Reply #117: There may be different forms...

[Banazir]

...although I'm not sure what the point of the different names for only two forms would be. I know some disagree with me.

I am obviously autistic. I can't do anything about it. Received years of behavior mod and couldn't pass for normal if my life depended on it.

It's very important for me therefore to combat discrimination against people who look obviously autistic as well as those who end up having to pass just because they can pass and society treats those of us who don't not very well. To make this a world where looking like me does not get me sent automatically to an institution when I go out my door, which has happened more times than I want to think about.

My biggest problem areas are in reliably being able to recognize and respond to my environment in useful ways. But there are things before that recognition and response that I value, things that the non-autistic language doesn't even have words for. Things that can only exist for a person who is not automatically processing information in the usual ways. I know I have social differences but next to other stuff they seem like a tangential side-issue.

I have no savant skills, but I also do not measure the value of my life or of the shape of my life by my skills. I am valuable because I exist, I am valuable as autistic because this is the shape in which I exist. I like this shape. I understand this shape in ways that people outside of me cannot. I have been presumed incapable of understanding, but that is not true. I know that I have an exact place in the universe and that this place does not include being turned into a non-autistic person. I need a good deal of unusual assistance, but I am not measured by a dollar value nor is anyone else or it gets into the realm of rampant ableism among other things. Those who assist me value me for who I am, not for what skills I do or do not have.

Autism is the configuration of my brain that gives rise to a number of things, not just a list of DSM characteristics. It is a word for a central part of how I am constructed. I cannot separate myself from my brain configuration, so I cannot imagine wanting a cure, any more than I would want to make non-autistic people autistic. Even if I had to spend the rest of my life without a reliable means of communication (and I have spent part of my life that way), it would not mean that my autism was this appendage that could or should be chopped off.

That is my stance on all this, and I am glad the article managed to convey this rather than resorting to the simplification of functioning level and "Asperger's" in order to drive home the point. Unfortunately some people will still read it that way, but our side has finally been represented as fairly as possible in the major media. And that is major.