Okay, my last post seems to have confused at least one person.

It was based on the sort of thing like Questions for Heterosexuals.

So an explanation:

How have you learned to compensate for being nearly incapable of directly perceiving your surroundings?

That one stems from the fact that autistic people’s, in fact all disabled people’s, strengths are usually regarded as compensation for our weaknesses. Also, there is an assumption that if we have an area of weakness, we will develop superhuman powers to “compensate” for it. And people often make assumptions about what our weak points are without finding out first.

Since neurotypicals (people whose neurology is the standard-issue variety, not autistic, not other things either) also have specific weaknesses in cognition, I thought I would show how ridiculous these assumptions are, by turning it around and asking a question of a neurotypical person regarding an assumption about their weak areas.

A documented autistic strength is the privileging of perception over some other kinds of cognition, meaning that, overall, we are more likely to perceive certain aspects of our surroundings accurately. Non-autistic people tend to have this same perception canceled out more often by other areas of cognition, and to be less able to turn those other areas of cognition off to see what’s in front of them. Hence, “nearly incapable of directly perceiving your surroundings” used in a pejorative way above, to mirror how autistic weaknesses are described and generalized in similar ways.

I am not serious. I do not think that neurotypical strengths happen because of neurotypical weaknesses, any more than I think that autistic strengths happen because of autistic weaknesses, nor do I think either one is superior to the other in value. Nor do I think of things in such absolute terms, these are trends. But in showing how ridiculous this kind of thinking is when applied to autistic people, I am applying it to neurotypicals, who will of course see it as ridiculous or even insulting, because they are not conditioned to view themselves the same way autistic people are conditioned to view ourselves.

Why do you think your life is worth living if you don’t have an intense area of interest? Don’t you miss it? Are you in denial or something? Don’t you understand this is a fundamental aspect of the human condition?

“Intense areas of interest,” by the way, are often seen as “compensations” for “lack of social skills” (a viewpoint that may not even be exactly accurate about autistic people, any more than “lacking an intense area of interest” is always true about neurotypicals).

Autistic people are always asked whether we miss certain things that we don’t have. Some of these things, we don’t have because of discrimination. Some of these things, we don’t have because we’re autistic. Some of these things, we don’t have because we just plain don’t want them.

But in any case, we are frequently asked how we manage without various things. If they are things that we don’t have because we’re simply not interested, our neurological makeup does not push us in that direction, etc, it can seem ludicrous. If they are things that we don’t have because of discrimination, and people are assuming that we don’t have them because of who we are rather than how we are treated, then it’s merely irritating.

This goes beyond autistic people of course. Here is a blogger applying it to disability in general, in Q: What’s your problem with people talking about how horrible it must be to be disabled?. I get these sorts of questions because I am autistic, because I use a wheelchair, because competitive employment and I don’t get along, because I speak through a keyboard, because I need assistance with things the person asking the question doesn’t need assistance with, and the list just goes on and on. Sometimes I have gotten it based entirely on my appearance, explicitly based entirely on my appearance (which people characterize as looking “severely retarded” or “profoundly autistic” or some other such thing, both of which they for some bizarre reason translate as meaning less happy).

As Laura Tisoncik (who is autistic, and uses a wheelchair because of a pain condition related to scoliosis surgery and a bad knee) has put it to me, “I don’t understand why people think it is a sympathetic thing to say to come up to me and tell me they’d rather be dead than be like me.” Believe it or not, both she and I get that comment a lot from people who do imagine themselves to be sympathetic.

Anyway, then people spring the “human condition” thing on us regularly. The “human condition” is defined of course by a non-disabled, non-autistic reality. Is it any wonder many autistic people grow up wondering if we’re actually human? I was flipping things around, showing neurotypicals how it might feel to have the “human condition” defined by something that only some of them do or even want to do.

How do you deal with your dependency on social information? Have you done anything to reduce that dependency? If not, why not?

Everyone is dependent on other people for various things, it’s just that non-disabled people’s dependence is just viewed as The Way Things Are instead of as dependence. Read Critic of the Dawn for more on this.

Most non-autistic people depend a good deal on social information to show them things about the world that many autistic people pick up on our own. There is nothing wrong with this at all.

Most autistic people depend on other things, or on other people but for different things, and this is usually viewed as wrong, even tragic, and our desire to “reduce our dependency” is taken as a given. But, like non-autistic people’s dependencies, there is nothing wrong with them.

I am, yet again, flipping things around. Non-disabled people take for granted that nobody will see them this way. Autistic people end up taking for granted that people will generally see us this way. Thus, again, I’m making you (non-autistic people) think before you say these things to autistic people.

Surely you must miss the all-encompassing joy of simple perceptual experiences. Don’t try to tell me that all your canned, pre-filtered experiences of sunsets and the like hold a candle to watching a tiny spider crawl across the carpet or rubbing a fuzzy blanket on your face. Nobody would believe anything that ridiculous, you’re just trying to romanticize neurotypicality.

Now I’m not saying here that autistic people can’t enjoy sunsets. This is another stereotype. (This entire thing is based off stereotypes, because the questions autistic people ask are likewise based off stereotypes.)

But the joy and beauty that autistic people find in the world, in different ways than neurotypicals generally do… when we describe it, we are often dismissed as romanticizing autism, as just searching for things to be good about autism but the things supposedly don’t really compare to the joy and beauty that non-autistic people find in the world.

Blind and deaf people get this too, by the way, from people who assume they can’t experience the true beauty in the world if they can’t see a sunset or listen to an orchestra. It’s no more true of them than it is of autistic people. I used to get this not about being autistic but about being stuck in bed while very ill. People assumed I couldn’t get anything out of life then, either, but I got different things out of life (some of which people who have to move around all day, even the extent that I do now, can’t experience).

So this is what it’s like to have your experiences of joy and beauty treated as if they are merely inferior versions of another person’s experiences, ones that you might not in some cases be able to have to the same extent as this other person.

How do you feel about being most likely to give birth to children who have your own limitations? Don’t you think that’s irresponsible?

People with inheritable conditions, including ones that are only sometimes inherited, are asked this all the time, provided the condition is a devalued one. There was even a news anchor with a genetic condition causing fused fingers and toes who sparked nationwide debate by getting pregnant. Read From ‘Passing’ to ‘Coming Out’ and A Simple, Unquestioned Fact for one disabled woman’s experiences during pregnancy and after the birth of her child.

Most neurotypical people will give birth to neurotypical babies. Neurotypicals do have limitations, too. Thus, the above question. If you don’t like it being asked of you, don’t ask it of us.

How do you compensate for your inability to perceive body language? What do you mean, you have a kind of body language of your own? Nobody’s buying that, that’s just silly. Science hasn’t proven that.

Autistic people have body language, and many of us can read body language (like our own, or different). But both of these things are denied a lot of the time, or regarded as “unproven,” as if we have to wait for science to prove something in order to say anything about ourselves.

Many neurotypicals cannot read autistic body language. Hence the above first question. But also hence the second question. They believe that we do not communicate through body language, this is even codified into the criteria for autism, and they believe this because they can’t read our body language.

This is exactly identical to an autistic person being unable to read neurotypical body language, and thus concluding it doesn’t exist. Except neurotypicals have the power to define autistic people and the opposite is not true.

How do you deal with being unable to perceive minds different from your own? Doesn’t that limit you socially?

Autistic people are widely regarded as lacking theory of mind, the ability to understand that other people have minds. (Even though recent research that Morton Gernsbacher’s been talking about a lot, is showing that the way theory of mind tests are administered to us is the bulk of the problem.)

In fact, especially by adulthood, we are usually adept at not only dealing with the fact that other people have minds, but dealing with the fact that other people’s minds work in ways that are in parts vastly different from our own.

On the other hand, when many neurotypicals look at us, they often wonder if we have minds at all (hence “empty shell” being a common description of us, and as if we have had our minds kidnapped or stolen, and so on and so forth), which points to an inability to see minds that work very differently from their own or that inhabit bodies that move very differently from their own.

So… again, turning things around.

Have you considered LSD for your perceptual deficits? If you haven’t, don’t you think it’s just a little bit ridiculous to say you’re against all parents giving LSD to their children? I know you talk about distorted thinking, hallucinations, sensory overload, and other minor side-effects, but isn’t that a small price to pay for being able to perceive the world more directly? Don’t you want to enjoy a normal life, or at least have the next generation able to enjoy one? Aren’t you just a tad rigid? You shouldn’t apply your experiences to everyone you know, every child is different.

It has been my direct observation that people on LSD start doing things that I do when I’m not on LSD. It has also been my direct observation that for a long time I was perceived to be on LSD even though I wasn’t.

Autistic people are often prescribed neuroleptic (also known as “antipsychotic” even though that term is not strictly the case) drugs to make us superficially look more like non-autistic people, whether “for our own safety” or for purely cosmetic reasons. Neuroleptic drugs are even more dangerous, in terms of the potential for brain damage long-term, than LSD is. (LSD can cause brain damage, but not the same type and extent.)

People generally agree, even if they believe LSD should be allowed for consenting adults (and I believe both LSD and neuroleptics should be available to consenting adults, although I have no interest in either one), that LSD should not be given to children. But neuroleptic drugs, far more dangerous in nature, are routinely dispensed to children. LSD, by the way, used to be a “treatment” for autistic children, there were even studies showing its effectiveness.

So I was thinking, what if the world were populated by autistic people who wanted neurotypical children to act superficially more autistic (including stopping neurotypical behaviors that we regarded as highly dangerous in nature)? Simple, give them LSD. I am sure the rationale would run that it helps them perceive the world like us, or corrected a chemical imbalance in their brains that made them different from us, even if it really doesn’t.

Autistic people who complain about the use of neuroleptics (which have a permanent brain damage rate that approaches 100% the longer you are on them, which are explicitly non-approved for use in autistics by the FDA, which autistics are far more susceptible to some of the negative effects of, and which are far more dangerous than most drugs, so these are not just “minor side effects”) are usually told that we are just expanding our experience to fit the experiences of most people who are not like us, that parents have a right to put anything in their children’s bodies they want to, that children who get neuroleptics get them for “severe behaviors”, and so forth. (I was a child who was given neuroleptics without my consent for “severe behaviors” that far exceed the behavior most people are talking about, I had a lot of vocal and motor tics, and I still do not think it would have been justified except possibly as a short-term anti-emetic, so these arguments don’t go very far with me.)

So I’m applying these arguments to something that most people agree on: Giving children LSD to make them act more autistic, even to stop dangerous but common neurotypical behaviors, is probably a bad idea. (It also illustrates the ridiculousness of the “But it’s a last resort” argument — if you wouldn’t give LSD to your kids as a “last resort,” why neuroleptics? Some things are not any legitimate resort at all, last or otherwise, at least for people who are too young to consent.)

What? You’re against LSD in children? I bet you just want to let kids have seizures, too. Would you deny a diabetic his insulin?

This has to do with the fact that when autistic people criticize the use of neuroleptic drugs (the APANA site has a lot about that, by the way) we are often characterized as “anti-medication” in general. I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten angry emails from people who think that I mean children should not be given medication for seizures. And the insulin comparison is ubiquitous and goes back to the pervasive myth of the chemical imbalance corrected by a drug. (Whenever a drug seems to “work” on a certain kind of behavior or feeling, it’s assumed the person had a “chemical imbalance” to begin with that the drug “corrects”, even if there’s zero evidence for this.) The insulin comparison is often started by psychiatrists, by the way, who want to persuade someone or their parents to take something.

Whatever your beliefs about neuroleptics in autistic people, our concerns about them shouldn’t be trivialized by either calling us ‘militants’ or the above sorts of arguments.

Speaking of which, you shouldn’t be saying that behavioral therapy is a bad way for neurotypicals to learn. I know that you say you have your own ways to learn, but we have all this proof that we can at least make you indistinguishable from your autistic peers. Don’t you want that? If you’re indistinguishable from your autistic peers in your every movement and word, then how can you continue to claim you’re not autistic?

Autistic people are told that behavioral therapy is “proven” to work for autistic people. The “proof” being that some autistic people are made “indistinguishable from (non-autistic) peers”. When we say that even if an autistic person passes as non-autistic, they are still autistic (and possibly suffering a lot in their attempts to pass), we are told that autism is behavioral in nature. And that anyone who can pass (sometimes only slightly) for neurotypical is not really autistic.

If this is true, then flipping things around means that if a neurotypical is trained to act autistic, then they’re really autistic. Which is just as ridiculous as its opposite.

Don’t you think you ought to stop speaking for all the severe neurotypicals out there? They’re different from you, they can’t even carry on a proper conversation with an autistic.

Severity of autism is measured by how well we are able or willing to conform to non-autistic standards of behavior and communication, not necessarily to “how autistic we are”. It certainly doesn’t mean most of what people say it means.

So here, I am using severe (or low-functioning) neurotypicality to mean the same thing. Neurotypicals that I just happen personally to find difficult to communicate with. Ones who can’t seem to avoid making large numbers of annoying assumptions, using language in ways that are hard for most autistic people to comprehend, and who do not communicate with autistic people or acknowledge our communication even when we are trying very hard to communicate with them.

(The term “high functioning neurotypical”, for NTs who “get it” about autism, has been floating around since when I was on IRC years ago.)

By the way, Michelle Dawson has cited some research about how non-autistic people simply don’t respond to autistic people’s communication efforts a lot of the time, because they can’t see them. While I’d never really divide non-autistic people into high-functioning and low-functioning based on things like this, the temptation is occasionally there.

Have you learned to make real conversation with strangers instead of just measuring them up socially and moving on?

A common non-autistic stereotype of autistic people is that we cannot make “real” conversation because our conversational methods are different than theirs. I hope the reversal makes sense.

Why do you think you should have any say in the treatment of neurotypicality? You can’t be saying you want to let it fester untreated. You know what can happen then, and besides when you want to learn about a disorder, you go to a real expert, not someone with the disorder.

Autistic people know intuitively a lot of things about living as autistic people, that take scientists years or even decades to uncover, when they’re even things that can be measured by scientists.

Yet our observations about autism, and our assertions that being autistic is too deep a brain difference to make removing it good or even truly plausible, are treated as if we should have nothing to say on the subject. The same goes for our observations about the ethics or science of various “autism treatments”.

We are supposed to leave these opinions to the “experts,” and we are not “experts”. Even when we do attain the status of psychologists, or researchers, or other autism professionals, we are told that our opinions are solely generalizations from our own personal experiences.

We may even be told that our opinions of our personal experiences are wrong. I was once told that the things done to me in institutions would not constitute torture unless a psychiatrist approved of that label. They would easily constitute torture if done to political dissidents, although they too would have a hard time, in their society, proving it, because torture is nearly always done by the (politically) strong to the (politically) weak.

All of the above things, at any rate, have been said to autistic people. Turning them around to apply to non-autistic people is just as ridiculous… etc.

How can you say that neurotypicality is not devastating? Lots of autistic parents feel devastated by their neurotypical children. Can’t you understand that means it is devastating, even if in your one solitary single case you don’t think it is?

I’ve been told that it was okay to say, on national television, as part of a PR campaign for an organization, that autism was devastating, because it validated the feelings of some non-autistic parents of autistic children. And that if I, personally, was not devastated, well then, that’s just me, personally. Sorry, try again.

I feel so sorry for you, you poor thing. I have no idea what it’s like to have such awesome limitations. You’ve overcome a lot just to be able to talk to me, I’m sure.

Pity for being who you are doesn’t feel good and doesn’t do anything good. Describing everything in terms of “overcoming” doesn’t either. Etc.

In the book Pride Against Prejudice, which is well worth reading, Jenny Morris quotes a list of assumptions by Pam Evans. They are assumptions about disabled people. She notes that it’s important to state these explicitly, despite the fact that non-disabled people often try to deny their existence:

That we feel ugly, inadequate, and ashamed of our disability.

That our lives are a burden to us, barely worth living.

That we crave to be ‘normal’ and ‘whole’.

That we are aware of ourselves as disabled in the same way that they are about us and have the same attitude to it.

That nothing can be gained from the experience.

That we constantly suffer and that any suffering is nasty, unjust and to be feared and retreated from.

That whatever we choose to do or think, any work or pursuit we undertake, is done so as ‘therapy’ with the sole intention of taking our mind off our condition.

That we don’t have, and never have had, any real or significant experiences in the way that non-disabled people do.

That we are naive and lead sheltered lives.

That we can’t ever really accept our condition, and if we appear to be leading a full and contented life, or are simply cheerful, we are ‘just putting a good face on it’.

That we need ‘taking out of ourselves’, with diversions and rewards only the normal world can provide.

That we desire to emulate and achieve normal behaviour and appearance in all things.

That we go about the daily necessities or pursue an interest because it is a ‘challenge’ through which we can ‘prove’ ourselves capable.

That we feel envy and resentment of the able bodied.

That we feel our condition is an unjust punishment.

That any emotion or distress we show can only be due to our disability and not to the same things that hurt and upset them.

That our disability has affected us psychologically, making us bitter and neurotic.

That it’s quite amazing if we laugh, are cheerful and pleasant or show pleasure in other people’s happiness.

That we are ashamed of our inabilities, our ‘abnormalities’ and loathe our wheelchairs, crutches or other aids.

That we never ‘give up hope’ of a cure.

That the inability to walk, to see or to hear is infinitely more dreadful than any other physical aspects of disability.

That we believe our lives are a ‘write off’.

That words like ‘walk’ and ‘dance’ will upset us — as if people who’ve endured what we have endured have fragile sensibilities.

That when we affirm that we cannot, or do not wish to do something, our judgement and preferences are overridden and contradicted as inferior to theirs.

That we are asexual or at best sexually inadequate.

That we cannot ovulate, menstruate, conceive or give birth, have orgasms, erections, ejaculations or impregnate.

That if we are not married or in a long-term relationship it is because no one wants us and not through our personal choice to remain single or live alone.

That if we do not have a child it must be the cause of abject sorrow to us and likewise never through choice.

That any able-bodied person who marries us must have done so for one of the following suspicious motives and never through love: desire to hide his/her own inadequacies in the disabled partner’s obvious ones; an altruistic and saintly desire to sacrifice their lives to our care; neurosis of some sort, or plain old fashioned fortune-hunting.

That if we have a partner who is also disabled, we chose each other for no other reason, and not for any other qualities we might possess. When we choose ‘our own kind’ in this way the able-bodied world feels relieved, until of course we wish to have children; then we’re seen as irresponsible.

That if our marriage or relationship fails, it is entirely due to our disability and the difficult person this inevitably makes us, and never from the usual things that make any relationship fail.

That we haven’t got a right to an able-bodied partner, and that if they happen to be very obviously attractive, it’s even more of a ‘waste’.

That any able-bodied partner we have is doing us a favour and that we bring nothing to the relationship.

That we can’t actually do anything. That we ‘sit around’ all day ‘doing nothing’. Sitting seems to imply resting so it is presumed we get no ‘exercise’.

That those of us whose disability is such that we require a carer to attend to our physical needs are helpless cabbages who don’t do anything either and have nothing to give and who lead meaningless, empty lives.

That if we are particularly gifted, successful or attractive before the onset of disability our fate is infinitely more ‘tragic’ than if we were none of these things.

That we should put up with any inconvenience, discomfort or indignity in order to participate in ‘normal’ activities and events. And this will somehow ‘do us good’.

That our only true scale of merit and success is to judge ourselves by the standards of their world.

That our need and right to privacy isn’t as important as theirs and that our lives need to be monitored in a way that deprives us of privacy and choice.

That we are sweet, deprived little souls who need to be compensated with treats, presents and praise.

She points out that Ruth Bashall, a disabled lesbian, adds that there’s an assumption that disabled people can’t be gay or lesbian, and that if we are it’s because we had no hope of a ‘normal’ relationship. And Nasa Begum, a disabled Asian woman, adds that there’s an assumption that “it is our ethnic culture which restricts our lives as disabled people and that ‘we should be grateful for the services we receive in Western societies, because we wouldn’t be able to get them in our own countries.'”

A note to the person who assumed my responses were “bitter” — it’s interesting how that word is usually chosen. Someone once pointed out how “angry black woman” rolls off the tongue (for some people, anyway) in a disturbingly easy manner. For other people, “bitter cripple” or “bitter disabled person” rolls off the tongue just as easily. “Bitter” is a word used to describe us, for reasons that I don’t totally understand, whenever we address injustice too directly, regardless of our real personalities.

One disabled woman asks, in a forum:

How can I be more assertive and quit letting people step all over Me without coming across as a bitter cripple?

Simply put, her problem is not “coming across as a bitter cripple,” but the fact that assertive disabled people are automatically viewed that way at all, just as assertive women are often viewed as “bitches”. “Bitter” and “bitch” and “angry” and so forth become personality traits ascribed to us, and negative ones at that, rather than people acknowledging that maybe we’ve got a point.

Carolyn Gage has written a list of dos and don’ts called So You Know a Dyke with CFS. It’s on the Internet at that link. It’s also in a very interesting book called Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability.

Two of her don’ts are:

DON’T attribute your lack of sympathy to my attitude. This is a standard defense of bigots. Racists are always sure that there are right ways to be African American and wrong ways. Sexists believe that harassment and discrimination only happen to women with bad attitudes. Ableists are always convinced that there is something in the attitude or the behavior of the disabled person which is causing their own irritation or aversion towards us. Nothing unmasks your ableism more than this point of view toward me.

DON’T accuse me of being jealous of your health when I confront your ableism. I wish that my able-bodied friends were more aware of how their able-bodied privilege translates into ignorance, arrogance, and bland sadism. The issue is not my envy of your privilege, but your abuse of it.

In other words, people often tell her that when she runs up against a barrier, or a problematic attitude in other people, then it’s something in her own attitude that’s causing the problem. Disabled people are often pressured to be more sweet, calm, and nice than most non-disabled people would be under the same circumstances, because when we encounter unfair treatment, we will be considered jealous of other people’s ability, bitter about being disabled, or some other thing that blames us for what people do to us.

Note two of Pam Evans’s listed assumptions again:

That any emotion or distress we show can only be due to our disability and not to the same things that hurt and upset them.

That our disability has affected us psychologically, making us bitter and neurotic.

I would add a sort of combined one, that any emotion or distress we show can only be due to our status as “bitter”, and not to the same things that would bother other people, certainly not to any legitimate reason.

The purpose of the humorous “questions for neurotypicals” (and they were intended to be funny) was to illustrate that neurotypicals would probably feel the same about being described that way, and questioned that way, as we do. They just don’t always notice it when it happens to us, because it’s the sort of thing that is acceptable when done to us but not to them for some reason.

I know of a non-autistic guy who was mistaken for autistic at a conference, and he was barraged with questions like “Do you have a girlfriend?” He was utterly stunned by the experience of having a microphone shoved into his face and being asked such a personal question, whereas autistic people take such questions as almost inevitable. The point of the last post was to give other people a taste of that experience, while at the same time making them laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.

The point of this post is to explain the last post in more depth.

Many of these things can be, and are sometimes, reduced by others into a matter of hurt feelings. Bad, maybe, but not horrible, not dangerous, nothing that truly needs changing in the world.

The problem is that it is not only our feelings that are hurt by things like this. It is our entire lives that are changed by it, and the lives of all autistic people are profoundly and badly affected by the assumptions contained in these sorts of questions. Some autistic people die because of these assumptions. They are not trivial.

Cal Montgomery has written two articles, and promises more to come, in what she calls Project Cleigh. Carol Cleigh is a disability rights activist who responds every time someone confronts her with what Cal calls ‘little acts of degradation’. Cal has made a New Year’s resolution to be a little more like Carol Cleigh. Here are two of Cal’s articles on the topic: Little Acts of Degradation and Project Cleigh: Dare to Resist. (If those links were identical earlier, try again.)

She notes that while these things seem little, they are not all that little at all when combined and turned into a constant barrage that disabled people encounter every day. She notes that ‘unintentional’ does not mean ‘okay’ or ‘harmless’. She notes that some disabled people are ‘housebound’, not because of their physical limitations, but because they can’t deal with going out into a world that throws this at them all the time. And she, and her readers, point out many of the consequences of these things, that other people don’t tend to foresee. If you read any two links from my entry today, read those two.

Note: This is not my actual attitude to neurotypicals (I’m using that term specifically because it’s more precise than non-autistic here). But it mirrors the way autistics are often addressed.

How have you learned to compensate for being nearly incapable of directly perceiving your surroundings?

Why do you think your life is worth living if you don’t have an intense area of interest? Don’t you miss it? Are you in denial or something? Don’t you understand this is a fundamental aspect of the human condition?

How do you deal with your dependency on social information? Have you done anything to reduce that dependency? If not, why not?

Surely you must miss the all-encompassing joy of simple perceptual experiences. Don’t try to tell me that all your canned, pre-filtered experiences of sunsets and the like hold a candle to watching a tiny spider crawl across the carpet or rubbing a fuzzy blanket on your face. Nobody would believe anything that ridiculous, you’re just trying to romanticize neurotypicality.

How do you feel about being most likely to give birth to children who have your own limitations? Don’t you think that’s irresponsible?

How do you compensate for your inability to perceive body language? What do you mean, you have a kind of body language of your own? Nobody’s buying that, that’s just silly. Science hasn’t proven that.

How do you deal with being unable to perceive minds different from your own? Doesn’t that limit you socially?

Have you considered LSD for your perceptual deficits? If you haven’t, don’t you think it’s just a little bit ridiculous to say you’re against all parents giving LSD to their children? I know you talk about distorted thinking, hallucinations, sensory overload, and other minor side-effects, but isn’t that a small price to pay for being able to perceive the world more directly? Don’t you want to enjoy a normal life, or at least have the next generation able to enjoy one? Aren’t you just a tad rigid? You shouldn’t apply your experiences to everyone you know, every child is different.

What? You’re against LSD in children? I bet you just want to let kids have seizures, too. Would you deny a diabetic his insulin?

Speaking of which, you shouldn’t be saying that behavioral therapy is a bad way for neurotypicals to learn. I know that you say you have your own ways to learn, but we have all this proof that we can at least make you indistinguishable from your autistic peers. Don’t you want that? If you’re indistinguishable from your autistic peers in your every movement and word, then how can you continue to claim you’re not autistic?

Don’t you think you ought to stop speaking for all the severe neurotypicals out there? They’re different from you, they can’t even carry on a proper conversation with an autistic.

Have you learned to make real conversation with strangers instead of just measuring them up socially and moving on?

Why do you think you should have any say in the treatment of neurotypicality? You can’t be saying you want to let it fester untreated. You know what can happen then, and besides when you want to learn about a disorder, you go to a real expert, not someone with the disorder.

How can you say that neurotypicality is not devastating? Lots of autistic parents feel devastated by their neurotypical children. Can’t you understand that means it is devastating, even if in your one solitary single case you don’t think it is?

I feel so sorry for you, you poor thing. I have no idea what it’s like to have such awesome limitations. You’ve overcome a lot just to be able to talk to me, I’m sure.

Last year, I went to the emergency room at the same time as someone else: Both of us were asthmatic and both had been exposed to some sort of really nasty toxin that was a byproduct of the construction process in our building. (Right after we had been assured by the housing authority that everything was safe in here. I have never had breathing problems as bad as that, or anything that felt even remotely like that, even when I inhaled smoke once in a kitchen fire.)

Anyway, we eventually got our medical records from that visit, to show the housing authority so they would relocate us somewhere breathable.

It was very interesting. My records claimed that I had a history of severe scoliosis and allergies to medications that I am not allergic to. I think her records noted allergies to medications that I am allergic to, as well as other elements of my medical history. In other words, despite the fact that they seemed to question us each separately and enter us into the computer separately, they got all the data jumbled. That is scary.

Scarier is that I’ve seen other of my medical records. They often mess up things as routine as what city I live in. Sometimes they confuse me with other patients. Sometimes they add fictional bits of medical history that never existed, sometimes they leave out things that did exist.

Some are undoubtedly deliberately fudged.

I have on tape a description by a tester of fudging an IQ test so my weak points would not show up, which has me even more convinced that IQ testing is not as “objective” as people claim it is.

On a more sinister note, I have the records of the time I experienced attempted murder by neglect, and things were clearly charted in such a way as to make even the medications I was given at the time look much different, more according to procedure, more innocuous than they were. (When they did not succeed in allowing me to die the first time I had an obvious dangerous reaction to a drug, they gave it to me a second time “just to make sure” and told me that they would give me an antidote if I would agree to do what they told me in other areas. Records of that time document a slow increase in that medication (never happened) until an adverse reaction happened and it was discontinued (not quite).)

I’ve seen instances in which what they told me was not what they wrote down. When we had the breathing problems, they talked all about how they could hear the big difference in lung volume after breathing treatment, and exactly what was going on and stuff, but when they wrote it up they wouldn’t mention things like this, although they would sometimes exaggerate what we said about what we were planning to do about all this. In that case, since it was tied to a somewhat high-profile controversy in the area, I suspect they were covering their asses (one doctor even explained to us that he couldn’t write something a certain way because although he believed it was that way, he was afraid if it showed up in court he wouldn’t be able to prove it 100%, because there is no way of proving that particular symptom 100%), but it doesn’t make it right.

I have also had people invent elements of my life that don’t exist, as if out of thin air.

I once had a case manager write in my file that I was working for my landlord in exchange for rent. I never did anything like that so I don’t know where she came up with it. She also fabricated diagnoses out of thin air, and claimed I’d told them to her, when I’d never heard of them before. On the other hand, the diagnoses she was faxed by my doctor, for physical problems, were disregarded in favor of her imaginary diagnoses and of psychological problems. The most bizarre part was that she said all of this, and all her other distortions of my life, were what I had told her. I had told her nothing of the sort. She didn’t like me, though, and I think that was a lot of what happened. She told me not to be so confrontational before I’d had a chance to type a single word to her. She seemed to not be responding to reality much at all.

But others just seem accidentally, but dangerously, careless.

Switching around elements of my medical history and the history of the woman who came to the emergency room with me is bizarre and dangerous but probably not deliberate.

A lot of the factual errors are probably similar. Stuff that people got confused.

But what disturbs me is that medical records like this are taken as more factual than anything else. Clearly, from my experience and others, they can be either deliberately fudged or unintentionally screwed up in other ways. Yet medical records are supposed to be some kind of reality. They are sometimes treated as more real than real. This is strange.

The Schafer Report, by the way, is going away.

But there was something I wanted to bring up about an old issue of it, that I never got to say quite how I wanted to.

It’s part of In Defense of Behaviroal [sic] Treatment for Autism, the old smear campaign against Michelle Dawson, that attacked the idea of autistics wanting or being able to communicate, in order to discredit her, and us, without having to actually take on our arguments.

Here are some of the things that were said in that report.

One of the first articles said things such as this, and many have echoed the idea:

…autistic people would not, by definition, be interested in a career in communication…

…even as they behaved in ways that a person with autism would never choose to do (seek public speaking opportunities, seek recognition, constantly communicate, etc.)…

Autistic people, as he is defining us for his convenience, do not communicate, do not seek out opportunities to communicate, do not have any interest in people, and so forth. Even though these things are proven false, that’s what’s printed in this edition of the report.

Some of the other articles acknowledge that some autistic people communicate in words, but that, for instance:

Suppose you were the individual who, without treatment, was destined to be standing alone in a corner of an institution, dependent on everyone around you to take care of even your most basic needs, rocking perseveratively and eliminating in your clothing, unable to sample what life has to offer. Would you like someone who could speak and could interact in the everyday world speaking on your behalf and counseling against treatment? No, I wouldn’t either.

In that case, the person has decided that it’s mainly bad if autistic people who can talk (or write) say certain things about autism or autistic people.

So it’s okay if we talk, we can remain autistic then, but it’s not okay if we say certain things.

And then, after all this, commentary by parents and professionals to the effect of either “Autistic people can’t communicate” or “Autistic people who can communicate should only stick to certain topics,” here comes the following, which is printed without any hint that the person is not autistic:

David Corbett was very animated with him and asked him about his autism, to which he replied by stretching his arms out really wide, “I used to have a lot of autism now I just have a little (he brought his hands close together to show a little), but I want to have none (to which he dropped his hands down to his side and told them that dropping his hands meant zero).

David asked him about a letter he had written and gave him a copy of it. David asked him if this was his letter, he said “Yes, and I’m working on making my printing better!” David asked him if he had given his letter to the government, he replied “Yes, I took it to the government that lives close to our house”.

David then asked him if he would please read his letter for the court, which he did with great pride.

David then thanked him and told him it was a great letter! David asked him if he had worked hard himself, and he said “I worked very hard, though Mom says that I got rid of the autism myself by working hard, I needed my tutors they helped me a lot, I wouldn’t have been able to get rid of most of it without my tutors”. He continued, “It takes a long time to get rid of it, it just doesn’t happen quickly, it’s not fair to take the teachers away just because they are six”.

So, in that case, an autistic boy not only communicated, not only spoke out loud and wrote, but went into a court room and engaged in public speaking.

And nobody in the Schafer Report questioned that he was autistic. Bobby Newman did not say, “He can write, he’s not autistic enough to speak for these children.” Jenny Ladew did not say, “He hasn’t raised an autistic child while juggling a family and career so he has no right to comment.” James Mulick did not say “He is not autistic, because he speaks, and real autistic people would be uninterested in public speaking.” Lenny Schafer did not call him an “Asperger imposter”.

Because if you say the right things, nobody’s going to question you.

As I was writing this, another thing came up that’s somewhat related to my last statement.

The Autistic Bitch from Hell wrote On Authenticity, about a rumor she heard (I don’t know how substantiated of unsubstantiated) that someone in the autistic rights movement is not who they claim to be, is in fact a journalist working on a book. She further writes that it’s hard to want to say anything, because the person could do us a favor with the coverage.

I wonder if this is another instance of “If you say the right things, nobody’s going to want to question you.”

Marty Murphy, a middle-aged speaking autistic woman, posed as a 25-year-old non-speaking autistic man, and was defended by many people because of her message. I was offended by the fact that, as a 25-year-old non-speaking autistic person myself, the stereotypes of the sort of person I am were being exploited to send a message I would never send. A lot of “autism is evil” types were fine with her deception, and still are, because they think it’s the message that counts, not the deception.

Is it really any better when one of us turns out to not be who they say they are? I mean, I’m hardly the Autism Police (I in fact usually detest that form of policing), but if someone is not who they say they are (and I don’t know enough of the facts to know for sure), and lots of us protect them, how is that better than people protecting Marty Murphy just because they liked her message? If we are enraged by other people doing that, should we really be doing it?

I do think there is a difference between choosing what to say and what not to say, and the fact that all words are in essence lies — and the act of deliberately deceiving people about a major aspect of who we are, by deliberately lying. Some of us hide certain aspects of our lives, sometimes for good reason. Some of us also say things that people take wrong.

For example, I am frequently represented as having spent my entire childhood in an institution, as never having spoken in my life, and as only having been in one institution, usually people assume the kind reserved for developmentally disabled people. In fact I only spent part of my childhood in institutions, I spent time in several of varying sizes and shapes and with varying kinds of people inside, and I have produced plausible-sounding speech sounds with my mouth in the past. Some people view me as misrepresenting myself when they find this out, or even as lying about events in my life, but it’s usually more a matter of the fact that I’m not going to tell my life story every time I meet someone, and my life story defies enough stereotypes that people’s initial assumptions are likely to be wrong. It’s simply too complicated to give out every nuance every time I talk to people, and I am aware that people assume all kinds of things that I don’t have the time to correct them on. If I cannot now speak, have spent time in institutions and say so, and did so in childhood, people fill in the blanks with the rest.

But there is a difference between all that and saying that we really are unemployed when we have jobs, or other sorts of deliberate lying. Posing as an autistic person when you’re really a non-autistic journalist is different than either not having the exact words for the truth or choosing which parts of the truth to tell.

And I don’t see any difference between that and Marty Murphy.

I have said in many earlier posts that the world needs all kinds of people in it. I quoted my friend, who said that training her to be like everyone else would be training her to be a true misfit: She already has a place in society, and she benefits from learning how to most effectively use that place. Dave Hingsburger has written that the most important thing in life is finding who God wants you to be, and trying your best to be that person (I know not everyone reading my blog is religious, but I think even non-religious people can understand the idea).

I am reading a book called Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire by Anne Norton. It’s a very interesting book. I read it after a friend read a book by a Straussian, drastically changed her outlook on life, and started attending a school with a curriculum that comes highly recommended by Straussians. (The book I am reading draws a clear distinction between Strauss and Straussians. The author was taught by many Straussians, but is not one herself. She is trying to chronicle their origins, their beliefs, and their influence on American politics.)

In one part, she describes the Straussian aversion to postmodernism. I have an aversion of my own to much of postmodernism (and I actually regard Straussian philosophy as highly related to it), and to the forms of moral relativism that say for instance that if something is done in some culture then it’s okay (there are many things taken for granted in my culture that I think are absolutely wrong), but I agree with what Norton says in the following passage:

Derrida’s reading also suggests, more disturbingly, that the fulfillment of one set of responsibilities may demand the sacrifice of others. If doing one duty requires us to neglect other duties, if cultivating one virtue requires the sacrifice of others, then an all-encompassing perfection is beyond us. Each of us will be dependent on others to repair the duties we neglected. Each of us may someday be faced with someone who cultivated a virtue we sacrificed. I think that is something most of us are all too ready to acknowledge. Perhaps the danger lies in what follows. If this is true, if we do, if we must, sacrifice some virtues in cultivating others, then we must acknowledge that there is more than one good and honorable life. Some call this “moral relativism,” and it makes them angry. I call it a simple recognition of the limits of a human life, and I take some comfort in knowing that the duties I could not fulfill and the virtues I had to sacrifice will show themselves in others, where I can depend on and admire them.

My own belief is that if everyone were the same, society would cease to function. We need generalists of various kinds, and specialists of various kinds, and all kinds of brains and bodies and minds, in order for society to work. And I do take comfort in knowing that there are people who can do things I can’t, who are good at things I am not, who are doing those things.

My friend (after reading Allan Bloom) told me at one point that she had to divorce herself from the autistic liberation movement, because some of the ideas were too hooked up with postmodernism, in a bad way, and she could see what postmodernism was doing to society, and it was dangerous.

I remember holding a conversation once with someone in the medical profession, online. I was saying how most people who are born with no arms are better at using their legs, than using clumsy and uncomfortable prosthetics. But how the medical profession often forced them on such people anyway.

The doctor became very angry with me. He told me in no uncertain terms that I was a dangerous moral relativist postmodernist something or other, and that these ideas would ruin the practice of medicine. He told me that at least if you gave people prosthetic arms you were giving them a chance, and who would withhold that chance from a child. He didn’t seem to think that, even after the child got old enough to say something, the child should have any choice in the matter. It was sick, to him, to want to use your dextrous feet instead of clumsy fake arms.

I have a videotape called Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. It includes clips from a performance by Mary Duffy. Mary Duffy is a performance artist who is, conventionally, stunningly beautiful. And she has no arms. She poses as the Venus de Milo, naked, in one of her performances, and says to the audience:

You have words to describe me that I find frightening. Everytime I hear them they are whispered or screamed silently wordlessly from the front to middle-page spreads of newspapers. Only you dare to speak them out loud. I look for them in my dictionary and I only find some. The words you use to describe me are “congenital malformation.” In my child’s dictionary I learn that the first part means “born with”. How many times have I answered that question? “Were you born like that? Or did your mother take them dreadful tablets?” How come I always felt ashamed when answering those big staring eyes and gaping mouths? “Did you have an accident? Or did your mother take them dreadful tablets?” With those big words those doctors used, they didn’t have any that fitted me properly. I felt even in the face of such opposition that my body was the way it was supposed to be, that it was right for me, as well as being whole, complete, and functional.

In an interview, she describes her experiences with the medical profession as a child:

…I felt I’d been objectified by the medical profession in general, and I wasn’t able to talk back. And particularly about how they made decisions and comments about my future as if I wasn’t there. And speaking to a dictaphone and describing my future as if I was incapable of comprehending.

Then she concludes with:

Today I’m winning battles every day against my own monster, my inner critic, who has internalized all my childhood oppressions. The oppression of constantly trying to be fixed, to be changed, to be made more whole, less visible, to hide and to be hidden.

The idea that Duffy is whole, without arms, and does not need fake arms, does not need to be changed into someone who appears more normal (even if functionally it’s all wrong), was threatening to the doctor I spoke to. He was angry at me. Very angry. Disproportionately angry. My ideas were, he thought, tied into a whole philosophy. A philosophy I actually don’t buy into. But he couldn’t see these ideas as part of a different view of the world than the one he was attacking.

Anne Norton talks about how there are many ways to be good and honorable. I think that some people mistake that idea, with the idea that there is no way not to be good and honorable, that everything everyone does is right. But that’s not what she was saying. She wasn’t saying “Everything everyone does is right.” She was saying “There’s more than one way to do the right thing.”

People make a similar mistake when autistic people, or disabled people in general, argue that there’s nothing wrong with the way we are made, that everyone is valuable, regardless of disability, that the ways disabled people do things are different and it is right for us to do them in this different way.

They think that we are saying, “Disabled people are exempt from the process of growth that all humans go through.” And they deride us for it.

They are wrong.

The world is not a set of clashing philosophies, and the world does not need to be reconciled to a philosophy. Trying to do so, will leave out important parts of the world. The real world is not a fight between postmodernists and modernists, that stuff all seems to me to be a clash of words in the air, and I always feel like I’m left sitting on the ground wondering why all the words high in the air are seen as more important than what is right in front of me.

What we are saying, is that disabled people have a place in the world, and that our place in the world, and how we fulfill it, how we move, how we think, is going to be differently shaped in some ways than other people’s places in the world. There is more than one way to be. It does not mean that all ways are correct.

When I write things, it is easy to take what I say as “All ways are correct,” sometimes. I never mean that. I never mean that if a parent chooses to enroll their child in the Judge Rotenberg Center, I will ever agree with that decision, because I won’t.

I never mean that autistic people, or any people, should be neglected and left totally alone forever.

But I find it very interesting that people think I mean that.

People are very adept at raising non-autistic children without trying to force them into autistic ways of operating. But most are stunningly bad at raising autistic children without trying to force them into non-autistic ways of operating. So they interpret “Don’t make someone non-autistic” as “Don’t raise someone, just ignore them.” They literally don’t know how to raise an autistic person as an autistic person, so they assume that raising an autistic person as an autistic person is not raising them at all.

I read an article recently that condemned “postmodern” practices in special education, right alongside its condemnation of Nazi eugenics policies. (It also condemned facilitated communication. I really liked the article, which was about the genocide of disabled people, until it went down that road.) I looked up the references and “postmodern” practices apparently include believing that society has to change in order to include disabled people, which is equated with not teaching disabled people anything about the world.

This puzzles me. Does the addition of ramps to buildings mean that people don’t learn how to move their wheelchairs? It’s illogical to equate the two so rapidly, but people seem to do so. People regard acceptance of autistic people similarly: “Oh no. We can’t have people flapping their hands in public. What would happen next, not teaching them anything at all?”

I’ve used the analogy of trees before. Ever try to get an oak to look like a counterfeit redwood? It injures the oak, prevents the oak from growing the way oaks are supposed to grow, and doesn’t look a thing like a redwood. What if we had a whole viewpoint that only redwood-like growth was growth and all other growth was really just stagnation? There need to be lots of kinds of trees, and there need to be lots of kinds of people, it’s that simple.

I don’t know, though, how to enter words properly into some of the more ridiculous-seeming debates that go on, debates that are clashes of words, clashes of professional egos, clashes of a lot of things. There’s something going on underneath all these words, there’s a way things should be, that can’t be articulated in words, ever.

But there are many ways to do the right thing, many bodies and minds that are the right way to be, and this is not nonsense or moral relativism or any of that other crap, it’s just how things are. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t wrong ways to do things, it just means that there’s not only one right way.

A little background on how and when I was told that.

I was dealing with the San Andreas Regional Center, an agency whose real job is to withhold as much funding from disabled people as possible (I’ve even heard this from people who’d worked at the Regional Center), but who pretend to be about great humanitarians who fund us as much as possible. And hold big dinners about how wonderful and selfless they supposedly are. And so forth. But that’s a tangent.

The main background information they had on me was either:

• Obtained from an hour-long interview with a relative who was under pressure from the interviewer to answer in certain ways and not others.
• A few pages of diagnostic information from a psychiatrist.
• Their own impressions from seeing me.
• The inventions — out of her ass or something, I can’t figure out where else she would have gotten some of those “facts” — of a bizarre and scary case manager.

Needless to say, this was not a lot of information. In the meantime, I had a letter. The letter was from someone who’d known me for a long time and had been my primary caregiver recently. She knew a lot of things about me that would be missed by people hurrying by with diagnostic information and such. She condensed the most important things into a letter, sent from her position as an officer in an organization for helping autistic adults with daily living issues, and sent it to the Regional Center.

The letter contained more accurate information, by far, than people could have gotten from the other things. It contained a reasonably accurate assessment of my strengths and weaknesses and the kind of assistance I needed.

Anyway, at one point I told someone from the Regional Center, “Don’t look at the other stuff. Look at the accurate stuff. Look at the letter. It’s the most important one in there.”

The response, “Oh, so that’s the one that tells us what you want us to hear, I’ll bet.” Or something similar.

As if wanting them to hear the truth was a problem.

What kind of “service” are agencies providing if they trust the opinions of people peripherally involved, and trust short interviews and such and bizarre inferences, more than they trust the most likely source of accurate information?

And what kind of “service” are they providing if they refuse to see that what is important to me might just be the most accurate stuff?

I remember a video I once watched. Part of it featured a woman whose disability theory I’m not always fond of, because she has built it entirely around certain physically disabled people and left the rest of us out. But she said something important.

She said that disabled people are seen as manipulative, as needing to be pushed by non-disabled people into doing what’s right for us, as unable to understand that on our own.

Often we are seen as manipulative when we are only trying to run our own lives. Often when we do things that would normally be “manipulative”, what we’re doing is doing all we can under a system of power that prevents most other self-expression. But often, we’re just “manipulative” whenever we do something someone else wants, “unaware” whenever they want to emphasize that it’s their way that matters.

To SARC, who I am mercifully free of now: Yes, that was the paper that told you what I wanted you to hear. I wanted you to hear it for a reason. I wish you had listened instead of making power play after power play. I’m a real human being with a life, too, you know, and I bet you’d want accuracy and power in your own life too if our situations were reversed.

I’m reading around in some rather disgusting American eugenics literature for historical purposes. I have found a letter from Mary Dendy to Karl Pearson, dated 1912, that reads partially as follows:

Imbeciles – It is difficult to find a definition of these which does not apply for low-grade Feeble-minded. They may be described as low-grade F.M. who are not able to be taught the proper care of their persons and whose habits require constant attention. They are apt to be excessively restless, to “echo” (i.e. repeat words instead of answering them.) They are occasionally destructive and apparently cruel, though it is probable that their acts of cruelty are due not to an instinct to give pain, but an instinct to destroy. If able-bodied they can be taught to work, i.e. to repeat the same movement over and over again, in a purely mechanical manner. They often use repeated movements of some part of the body quite without purpose, as striking the head rhythmically with the hand. Their articulation is generally very defective and they sometimes have little or no speech.

She describes “low-grades” as “sometimes having special mental gifts, but more commonly low-grade all round”.

Hmm. It always amazes me when I run into this stuff and remember that some people actually believe that autistic people didn’t exist until Leo Kanner. We were — some of us anyway — spread out among a number of classifications of “mental defectives”, which is what they considered a broad range of people back then.

You were the ones who watched how we moved, then said what that must mean. You wrote that we lived in closed-off worlds, rejected all contact with the world outside. You wrote this when we did not react to things the way you expected, you even wrote this when we had reflux that caused us to vomit our food, it was all rejection of the world outside. You defined us based on what you imagined to be our isolation. You looked at us and you saw only your imaginings of what life must be for us, then you defined us based on your imaginings.

It’s tempting to say you couldn’t help it. You’re for the most part non-autistic. Non-autistic people’s brains really do work more that way than autistic people’s brains do. You are more likely to superimpose your imaginings over the real world, and to sustain that superimposed version of things. But it’s not just that you couldn’t help it. It’s that you were the non-defective ones and that gave you the power and the right to define us, the defective ones, on the basis of your superimposed mental hallucinations.

Part of our role in society is to be a counterbalance to those hallucinations, to have clearer perception of things you can’t see through the images in your head, just as part of your role in society is to do all the things that your thought-shortcuts free your minds up to do. But that part of our role in society has been denied for a long time, like the roles of so many others you don’t seem to have room for, so your mental hallucinations continued to take precedence, and we continued to be defined according to how you saw us through your mental hallucinations.

“Even though non-autistic people may hate or fear or pity us for being different, I think they really need us to be just the way we are. We’re the ones who notice that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.” -Jim Sinclair, What Does Being Different Mean?

You saw us as unaware of our surroundings. You saw us as unaware, particularly, of people. You saw us as encased in a bubble world totally separate from you. It’s kind of a strange thing to hear from people who have much more wiring enabling them to live in their heads to the point of rearranging their perception of the world around them, than we do. But again, you had not only those particular biases but you had the power to inflict those biases on the rest of us.

So now you come along and say that if someone has relationships with others, they are coming out of autism. You say that autism is defined by a shell that you hallucinate around us. Even if they had relationships all along that you were unable to see. You come along and say that we’re in these enclosed worlds, and it’s your job to come in and get us out, but you’re oblivious to the much more enclosed worlds you tend to live in, and oblivious to how much of the world we do perceive. You come along and basically say that anyone who can talk about it isn’t autistic, anymore, or isn’t very autistic anymore.

But you’ve defined autistic along your parameters. You have defined it, not in terms of how we actually work, but in terms of what you guys have been imagining all along to be inside us. Then you made the rules based on what you imagined rather than what was there.

And now you’re writing books, to be read by many people around the world, that may as well all be your imaginings. You write very well. You write deceptively well. It may take an autistic person, maybe an autistic institution survivor in parts, to see through what you have written, what you have gotten yourself to believe about us, what you are telling others to believe about us, what you are telling others to believe about you. What you are telling us to believe about ourselves, which is the scariest part.

Take a look at what your ideas about autism have been founded on: Mental hallucination on top of imagining on top of bad inference on top of mental hallucination stacked for decades. Take a look at the assumptions you have made. Take a look at alternate explanations for what you have done to us, for what we have done to you. Have faith that even if everything you thought you knew about us falls apart and leaves you totally confused, who and what we are is still going to be here and will be easier to see. And then maybe you’ll be able to actually listen to us and hear something other than a distorted reflection of yourself.