“extremely low-functioning autistic individuals” lumps a lot of things together; many people can and do express political views while unable to live independently—that is, to depend on other people to grow, prepare and transport their food, but not to feed it to them.
And I realize that seriously gruesome things have been done to left-handed people in some times and places, and that many people suffer because of attempts to train them to be right-handed, but compared to things like being beaten for fidgeting when you can’t possibly stop fidgeting without having a metdown, it comes off a bit like “I have a tan so I understand black people”.
Having now gotten two different responses that both missed the point I thought I was making, I’m just going to acknowledge that I must have done a bad job expressing it and start over.
I would hope (perhaps this is mind projection—given that I would never be inclined to beat someone for fidgeting either) that the driving sentiment behind the desire to “cure” autism is not about eliminating alternative perceptual paradigms, unusually strong predispositions to literalism and consequentialism, and the like, but rather about enabling the ability to communicate effectively with other humans.
Obviously, if I am wrong about that, then that would just be horrifying. But I’d like to give the average parent of an autistic child a little more credit.
I agree, that would be a lovely thing. Actually, this interchange alerts me to the possibility that NT parents of autistic children might often be taking this stance, which is muddled sometimes by certain factors such as Autism Speaks being the largest autism-related not for profit in the US; them having huge frustration over parenthood which is hard in the first place; technology like AAC being a Scary Outside Thing and teaching your child how to be nice and say I Love You being well-approved parenting tactics, as well as heartwarming.
Sometimes, the world is so frightening that my inductive reasoning is obscured. I’m sorry for not giving you more credit, and I’ll mull over what I’ve learned here. I really should have seen it before. The fact that often, parents of autistic children who are nonverbal or not typically emotive say things like “I just want to hear my son say he loves me” or “I just want to hug him” makes it hard to see that those words do profess a desire to communicate, just in nonstandard-to-me ways.
Okay, what happened is that your position sounds a lot like another position that’s really common so we misinterpreted it.
I don’t think most cure proponents are evil bigots out to abuse minorities or anything. I do think that their concept of “ability to communicate effectively with other humans” is built in such a way as to overly favour “teach autistic people to conform to the norms we use” over “teach people in general to communicate with people in general even when norms break down” or over “give ’em fancy tech”.
But I’d like to give the average parent of an autistic child a little more credit.
I’d give many non-parents more credit than parents. Nephews and nieces might deserve the most. Random people might deserve about as much as parents, it would depend.
Read up, all of these have standard answers. The best answer to this argument is probably the Oak manifesto.
Low-functioning people do not seem to want cures more, inasmuch as functioning labels make sense at all and aren’t missing more important aspects.
The idea of a cure has problems.
“extremely low-functioning autistic individuals” lumps a lot of things together; many people can and do express political views while unable to live independently—that is, to depend on other people to grow, prepare and transport their food, but not to feed it to them.
And I realize that seriously gruesome things have been done to left-handed people in some times and places, and that many people suffer because of attempts to train them to be right-handed, but compared to things like being beaten for fidgeting when you can’t possibly stop fidgeting without having a metdown, it comes off a bit like “I have a tan so I understand black people”.
Having now gotten two different responses that both missed the point I thought I was making, I’m just going to acknowledge that I must have done a bad job expressing it and start over.
I would hope (perhaps this is mind projection—given that I would never be inclined to beat someone for fidgeting either) that the driving sentiment behind the desire to “cure” autism is not about eliminating alternative perceptual paradigms, unusually strong predispositions to literalism and consequentialism, and the like, but rather about enabling the ability to communicate effectively with other humans.
Obviously, if I am wrong about that, then that would just be horrifying. But I’d like to give the average parent of an autistic child a little more credit.
I agree, that would be a lovely thing. Actually, this interchange alerts me to the possibility that NT parents of autistic children might often be taking this stance, which is muddled sometimes by certain factors such as Autism Speaks being the largest autism-related not for profit in the US; them having huge frustration over parenthood which is hard in the first place; technology like AAC being a Scary Outside Thing and teaching your child how to be nice and say I Love You being well-approved parenting tactics, as well as heartwarming.
Sometimes, the world is so frightening that my inductive reasoning is obscured. I’m sorry for not giving you more credit, and I’ll mull over what I’ve learned here. I really should have seen it before. The fact that often, parents of autistic children who are nonverbal or not typically emotive say things like “I just want to hear my son say he loves me” or “I just want to hug him” makes it hard to see that those words do profess a desire to communicate, just in nonstandard-to-me ways.
Okay, what happened is that your position sounds a lot like another position that’s really common so we misinterpreted it.
I don’t think most cure proponents are evil bigots out to abuse minorities or anything. I do think that their concept of “ability to communicate effectively with other humans” is built in such a way as to overly favour “teach autistic people to conform to the norms we use” over “teach people in general to communicate with people in general even when norms break down” or over “give ’em fancy tech”.
I’d give many non-parents more credit than parents. Nephews and nieces might deserve the most. Random people might deserve about as much as parents, it would depend.