I can’t remember what I wrote re: Aspies towards the top of my long comment (didn’t save it and it hasn’t posted yet; Amanda must be doing something besides sitting in front of her screen, waiting on bated breath to read all my glorious musings ;P), but it seems I had some clause disagreement going . . . I meant to suggest *not* that Aspies might relate to a distinct community any more than other Auties, but that Aspies might be more likely to *suspect* that there is “something different” about them but may not be able to put their finger on it, whereas Auties with more “profound” manifestations on the spectrum are probably more likely to *know*.

And I’m sure the language thing is a big factor too. I definitely appreciate the nuances of sign as being as complex as any spoken language, and with distinct language comes distinct culture, as any historian can tell you. And I guess, if you’re asking why folks in this forum seem to be so well-learned in Deaf culture, maybe it’s because we think Deaf folks are cool. ; ) But I imagine it’s also ’cause lots of these folks are open-minded — in about the freest sense you can get and not just that supeficial “liberal” open-mindedness that is rooted in just as many stereotypes as closed-mindedness — and can grasp the validity of diverse culture, and are probably well-read on all sorts of different cultures as well.

And as far as genetics goes, I honestly have no idea what the figures are; I’m just speculating and have absolutely no research or anything to validify what I’ve said. :P But it does seem to me that a lot of autistic couples have autistic kids. (Though it’s also possible that they’re just more in-tune to what an autistic kid looks like.) And yeah, since I’m of the belief that autism, unlike deafness, is not something you can pick up from illness or (contrary to crackbrained belief) doing too much LSD or something and *is* rooted in genetics, since it’s always about the way a person is hardwired and never about what “messed up” the wiring, then obviously two autistic parents would be more likely to produce an autistic kid than would a deaf couple in which one of the parents became deaf after birth. But that kind of logical math stuff aside, it seems to me (and again, I’m really just kinda making this up based on what I’ve noticed) that the genetic combination responsible for autistic hardwiring is a very dominant combination.

It occurs to me, if you’re noticing that Deaf issues seem to be conspicuously absent from forums about disability issues, that perhaps the idea that many Deaf people do not identify with the disabled population, and may even take offense to being considered a part of the disabled population (though I personally think that taking offense at the idea of being disabled is a glaring insult to people who *do* identify as disabled), perhaps those forums are deliberately omitting discussion of Deaf issues with respect to that stance. Though I have noticed myself that Mary Johnson of Ragged Edge, for example, will fight like a bulldog on behalf of Deaf rights, while concurrently acknowledging that a lot of Deaf people don’t consider themselves disabled.

And, you know, I think it would be really quite nice if more people were in the school of “Well, that’s the way Jamal has always been” rather than in the school of diagnosis. ‘Cause it ain’t no disease. : )

You raise some good points, re, the comparative difficulties of accurate diagnosis, at least in terms of modern times with modern equipment in rich countries. Today, they can diagnose hearing loss in new born infants.

Even in the absence of appropriate technology (in many developing countries, for example, this is still a major issue), it’s easier to recognize deafness even if you’ve never known anyone else who was deaf (Gee, this kid never seems to respond to noises!), whereas with autism, I could imagine that in a developing country where maybe they don’t have the same awareness, someone autistic could be seen as simply, “Well, that’s just the way Jamal has always been” and not as something to be diagnosed. Or if diagnosed, they might lump it in, along with mental retardation and learning disabilities and schizophrenia and so forth, into a single label, maybe “mentally ill” or whatever the local term may be.

As for the numbers with deaf people — there ARE some all-deaf families out there, and even some families where generation after generation have at least some deaf members. But it basically comes down to exactly what caused the hearing loss. Deafness can be caused by things that are not genetic — by diseases like meningitis or by injuries, for example. Those parents will usually have no relevant genes to pass down. Even where there is a genetic cause on the part of both parents, there are many different recessive genes (and a few dominant genes) that CAN cause hearing loss. For the recessive genes, you have to have two copies of the SAME recessive gene to become deaf. If you have two DIFFERENT recessive genes, it won’t work. That’s probably why so many deaf/Deaf parents still end up with hearing kids.

… I gather they’re still working on understanding the genetic roots of autism?

I agree with you on the so-called “epidemic” thing. People sometimes talk of a so-called “epidemic” of attention deficit disorder too, but I think that’s the same issue — people just know more about how to recognize it today than they did even just 20 years ago. I’ve had ADD all along, since I was a little girl, but was not diagnosed until age 26. I didn’t suddenly “become” ADD then, I just had better awareness of how that label might apply to me, so I finally knew to go seeking an evaluation.

One more question occurs to me. Normally, when I look at cross-disability organizations, it’s rare to see much inclusion of deaf/hard of hearing issues at all; and when they’re included, there often seems to be very little awareness that some (not all) Deaf people see themselves as members of a cultural community and often reject the whole idea that they are “disabled.” But, from the little bit I’ve seen of the autistic community so far in the past couple of months, there seems to be so much more awareness of the Deaf community and so much more of a tendency to capitalize the word Deaf! I wonder why that is … is it simply because some autistic people sign and so ended up learning more about the Deaf community through sign language classes or whatever? Or are autistic people just cooler? ;-)