What can you tell me about Autism?

one of the articles says that third-party mediation didn't work.

and that the parents who are being sued were not watching their child while he was out playing, at some of the times of the alleged attacks; neither was the child's sitter.

It's always dangerous to wade into these things on the internet because it's a little like that Maine diner toddler story that was going around -- a lot of one person's word against another, facts always incomplete, people interpreting things how they want etc. But I'm not ready to join the chorus against the parents filing the suit after reading that their small kids were physically attacked multiple times, which has nothing to do with whether it's the autistic boy's "fault" or not.

Well you could always start some pressure group for disability free neighbourhoods, one in which your precious fucking children can grow up in an environment that is entirely free of child on child violence.

oh shut up

Well if you are condoning a neighbourhood witch-hunt against a disabled kid just be a fucking honest bigot.

whooooa dial it down jfc

shut the fuck up, asshole

self-righteous internet posting pos

Xelab has one setting ime

it's weird how xelab pretends to give a shit about people being treated with dignity and then lashes out at people, having no idea about or interest in the lived experiences of the people he's talking to

like, just be a fucking honest aggro dick instead of cloaking your need to be aggro with people behind this transparently false veil of concern for people who need help

this whole case just bums me the fuck out

We don't know all the circumstances .... but i can't imagine any course of events that leads to this kind of legal action that doesn't involve the plaintiff being a wanker

― OshoKosho B'Gosho (Noodle Vague), Monday, September 21, 2015 12:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

it just bums me out

i understand their concern for their kids

but their neighbor with autism is not a fucking pitbull

just totally bums me out, their action smells like shit even if they don't think it does

lol did i say it bums me out enough times

Yeah i'm not gonna judge here cuz who knows the actual facts here, it's just a bummer all around

Here, i say

again yeah i understand about the unknown facts, but the feelings this arouses are coloured by the context of prejudice and misunderstanding habitually faced by autistic people and their families - and i guess media coverage of this story is only likely to continue that context precisely because it doesn't (can't?) explore the complexities of the situation

it bums me out too, and as I said above I think nuisance lawsuits sound like a horrifying way to handle this issue and a bad precedent. I only meant that it's hard to get a full picture of what any of the parents in the story have actually gone through from a couple of news articles, so I'm not rushing to assume these parents just want to live in a disability-free zone.

also once I saw a thing about a toddler getting beat up that just emotionally murked up the situation for me and made it harder for me to assume anything about the parents

there are actions not born of individual discrimination that serve to further a climate of discrimination tho

Listen here Chaki, I have a 13 year old with autism and have been through the full fucking wringer on the parent of disabled kid experience - so go shooting at the hip to someone else you interloping dick-head. I am going retire from this thread because I get too angry when people start defending acts of disablism and am a piss poor debater.

yeesh, well sorry I called you an asshole then, hugs to you if you're still looking at the thread

Don't worry I didn't exactly approach the "debate" in the best manner:P

Glad everybody's hugging now. Just dropping in to point out to xelab that Joan Crawford Loves Chachi is not the same person who used to post as Chaki, who now posts under the name kurt schwitterz.

yeah hey fuck you man jeeze lol

i'm gonna need a diagram

I just spent 3 hours trying to negotiate with my kid to let me administer a nasal spray flu-vaccine on him. He requires general anaesthetic for any dental work and is not keen on anything near his eyes/ears/nose/mouth and will punch and kick with impunity if you are persistently intrusive, as the nurse in the clinic found out when she sent me home with the vaccine. I got there in the end but fucking hell ... ^^;

sorry xelab, sounds rough. my three old hasn't been to the dentist yet, we are kind of terrified, we definitely need to get some recommendations from other families with ASD kids

Look up duraphat 2800 ppm fluoride toothpaste for starters. Luckily I can get it on NHS prescription and it might be a bit costly over there, but worth the money imo.

ah high flouride for extra cavity protection? to avoid dentist trips i assume, makes sense

I go to a specialist NHS dentist and she assures me that it strengthens his teeth against decay, for the last 18 months he has used it his teeth are in impeccable condition. He previously only had minor problems with his first teeth, but his pain management skills are not the best - as I am sure you can imagine.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-34548638

I had a lengthy post on this and ended up deleting it because it got out of hand.

had some random thoughts about the way BBC news covered this case too but probably not worth hashing out

the margins are getting broader and broader and the UK gov does not give a fuck about anybody who's pushed there

I worry about the way things are going, as in decent local authority funded disabled facilities getting the life strangled out of them by this hateful government and as they say once they are gone, then they are gone...

I was offered funding for a private sector facility recently for Alex to have some independence and "fun" time on a fortnightly basis. We visited the place and it was small, oppressively institutional and badly staffed, it actually reminded me of one of them Ceausescu era asylums. He was pulling my sleeve to gtfo of there in minutes, it was basically a room full of bored + depressed disabled people so I declined and in blunt terms told them that their operation doesn't belong in a first world country. The sad thing is that companies like these seem to be thriving by paying the minimum wage and treating disabled people like "storage", the Tories love that shit. Although the Connor S tragedy seems to be a case of NHS Trust negligence, I can imagine a lot of more these needless deaths to come will be purely cuts related.

there are good people and good organizations out there dude, stay strong and don't let the bastards grind y'all down

https://juststimming.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/quiet-hands/

i would recommend the HBO documentary How To Dance in Ohio as a worthwhile watch and the first film I've seen that explores the challenges inner life of high functioning teen to young adult women with autism from their own perspective.
http://www.howtodanceinohio.com/

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/23/neurotribes-legacy-autism-steve-silberman-book-review-saskia-baron

My partner has tasked me to get that doc but I can't find it on the torrentz yet and she is currently reading this ^^^, it gets Baron-Cohen approval so i'd guess it will be good stuff.

xp

that is a brilliant piece as well NV, when ABA is little more than GBH....

Has Baron-Cohen rolled back on the heavy-duty neurosexism and the toxic transphobia yet?

Because I am, frankly, desperate for good, sensitive and understanding experiences and coping strategies of people with female-assigned bodies and Aspergers brains, but Baron-Cohen has repeatedly come out with such "wow... NO" stuff from his mouth that a recommendation from him is pretty much like erecting a wall of kryptonite warning me away from a thing.

(My Dad did tell me to read it, though, so...)

I wouldn't let your dislike of Baron-Cohen put you off, from what my partner says it is an essential read with a lot interesting historical stuff about about attitudes/mistreatment of ASC people.

It's not a "dislike" of Baron-Cohen, it's a distrust. When someone comes out repeatedly with stuff that is demonstrably false, to downright dangerous, it doesn't affect one's "liking" of them so much as it casts a suspicion over the veracity or usefulness of the rest of their statements.

Fair enough B. My partner speaks highly of him and has all his books which I have never read. To an uneducated schmuck like me he is the *important* professor of autism studies guy she often quotes, I am guilty of unquestionably accepting someone's credentials without reading them. Well I did start Mindblindness but was bored rigid and put it down for something more to my interests.

Well, I guess it's because the first place I encountered him was, whenever anyone was hosting a debate about "Brain Gender" (and spurious topics attached to Neurosexism), he was THE Go-To Guy to stand up and say "Brains Are Totally Gendered!!!" and talk about how there are delicate pink ladybrains and true-blue EXTREME MALE BRAINS. And I watched while Lady Scientists and Lady Linguistics Professors and Lady Experts one after another, demolished his brain-gender arguments, and sorry, nice theory, bro, but the science and the facts and the research and the meta-studies just don't back you up.

And he would stand up and protest BUT MY THEORY OF EXTREME MALE BRAIN HELPS SO MANY AUTISTIC BOYS!!!! You are trying to TAKE AWAY a thing that helps men!!!!

Never mind how the theory of EXTREME MALE BRAIN!!!! is actually highly detrimental to autistic spectrum women and girls, and I am 99.999% certain that it was a factor in why it took me so long to be diagnosed; hey, I was even told, the first time I took a test that put me off the scale on Aspergers Traits, "Don't be silly, you can't have that, you're a girl."

Things I know from reading a shit-ton of books on brain development (and neurosexism) when I went through a little obsession with it: there are *multiple* intelligences in the human brain. There is maths-systems-logic intelligence. There is verbal intelligence. There is musical intelligence. There is "I can rotate 3-dimensional objects in my mind" intelligence. There is emotional and social intelligence. (There are others I've forgotten.) There is no gendering to these intelligences! Most people of all genders have some functioning in all these different types of intelligence, to scales of varying ability that differ with individuals.

Yes, it is really important to recognise that Autistic Spectrum Disorders (from what reading and research I've done, and been told by my therapist) affect a specific subset - it is the impairment of the Emotional and Social Intelligence set of functions that renders a person autistic. There may be impairments of other intelligences or other learning disabilities, but it's the specific Social Intelligence impairment* that brings the diagnosis of autistic spectrum. There is a subset of people who have serious impairments of the social intelligence functioning combined with above average maths-systems-logic intelligence. That is the specific set of traits that's grouped together as Aspergers. This is good science! This is helpful stuff!

*one of the best things I've ever read on these specific impairments and how they manifest is this: http://www.lifeonthespectrum.net/blog/?page_id=762

But when dude starts calling the social intelligence "lady-brain" and the maths-systems-logic kind of intelligence MALE BRAIN (TO THE EXTREME!!!!), that is not science. That is just stereotypes and sexism. And this is the fundamental BASIS of his whole theory! It's not a little added-on oops, ignore the weird opinions coming from an otherwise sensible person, like Pythagorus and weird thing about beans. It is foundation-level RONG-ness. Social != female! Logic != male! If this is your basement, your house will collapse.

But where Baron-Cohen jets off from eye-rolly Daily Mail style neurosexism into stratospheric level WOW NOT OK levels of ~PROBLEMATIC~ that would have him banned from every university in the country if he were, say, a feminist author rather than a respected scientist is:

He has ~opinions~ on Trans Men. Trans Men, says Baron-Cohen, are not men. They are autistic women. (I'm not sure how this works with the EXTREME MALE BRAIN and all, like, how can ~male brains~ be inside ~actual women~?) They are autistic women who have AUTISTIC FIXATIONS on masculinity, so therefore believe, VERY STRONGLY, that they are men! But of course they are not really Trans Men, they are actually delusional little autistic weirdoes who need Baron-Cohen's help. Right.

Like, how the fuck do you even parse something like that? Like, help me out, because I am aware that I have a Asperger's brain that just grinds to a halt when confronted with non-logic of this order. Male brains. Autism means ~Male Brains~. So how does a ~Male Brain~ get inside a woman? How? What? Either brains don't actually have a gender, or else, surely... if there really *IS* such a thing as ~brain gender~ as distinct from what I was talking about above, (with there being differing types of intelligences, and there *IS* such a thing as a ~Male Brain~) then surely a person with a Male Brain in their head would be a Man, and even in this bizarro-world, Trans Men are still correct, and they are in point of fact, still men. (Never mind that there are autistic women who are not trans, and trans men who are not autistic, which contradicts this little theory!) It's just staggering non-logic which veers from the territory of "just wrong" to "really fucking dangerous."

Because that whole argument of "trans people are not the gender they say they are" - when that logic appears in the mouths of Germaine Greer or Julie Bindel, there is debate and push-back and protest and people explaining why this is dangerous and wrong. But when it comes from the Great Male Scientist, it's... it's... ... ??? ?????????

There *is* a nugget of a thing under all that wrongness. It is totally true, that Apergers women often struggle with gender and the performance of it. Might that just be, because Gender is another of those confusing and perplexing non-logical social interaction unwritten-rules set of social conventions of the sort that ALL people with Aspergers struggle with? All people with Asperger's struggle with social conventions; the performance of Female Gender is a really bizarre set of social conventions; therefore women with Aspergers often don't "Do" gender very well. Isn't that a more ~LOGICAL~ conclusion than that Trans Men Are... Unicorns?

Sorry this is much longer than I intended (isn't everything I write on ILX?) But I find it really, really difficult, when I'm trying to look for useful or helpful information on this subject, but it seems so much of what ends up in the media, especially in this country, gets filtered through the mouth of this guy who, for me, needs a giant flaming bullshit detector before I will go anywhere near anything he says, and this is why.

Banging on at totally un-called-for length... about the manifestations of Asperger's.

I mean, I am into self-parody territory at this point, I am well aware.

Well that is a very comprehensive post B and makes me guilty about how poor I am at expressing my own internal shit. I can recall Andrea quoting some of that Male-brain stuff to me and I was nodding along without even engaging, but I lazily surmised B-Cohen was some kind of force for good. She is not evil or bigoted but is susceptible to ropey or cultist b/s sometimes. Years ago I had massive arguments when she went to this Son Rise Foundation meeting and was on the verge of donating money we could ill afford to these fucking hucksters who CURE autism. She is afflicted with a rare form of MS that is aggressively attacking her brain and motor functions and she is a shadow of the person she was a decade ago. Not really relevant to this thread but just trying to illuminate why someone's ability to make nuanced judgement can be affected by illness. Anyway that was a brilliant post B and I will c+p it to Andrea.

There *is* a nugget of a thing under all that wrongness. It is totally true, that Apergers women often struggle with gender and the performance of it. Might that just be, because Gender is another of those confusing and perplexing non-logical social interaction unwritten-rules set of social conventions of the sort that ALL people with Aspergers struggle with? All people with Asperger's struggle with social conventions; the performance of Female Gender is a really bizarre set of social conventions; therefore women with Aspergers often don't "Do" gender very well.

this is a really interesting insight!

No, this stuff is believable, because it's a nugget of truth wrapped up in stereotypes that are really, really prevalent! (Which is why I think it's important to try to counter it.) And then wrap that up and have it delivered by reassuring Big Science Expert.

When dealing with something so scary and disorienting happening to your kid, if someone offers some hope and an answer, of course you're going to try to take it! Even if one isn't dealing with a disease which is sapping one's own ability to function. (I mean, that in itself is just... so rough. I'm so sad for her, not angry.)

But yeah. Important to separate the spurious from the helpful because there is so much spurious out there.

the "male brain" is a horrible concept that SBC absolutely shd've disowned by now