Do you still believe in the Autistic Community & Culture

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Oh, then I hope this thread gives you enough information about it. If there is additional information about Autistic Culture you would like to receive, then let me know and I will post it in this thread.

"Do You Still Believe In The Autistic Community & Culture?" No.

I believe we should see ourselves as viable people.

I believe we should see ourselves as competent people--but we have different "competencies" to non-autistic people.

I believe there is an "autistic culture," and I believe there should be an "autistic culture."

I don't believe we should be separatists, though.

There is one but it is in its toddler stage.
I do not see it expanding in the next few years because of the increasing anti Neurodivesity movement backlash.

The very idea of an autism culture is a separatist one. Its promoters oppose ABA, which is needed to help autistic people talk, communicate, and function in society. Its promotes oppose teaching autistic people eye contact and would like to see autistic people stuck in diapers in the name of promoting this disability as an "alternative lifestyle." What really boggles my mind is how they can say they want more autistic voices out there, yet oppose the services that's needed to get those voices out there. What they want is control and an echo-chamber, where they use their victim status to manipulate and control people.

Any concept of an autistic "culture" is a joke that'll fall apart. Why should we celebrate a disease that you say makes autistic people too weak to learn eye contact?

Some autistic people have written moving, dramatic accounts of immediately feeling "at home" among other autistics, having a natural sense of "belonging," and recognizing other autistics as "their own kind" of people (French, 1993; Williams, 1994; Cohen, 2006).

Jim Sinclair's words to describe the 1992 visit with Xenia Grant and Donna Williams during which Autism Network International was founded were "feeling that, after a life spent among aliens, I had met someone who came from the same planet as me." This "same planet" metaphor, along with metaphors about "speaking the same language" or "belonging to the same tribe," are very common descriptions used by autistic people who have had this experience of autistic space. One participant at the first Autreat in 1996 summed it up saying, "I feel as if I'm home, among my own people, for the first time. I never knew what this was until now."

For autistic people who have this kind of autistic-space experience, it is obviously a powerful and often life-changing experience. Therefore, the Autistic Culture does exist and it continues to grow and to develop:
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1075/1248

I've introduced my daughter to other autistic kids her age when she was 6. I don't know if it was a contrived situation of meeting in an unfamiliar surrounding but it came across like an episode of the TV series Babylon 5 where every child behaved like they came from a different planet, each doing their own thing. The irony of proposing an autistic culture is that each person is as different from one another as they are from NTs...

I do. It's just that I don't have the money or the time to go to all the different events. Having said that, I do believe in all the things that you do.