General Autism Discussion

Do you have a source for that? Because my experience couldn't be more different.

I don't. It's just been my experience with those I know. Not really trans "phobic", but just not understanding of it. Like for instance, one person I know is a lesbian who is autistic along with her younger brother and biological dad, who crossdressed, then later identified as a woman.

She said, "It feels so weird to call my dad a 'she'. I don't understand it, but that's what my dad wants."

Not bigoted or hateful, but more like "I don't understand this at all", while trying to be accepting.

"Transphobic" was the wrong word to use.

I'd probably use the word "Transkeptical" for that-not feeling active bigotry or hatred for Transexuals while not understanding or believing in the difference between biological sex and gender.

That makes more sense. It's that, which I've seen in many autistics. The ones I know are not hateful of trans people, but have the sentiment you described.

Also, if I weren't on my phone at work when I typed the last two messages, I might have had more time to reread and think over what I was saying and explain it better.

On a related note, I did once read an article on how trans autistics are frequently told they can't be trans, that they're just confused because they're autistic, and then they have their concerns dismissed.

I also saw someone online say they went to a transgender support group, and "like half the kids there were stimming". Indicating there's a massive amount of autism in transgenderism, according to this one person's experience at least.

You know what this is saying to me? That autistics who aren't a white heterosexual cisgender male tend to have their autism dismissed. Kinda like how doctors dismiss medical conditions in women as "all in your head" and "just stress" (I know a woman who told me her ulcer went undiagnosed for many months because her doctor kept dismissing her concerns!). Racial minorities have a hard time getting their autism diagnosed also. It's fucking stupid how what appears to be a subconscious sexism/racism/other such things makes life needlessly hard for a lot of peope.

Autistic people aren't really accepted - and it's impacting their mental health

Years ago I argued with two people who said that autistics need to just accept the fact that we are the minority, and we need to stifle our autism symptoms as best we can, our stims, force our facial expressions to look normal, etc., to be accepted. I argued that it was asking the impossible of the majority of autistics to live that way, and that society needed to change to accept us. That constant camouflage is impossible and sooner or later, cracks show up anyway that result in us being rejected (as many adult autistics have claimed has happened to them). And that society needed to change to deal with it, because we couldn’t.

Increasingly, editorials and experts are taking the side that it really is society that needs to change to accept us, because we can’t change ourselves to fit into exactly what they want (normal eye contact, no unusual looking stimming behaviors, learn to just put up with noises being louder and touch being more intense, etc.).

edited 14th Nov '17 3:39:40 PM by BonsaiForest

But a lot of non-autistics are like that too. It still doesn't show that autistics are more likely to be like that

edited 14th Nov '17 3:56:06 PM by Cailleach

You're right. I was speaking from very limited experience. I didn't think to compare autistics to non-autistics, and thought of my own experiences as applying more broadly.

edited 14th Nov '17 5:05:54 PM by BonsaiForest

On the camoflaging thing, I wonder if it's possible for someone to camoflage their autism from themselves, and what complications might arise out of that. A lot of people may not even know that they are autistic.

Meet my dad's extended family.

What are they like?

I'm not sure if I've ever camouflaged. If I have, I never noticed like I don't notice a lot of things I do. Generally I don't try to hide who I am or try to fit in, mainly because I don't care about or even want to be friends with my entire city.

Though I can see why other autistic people would try to pretend to be normal. Unusual behaviors such as stimming can get someone ostracized. What people don't understand they prefer to just push away, it's not just limited to the understanding of autism.

You're not kidding. People really do freak out about the most random harmless things that strike them as just "off". And they do punish stimming. One autistic on You Tube claimed to have been fired after stimming at work, alone, when no-one else should have noticed but the boss just happened to walk by.

There's Growing Evidence For A Link Between Gender Dysphoria And Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Just wanted to share a bit of wisdom with anyone who feels him/her-self an outcast :

<< Society doesn't want me ? May she rest assured : I don't want her either ! >>

From : Michel Colucci alias "Coluche", 1944-1986.

PS : In the original French language, "society" is a feminine word, so I transposed it into English.

edited 15th Nov '17 4:45:50 PM by Nuup-Kangerlua

Nice quote!

(As a French speaker, I've always liked it when that personification we get gets transposed to English. It always sounds so charming in English)

R Kelly met an autistic fan and mistook him for being high, apparently. In fact, this link contains a(n autoplaying) video, so you can see the man and be the judge yourself.

Basically, R Kelly asked this fan to sing, and he sung "I believe I can fly". Then R Kelly sung his own added lyrics such as "I believe this guy is high", to the laughter of others.

R Kelly later said he didn't know the man was autistic.

I bet he didn't; people tend to mistaken Aspergers-style autism for just about everything else, it seems. Earlier, there was a police officer who stopped an autistic driver and put the man in a jail cell overnight for being drunk, only to later get results showing that he wasn't. The chief of police said that someone being arrested for no criminal activity at all was disturbing, and ordered autism training for his department.

Adding more anecdotal evidence to the "autism is genetic" idea (which has a growing body of scientific evidence also behind it), I happened to see a news article about a third grader who wrote a book about autism to educate her classmates about it, since her younger brother has it. I wanted to know more about the book, and I found her website. And on the site, it says this:

It's awesome that she wants to protect autistic kids from being bullied and abused! It's great that she's being very proactive about it.

The thing I wanted to point out as well - her brother is autistic. She herself writes and reads above her grade level, and likes to research things. These are basically autism traits! But she doesn't have autism herself. I've heard sooooo many anecdotal stories of families where one person is autistic and another is a prodigy or has some of the autism traits without the autism itself, that it's just uncanny. Add this to the list.

My uncle is an alcoholic (thought I think he's in recovery now) and deeply unhappy guy who refuses to admit he might be on the spectrum, and in order to do so, has in the past denied that I am on the spectrum since he and I are virtual clones. He's gotten better about the latter lately, and has at least admitted to suffering from anxiety, but it took a very long time for him to get there. I want to emphasise here that he's not a bad guy at all; just one who has struggled with some serious personal issues.

Then there's my grandmother. Too old to have ever been diagnosed, yet so very obviously the source of the autism in the family that I could put her in a textbook. Also doesn't admit it's even a possibility and doesn't like to admit that I, my dad, or my cousin might have it.

edited 15th Nov '17 10:38:54 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Wow. Have quite a family history there, Ambar.

edited 15th Nov '17 9:25:04 PM by jameygamer

Hey, I didn't even mention my aunt and her kids. She's a recovering addict (of every drug on the planet if my dad is to be believed; I've heard alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin mentioned in reference to her) turned religious nut, and her kids are, respectively, an autistic neo-Nazi who beats his girlfriend and probably suffers from FAS on top of the autism, and a thoroughly soulless manipulator who is, if I rightly recall, a diagnosed psychopath.

I don't particularly enjoy family reunions.

...Is there something in the water where your family lives?

As I understand it, the combination of my grandmother's issues and my aunt's insanity pretty much destroyed the family. My grandmother had incredibly rigid ideas about how children were "supposed to be" and entirely different standards for the boys and the girl, protecting my aunt from her brothers at all costs, yet at the same time trying to force her into being mommy's little princess, a role my aunt most definitely did not want to play. When my aunt entered high school she went off the rails on drugs at the same time my grandmother entered a meltdown brought on by to-that-point undiagnosed depression. My grandfather took the youngest son out of the house to save him from witnessing it. The oldest brother (the uncle I mentioned above) was away at college at that point, so my dad got stuck managing the combination of my grandmother's nervous breakdown and my aunt's collapse into addiction and borderline criminality; while my grandmother fell apart, my dad was essentially assigned the task of keeping his idiot sister alive while she experimented with every substance known to man, and took out her issues with my grandmother on him. To pick one example among many, this is the woman who once went on a Ferris Wheel with my dad and tried to pull out the bolt that connects the carriage to the wheel.

The family's never really recovered. Personally, I have a good relationship with both my uncles, especially now that the elder's moved past his autism denialism, and I'm increasingly close with my oldest cousin on that side (my elder uncle's older son; this is annoying difficult to talk about without using names). My grandmother's gone down the rabbit hole of religious madness in an effort to repair her relationship with my aunt, though, and of course continues to enable her at every opportunity, and there's only so often I can listen to my grandma tell me I'm going to Hell while watching her insist her narcissist of a daughter is ensured a place in Heaven. My aunt herself has only gotten worse since her ex-husband died of cancer, and my dad and his older brother only really tolerate her for my grandmother's sake; I have a suspicion that when my grandmother goes we may see the last of my aunt and it can't happen too soon. My aunt's kids, it should go without saying, are lost causes; when the kid with the antisocial personality disorder is the more functional of the two you have failed at just an absolutely primal level.

edited 15th Nov '17 10:42:54 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Please tell me your aunt's psychopath kid doesn't have an interest in working at Wall Street.

He works construction I believe, and drinks/drugs all the money away.

In any case, to keep things more or less on topic, it can be hard enough for an autistic person to navigate society even when raised by a functional family. When raised in an entirely dysfunctional one...well, we've all seen the damage that can do to people who aren't on a spectrum. When you don't naturally understand social cues, and the ones you've memorized come from dealing with utterly dysfunctional parents or siblings?

I know my dad had a really rough time of it in his early twenties, and I expect that was the cause of a lot of it. I suspect it's also the source of some of the problems my uncle has spent his life grappling with. How do you learn to deal with normal people when all of your formative experiences have been spent around people in the midst of emotional and mental crisis? When all the rote responses you've learned were for avoiding emotional abuse at the hands of a parent or violence at the hand of a drugged out sibling?

edited 15th Nov '17 11:16:43 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Damn, Ambar. That's quite a story.

I remember reading about people who grew up in abusive households and how it affected them. Like, one of the things that happens a lot, is that they learn to instinctively lie automatically, since as a kid they do it to avoid getting beaten by their parents. They then keep that habit for decades, having a very hard time unlearning it. Just one example.

Now throw autism into the mix and...

And one of your cousins is an autistic neo-Nazi? The neo-Nazis aren't fond of people with disabilities, and neither were the real Nazis. In fact, Hans Asperger misled his Nazi superiors by showing them only his 5 highest functioning patients and trying to convince them, on this basis, that autism was a good thing if it got the right support. (The Nazis were not convinced of Asperger's idea that "not all that which is different is bad".)

Have you asked him how he manages to reconcile his autism and neo-Nazi views?

Then again, I've seen people who join bigotry movements while also being one of the very things that said movements are bigoted against. I even read an article about women who join white supremacist movements and play a big role despite such movements hating the idea of women in power. And as for your cousin coming from a dysfunctional family and joining the neo-Nazis, I can imagine him doing that to try to feel important and feel like part of something. In fact, I've been reading a very long article about the history of one neo-Nazi, Andrew Anglin, and how he went through many periods of extremism and trying to find himself (at one point he was a big Alex Jones fan and went around warning his high school classmates about lizard people disguised as humans - one of the wackier conspiracy theories out there). His current neo-Nazism is nothing more, it would seem, than an attempt to feel important and part of something.

edited 16th Nov '17 9:55:50 AM by BonsaiForest

Oh god, your family sounds kinda terrible.

I strongly believe that autism is genetic as well. Along with a few mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, autism is pretty common on my mom's side of the family. Two of my aunts have autism, one of my cousins was recently diagnosed with autism, my younger brother is low-functioning autistic, and then you got me. No doubt there is some kind of link between autism and genetics, my own personal theory being that autism originated as a type of genetic mutation that got passed down to other generations (but again I'm not an expert on genetics no matter how interesting it is to me).