For those who think AS/autism isn't a disability

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I have no clue. I never read about it being it.

How does left handness effect them? I don't see how it would limit what they can do. They can still play sports, play games, write.

Autistic people can still play sports, play games, write...

I was using dyslexia as an example because they have also said it's not a disability like some of us say autism isn't a disability despite how it effects us.

Does left handness effect the way their mind works?
Does it give them the same problems we have?
Does it give them the same problems people with disabilities have? eg. ADHD, dyslexia, NVLD, any type on learning disabilities, ceberal palsy, mental retardation etc.

That's not accurate.

To me being on the autism spectrum is not a disability its just a different way of being.

Its named Autism Spectrum Disorder - not disaibility..

Quotes: " From my clinical experience I consider that children and adults with Aspergers Syndrome have a different, not defective, way of thinking." Tony Attwood

I've only encountered one person I knew was Dyslexic. He was a good friend growing up. Reading was a lot of work for him. Last I knew, he was working as a programmer on Wall Street. Was he impaired? Maybe, but he seems to have done all right.

For myself, there are a lot of concepts I just don't understand. It's a mixed bag. One of the concepts I don't get is "impossible". That one has worked out fairly well for me. Am I impaired, or are people who believe in "impossible" impaired? Time will tell.

I don't have an instinctive understanding of "socially acceptable". Instead, I've had to study and learn, and maybe I've got a better grasp than most. At least I've got a number of very interesting questions. We'll see.

I don't consider myself "disabled". If anything, I'm just out of place.

But how do you explain all the problems we have as I described in my first post?

If it's not a disability, then why are we effected by it; lack of social skills, sensory issues, communication issues, difficulty with multitasking, resisting to changes, etc.

I'd like to see what people think of that. Everytime I see one of us saying it's not a disability I find it confusing because of I'm thinking "But all those problems the condition causes. How is that not a disability?":?

Is having a disability a bad thing we don't want to admit we have it so we say it's not a disability? That's what I'm thinking.

Actually it's one of those things that is very different culturally and where for instance in the USA left-handers could only be said to be non-disabled due to a gradual change taking place within some part of the past century or so.

In the past, people rarely made left-handed or left-hander-friendly equipment of any kind, which put us at a disadvantage in anything from writing to using power tools. Moreover, not only did people not teach left-handed people to do most things, but people were often forbidden to teach left-handed people in a left-handed way. Left-handed people were judged as worse at a lot of things because they were forced to use their right hands for them. If you're right-handed, imagine being forced to use your left hand for handwriting, and how much stress that puts on your life.

At that point in time left-handed handwriting was not considered a valid way of handwriting. Right-handed was part of the definition in people's heads of handwriting. (This is very hard for a lot of modern people to understand, but it's definitely how it was seen.) Doing things left-handed was not only bad, but a sign that all development was going to go awry if it was catered to, and not doing the "real" version of whatever it was that was being done. Countless left-handed people were treated as having specific or general learning difficulties in school because of this.

When I was growing up in the eighties, my parents didn't treat me as disabled for being left-handed because my mother and older brother are both left-handed. Our house was accessible to me because left-handers were in the majority, and my mother never allowed anyone outside the family to treat me as doing something wrong. But the books that existed at the time that dealt with left-handedness dealt with it in words such as defect, disability, and deviant, and in the best books there was at the most still question as to whether those words applied or not. Shorter lifespans of left-handers were cited, and considered possibly due to the effect of operating heavy machinery designed for right-handers. Despite this being a thing about how things were designed, left-handedness was still blamed for our purported shorter lifespans, and for our difficulty in schools designed for right-handed people.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has severe limitations in some area that make some things difficult or impossible for them. What determines whether something's considered disabling isn't merely whether they have severe limitations, because non-disabled people have any of a number of severe limitations that many disabled people do not have. It's determined by whether this sort of person is planned for in a way that enables them to use their strengths and not have to run up against their limitations all the time.

Dyslexia comes in many forms but is, like autism, apparently the result of differences in perception and cognition that just happen to collide badly with the written word. In societies where literacy is not an issue, many of these differences in perception don't matter, and some of them might even be considered advantages. Additionally, in societies that use totally different forms of writing, such as China, Western-style dyslexia does not affect Chinese writing and therefore isn't considered a disability. There are also forms of dyslexia that are considered dyslexia only in places such as China that use certain writing styles, but in a Western society the person would not only not be considered dyslexic but not stand out at all (just as many Western-style dyslexics would not stand out in China).

In Russia, at a time when IQ testing was forbidden for a long time, intellectual disabilities were not viewed within remotely the same framework that, for instance, America sees them in. They were considered by some experts there to be different patterns of growth rather than merely "defects," despite the fact that they usually caused obvious limitations in some areas. Only when this work was translated were English-speakers able to benefit from this perception.

And the "typical" brain and "normal" body has obvious limitations as well, they are just not so obvious when they are all taken care of seamlessly by a society that people happen to live in.

However, all this said, I don't think that it's productive to sit around saying that autism "isn't a disability". It's not even asking the right question. Of course autistic people are disabled, disability itself is a product of the connection between a person's limitations and their environment, and most autistic people are not in an environment that positively caters to our forms of limitations the way non-disabled people are. It also makes no sense to say that something being "a difference" means that people different in that way aren't disabled, it's not like "different" is reserved for only a certain degree of difference and no further. I've seen other people who are severely physically disabled refer to disability as part of human difference and they mean it. Trying to separate disability from human difference is a real problem, whether you do it by saying "Autistic people aren't 'different', they're disabled" or "Autistic people aren't 'disabled', they're just different."

I have a friend who wrote a really good post about this. Here's the link: Welcome to the Disability Community. What frustrates me, and him, the most about a lot of this stuff, is that neither of us has ever seen a person who both (a) claims that autism "isn't a disability", and (b) doesn't base Conclusion A over there on anything but some of the false disability stereotypes that the disability rights movement tries to overturn.

It's all very individual. However, each of them has potential benefits.

For one thing, very few significant innovations (if any) came from people who were content with the way things were. We have a built-in discontent. That can be a great motivator.

For the rest, don't focus so much on "what does this prevent me from doing?".

What new possibilities does it present to you?

What questions does it force you to ask?

How does it change your perspective?

What does it allow you to do?

What work-arounds have you had to learn?

My boyfriend is dyslexic and I see him as disabled and also because of his brain damage.

With his dyslexia, it makes it really hard for him to get a job because he isn't very good with spelling because of his condition, he can't read all the words. I don't mind helping him with spelling. I wouldn't mind helping him filling out his applications.
On the internet he doesn't look smart because of his poor spelling because lot of people don't even consider he could have a reading disability. It makes me mad everytime I see someone saying people aren't smart because of their poor spelling and they are bashing them. How do they know the person they are talking about doesn't have dyslexia. Having poor spelling doesn't make them stupid. Heck even applications with poor spelling gets thrown away because so many managers are too ignorant to even consider the person might have a reading disability. That's why my boyfriend would bring home the applications and have his mother help him and he bring them back.

With his brain damage, he has mighty troubles with multitasking. He cannot remember to go back to what he is doing, he cannot keep track of more than one thing. He gets turned around easily, he cannot remember directions or street names and how to get to places. It it harder for him to remember than everyone else. He is unable to know his address and phone number so he has to have it written down. He has to write down lot of stuff due to his brain damage.

When he was a kid, he had to learn stuff over and over and over and over like a child with mental retardation because he could not learn fast like the other kids so he was in special ed with all the ret*d kids because that's the way they did it back then before inclusion. They stick all the kids with disabilities in one class. Him being in special ed did help him because he couldn't learn fast like the other kids and things had to be taught to him over and over.

everyone should read the article Anbuend links to at the end of the long post.

I just found a quote about one of the books that was around when I was growing up:

(from A Fair Shake for Left-Handed People)

And then from a message board I read:



(Here is the link to the whole thing)

That was of course an old book, but that was from the time period in which left-handers could in fact be described as disabled because in that situation they were. I grew up past then and in a very accepting family and school regarding lefties, and did not develop many of those things that were once considered "obvious" parts of left-handedness.

I have wondered, at times, if an equally radical shift occurred in how autistic people were expected to live as what happened for left-handers (which included lots and lots and lots of redesigning everything so that left-handers could take part, as well as changing the way left-handers were treated in general -- none of this easy and not all of it cheap), whether some of the problems that are considered universal to autism would occur less and less often in the exact same sorts of people who are considered autistic today. Including some of the social ones. Possibly even including some of the current diagnostic criteria, which after all assess not just our brain but our reactions to what is around us.

If for instance all autistic people had access to autistic-friendly socializing from an early age, and were prevented from being involved in autistic-hostile socializing, then my guess is that autistic people would be seen as having fewer social problems than we currently do. Not necessarily none, but almost definitely fewer. Additionally, it's been proven in studies that very young non-speaking autistic children communicate in a variety of ways that they are very flexible at, before a tantrum starts. If other people were taught how to pay better attention to what we communicate, would we have fewer "behavior problems" and also fewer communication problems? Again, not none, but I am guessing fewer.

None of this is to say that something external is to blame for autism, any more than something external is to blame for left-handedness. But, on the other hand, changing things around for left-handed people made us go from defective and considered developmentally backwards and incapable of engaging in the simplest manual tasks and having a shortened lifespan, to being considered maybe slightly klutzy when working with things designed for right-handers. It can't hurt to try modifying things to be better for autistic people (and all sorts of other people). My guess is that it would reduce a lot (again, not all) of the problematic aspects of what is now considered to just be "part of autism" just as learning disabilities were once considered "part of left-handedness".

(and there are still people by the way who think left-handed people are "defective", just a whole lot less -- disabled people by the way tend not to want to be seen as "defective" either)

The left hand has historically been associated with evil, uncleanliness, uncoordination, and social awkwardness. In Latin the word for left is sinister, in French the word for left is gauche, meanwhile the word for right in Latin is dexter (as in dextrous -- coordinated), and the word for 'right' in English... well think of how many other things 'right' means other than a particular side. (This is common in lots of languages and isn't just an aberration of English.)

Last edited by anbuend on 06 Feb 2008, 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What part of social IMPAIRMENT do people fail to understand?

Blindness has the benefit of improving hearing, is that a difference too? We cut all those slackers benefits and make them get jobs like all those "optotypical" people.

Blindness does not improve hearing, merely, in some cases, a person's attentiveness to sounds. (But their hearing will test the same as a sighted person.)

And yes it is a difference.

There's a long-standing myth that anything a disabled person is good at is merely in compensation for what they are not good at, basically a weakness-first model of disability. That's not necessarily how things work. For instance, Michelle Dawson has described finding evidence that autistic people have no single common area of difficulty, but do have a single common area of strength, which in turn because of the way it's shaped causes all the deficits (this strength is there equally even in autistic people considered "severely autistic" by most people's standards).

That doesn't make autistic people better than other disabled people, nor does it make us non-disabled, I'm just trying to point out that the strength-to-compensate-for-weakness model doesn't work. Nor does a social-skills-first model of autism, because autistic people's differences still exist in non-social situations, and it's the perceptual and cognitive differences (both strengths and weaknesses) that appear to cause the social problems, not the other way around. (Which might, as with handedness, change if we were raised from an early age in a very different social situation. Or might, as with dyslexia, just not really make much difference and always result in trouble with whatever that thing is.)

Additionally, people in general might be interested in going to this page and scrolling down to the part headed "LEGITIMIZING THE UNTHINKABLE", then clicking on the links. One quote:



She is someone that nobody including her would consider anything other than severely physically disabled (she has a genetic disease causing some form of muscle-wasting) but that's her opinion on her condition, it's a form of difference and not one she has a problem with. Most people outside the disability community don't tend to understand that this is how a lot of us view ourselves, not just those with things that cause "obvious strengths".

Last edited by anbuend on 06 Feb 2008, 4:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.

For me it is a different way of being that has many disabling traits and many positive traits. Sometimes it just depends which side of the bed I get out of in the morning as to which goes where.