other peoples points of view, and particularly prone to black and white thinking etc?

Whose interests does it serve that the label reinforces and reaffirms the "values" of group activity, of human interaction, more than anything else? ( by making other behaviours seem malsaine)

Efforts to stitch the family back together again with marriage counselling, Tax changes, etc have failed, so instead label as pathological all solitary behaviours, all preference for own company? Label as disabled, needing care, those who are in that situation, or those, ( like children) who show signs of being in it later on in life?

There have been many articles in recent years concerned about the number of people living alone in our society.
Does a medical label explaining unpopular social skills as brain wiring benefit those who are unhappy living alone, in the majority men, ( who it is well known find living alone more difficult than women) ? And who have been suffering from the relaxation of the divorce laws.

Is it in fact part of the ripples still spreading from the changes in womens rights this last century?

NB: oddly enough the pathologisation/medicalisation of homosexuality occurred at a time ( late 1800s) when there was a severe shortage of marriageable men , after various wars, and yet at a time when women still "had" to be married off, so that it was important to "encourage" men to want to marry, rather than be merry bachelors ........... !?

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Dec 2007, 5:18 pm, edited 11 times in total.

So for you the label is progress towards reintegrating "us" into society, but it still refers to a real group of people?

Homosexuality is a choice whereas AS isn't.

People who call themselves homosexual may be attracted to people of the same gender due to how they were raised, their morals, and their environment but they ultimately have a choice in who they choose to have sex with.

I was born with HFA. I tried making friends but was unable to. I tried fitting in but couldn't. I tried to understand people but was unable to. That's a lot different than choosing to be alone or choosing to avoid people. I consider my autism a medical condition because I was born with certain neurological weaknesses that resulted in me acting autistic. If it was a choice, then I wouldn't consider it a disease even though psychiatrists say people make "wrong" choices because they have a disease.

That quite simply isn't true as i already pointed out above. Unless they want to kiss goodbye to ever experiencing sexual desire or fulfilment with a partner most homosexuals can not "choose" to have sex with the opposite sex. Unless they are bi.
The true parallel with a homosexual not ever having sex with their own sex, because "it's a choice" ! !, is that of someone on WP suppressing all passionate interests, making constant effort to look people in the eye, forcing themselves to spend time engaging in small talk with people etc, .......

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Dec 2007, 4:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Being gay and having gay sex are two entirely different things. You end up gay, bisexual, asexual or straight because of genetics. You choose to have sex (or not have sex) with whomever based on social conditioning, moral code, education and aesthetics.

Exactly, thank you!!
Imagine, Zendell, if you were never able to spend time alone again, never able to follow your passionate interest in something again, always had to look people straight in the eye. That is what you are suggesting a homosexual should be able to do when you say it is a choice.

Is it possible that your understanding of them was correct but unwelcome? Many people would rather not be understood, or will only accept certain "understandings" of themselves, because other versions/interpretations, more accurate ones, are too painful. ( adults are particularly likely to find childrens understanding of them unwelcome, and will reject a childs clear view of things)

It is not at all unusual anyway, despite all the publicity which suggests otherwise; adults are constantly failing utterly to understand children, whites to understand black people and vice versa, men to understand women, etc. Where does the idea come from that it is NORMAL to understand other people?It is more like the exception that proves the rule,
The pressure has grown to point that people think that should be able to understand everyone, should be "able" to fit in. . Garbage. And what total hypocritical self-delusion too, to ignore all the cases of incomprehension between ages, and other classes, and colours and sexes.

Fitting in.. pah! What on earth does that mean? Making no difference, being unremarkable, of no significance, invisible, irrelevant, changing nothing, having no effect, might as well not exist .

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Dec 2007, 6:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Who is this term for? Who does it help? In what way is the term aspergers shaping behaviour?
It's not describing a real thing; it's like a dog for herding sheep into the pen. What/where is the pen?

Following controversy and protests from gay activists at APA annual conferences from 1970 to 1973, as well as the emergence of new data from researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, the seventh printing of the DSM-II, in 1974, no longer listed homosexuality as a category of disorder. After talks led by the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who had been involved in the DSM-II development committee, a vote by the APA trustees in 1973, confirmed by the wider APA membership in 1974, had replaced the diagnosis with a milder category of "sexual orientation disturbance". This was replaced with the diagnosis of ego-dystonic homosexuality in the DSM-III in 1980, but this was removed in 1987 with the release of the DSM-III-R.[3][9][10] A category of "sexual disorder not otherwise specified" continues in the DSM-IV, which may include "persistent and marked distress about one’s sexual orientation”.

Are you saying that homosexuals wouldn't enjoy sex with the opposite sex? If so, I wasn't aware of that. I always thought it was a preference. I took a sociology class in college and we were told that male heterosexuals will choose to have gay sex if they are locked up in prison for a long time and then go back to women when they are released. I assume heterosexuals wouldn't have gay sex if they didn't enjoy it so it seems like homosexuals would enjoy straight sex but choose otherwise out of personal preference. All I know is that I don't choose to act autistic.