Why is it so wrong for one to admit one has AS?

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Ha. Speak for yourself.
That aside, I agree with the rest of your post.

Well, yes it's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but to a fair extent it takes two to make it a disability.......the social "impairments" of AS barely seem to exist in front of the right audience - if society stopped expecting neurotypical behaviour from everybody, if it stopped shunnning and marginalising us just for being a bit different, we'd be pretty much normal. You might be surprised what Aspies can do when others build their confidence instead of smashing it down. Of course stuff like executive disfunction and sensory issues wouldn't go away, but again, if the rest of the world took us seriously over these things, those things could be seen as differences rather than impairments. I can't fly, but that disability would only be apparent if most other people could fly. To a large extent we're disabled because other people choose to see it that way.

I disagree that executive dysfunction and sensory issues are just "differences". If input that doesn't bother most people can cause one to be in so much pain that one feels sick, it's not just a difference, it's a problem. The same with executive dysfunction. Struggling to get anything done and to sequence tasks that are considered basic by most people is a difference, but it's a serious problem, not just an endearing little quirk.
The sensory issues and executive dysfunction, for me at least, do come packaged with things that I'm pretty sure are related and that I do find advantageous, but I can't just pretend that the problems caused by them aren't there, as they affect me every day, and it's nothing to do with how people react to me, and I'm sure I can't be the only person with experiences like mine.

As for the social thing... people are typically nice to, and accepting of me. My social impairments are still very, very much there; it's just that I don't care enough about socialising for them to really worry me. If you have trouble with things like getting a sentence out; having words in your head to say to people; knowing how to contribute to a topic; and other aspects of socialising, acceptance might make you feel better about those things, but it's not going to make them go away.


Edited to add: I can/could communicate pretty easily with the few people with ASDs that I know/have known in public, which would probably count as a "suitable audience", but I would think that that is more due to similar neurology and communication styles than any attempt on their part to be accepting.



Well, yes; disability exists within a context. It doesn't change the fact of the disability. We live in a world that is designed to run relatively smoothly for people whose brains operate differently from ours. I don't think it has much to do with how they see it; it's just a fact that we can't function in the same manner as they do. Until the world magically changes into one that is set up to accomodate our neurotype, we are disabled. The disability doesn't take away our worth and personhood, but it's there/

I wasn't trying to undermine the situation. By all means, talk about it and discuss personal issues. I understand completely how a community can bully you, take information out of context, believe that they can undiagnose you based on your behaviour in a heavily edited video that lasted about 2 minutes or less or in blog entries (for instance) and outright lie about what you stand for. I've gone through that on the internet and in my day to day life (and also in what I've observed in the autism community in general). I don't understand the bit about nazi's, though, but I know what you mean in general.

However, I don't know what the situation is and from the looks of it, there's more to this story. And lets be realistic, AS is a disability, but I do agree that the AS in itself is not always the issue and often it's the way in which society has failed to accomodate for people.

One thing I did notice that did kind of piss me off about the forum was how all the people there seemed to b***h on about people with AS who recognise that there IS injustice towards disabled people and treating those people as if they are just whiny. That's not fair, in my opinion. These people seem to be in denial of real issues in our community- real ableism that people face that our own communities don't do anything about. I feel that my country has failed thousands if not millions of people in education and in healthcare in respects to autism. I;m one of the few people in my country who are lucky enough to recieve support at school specifically for autism by people who are specially trained in this area and I'm very lucky to recieve early intervention. There are people who work hard all the time just to get through a single day and if the community actually got off of their arses and did something, then people would have less on their shoulders to deal with. It's not whiny, selfish or lazy for someone to want a servuce that they desperately need or even just for people to respect their rights.

They also seemed to misunderstand the point of this website and the opinions of the neurodiversity community, thinking that it was all about how we're all "speshul snowflakes". Bullshit- I'm disabled, but I'm not hopeless, fighting a battle or being heroic just because I live with a disability. Neither am I pathetic or intending to exploit others. I deeply resent people who tell me how to think about my disability. It's my life- it's my brain and I'll do with what I've got and it works fine, even though it comes across a lot of obstacles.

With all that being said, we shouldn't assume anyone is guilty or innocent until proven otherwise. I think that's fair, though I do apologise if I have come across as insensitive.

Again, people's reactions are often more how you present information than what information you're presenting. If you say "Hi, I'm Patrick and I have Asperger's!" it'll come off as very odd, but if you find a way to transition the conversation toward that, like I have with several of my professors and close friends (with the friends, it was easy: "Hey, you ever heard of Asperger's? Turns out I have it.").

Even though I'm very social, and most of the information is about social difficulties, I haven't had anyone doubt me yet. Not sure why, but I guess it's because people have already picked up on that I don't really notice trends, so I'm not doing it to be trendy.

Yeah, that's true. I tell people about it and try to be frank about it. If my past comes into conversation, I will eventually go onto my disability and if people deny it then that's their problem. if people can be brutally honest about having a physical disability, then why the hell shouldn't I talk about my own mental disability.

I hate it when people go "but people who actually have x condition won't talk about it!". BS. I have it and I have no problem with talking about it or even my anxiety. When people DON'T talk about it, it adds to the stigma. When the only people that will talk about it openly are (supposedly) liars adds even more to the stigma. This is why we need to stop the stigma by making disability as something normal, everyday people experience, i.e, stop with this dumb, dramatic portrayal, be objective and above all, talk about it.

But in the right environment, such quirks really would be of no consequence. Like anything else in life, if you can't do it yourself, get help or do something else.


You'd need to give me concrete examples of those AS problems. They'd have to be things mentioned in the diagnostic manuals or I could just argue that it's not really AS. I can't think of anything in my own experience that seems purely down to AS in me. They all seem to be the inability to do something that I really don't need to do, or that I wouldn't need to do if not for society's myopic expectations of me.


Hmmm.......now you've got me wondering if we're not arguing the same case but with a different definition of disability. I think people tend to see "disabled" people as being in some sense absolutely disabled, as if the problem wouldn't go away whatever they did to accommodate it, as if they themselves bore no responsibility for it.

"for they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together. And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also."
-Khalil Gibran, The Prophet


The word nazi isn't important to my point, I was just using it as a pejorative term for groups of people who attack the vulnerable - i.e. those horrible kids. What I was driving at was how much worse it would feel if friends just shrugged it off as an unwanted drama. But I don't suppose you'd have done the "drama" post if there hadn't been a lot of supportive messages already.


See my comments above re disability. I think we humans are a colossally interdependent species.

I cant believe all the moving avatars and pictures in that forum. NT must have such stable visual systems, how can they stand it?

What are you implying?




True, but for as long as our profile of needs and abilities are different to what most people have, we are technically disabled (or at least in the eyes of others). That's not to say that our abilities are not beneficial or unique. Take weak central coherence theory, for instance; it explains why aspies learn facts related to their obsessions and may lean towards subjects such as music, mathematics, engineering and so on but struggle with language and communication (anyone who knows more about this, please correct me). My neurotype makes my peers at college baffled at my own difficulty with the coursework because they have the idea that if you can memorise many many facts and notice tiny details in the work with very little difficulty, then that must automatically mean that you can summarise it with the same ease in an essay. They couldn't be more wrong. It pisses me off that my neurotype makes it difficult to summarise information, but it gives me an advantage. Unfortunately, I need to mould my neurotype to fit into the "peg hole of society" (but nuts to everyone else- once I learn these skills, I'll be invincible, mwahahahahaha).

With that being said, WCC theory is a bit iffy- some people don't agree with it for various reasons, though I feel it explains my own abilities or lack therof. Anyone out there who knows more about neuroscience than me- please correct me if I'm wrong.

I was just trying to reassure you that I wasn't trying to say that you were the kind of guy who would have poured cold water on the OP's prayer if she hadn't already had a number of sympathetic replies to cushion her from the potential blow. It would have been a very different thing if your reply had been the only one - in that case the effect could have been quite harmful to the OP.

I agree......they think we're disabled but they're wrong.

Don't forget, one person at that forum has AS. He said in his post in the thread Punkykat linked.