As usual with such lists, I’m none of the above, off in some other direction. 🙂

Hi Donna,

I think I fall somewhere between the Moderate and Militant Culturalist categories in this scheme.

Like yours, my autism involves a lot more things than just my personality (for me, there are a lot of sensory and processing issues as well), which can be quite disabling, and can cause the person a lot of trouble and grief. I am therefore totally on board with treating these symptoms, and with trying to develop better treatments. I’m also totally in favor of teaching autistic children the skills we often don’t pick up as readily as some of our peers — general life skills, organizational skills, study skills, social skills. What I do not want is a cure for autism, or treatments whose sole purpose is getting us to appear indistinguishable from nonautistic people, but which do not actually give us anything we can use. (This apparent treatment goal of “indistinguishability,” and of appearing normal for its own sake — as well as its ongoing history of abuse — is why I am leery of most behavioral treatments for autism). I also do not doubt at all that autism — even without any of these other problems — is a disability, although I blame most of its disabling effect on the way much of modern society is set up.

At the same time, I am proud to be autistic, I do think we have our own shared culture and constitute a minority group. I do feel that my autism is inseparable from my self. I don’t consider us superior to neurotypicals*, though: our minds work differently from theirs in a few shared ways and a lot of ways that also vary among individual autistics. (Similarly, I think NTs are just as internally heterogeneous; like us, they’re united only by a few diagnostic criteria — or the lack of any. Other than that, they vary, as we do). I do think our liberation movement is like the gay liberation movement, and also owes quite a bit to the disability and Deaf movements. I don’t think we should be penalized for being different, or have to hide our differences to be accepted.

So, what does that make me? Moderately Militant? 😉

(Also, I love the look of your blog. Very beautiful! I lack the graphic-design know-how to customize the look of my blog very much, so I very much admire those who can).

*I do not use the term “neurotypical” to refer to non-autistics: for me, the word refers to people whose nervous systems work in more or less the expected way. This category therefore includes not only people who are not autistic, but people who are not ADHD, not dyslexic or otherwise learning-disabled, don’t have tics or seizures, don’t have CP or any other neurodevelopmental disorder, who haven’t suffered brain damage, who don’t have synesthesia, hallucinations or other unusual sensory experiences, etc. This is accordingly a much smaller group of people than the group of people who are not autistic.

I think neurodiverse includes any person who has also had transient but significant experience of altered neurological states … In the end I find it hard to find many who have never directly experienced degrees of neurodiversity.

Oh, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.

It had occurred to me that “neurotypical” is problematic in that implies that their minds all work the same way, which I *KNOW* they don’t, anymore than ours do!

But I hadn’t thought to question the existence of a divide between neurotypical and neurodiverse. That’s very interesting.

I think it is an error to describe all “culturalists” as militant and indeed to imply that militancy embraces reverse discrimination.

I am pretty militant, but my militancy is of the kind that abhors “Aspie supremacism” as an unhelpful and dangerous tendency within autism politics, and one that is sure to drive a wedge between various groups who are also “stakeholders”.

My militancy derives from the disability movement, and I go back a long way in that, it comes from a pan disability perspective encompassing neurodiversity, sensory impairment, psychiatric survivors and physical impairment. There has long been a tendency within the disability movement for some people to impose an artificial “heirarchy of impairments” valuing some impairments as more fundementally within the concept of disability than others. That is outright wrongheadedness.

Autism is a culture, but not a monolithic one, it has it’s subcultures too. One can also see that the culture is a relatively young one when compared to other disability cultures, and so the same mistakes are being made amongst the “militants”

It is of course understandable for any “out group” who has been devalued and discriminated against to build a positive identity that involves going over the top in self affirment to the point of denying others. It is not much different really to Coventry City supporters clinging on to the belief that the team is not (no I had better not go ther.

Any way is being one eyed worse than being binocular? I would not know, and I cannot, I simply have no desire for those things that are not within my capability.

I laugh sometimes at all the Einstein talk, he may well have been one of us, but he has been claimed by dyslexics equally, indeed everyone wants a piece of him and you can see why. However Einsteins are not all that common (unfortunately) and within any culture there are exceptions, there are the good the bad and the ugly (which reminds me, I really need a haircut)