“I don’t want to be associated with that other kind of autistic people,” goes the standard whine line. “You know… Those Ones.” The crazy drooling retarded low functioning diaper wearing nonverbal ones who can’t take care of themselves and need to be on welfare. Which one of those or many other pejorative categories depends on the individual variation in the snobbery. (What is it? Snob not otherwise specified? Not like those other snobs.)

I’ve written a lot of posts on this blog about aspification and snobbery of this very sort. It’s been sitting around in the autistic community for a long time. And now it’s coming out of the woodwork. I might link some of those posts once I get to my main computer, just for a refresher. But this is some of the most blatantly hateful and snobbish stuff I’ve seen in a while.

What I wrote to someone earlier:

And some of us might rightly find it insulting to be referred to as the ones that others had to be oh-so-tragically “lumped in with” (you know, “crazy”, “low functioning”, “retarded”, “autistic”, or other categories that people seem to do their darndest to distance themselves from).  Like we have disability cooties or something from the way some people behave, and like having the medical people put us in the same category as our “betters” is such a terrible threat (and like it changes anything about who any of us really are).

And it’s true. It’s insulting. It’s insulting to me. It’s insulting to anyone who bears the characteristics that any individual aspified snob might throw at us. And it ought to be insulting to all of those who don’t have disability cooties At the moment either. Anyone with any decency should be appalled that people are upset, not over anything that is really going to harm autistic people as a whole, but at the idea of being thrown in with the rest of us.

It’s especially interesting to see that one of the people most widely quoted as divorcing himself from people who wear adult diapers (like me) is someone who has never seemed to hesitate to use my writing (both with and without permission) but apparently can’t stand the thought of sharing a label with people whose underwear differs from his in certain key aspects, or with people who self-injure. I guess nobody had better tell Carley that lots of people diagnosed with Asperger’s are incontinent and/or have severe self-injury. He might want to create a divide within Asperger’s to wall himself off from such people in.

Funny but I have never minded as a person who has had both such characteristics, sharing an autism label with people without those characteristics. Anyone who delves deep enough into either science or personal experience of autistic people will find that the characteristics related to perception and cognition are the ties that bind us together, regardless of the more superficial characteristics that people divide us up by. Of the autistic people who seem to have the most similar experiences on those deep deep levels to mine, include people diagnosed as high or low functioning, Asperger and autism and PDD-NOS, with IQ scores from 20 to 160. The same can be said of those who most differ from me. The reason is the diagnostic categories are neither deep nor penetrating nor accurate. They divide those with the most in common and connect those with barely anything in common in such haphazard ways it should be obvious that they are falsity of the worst kind. And the same goes when people pick these singular outward traits and hold them up as the ultimate dividing line. Like many autistics I have been saying this since I first got a good hard look at what the categories meant. And surely the deep down bones-level traits are those that matter.

People often get the idea from the media that I prefer to be called low functioning. I don’t. I don’t think that such labels can ever capture the intricate and beautiful complexity that exists within all of us. Nobody should be reduced to such a term even when they do the harm to themself by self-applying such terms. But as a person who has received that label from several doctors without even knowing it, I will stand up and resist the way it is used, and will tell people that when they speak of what they want to do to people with that label then they mean me since I have worn that label. (It is not for them to say they make an exception for me, because when people with that label are mistreated I am mistreated because the label is forced upon me whether some random guy likes it or not. It is forced on me by doctors and by people who yell out of car windows alike and is not so easily repelled.). Such things do not fit into soundbites.

Anyway just let it be known that I totally and completely divorce myself from any person or community who shuns people like me or like any other random autistic person who doesn’t meet the standards of aspified perfection. This is not the way to celebrate human diversity and it is not the way to gain status for yourselves by throwing the rest of us to the wolves. We may share an official diagnostic category (in places where the DSM is recognized), people may finally be forced to acknowledge the sameness that many of us have believed in all along, but (thank God) we don’t all share such a terribly harmful set of ethics. And thankfully it’s okay to reject crappy ethics even if it’s not okay to reject people for having unsuitably proper characteristics.   

(“Better? Fuck better. We don’t exist for the beautiful people of the world, Ted. We’re there for the oddball. The rebel. The outcast. The geek.” A line from the movie “The Specials” that just came to mind. As it always does when I am confronted with outrageous elitism.)

Anyway as much as this is a rant against snobbery it is also a call to remember what is important. Look to that beautiful shifting central set of attributes that make us alike and different. Stop using the periphery to divide us. And just as we remember the central attributes that matter, we need to look to the central values that bring us together to assert that we are of equal value no matter how we seem to differ, that we all matter and are valuable, in a deep down way not a surface feelgood way. Because we need those roots to sustain us while other people are fleeing and pointing fingers at those they don’t want to be lumped in with. And because it’s too easy to get blown away by the ethical storms that surround situations like these.

There is so much beauty in those deep levels of who we are, and it’s so easy to forget it when people are going on at great length about how inappropriate it is to see our connections when we could be dividing on the basis of things as surface level as the fabric of our underwear or our IQ points. Yes those things can make a huge difference in how we are treated and what lives we lead, but isn’t that fact something we are trying to change, rather than intensify the oppression?