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Sometimes the same behaviors in a person {read as} neurotypical would not even be noticed.
But because people with autism are scrutinized all day, every day, by teachers, therapists, parents, and almost everyone else around them, their behaviors are labeled, treated […]
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When you tell me there is no such thing as normal, this is true, in a sense. The things we as a society prize as normal can not all be found in one person. […] There is no one ‘normal’ person, never was, never will be. So many of us are more comfortable with people like ourselves that we take as normal those with a certain amount of similarity to ourselves, and if we have sufficient power in society, this normal may override the normals of others.
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There is simply no need to speak at all of ‘what makes us human’ in scientific discourse. What makes us human is nothing, save perhaps our rich diversity.
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A lot of people think they can relate {to my struggles} which means it’s brushed under the carpet as not a big deal.
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“You know how it is. People like that . . . they don’t experience emotions the same way that you and I do.” […]
I thought about telling her [that I am autistic]. I chose not to. I’m not sure what it would have accomplished if I had told her […] revealing myself to be a person like that
The truth is, I don’t experience emotions in the same way as that woman who spoke to me about her disabled clients. Or in the same way that you do. No one does.
Human beings are cognitively and behaviorally diverse. We are so diverse that we defy taxonomy entirely.
There really is no norm, no fixed point of reference from which to deviate.
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[F]ew issues are completely exclusive to one group, but some things affect some groups more strongly than others, and that can be very important.
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[S]ome critics […] suggest abandoning the term ‘autism’ altogether. In their opinion, labelling autistic people as such was merely a mistake: We thought there was a natural category called ‘autism,’ but now that we know more about it, we can see that this was an error.
[I]dentifying as autistic may not be biologically meaningful, but it is politically meaningful
[W]e have our own communities, norms, and practices […] Autism, in other words, has begun to develop into a culture, and this culture opens up the space for autistic behaviors to begin to manifest as meaningful […] challeng[ing] existing standards of acceptability within […] dominant social and ideological framework[s]
Some of our most significant and deeply-entrenched human categories – like race and gender – are partly rooted in a constellation of physical elements, and partly in historically situated social construction.
They do not reside on a single gene, or even a network of genes, and yet they are both extremely ‘real’ and extremely important to our conceptions of self and others.
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When you are different it’s okay for you to not quite meet up with the rest of the world here and there, because most of the time, when it matters, everything syncs up.
When you are disabled you don’t have that luxury.
When you are disabled you have to prove, over and over again, that you are a real person […]
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In a world where autism exists, because we do taxonomize human difference and build systems of power around it, I am autistic.
Autism: Explorations 