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

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I describe autism as being like an alien intelligence. An intelligence that is only different and has just as many strengths and weaknesses as NT intelligence.

2ukenkerl,

Dude, I had the lowest grades from grade 10 onwards in math in the whole school; I'm quite certain I was the only autistic person there too.

If I was good at math due to my AS, I wouldn't have had the lowest grades (I'm talking "F" here); sure, I was away from school every other day, I could never execute the function of going to the library and getting the requisite textbooks, but if AS made me "good", I should still have done better than what I did (just by listening to the teacher in class).

I wasn't exactly the best either. I didn't FAIL, but I didn't get straight As either. Frankly, I lost interest in math. I HATED the school system for it. I was asking for algebra in like the 2nd grade. I am simply saying that to say NTs have it SO easy is overly simplistic.

I suppose whether AS is a disability depends upon the severity of the case. There are plenty of adults who have lived relatively 'normal' lives who have only been recently diagnosed.

I recall reading that the majority of people on the spectrum are incapable of working. So what of the minority that can function in society with comparatively minor difficulties compared to those who can't work? Are they too 'disabled'? They may have no friends or relationships, yet they can support and take care of themselves. Should such functional people with clear autistic traits and clear difficulties relating to people even be labelled as AS/HFA?

I have not gotten through this entire thread but I want to thank anbuend for some amazing, informative and insightful posts here. Don't breeze over them - there is a great deal of good information provided here.

I am old enough to remember the prejudice against left handers quite well. I'm a righty but my Aspie son is a leftie. It was not even made mention by the time he came along (he's 24). But when I was a kid the lefties were ostracized and forced to learn to use their right hands.

I'm not leftie but I am nocturnal and I know that fight very well. I have had a lifetime full of "be like everybody else - what's wrong with you?" from my Aspie quirks to my nocturnal schedule (which may or may not be an Aspie quirk). Forcing a person to live on a schedule that is not right for their built in body clock is as bad as forcing them to use a non dominant hand.

It's a good exercise to think what would the right handers do if we suddenly made them all use their left hands only? And it's a good exercise to ask what if all of the morning people had to stay up all night? Or worse, what if suddenly the 'norm' was for ever person to sleep 2 hours only and then get up and function fully? They would feel the way I do when I am forced to be awake early in the morning.

Left handers were considered clumsy and bungling - that was one of the quotes in that article. What a joke! They were using scissors and every other type of equipment that was designed for right hand use. How could they not be clumsy?

Aspies are considered weird or don't do well socially. Not so much when they're with other Aspies. Funny how that works, huh?

Well if the autism numbers are even close to be right (I tend to think they're a bit high in their reporting right now but maybe not) then very soon the 'norm' will be much more autistic and the NTs will be odd. And then we'll hear people complaining that the NTs are too weird and need to be in their own small, special classrooms. For some reason none of them can keep up with the accelerated level of the class. They all wander off and can't stay focused for more than 2 hours. They want to joke around and play during chemistry lab and not one of them have cured a single disease yet, and they're already in 6th grade! Such slow learners and a achievers need to be put in the gym in a special class. They seem to do well playing with balls.

Well, the way the DSM reads, one would think that anyone with AS, and hopefully most with HFA, CAN work. After all, it DOES talk about normal to superior communication and intelligence, and decent self help skills.(For AS). HFA is at least passable intelligence, though there isn't a ceiling, and the idea of passable self help skills is implied. That doesn't mean you can be an astronaut, but certainly doesn't exclude rocket scientist.

BTW I should also say that BOTH are relatively new diagnosis, at least in the US, around for not even 30 years, and MOST people that are relatively OK probably won't even try to get a diagnosis.

I think its crap how the autistic community (mostly those affected by aspergers/hfa) go on and on about their superior strengths and how all autistics are somehow on an elite level. I read and listen to comments by these people, wondering why I can't get myself straight, why I can't seem to do the simplest of all tasks.

It just seems like false help. It comes across as if the person is trying to tell the world "See, I'm fine?" when they really are not. The whole "I'm better than you" "We can think ourselves out of any situation" "We are elites in math" "NT's are inferior in all ways" I find these comments to be beyond stupidity.

I'm not sure if you can tell, but I really do feel autism is a disability. The whole "don't want a cure" propaganda usually comes from those who are capable of doing tasks; they neglect there are autistic people who truly cannot do anything with their lives. The whole "we are just different" come from those who are able to completely isolate themselves or have adapted well. For the many who doin't need a stroke of ego, these people appear as giving imbecilic ramble.

I'm not sure about you, but I truly cannot stay cooped up in my house...obsessing about for the rest of my life.

I was extremely low functioning as a child. As an adult, I am very high functioning. However, the Asperger's autism is still a dimension of my personality. I have simply learned to compensate for certain aspects of it.

totally agree oscuria

I hope you aren't talking about people like me. Only a few posts above I said I wasn't that great with math. Probably over 90% here READILY say they have lousy social skills. I do ALSO! Still, there ARE strengths that help offset many weaknesses. Forgive us if we don't cry about being so bad with weak areas.



WOW, that is an odd way to put it. Frankly, I don't want to waste my time crying about what I can't have, or pointing out problems. I don't even point out big problems to help depressed people that think my life is so great. In the past, they always end up seeming to want to depress me.

NTs have told me they had great strengths, etc... that, if true, would have depressed me because I would feel like an idiot in a world of geniuses. Happily, I was able to prove everything a LIE! GRANTED, some here say similar things, and I know some HAVE to be telling the truth. Maybe ALL are. But HEY, that just means SOME people do SOME things better than I can, and that is a given. That is nothing to get upset about.

It is a small, yet vocal, minority of autistics who believe in the "aspie superpowers" ideas.

Although I unreservedly dismiss it, I am not unsympathetic to persons who hold to such viewpoints. When people have been bullied, and have internalized so much abuse and victimization, it is not to be unexpected that they would, almost in defiance, adopt the idea of having, as you wrote, "superior strengths."

Now, in my 50s, I can easily reject the superpowers construct. However, if I had heard about it as a kid, I would likely have accepted it myself.

Actually, when they bother studying self-help skills, there's "surprisingly" little correlation between academic and self-help skills in autistic people. I have "surprising" in quotes, because I can't even tell what they're supposed to have to do with each other, but other people seem surprised by it.

Well, I listed intelligence and self help skills separately NOT only because the DSM does so, but because they ARE different types of abilities. There are movies showing smart people with poor self help skills, and there ARE some pretty dumb people that don't have problems. I guess it is like Math, Logic, Vocabulary, Coordination, and Social endeavors, which one would THINK are related, but AREN'T. I guess it is like muscles where having strong arms doesn't mean you even have enough strength to walk.

Indeed, and a far larger group of us who get tarred with the same brush, merely for discussing the fact that there are some strengths peculiar to being autistic (that don't make us superior, that doesn't mean denying we have problems, and that are more subtle than something like "math" or something), and/or for not wanting to be cured (which doesn't mean denying that we have problems either).

I sometimes feel like there's a bit of a time-divide in the autistic community. I showed up in the online autistic community when there were only three email lists specifically by and for autistic people, and a single web board that almost nobody posted at. Only one of the email lists showed any particular slant towards viewing autism as non-defective (not at all the same as non-disabled, since disabled doesn't mean defective).

The biggest proponents of the view that autistic people did not need a cure (and mind you, they'd been developing this view for longer than I'd been around), were people who had serious trouble taking care of themselves on a daily basis. Campaigning for better services for autistic adults was always one of the main things on their advocacy agendas, along with finding ways of navigating the world as autistic people instead of non-autistic people. They openly rejected doing things in a way that merely outwardly performed as looking "normal", because they knew this was preferring form over function. They never were insulted by the idea that autistic people had trouble doing certain things, but they did also believe that autistic people had certain abilities other people didn't necessarily have (and a lot of those were borne out by research), and they also believed that there was no reason to go for a cure since there are ways of living a good life as autistic.

Most of them were diagnosed with autism, not Asperger's, because the way-before-my-time point at which they all started getting together was a time at which the diagnosis of Asperger's didn't exist. None of them fit the current stereotype of someone who needs no extra assistance with anything, or even someone who needed just barely any.

And so, that was always factored into the no-cure stuff with them.

Some parents openly embraced that message, but other parents rejected it. The "functioning levels" of the children of the parents in question were not different one to the other, it just reflected different attitudes. Among the parents who rejected these messages, they routinely accused the autistic people in question of being far more capable than they were of various things. Some of them accused the autistic people of not even being autistic, and in some cases this resulted in slander campaigns and harassment of not only the autistic people but people close to them (some things never change, they just keep picking a new person to be their target of the day). This began to build up a myth that those who did not want to be cured, were all these super-capable sorts of people who didn't really have any problems and may not be autistic at all.

And since then, there've been a lot of people who've seen the no-cure thing and run with it, but not understood the nuances of it for a person who has real difficulty doing a lot of things. And there've been a lot of people, including some autistic people, who've seen and read the myths about autistic people who believe it, and then just assumed a whole heck of a lot about those of us who don't want a cure, and attached all these things to us that we don't actually believe. It's made it nearly impossible to talk about a cure without hearing that we hate NTs, that we don't understand "real" problems (a lot of us have more of those "real problems" by typical measures than people who say that about us, but of course never mind that), that we have no sensitivity to people with "real" problems (same...), that we want to force everyone to believe exactly as we do (apparently expressing an opinion and explaining it is force, hmm... whereas a lot of us who have prominently had these views a long time have been threatened with all kinds of violence and death for a number of years as well as other forms of actual illegal force and had to learn to live with all that if we want to say our opinions), etc.

I'm sure there are some people who really fit that bill.

But I get more and more the sense that the existence of those few people has been used as a means of ignoring the larger number of us, and those (before my time, which means way before WP's) who came up with a lot of the basic ideas, whose ideas are not so... cartoonified and easily refuted, as the idea that we hate NTs, consider ourselves elite and superior, and don't have any real problems, and that if we do have real problems then our only option is apparently to support a cure, even though that's never been accurate.

If you're interested in more of the history of this part of the autistic community (there are already other things about other parts), you might want to read:

Autism Network International: The Development of a Community and Its Culture

That is a GREAT way to put it! There is a REASON why so many with AS(And YES, many DID get professionally diagnosed!) took so long to be associated, or even diagnosed, with AS! That is that, despite having problems and seeming wierd, our biggest problem deficits seemed to be NO WORSE than NT failings.

If NTs are SO great with social things, then why do SO many do SO badly? Heck, the divorce rate is like 50% or more. Some women marry JUST to get money. Porn is BIG business! Companies like GE(I won't give them free advertising) make LOTS of money to try to get people married. I could go on...

If they remember SO well, or are so great with math, etc... WHY is there so much cheating and lying? You would be SHOCKED at how many people lie on their resumes. Even "TEACHERS" are falsifying education records to get more pay! By doing that, they reduce the integrity of the diploma and that lowers the value of the school which even brings the "EDUCATION" into question! So they are devaluing EVERYTHING including the value of their class, to try to get paid MORE!?!?!?!? So much for LOGIC!

I don't say this to say ALL NTs are evil, bad, or stupid. I don't say this to say ALL AS people are ethical, nice, or geniuses. I say this only to try to bring reason to the discussion.

Thank you very much for that well-written, nuanced posting. I downloaded the article you recommended. So far, I have scanned it. I will read it more thoroughly later.

I have been trying to think of how to express this idea without offending anyone. Unfortunately, I have been unable to come up with a method, so I will just try to say it respectfully.

Perhaps I am wrong, but, speaking as a guy who will be 52 years old later this month, my impression is that most, if not all, of the people who post messages on "aspie superpowers" and the like are quite young. As I said before, given the constant bullying I experienced, I could imagine being attracted to the idea myself when I was a boy.