[zozbot234]

> To my understanding, the argument made by autistic rights advocates is that people with the condition could usually live like anyone else, if society open-mindedly accommodated for them.

I wonder what's appropriate "accommodation" for a very low functioning kid whose idea of a good time is banging their head against the wall over and over again. A padded room, most likely? Many "autistic rights" advocates simply ignore and dehumanize these kids.

[hnbad]

The problem is that the way autistics are treated by non-autistics often involves an expectation to simply not be autistic. This includes behavioral therapy that in any other context would be described as torture. The stated goal is to reduce perceptible "symptoms", not to address whatever the person themself might find limiting to their wellbeing.

Autistic kids generally don't bang their heads against walls for "a good time". It's a form of stimming and it's intensified by certain situations or interactions. The desirable approach would not be to prevent the kid from stimming (which can cause them massive additional stress and even trauma) but instead offer them a safer alternative that is less likely to cause them injury.

But allistics (non-autistics) tend to be annoyed by autistics stimming at all, so often it comes down to whether autistics are able to "mask" and suppress their more obvious traits (even if it causes persistent stress) or not.

[Sprocklem]

The answer, as I understand it, is to provide another method of stimming that doesn't cause physical harm to the child.

[danShumway]

> Many "autistic rights" advocates simply ignore and dehumanize these kids.

Autistic rights advocates don't argue against medication or treatment for autistic individuals who want that. We advocate against a universalist approach that assumes that autism is fundamentally something to be avoided regardless of how high/low functioning the individual is, and independent of whether the difficulties for an individual are stemming from something inherent to the condition or whether they're coming from a lack of accommodation.

Many autistic people view the way they look at the world as a fundamental part of who they are. It is offensive to them to be told that they shouldn't exist.

Of course, more severe, low-functioning individuals can and often do disagree with that assessment of themselves, and that's fine, and those individuals should be given the help they want. But let's be honest here, nobody in the "autism speaks" branch of activism talks about a cure for specifically low-functioning autism; they talk about a cure for autism in general, they talk about eliminating autism from everyone across the board. And if you view autism as an inherent part of your personality, it's pretty understandable why you might start to suspect that those people are hostile to you as a person.

It's valid for autistic people to object to the characterization of autism as a universally negative condition that they just "don't have as bad". It's also valid to object to neurotypicals drawing the line between autism as an identity and autism as a debilitating condition based purely on what behaviors are inconvenient to those neurotypicals, rather than what the internal experiences are for autistic people themselves. Autistic rights advocates argue that autism can (and often is) a real disability with real negative effects, but also that a lack of accommodation can exasperate some of the negative effects of autism, and that it's important for society to think more critically about when and why these negative effects happen and how to best alleviate them. Autism rights advocates argue that inconvenience or incompatibility with existing neurotypical workflows are not universally reasons to call someone broken, even though functioning in a modern society might require interventions or medication to help manage those incompatibilities even in high-functioning individuals.

But of course we should try to help people with debilitating autism, and of course we should allow people who want to suppress or eliminate parts of that condition to do so. It's just that it's really messy to act like autistic people are secretly normal people who have some kind of disease that's keeping them from being normal. That "disease" can't be easily separated from identity.

Anti-autism is like arguing that because some people have PTSD or trauma or depression, that we need a universal cure for emotions, and that anyone who suggests "sometimes even inconvenient emotions are a good thing" is ignoring the entire gambit of suffering that emotions can cause. It's ridiculous.