Is Autism the New Gay?

I recently read an article in Wired magazine that challenged my perception of autism. Reading the article sort of felt the same way as when I was first exposed to homosexuality in college. I was a corn-fed, Midwestern young man who was raised on Northeast-Ohio idealism. Anything that was not normal was either not talked about or was weird. I felt like a pioneer in Ohio just because I had broken away from listening to popular music and was into bands like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Dead Milkmen and Public Image Ltd. A new friend of mine came out to our crew when someone in the residence hall found out that there was a gay person living on our floor. The Midwest back then (maybe still) was pretty brutal about stereotypes and this guy challenged everything that I knew about homosexuality. For all intents and purposes, he was an All-American dude living his life on a slightly different path than society would expect from looking at him. He let us ask a ton of questions and changed our perceptions. With the Internet not as prolific, the world was a smaller place and information was limited to immediate surroundings or what we sought out through reading books, magazines and TV.

“Enter” Amanda Baggs, wired and youtube.com and a perspective on the “problem” that is different. While Amanda is not the first autistic person to write about autism, she is one of the first to put something like this on youtube, a place where just about anyone outside of Pakistan can consume it freely.

Amanda says that her series of movements are interactions and constant conversation with her environment. She says that autism is not a life inside of “her own little world” but a form of communication and expression that neotypicals have not taken the time to understand and have branded. She made the movie herself. She translated it to language that any neotypical can understand. I find that people in my circles can be intolerant of foreign languages and cultures. Reviewing something that has been treated like a disease for… forever is going to take a lot of convincing. Luckily clinical psychiatrists Laurent Mottron has dedicated himself to explaining autism

Early on, Mottron decided that theories, such as this is the fault of the parents and that children could be reeled back into normalcy with play therapy and increased work on parental relationship, were crap. “These children were just of another kind” he says. Autism is hardwired and no amount of therapy can “bring them back”. He contends that autism is just another way of thinking. One that allows for advanced perceptual abilities that translates to higher incidences of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing, pattern recognition skills and superior memory. Their brains are not broken, just different.

In the article, Baggs recalls seeing an influx of gay pride websites in the late 90s and envying them, wishing that there was something like that for autism. She says that the new message is “We’re here, we’re weird get used to it.”

For the entire article, see the March 2008 Wired magazine.