Regarding the link to your other post, yea, my father spent 20 years trying to make me social and polite, he only succeeded in making me hate the “pretend to be normal” game, that would be the main reason why i started looking for “alternative” solutions to autism, i wasn’t willing to pretend, and i was too old to keep living locked in my room with no job, friends, etc.

I remember you as someone who claimed to have found an exercise that could cure autism or something. I’d be interested to know what you think it is, certainly, and which parts you think are innate versus which parts you think are learned, but that won’t necessarily change anything.

You might be interested, in fact, in this post, where I go into some traits that are often attributed to autistic people but that I think are often acquired and not actually useful except for when surviving awful situations.

Anyway… yeah, if you’d do more than hint around I’d be happier.

If i could prove to you that less than 10% of the traits are biological and the rest was acquired in your early life, would that change your views? would you then accept a treatment that removes the other 90%?

Human beings can’t fly. Many human beings wish they could. However, in order to change a human being into a flighted animal (without artificial external aids such as hot air balloons, airplanes, etc) the entire bone structure, metabolism, brain, inner ear, size, and several other aspects of the standard human body, would have to be changed.

If such a change were available, how many humans would be willing to pay that price to lose the inconvenience of not being a flighted animal?

I suspect, if they truly knew what that price was, they’d rather go back to using assistive technology to fly rather than being cured of their non-flighted state, even if being flighted would save their life in some situations, and make other situations far more convenient. And this despite the fact that many humans wish they could fly. A few might choose to pay that price, but not a lot, and it’d be a personal choice, not a matter of everyone who didn’t choose to pay that price being medicalized or told that they just identified too much with a group.

When others with like minded interests do too, they take the form of a “community”–for that topic of interest.

Individuals with vastly different philosophies or histories tend to find commonality somewhere. (They may like the same brand of takeout pizza, or come together for the same musician’s performance.) Then those in themselves comprise their own “communities.”

This is a compositional outlet for her (as well as to converse, opine, persuade, correct, spar with others): (disability-rights) political, anthropological, spiritual, mostly with an “autistic community” bent–this one happens to speak prevailingly on issues topical to her appraisal of an “autistic community” which she feels she intersects with, like some other people with similar issues do. (Who knows, she may even have other blogs that address other things that we don’t even know about, with their own sets of followers.) She’s not even defined by blogging.

The original topic of this thread was clear: People are temples, who have a right not only to prioritize (an understatement), but to set personally directed limits, on what some others would do to them if they were allowed that authority. There are plenty of casualties in the historical record when those rights are not respected; you can really damage someone with the practice of quackery. (But she even has made abundantly clear in certain threads that her particular makeup results in certain beautiful, invaluable (side?)-benefits (perceptional, cognitive, empathic, even in some ways physiological to name a few) in addition to those numerous complaints she never hesitates to mention.)

Where would you draw lines of demarcation then? If it weren’t up to her, how would you have her (or any of us) changed? What zones of familiarity, comfort–even pleasure–would be invaded in the process? How many procedures? At what cost in iatrogenic consequences, physiological and psychological? Or in personal liberty? Or in dollars? Those are all the things that are “attached.”

Check out a seriously great piece of art–“Seconds” (1966) by John Frankenheimer. Available on DVD. (Parts of “The Game” a few years ago were nicked from it.)

As with anybody, let her decide what she would change about herself. Penultimately, unless you have lung disease or something, no one really wants to change a whole lot neurophysiologically–identity is tied up in it. We all relax and chill our own ways.

I haven’t seen the word “pride” used anywhere on her blog–maybe it is. But the word when mentioned in the world of humanity is basically pride in standing up for one’s self.

If you disagree with using the word “pride” to refer to a state of “not being ashamed”, that’s fine — I’m not going to quibble over that point.

But I take great issue with your attempts to frame Amanda’s (and my) explanations/arguments as evidence of some kind of “groupthink” or “group mentality” or whatever you want to call it.

I don’t write about ethics and stuff because I want to “identify with a group” — I don’t know where you’re getting that. I’ve always resisted that kind of thing, for as long as I can remember. I’m not a fan of granfalloons at all.

Heck, when I was eight years old I wrote in a journal that I didn’t see myself as “either male or female”, just as “me”, because I thought gender was a really stupid way to divide people up, and I didn’t identify with any of the feminine stereotypes I came into contact with as it was.

Nevertheless, I recognize that there are certain practical realities about being female that it would be ridiculous not to acknowledge.

For instance, because I am a woman, I need to get checkups at the gynecologist’s every so often. Because I am a woman, I need to buy feminine hygiene products. Because I am a woman, I need my employers to have bathroom facilities I can use (e.g., not just male-only urinals). These things do not “define me”, and I most certainly do not get a warm, fuzzy feeling of community whenever I walk to the checkout line carrying a package of maxi-pads, but it would be dumb for me to insist that I wasn’t really female or that there are no issues that are common to most (if not all) women. Or that there wasn’t anything I liked about being female.

I also live in California. There are practical realities associated with living in California — for instance, the necessity of learning what to do in the event of an earthquake, the necessity of paying California state taxes, and the particulars of California’s geography and climate. I don’t “define myself” by the fact that I live in California, but the fact that I live here does make it useful to learn about the practical realities of being here.

And if people living in other states suddenly started running news articles and media sob-story pieces about how living in California was “devastating”, and that everyone here was miserable, and that the rest of the people had some moral obligation to send trains into California to cart all of us off to Minnesota or Alaska where we’d be able to “flourish properly”, you can bet I’d have something to say about it. Not because of some weird tribal identification with being “Californian”, but because California just happens to be where I live and I don’t want to be carted off in a train and put somewhere else on the basis of someone else’s mythology about my home state. In other words, I’d certainly have a practical interest in helping dispel the mythology, but that interest would have absolutely nothing to do with wanting to maintain a sense of “belonging” or “community” in the Californian Club. I couldn’t care less about that kind of thing, but I don’t want people spreading lies and misinformation about where I live and then using those lies to justify taking away my rights or the rights of my neighbors “for our own good”.

The same goes for being autistic — being autistic means that there are practical realities in my life I need to deal with, and that my life goes a lot better when I’m acknowledging these realities than when I’m trying to ignore them or insist they don’t really exist. It also means that yes, there are other people who know similar realities, and that people who know these realities can benefit from swapping strategies, experiences, and suggestions with one another. And it means that yes, I should be allowed to say that I like some parts of being autistic. Just as I like some parts of being female, and some parts of living in California.

If you think that is “identity politics”, I don’t know what else to tell you.

I repeatedly clarify that I don’t have those beliefs (and point back to instances of me actually saying I don’t have those beliefs), and you repeatedly insist that I do have those beliefs, seemingly because anyone who says/does such-and-such must have such-and-such a belief, or something.

And even when you say something that I completely agree with, you put it in terms as if it’s somehow opposed to my viewpoint.

And, yes, I think there must be something you don’t understand about what I said, because you keep saying I said things I did not say. I thought at first you might have skimmed what I wrote, because what you said does not make sense in terms of what I did write, and what I did mean by it. Generally if someone responds continually to things I did not say as if I said them (and/or insists that my saying one thing means I buy into an entire ideology that the other person happens to associate with that one thing), my assumption is that they did not understand what I said, because the alternatives (making a deliberate straw-man argument, willful misinterpretation, malice, etc) are things I don’t tend to accuse people of without stronger evidence than them not seeming to get what I’m saying.

A person who disagrees with me, is someone who knows what I meant by something but believes something else about it. If you would phrase your disagreement in terms that indicated you actually understood what I said, I’d be more inclined to believe you understood what I said even if you didn’t agree with it. As things stand, you’re saying I said things I didn’t say, and I can’t see how far this conversation can go because (among other things) it requires too many attempts on my part to go into a really abstract mode of thinking to try to model what you might think I meant by just about every other thing you think you’re responding to in what I said.

And on the combination of meds I’m on, that’s just not feasible.

But I’ll say this: I’ve been referred to by friends as a ‘perpetual outsider’ for a reason — although I identify with and work with many ‘communities’ of the sort you describe, I never entirely fit into them, because each one (in general, not necessarily the specific people within it) tries to warp the entire world to fit their own agenda, heedless of what other people might need or want. And additionally demands everyone within it to believe the same things. Etc.

And I don’t go to rallies.

I think I’ve also repeatedly managed to demonstrate what I do and don’t view as a problem and why, and I sincerely doubt that what I write fails to acknowledge problems.

So… yeah. Feel like I’m standing here and there’s this ghost standing next to me that someone’s having a conversation with and insisting it’s me. Not sure what to do about it, because the more I point to myself, the more the person talks to the ghost.