Positively Autistic.

[Odin2005]

I ran into a wonderful series of 4 videos of a CBC special on autism and autistic rights.

http://www.esteeklar.com/media/video-vault/positively-autistic-clip-1

Given the bigoted views of the anti-vax/pro-cure people like Jenny McCarthy and Autism Speaks it's good that autistic rights is in the news somewhere.

[Forkboy]

1. kick

:kick:

[KamaAina]

2. Yes indeed. She also has The Autism Acceptance Project.

PSA: There are more of us hanging around here than most of you "neurotypicals" realize. To paraphrase the immortal New Yorker cartoon, "On the Internet, no one knows you have autism."

[Taverner]

3. I knew there was some reason I liked you!

Having ADHD I get along with Aspies and Autistic folks really well

[Odin2005]

5. Oops, replided to the wrong post...

[Deep13]

4. I'm still not clear on what you mean by "pro-cure"...

...or why its bigoted. I have to assume it is something like "pro-life" where the label does not match reality.

[Odin2005]

6. People that think being autistic is a tragedy that needs to be fixed.

It implies that my autism is something apart from me instead of it being part of who I am (which is why I prefer to call myself an "Autistic Person", not a "person with Autism"), it implies that my way of being is inherently inferior to that of a neurotypical person and that I need to be "fixed" by being turned into a neurotypical person as much as possible.

[nomorenomore08]

7. Because it pathologizes aspects of a person that, arguably, don't need to be pathologized.

Helping a person with whatever difficulties or disabilities adapt to the world is of course a good thing, but that doesn't mean anyone with any form of autism, however mild, *has* to be made superficially "acceptable" to others. And a blanketly "pro-cure" mentality precludes acceptance of any difference stigmatized as "autistic" - in other words, the thinking is that we have to make them as close to 100% "typical" as possible, otherwise they're still defective.

Not sure if I got this quite right, but I tried... :shrug:

[KamaAina]

8. There isn't, and won't ever be, a "cure" for autism

because it isn't a disease like diabetes or the flu. Rather, it is "a behaviorally defined syndrome with multiple etiologies", which means, in English, that it is a common set of behaviors that can arise from any of several different causes.

[Odin2005]

9. KICK