ANI-L has a Parents’ Auxiliary, but parents there have to be able to avoid being pesky with questions and stuff because autistics there don’t necessarily want to be put on display, so there’s all kinds of rules about how and where to ask questions.

I guess one of the reasons I don’t know a specific place, is that most lists that include both parents and autistic people have parents asking the autistic people questions, it’s rarer to find a place where autistic people are not expected to answer.

Although there’s of course a tone to the lists.

The autism list that used to be at St. John’s has mainly some of the thicker-skinned autistics on it, and is mostly parents and professionals, and the cure viewpoint tends to be more valued there (although it’s currently run by an autistic person and supposed to involve people from all three groups in the list management).

AutAdvo is largely autistic people and has a much more anti-cure stance, and there’s a fair amount of people there who are happy to give parents plenty of (often conflicting ;-)) information.

ANI-L is also anti-cure in stance but has some restrictions on what parts of the list parents can post questions to, so that autistic people who do not want to read those things do not have to.

There’s a lot of lists, and many of them I don’t read or post to often. (I am not on ANI-L at all at the moment, but I used to be, and I left a lot of the lists I’m on during a move when I was too stressed to deal with it.) You’ll note a tone varying from list to list.

My current favorite is AutAdvo, but it doesn’t serve the needs or desires of all parents. (Cure-oriented parents are not likely to be happy there, although it doesn’t stop some from coming and trying to persuade us with the same arguments we’ve heard forever.)

I’ve often wondered how much of the “male-female communication gap” alleged by Tannen and others lies in a similar phenomenon. Generally speaking, when such people refer to “men” and “women,” they mean “middle- to upper-class white heterosexual men and women.” (Our partner& come from a Jewish family on one side, and have described how the communication between the women in their family was nothing like the passive accomodating ‘female communication’ Tannen describes– frequent interrupting and strident declarations of “Aw, he’s full of shit!” were common.)

But the point is basically that if you’re the type of person the dominant culture regards as ‘normal’– male, white, heterosexual, non-autistic, etc– you have no reason to develop communication skills for negotiation and accomodation with those who are unlike you. This isn’t to say that such people *never* can or will, of their own accord, but in most cases, you have power simply by virtue of being what you are; you do not have to negotiate for your rights, or use any tactics besides just speaking to get yourself listened to. Your culture and style are dominant everywhere, so you don’t have to learn anyone else’s.

For instance, I don’t think it’s true that men are ‘innately worse’ at communication than women– see here for more details on that. There are some men I’ve communicated with far better than I have with most women. The fact that does stand out for me is that almost all of the men I communicated this well with were disenfranchised from the dominant culture in some way– in terms of race, culture, sexual orientation, religion, etc. This is a lot of what makes me suspect that power is a more compelling factor here than biology.

Generally, yveryone who doesn’t communicate in the ‘standard’ fashion is treated as having something wrong with them. For instance, eye contact carries a different connotation in certain cultures– many Plains Indians consider direct eye contact to be impolite, which resulted in the Anglo-American culture considering them “shifty.” It was never considered that a lack of eye contact might have its own message, or might even be polite within the other person’s milieu; instead it was merely judged in terms of its deviance from the dominant culture. If you have enough power, you can afford to ignore such issues and contexts. You aren’t usually in danger of being seriously harmed if you can’t make yourself understood.

someone^amorpha

My own impression is that we should be exposed to knowing what different ‘social skills’ are (to the best of our knowledge), but given a choice as to whether we use them.

For instance, it’s useful for us to know how others interpret our patterns of eye contact, etc, but wrong for us to be forced to make eye contact if we don’t want to. A more useful social skill there might even be to have a way of explaining our eye contact patterns (and what they don’t mean), rather than a bad mimicry of non-autistic eye contact patterns (although we could always be shown that if we felt like it and were able to, most people couldn’t tell the difference if we looked at a certain other place than the eyes).

It has also been useful to me to know how other people interpret my mannerisms, but there’s no way I could stop them for long and stopping them is not good for me. But being taught how should not be done in a shaming and controlling way, like “See how people look at you when you do that? See what they think of you? Do you really want to do that and make them think that of you?” There are much better ways to learn it than that.

There are a number of social skills that are specific to autistic people interacting with non-autistic people, that have nothing to do with emulating non-autistic people, and those are important too.

For autistic people like me (and not all are like me), it’s important to be able to make sense of body language in the way we read it, rather than getting lost in the rote-learning of body language in the way non-autistic people read it. I am very capable of reading certain forms of body language, but they are never the kind taught or measured explicitly by others. I do it by mapping out patterns of movement rather than by “reading faces” or “looking at eyes” or any of the other things I’ve seen taught. That is not a non-autistic social skill, but it is one of many social skills that deals with non-autistic people while being a more autistic way of doing it.

There’s a lot more than that. But I don’t see anything wrong with autistic people learning how to interact with non-autistic people, more the ineffectiveness or worse, of the ways we are often taught to do it.

Additionally, it’s been shown, I think, that autistic people make lots and lots of attempts to communicate with non-autistic people, and non-autistic people are extremely unresponsive to us. So at times we have more social skills than they do (mainly, I suspect, because they’re in the majority and don’t have to develop social skills to respond to us, not because they’re innately worse at it).