The Mandelbear's Musings

The Observer | Magazine | Say it loud, autistic and proud

hese are pictures designed to trigger pity and maybe a guilty twinge of revulsion; they might even move you to make a donation. But you've been suckered. They form the opening pages of an angry radical website designed to challenge familiar stereotypes. They are a knowing and brutal parody of campaigns to raise money to find a cure for a 'terrible disorder'.

They are part of a grassroots revolution by a new breed of autism activists who identify with other once-marginalised sections of society like black people and homosexuals, engaged in the same sort of struggle to establish basic rights and to outlaw discrimination. The first Autistic Pride Day march took place in America this summer and the organisers declared their intention was to 'promote the concept that those identified as autistic are not suffering from a pathological disease any more than those with dark skin are suffering from a form of skin disease'.

This point about the integrity and validity of the autistic state is also hammered home on www.gettingthetruthout.org. After the initial pitiful images, we see the same woman wearing a different T-shirt. It reads: 'Not being able to speak is not the same as having nothing to say.' She may not be able to speak, but she is fiercely articulate at the keyboard as she lucidly denounces the way autistic people are belittled in the name of 'helping' them: 'I will not have my life medicalised this way so you can fund the elimination of autistic people from the planet.'

There are more than 500,000 people believed to have some (often undiagnosed) degree of autism in this country, and if the radicals are right we could be treating them in completely the wrong way. If this is the case, there are some major implications for many of our assumptions about education, brain sciences and psychology. Last summer, to pick up some clues about what the autistic pride movement wanted and what it might have to teach us, I went to the strongest manifestation of this new consciousness yet to emerge in the UK.

Called Autscape, it was the first conference in Britain organised by and for people with autism, a process described by the organisers as 'like herding cats'. The media stereotypes I carried with me were three: the once-cuddly toddler now screaming and unreachable, lost to his distraught parents; Dustin Hoffman's incompetent but endearing genius calculator in Rainman; and the shamelessly inquisitive, literal-minded adolescent in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Just go read the whole article -- I found it fascinating. Your mileage may vary. From this post by wendyg. (Many of the other articles in the shortlist look interesting, too. I'l get to them eventually.)