this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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The idea of classifications of autism into high-functioning and low-functioning groups like that was invented by famed Nazi Hans Asperger because he was enthusiastic about eugenics and wanted a method for determining which autistic people should stay and which should go.
Someone who would get classified as "level 3" will 100% have issues that would be classified as diseases, and it makes more sense to treat those diseases first. But for someone with autism and nothing else? Yes I hold the same opinion that they should not have their autism eradicated.
I get your point. Trying to categorize people does create more division.
But we’re not talking about eugenics. We’re talking about treatment. I think the option should be available to autistic people, and it should be their choice to take it.
I wasn't bringing up the eugenics roots of "high function/low functioning" to call gene therapy eugenics, I did it to reject the idea that these people in your hypothetical are of less value if they don't take the gene therapy. When we say that autism is not a disease, we mean that it is that autistic people have material needs to be met, just like anyone else, and the autism itself is not a problem.
Also,
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, unless we're talking about autism, in which it's better to purge their genes of neurodivergence than ask anyone to help them out, apparently
Okay, so what you’re advocating is an entire movement backed up by medical professionals.
I do like this paradigm a lot better. In learning about neurodiversity, we can better learn about childhood development and education as well.
Bad analogy, but a similar thought process could be applied to being gay. The reality is that the majority of people researching, allocating funds for or marketing these "solutions" are usually neurotypical themselves. I really don't want to see how tenuous the definition of "volunteer" is going to be if this ever gets to human trials.
Being gay does not represent an intrinsic substantial detriment to one's quality of like the way some manifestations of ASD can, e.g. problems with sensory overload. The comparison is completely inappropriate because there is little reason other than homophobia to want to "cure" homosexuality.
To be fair I'm not up to date on the debates among researchers nowadays, but I think it could be possible for there to still be a parallel. Until fairly recently the medical consensus on LGBTQ people was that they were mentally ill, and specific examples of people who were both mentally ill and LGBTQ were used to discriminate against the entire group.
But nowadays we have a different understanding that queer people are just people and the mental illness bit is just because people are often mentally ill (and also because of a lot of correlation with trauma, discrimination, bullying and social pressures).
I wouldn't be surprised if a similar trajectory happened to autism and the classification of type 2-3 autism got reformulated into separate categories.
But even if my analogy was worse than I though, I think my point still stands. The most enthusiastic supporters of something like that won't be actual autism advocacy groups, but shit like Autism Speaks, and legislators surely aren't going to listen to actual autistic people. In the case of autism, they can even claim that "mentally ill people can't consent" as they've already done with sectioning.
Since the title already has "autism jab" in it it's worth noting that the very first "vaccines cause autism" study did a lot of unsafe, traumatic and anti-ethical tests on autisc children with basically no informed consent even from the parents.
I look forward to the categorization getting more refined.
No one believes ancient antivax hocum on this site, that's one of the few good things that I think can be said about it without reservation
what about blindness, is blindness too much part of a person for it to be cured, being gay is clearly "incurable" and no one would have a reason to try unless they were servery homophobic, and i think being blind is pretty clearly something that most people would rather do away with clearly divergences from the average are on a spectrum. i would say anything that prevents people from doing things they would like to do are a reasonable target for treatment and cure, and some of the things that are classified as autism are that.
also are u forgetting many people with autism treat their symptoms.
There hasn't been a historical drive to demonise blind people and their parents to this day, use of racially-driven pseudoscience to justify their mass incarceration and euthanasia or invent a whole conspiracy theory about vaccines that had massive consequences in the previous pandemic. And I've never met a blind person who prefers staying blind.
I'm not, I'm only refusing to forget the many people experimented on without consent going all the way back to Hans Asperger, those who don't wish for this treatment at all, or the historical pushing of drugs like risperidone for autistic children (often with lasting adverse effects) by the pharma-"advocacy group" alliance. And above all I don't forget we currently live in a world where a bunch of countries can lock people up "for their own good" in medical institutions and apply treatments with barely any consent.
I don't think it's too outlandish of a scenario to imagine "experimental gene treatments" being imposed on a bunch of children due to pharma companies preying on desperate parents.
Cures for otherwise blinding conditions do exist (e.g., cataract removal, some gene therapies for retinal diseases) and they're good. I have a condition that will eventually render me blind and I would seek to be cured if a cure existed for it.
But pursuing/promoting cures for disabilities, including blindness, is not without problems. See, in the US for example, the politics of the National Federation of the Blind vs. the Foundation for Fighting Blindness. Cures also raise class issues and threaten to further marginalize people who won't or can't be cured, for whatever reason. In particular, imagining a world in which 'everyone' is cured is dangerous and even inherently harmful ideology.
Also, while I have some reservations about the rhetoric and what I think it likely really means, there are blind people out there who will tell you they don't want to be cured because it's part of who they are and they're getting along just fine. Such people do exist. A similar sentiment exists for some within the deaf community as well.
Who are u talking to? I never said there werent any cures for blindness i said it was something most people who have it would rather not have it. i never said there is not conflict between trying to help people with disabilities with cures as opposed to other ways i said that it was reasonable for cures to exists. I never said i wanted a world where everyone was cured, i again said it was reasonable for some of these things to have cures or treatments or for research to be done to find them. And i didnt say that literally every one can agree they would rather be blind i said most people because obviously there is always some who thinks otherwise no matter how big a majority is.
So again who are u talking to, certainly not to what i said and especially not to what i meant cuz i didnt even mean to say anything at all about blindness I clearly meant that this type of research (into autism cures) was ethical (as long as it was only targeting forms or symptoms of autism that people with autism would rather not have). So who is it, at best u completely miss interpreted or ignored what i said or more realistically u are putting some very fucked up and ignorant words in my mouth that i didnt say cuz u know when u reply to me arguing against something i didnt say u are also arguing that i did say it or at least that i meant it. So again what are u doing what are u hoping to do here, this isnt a "fun fact" comment or funny comment u are making an argument but against a position im not even holding.
The reason it doesn't seem like I was arguing against your comment is that indeed, I wasn't trying to refute your comment. Reconsider your defensiveness. And bear in mind that not all critiques aim to establish a kind of propositional negation of what they address.
To reference capeshit, this was basically the plot of X-Men: The Last Stand, and it was never so simple. People around mutants pressured them and in some cases tried to force them to do it
What do you think of curing photoepilepsy?
Photoepilepsy is a disease. If that's why they're getting gene therapy, then great.
In my case, I have adrenoleukodystrophy, a genetic demyelenating disease, and I want nothing more than to get gene therapy so I stop losing the ability to walk (because my existing nerve damage will never heal, the most gene therapy can do is keep it from getting worse, which would still be very good) and being at risk of dying every time I hit my head.
I really do appreciate the value of gene therapy for treating diseases. But this isn't being presented as a "photoepilepsy jab", it's being presented as autism jab, and autism is not a disease.
I wasn't saying it was a photoepilepsy jab, forgive me for being unclear. I was just establishing a baseline here for my own reference. The next element is: there are symptoms of ASD (which is really a collection of conditions that get lumped together due to comorbidity) that plainly damage someone's quality of life not because of society being cruel to ND people (which it is and is the most common reason for someone with ASD suffering), such as being hypersensitive to sound, being overstimulated to the point of torture by being in a crowd of people, etc, without getting into the more extreme cases. Imagining that these sensory issues could be separated from benign things like "preference for concrete thinking", wouldn't it be good to have a way to prevent people from having that condition?
You’re using nazi eugenics terms to have your discussion, you can’t just say this isn’t about eugenics.
Nazi bullshit is making up a good part of your mental framing of this issue, that’s clear based on the words you use, reflect on your brainworms
Yes, this is one area I’d have to look more into and reformulate my opinion. From a quick search, a lot of medical professionals support the neurodiversity model.