Autistics like Baggs are now leading a nascent civil rights movement. “I remember in ’99,” she says, “seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were and wished there was something like that for autism. Now there is.” The message: We’re here. We’re weird. Get used to it.
Amanda Baggs
Mottron draws a parallel with homosexuality. Until 1974, psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, described being gay as a mental illness. Someday, Mottron says, we’ll look back on today’s ideas about autism with the same sense of shame that we now feel when talking about psychology’s pre-1974 views on sexuality. “We want to break the idea that autism should definitely be suppressed,” he says.
Laurent Mottron
….she went on an information-devouring rampage. “There’s such a variety of human behavior. Why is my kind wrong?” she asks.
Michelle Dawson
All this from The New Autism which you can download from the Wired website – or buy in its offline format.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Three cheers! Wired is a dang good magazine.
I think WIRED did a good job with this article.
Here’s what they said about it in their press release:
“The New Autism
Traditional science holds that people with severe autism are prisoners in their own minds, severely disabled, and probably mentally retarded. Don’t tell that to Amanda Baggs, an autistic woman who achieved viral fame with her YouTube video “In My Language,” which has so far received more than 350,000 hits. Wired contributor David Wolman gets inside the life that Baggs has created for herself, which includes blogging, hanging out in Second Life, corresponding with her friends, and a “constant conversation” with the world around her. Wolman’s conclusion: Much of past research about autism and intelligence is catastrophically flawed.”
At the risk of speaking for someone else, I think Amanda would say that she is disabled, and so would Michelle. If I understand them correctly, they aren’t saying that they aren’t disabled, but that their disability is in part or wholly a function of how much or how little people are willing to interact with them as if they are autistic people rather than merely shunting them off to the side because they are autistic people and not trying to see that they have a place in the world, but that they are different.
I say I am disabled, but my disability is a bigger or lesser problem depending on how accommodating people around me are willing to be (I can be unable to think and act more or less normally or instead be able to think and act more or less normally depending on how noisy and crowded my environment is, for instance).
“Severely disabled” is also a function of how much people want to accommodate the person and how demanding they are that a person be normal. It is severely disabling to be of a certain ethnic group in certain places, it can lead to immediate death. Being dead is definitely a severe disability.
At any rate, it’s interesting that Carly was just discovered as being on of these people who was supposed to be seriously retarded but is not. This article really makes the point that it’s not like Carly is the first, not by a long shot. And it also makes the point that there could be a million more Carly’s out there who are being severely disabled by the idiotic attitudes of those around them and ineffective or non-existent teaching/training/understanding/support they are receiving.
Nice to see one of my videos mentioned in the article (also glad they didn’t contact me because I couldn’t have handled being mentioned in a major magazine):
Baggs is cueing up
another YouTube clip. She angles her computer
screen so I can see it. Set to the soundtrack
of Queen’s “Under Pressure,” it’s a
montage of close-up videos showing behaviors
like pen clicking, thumb twiddling, and
finger tapping. The message: Why are some
stress-related behaviors socially permissible,
while others—like the rocking bodies
and flapping arms commonly associated
with autism—are not? Hit count for the video
at last check: 80,000 and climbing.”
What a path of hypocritical lies! It is a careless trivialization for high functioning successful people to imply that they are disabled, and making hyped up claims as to where the disability comes from!
lurker: huh?
I’m just mentioning Ms. Clark’s unfounded and highly exaggerated ideas about disability.
Whereas your ideas about disability are…?
Same tired old rhetoric from ideologues Mottron, Dawson and Baggs. You must feel lonely siding with that trio against the millions of parents around the planet who are trying to actually help their autistic children live a better life.
The only thing that trio has accomplished for autistic children is … well its. … OK I give up they have done nothing except draw attention to themselves. On that score I can give them full credit.
Oh Harold, do you know how bitter you sound?
Look my friend, I still have no idea what it is that repels you so much about the idea of autism being treated equally to other neurological states. But lonely? Um, no.
I see however, you have joined the ranks of the arseholes who think that if you don’t do it their way then you don’t help your kids.
In short, you’ve gone from a small minded little man to…well its…OK I give up, you’re still a small minded little man. On that score you’ve always managed to score full credit.
I agree with Harold. And I heard enough about the idea of having autism “treated equally” whatever that would encompass, but very little about pushing for equal quality of life. The “diversity” advocates sometimes pretend they’re trying to get progress for those with the condition. But the idea of diversity has still been shouted to denounce almost any effort to improve abilities in those afflicted.
lurker I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You want equal quality of life but not to be treated equally?
Harry D, just you don’t listen to Mr. Leich. I am hopeful that you do have somehting to offer here. Show us your tits!
I think people deserve more, like what people want, rather than what a few others say they should accept. It would be great if everyone was treated equally. I’ve heard about the vicious exploiters who enjoy messing with the unfortunate, to satisfy their selfish egos. I really hope ending that can be achieved. I don’t always see that tendency among those who say they oppose it. They only preach acceptance, but when the tough direct questions come up, some will claim they don’t know anything of them, or will go off topic and make vicious accusations.
Lurker,
“high functioning” is not “normal functioning” they use “high functioning” as a relative term. I do have a disability. People with my same disability get gov’t support in some cases because they are disabled. How hard is that to understand? There are a lot of things, a ton of things that I don’t do that normal people do easily. There are things that normal people do easily that I could never do. I can see, I can hear. Blindness and deafness are not my disability, but that does not mean that I am not disabled. How dare you say that “high functioning” people are not disabled when they are patently un-able to do some, even many normal and usually very necessary things?
I am also the parent of a more obviously disabled adult. I know from disability. I struggle to get by financially, underemployed, because my disability prevents me from taking normal employment for the abilities that I seem like I should have.
I don’t need you to mock my situation and say that I don’t have a disability when I do.
Ms. Clark, I have listened to the self descriptions of the lives of those with Aspergers/HFA. Many of them give no indication of significant impairments or disability. Some of them are very successful and able. I didn’t say that all of the high functioning weren’t disabled, but it seems like the HFA that are disabled, usually don’t hold such extreme opinions. I seldom see those with your opinions mentioning the disability that comes with the condition. If those like you are really disabled, I wonder why you don’t act in your own interests.
Lurker,
For one thing people get tired of always talking about how hard their lives are (well, with the exception of whiners like certain biomuddled parents, they live to complain about how hard their lives are and feel free to exaggerate and unnaturally isolate every disappointment), so no you aren’t going to get a laundry list from every “high functioning” person about every daily failure they have, and I can guarantee you that unless they live in a really fine community like the one Alex Bain and his family live in , which is extraordinarily accepting and supportive of Alex being autistic, that autistics face very hard times every day.
The difference between what “low functioning” autistic deals with and what a “high functioning” autistic deals with may be different, but they both can be extreme. The more normal looking person (on the surface) is a constant failure in the eyes of people who think of him really having normal abilities but as not trying hard enough. The less normal looking person may be just written off and not worth the trouble of asking them what they think or what they want and that’s horrible, too.
I can never expect that any real-life face to face or even phone contact with a person will be “normal” or “succeed” in what I set out to do. Sometimes the conversation goes “normally” as far as I can tell, and sometimes before I can tell what was about to go wrong, it has gone wrong. I’ve said the wrong thing in the wrong way and have to either fix the problem and hope that I don’t in fact make it worse, or figure out if it’s best at that point to just pretend that I didn’t say something in the wrong way and hope it wasn’t a big deal.
These things can turn into very big deals depending on who the other person is and what the “transaction” was about.
I have compared facing a new type of conversation (one that I don’t have a script for, essentially, and where I don’t know the other person) to the “lady and the tiger” fable. You open the door and you might get the nice lady or you open the door and you might get eaten by the voracious tiger, and there’s no way of knowing which way it will end. So sometimes, even though it will “cost” me in some serious way, I just don’t “open the door”. I literally “don’t go there.”
And that’s just scraping the surface. You can dismiss this as trivial, but unless you have dealt with a lifetime of major and minor social failures and been the victim of real life bullying you can’t get how awful it is to deal with other humans and how attractive it is to just avoid them.
You wrote opaquely:
“If those like you are really disabled, I wonder why you don’t act in your own interests.”
What in the world does that mean? I **do** act in my own interests, and where in the world do get the nerve you say that I don’t? I act in my own interests and in the interests of my much more obviously disabled child, running interference for that child so that I take the social pressures in situations that are too difficult for him/her to handle.
What do YOU do for disabled people besides insult and harass and demean them as you have done here with me?
Ms. Clark, I’ve said just about whatever I could say. I realize you act in your own interests especially. I didn’t actually doubt it. It’s just that someone with a disability holding your viewpoints would seem to be going against their own interests. You like to describe me as an insulter and harasser of disabled people. I’m not much of an able person myself. But I know your attitude towards “biomuddled” parents who you think are “whiners”, who take action in trying to help their disabled children who face a lot of challenges. I haven’t seen any of them castigate people like you for expressing what challenges you have.
lurker writ re: biomuddled parents:
“I haven’t seen any of them castigate people like you for expressing what challenges you have.”
You haven’t been around much. They usually do exactly what you just did, maybe with more cruelty. They deny that I have a disability at all. They snidely deny that I have a disabled child. They probe to see what they can find out about my child and if they find something they try to use it against me, try to make me look bad or like I have done something wrong. This blows up in their faces, but they try. Like one time one of them did this big AHA!!! revealing of what my child’s age is. But they had found the statement of what my child’s age is (was) on a website where I had written it like three years prior. So they said I was lying about my child’s (current) age because my child had added 3 years of life to his/her age, just by living. In other words, they hadn’t checked the date when I had posted my kids age (three years earlier).
That kind of thing. They hate that I show how stupid and utterly pathetic some of their “treatments” are and they go for the throat. They are not all “nice” people. No they are not. They will break the law, they will libel and defame, and they will threaten and harass people who challenge them. They have done this to me. (And Kev and others.)