That being said, I am really in favor of the DSM-V using a spectrum approach to the diagnosis. It will just make it that much more important I think for us to take control of the public perception of what autism can include. I don’t see autism speaks running any media campaigns trying to reach out to school counselors and child psychologists to let them know to look for those kids who aren’t head banging and poop smearing.

Hmmm, if the diagnostic shift could be used as a lever to emphasize that “autism every day” isn’t… that’s an interesting idea. I think we’ll really need to redouble our efforts on this one.

My wife points out, the aspie snobs and the “can’t be autistic because…” reverse snobs will all have to learn to share space. This diagnostic shift could really help that way, but will make our community, lets say, a bit more interesting for a while.

But, yeah, in any case, it seemed the common thread with most of the men who either dated us or wanted to date us was that they saw a socially gullible woman (or teenage girl). They didn’t actually care much about personality or common interests at all, even if they got us believing they did. Which actually held as true inside the geek community as out of it. There seems to be a weird dynamic where in a lot of primarily-male geek social groups, the most prestigious thing is to get a “normal,” non-geek woman, not a woman who will appreciate your collection of video games and Star Trek novels and your graphing calculator just as much as you do. We ran into several men who seemed to back off and decide they didn’t want to be that close to us after we started talking about video games a lot, or whatever. Apparently this made us the last resort for the losers who couldn’t get any other woman.

(Note that I’m not saying this applies in every single social group. I’ve seen plenty of successful relationships between men and women who were equally geeky, and were attracted to each other because of their common interests. But there is definitely a… thing, I don’t know how to describe it. It seems to be most prevalent in under-30, primarily male groups that are centered around something recreational, like roleplaying games or fandom. For all the articles that pop up occasionally about “how to get your girlfriend into your hobby,” most of which are full of sexist patronizing crap, men in those kinds of social dynamics can treat women who ARE into their hobbies already, without requiring prompting, like shit.)

But… yeah, I don’t claim our experience was typical, and I’m not saying all men in all mostly-male geek social circles are like this or anything like that, but there does seem to be a thing where autistic women can be seen as vulnerable prey by certain types of non-autistic men. Even if their relationships aren’t overtly abusive, and only one of ours actually was, it’s the kind of thing where you look back over the years and realize you were basically being used, that there were lots of warning signs you didn’t pick up on at the time; that you were treated like an object and that the guy was laughing/boggling at your “craziness” on some level the whole time, but figured you were too stupid and naive to realize it. (And that’s kind of the best case scenario, really. During adolescence, we got some apparently out-of-nowhere offers for dates from boys we didn’t even know, and didn’t respond to them because we didn’t know what to do; looking back at the kinds of cues they were giving off and what we know now, I suspect they would’ve ended in date rape or something close to it.)

Anyway, yeah, going off on a tangent here. :\ We had something to say about the aspie supremacists/snobs, definitely, but I think we’re going to put it in our own LJ.

I think they are also a falsity in that they create a distorted view of history. People get the idea that Kanner observed one group, Asperger a slightly different group. It’s actually other people that later created the dual division. The existence of two categories rather than, say, three or five, is pure coincidence, based on the fact that there were these two guys people could use as some kind of symbols for different ideas, because they happened to be talking about the same thing at the same time.

I’ve been reading a text by H. Asperger from 1952, and he said this, among other things (my translation – no intention to offend with the outdated terminology, just don’t want make H.A. to be more modern in his thinking than he really was):

“Unfortunately the positive and knowledgeable traits are not always dominant in the autistic character. There are people of this kind at quite different levels of personality: from the original bordering on genius, through peculiar, impractical eccentrics with limited functioning, to machine-like feeble-minded people with the most severe contact disturbances.”

For Asperger, “people of this kind” included all of what is now understood as the autism spectrum. It is a questionable tribute to the man to stick his name to a part of the spectrum when he never described such a division. He was well ahead of his time in recognising the similarity between autistic kids who needed a lot of support and their successful autistic parents, and concluding that this meant heredity and varying levels of difficulties were key concepts in understanding the whole phenomenon.

On the other hand, he was a product of his time and utterly stuck in the medical model. It would make sense to give him credit for the things where he showed great intelligence and foresight, but not stick a whole group of people with his name from here to eternity, as large parts of his work and philosophy are now well and truly outdated.

So to be angry that people dont want to be known as autists is foolish. Remember, asperger individuals are often the ones who actuslly adapt into full lives in spite of huge hurdles. So when youre in your cocoons remember things work differently in the real world when you have no help.

I would say…dont take this so personally. Some people will look down on you and thats their choice…why worry about it? This kind of entitled ranting makes it worse. Nobody has to respect you or feel sorry for you. Its not a rule of the universe.

Bottom line is that the word has a heavy stigma and people dont want to be stigmatized. Nothing surprising or hard to understand about that.

I picture normality and the autism range as extremely enmeshed 3D objects with many fuzzy projections that deeply penetrate the other, and one range nestles within the other. So, while picturing linear left to right ranges is a start, doing so and attempting to add clear division along the way (autistic, aspie) actually prevents greater clarity by creating shorthand terms for who we are that often don’t fit our realities. Some of us are extremely high functioning yet may be severely socially inept, to put it politely. That would describe myself. I don’t have friends not because I loose them but because I don’t have a clue how people make friends. I’m nice to people, I mind my manners, I try to follow protocol, but it never seems to be enough or on the right track.

The [Feb. 10, 2010] NPR recording is most excellent, by the way, and touches on the topic of this above blog entry. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123527833