“People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that distinguish me from a doormat.” – Rebecca West, 1913

And apparently a similar phenomon happens whenever any member of any population whose only role is to be good, quiet, obedient ______ (insert noun here) express any opinion at all. Nothing new here, unfortunately.

This also brings to mind about the early years of feminism. I wasn’t around back then, but apparently lesbians tried to speak up for themselves in the women’s movement and were told, basically, to go away, the women’s movement was much too new to be able to deal with the issues of lesbians, too. Same thing when black women tried to speak up in the women’s movement about how issues of sexism often intersected in issues of racism in inseparable ways.

And the LGBT movement isn’t immune to this internal “we all have to look alike and think alike to have any success with advocacy efforts” group think stuff. Some gay and lesbian organizations are not really welcoming places for bisexual people or for transgender people. Some gay activists are not comfortable being allies with the more “exoctic” members of the GLBT communities such as drag queens or members of the leather community. (I’m no fan of leather myself, but that’s because I’m vegan.) And of course, LGBT people of color and LGBT people with disabilities sometimes have trouble finding a place where all the identities they claim get equal time, space, or acceptance.

These debates, of course, are always a challenge no matter what community they occur in. I’m brand new to learning about the autism community, but so far I’m not hearing anything that marks it as especially different from many other emerging (and older) communities in the kinds of debates it has or how it deals with those debates, or even (unfortunately) in how it tries to silence people who some people think shouldn’t have opinions at all.

How will the Evidence of Harm set come together with the Aspies for Freedom set? (I’d like to be a fly on the wall at that bbq!)

LOL, me too.

GRASP is working on a “memorandum of understanding” with Autism Speaks. I’m already sharpening my virtual shishkebab skewers for that one.

That’s a question that a lot of groups go through. I’m currently dealing with the identical issue (half of a community trying to invalidate the other half, claiming them to be impostors, nonexistant, insane, not the “right kind” or just needing to be shut up because they give the wrong public image, etc) in a totally different community right now. My guess on this is that people do this because they think they need to assimilate themselves piecemeal into the dominant culture, that that’s the way to gain acceptance. “We have to start with something that is more normal or acceptable to them, because they won’t accept it all at once.”

That or, like Temple Grandin, they actually have internalized society’s prejudices against those members of their group they see as having “less worth” than them– they define their own worth in relationship to it: “At least I’m not one of THOSE types.”

The problem with the assimilation view, that you have to “start them with something that is currently acceptable to them,” is that it presumes that once you get people to accept a certain thing, you can begin a “gradual process” from there of introducing new things. However, as often as not, once you get the particular kind of acceptance or the right you saw as the “first step,” people will just continue to find excuses to hold the door against you. “We already gave you this. Why are you demanding more of us?” “This is all you need. You don’t need any more.” “We can’t give you any more than this. It was bad enough that we gave you what you have right now. People will never accept the idea of giving you any more than that.” Or people will use the fact that you did gain that one step forward as an excuse for a concerted backlash– “We have to stop them *now,* before they can be allowed to do any more,” and roll back whatever rights you might have gained.
The only thing I can currently I can think of to do about it is to try to make people aware of whatever internalized prejudices they might have that lead them to think that only the “ones like them” should be accepted or permitted to exist, and to challenge those prejudices directly– give them examples of actual people and their real lives defying the stereotypes. But that’s touching on a very sensitive issue for a lot of people, one they would rather not face up to, largely because some people do predicate their worth on being one of the “good kinds” and not the “bad kinds.”

Some people — autistic adults, even — spend their lives trying to fit a model of normality that just makes them less able to function.

I don’t know how to convince these people to hold off on this attitude. But I do think that getting people to stop being afraid to let go of the sickness model is one of the major challenges here…
It really isn’t possible for me to consider the pro-cure viewpoint seriously, since it is obvious to me that being on the spectrum has not in any way hindered my ability to achieve happiness in many respects, learn plenty, and “find a place in the world”, so to speak.

Well, I must say that for me is more complicated and, if you allow me, I will try to explain.

For me there is/are no reason for not to be alive for each human being. And you are right in the sense that morally reprensible opinions are not respectable. BUT I do not want to sink in a low level of discussion to prove a point, therefore many times I prefer to ignore, especially if he/she is offensive to me or -worst and not to forgive- to my son.
BUT to know about one person exchanging opinoins you must know much more about the life of this person. TO know about why a parent- me- selects some path of treatment- biomedical in my case- involves-to have a fair analysis- a lot of information to be known.
Why, based on what, doing how, considering what, with what expectations, with what information? ( formal questions)
With what feelings, with what consideration of the autistic person my son is, with what idea of what autism is, with what attitude to adult autistics, considering what, analyzing what? ( non-formal questions)
I almost never have been asked about this. It has seemed that telling something near to “biomed.. “for some people is to belong to some club with ALL the same rules, the same ideas, the same answers, the same styles, the same life, the same … And there are no two equal parents in my experience. Each family is a world, each child is unique and each parent is a voice, such as every autistic child, teen and adult is a voice to be hear- and I do my best to do it and I appreciate all your posts- Zilari and ballastexistanz. You opened my mind; you teached me. Thank you for that.

I consider that I detected, I am treating and my goal is to heal detected properly conditions that can bring pain or suffering to my son- and I found a long list. BUT my expectation is that he will be the best autistic he can be with this ( my goal is not “normalcy”- what is this really?)I will not change his soul, his uniqueness, but
who can assure me that the behaviors/limitations he sometimes have are not related to the medical conditions he has- beyond the label of ASD, that is for me not more than this and he is far far far far more than a label.

For me, the genetics roots of autism are may bes. Therefore it depends on the analysis and the individual case is or is not a disease, for me. Condition a lot of facts, biochemical and brain structure facts- but we do not know what else, today and what happens during development in contact with environment for an autistic child, genetically autistic since birth even unnoticed and what are the triggers, how they act,at what level, doing what, since when-beyond what we do know about the first weeks of pregnancy and prenatal insults.

What I consider am doing is acting on this “secondary” level, but I do not consider that I will change him at the level you consider ( to become “normal”). Therefore I consider that separating the respectable opinions- moralmente respectable- from the person- even if I disagree with, even strongly- at least I can learn and productive exchange can take place to understand why one individual person think the way he/she does, with agreement in mutual respect in disagreement.
Please let me know if I were clear. Thank you in advance
María Luján

Athena Ivan

Even the women’s movement was only about women (imagine if 80 years ago dads thought they should be equal partners in the womens’ movement because heck they had young daughters!Or psychologists because hey- we sell treatments for ‘hysteria’and other womens issues!)

I would be worried if the focus was on finding common ground too much because there isn’t much ground in common with the diffeent autism camps. The needs of a parent of a 3 year old with autism are not anything like the needs of an autistic adult. Where is the common ground with a rigid conservative type parent of an autistic and a freeloving hippy type parent of an autistic? What about an autistic teen from the Bronx and an autistic teen from a farm in India? How will the Evidence of Harm set come together with the Aspies for Freedom set? (I’d like to be a fly on the wall at that bbq!) I mean if half the autistic community is actively pursuing ways to eliminate the other half or claiming that they don’t exist, are imposters or lacking perspective etc.-where do we even begin to come together?

But other aspects of exhaustingness of books I haven’t covered discussing somehow.

Shiu et al: it’s fine to email me on that.

I think we’ve mentioned from time to time having been involved in an “activism group” in which the leaders decided that everything that anyone said or wrote in any place online or in a letter, related to the topic of activism, had to be pre-approved. To make sure that it wasn’t ‘offensive’ or wouldn’t ‘give the wrong impression.’ It was considered very important to the cause that we not “fight in public,” and “fighting in public” seemed in practice to be interpreted as merely disagreeing in any way, on any point, with any other member of the group. We were always told we had been too negative, “disagreed for the sake of disagreeing,” stirred up discord by questioning other people too much about policy, complained too much, etc, and were just generally a negative, irresponsible, bad influence who should not be allowed to do activism anywhere without being supervised by other members.

So basically, because we weren’t allowed to vocally have different views on the same subjects– and we weren’t supposed to talk about topics on which the whole group hadn’t agreed on a pre-approved “official” position– the amount of activism that actually ever got done was virtually nil. (We can give a more detailed account of what happened through e-mail, if you’re interested.)

That pretty much sealed our opinion on the importance of allowing people who are united for a common cause to have different opinions on individual subjects. To demand so much control over a group that everyone have exactly the same opinions on everything, and that everyone be made to “understand” why certain views are the most proper or the ones that everyone should hold, is not activism– that’s running a cult. You cannot make humans that uniform, or expect them to be.