NTs Are Weird

I’ve noticed a trend among some people who have autism, other disability, or even illness. The trend is trying to equate “severity” with “suffering”.

The illogic is pretty simple: “If this condition really affected you, you would be miserable. If it affects you more than me, it will make you more miserable than I am.”

Yet, this is clearly not the case. Different people respond differently. If I make jokes, am happy, or, conversely, let you know how miserable I feel, that doesn’t really tell you if I’m in pain or not. What it tells you is how I feel emotionally - maybe. But it is possible for some people to feel good emotionally while dealing with severe discrimination, pain, or other problem - that doesn’t make the discrimination or pain less miserable - it’s still miserable. But, for some reason, some people have different responses to the same things.

Some people have found ways to be happy in situations that others would find themselves suicidal. I know a friend who has told me that he would want to commit suicide if he went blind - but I know several blind people who, despite being completely blind, don’t find that sufficient reason for suicide - and in fact enjoy their lives. Are they “less blind” if they don’t want to die because of it?

It can be very hurtful to hear things like, “Well, life is tough for me, that’s why I want to die - if it was actually tough for you, you would too” when you are trying to hang on, trying to keep a positive attitude (likely to try to stay alive yourself) and someone tells you that your problems aren’t real because you want to survive. Yet, I see this far too often.

The source for comments such as that is typically frustration. Someone is having difficulty, and not getting the help they need. The frequent assumption is that anyone else in the same situation would also feel the same way or even worse, so anyone that might, for example, be able to joke about something, obviously isn’t suffering. But that’s not the case - and if we are going to provide services based on demonstrated need for those services, we should focus on the need for the services, not whether or not someone responds in an “appropriate” way.

I’ve seen this also manifest in other ways, with assumptions that “happy” and “miserable” autistic people have certain combinations of symptoms. Yet there is no single symptom of autism that makes everyone miserable - not that I’ve seen, anyhow.

This doesn’t diminish the real feelings of misery many autistic people (and others) feel. These are real feelings, not just something people should “get over”. But, at the same time, they don’t define anything but the emotional state of the person - they don’t define what difficulties are or aren’t present.

Autism ain’t:

• - Different from Asperger’s
• - Just another word for “geek”
• - Something that makes us superior
• - A horrible condition
• - A prison sentence
• - A guarantee of loneliness
• - Another word for “unemployable”
• - Worse than death
• - A reason to pity someone
• - A made-up excuse to get our way
• - Completely different, needing different advocacy than other disabilities
• - More stigmatizing than anything else
• - The end of someone’s life

There are probably tons more. Feel free to add them as comments.

A while ago, I took an online course on defensive driving that my workplace requires. Supposedly this type of course lowers accident rates (I’d love to see proof of that), which is a good goal I suppose. However, I suspect the real reason for the course is so that a lawyer from my organization can simply say, “We have a comprehensive defensive driving program” should we ever get sued after an accident…but I digress… A key part of the course is an online “assessment” to determine whether or not I possess the critical defensive driving skills that were being taught to me. There was just one problem: the assessment was incredibly badly designed.

For instance, it asks, “what is defensive driving?” Does it matter? Does knowing the definition help me actually drive safer? I doubt it. Another question asked for people to differentiate between unsafe driving practices and distracted driving practices - once again, does it matter if you can tell someone whether adjusting the radio is unsafe or distracted driving? Probably not! And, besides, isn’t distracted driving unsafe? Why is there a need for two categories?

Yet this is a typical problem with assessments. Rather than test what matters, assessments often test the “easy to test” things. In the case of this defensive driving test, it was far easier to test whether or not I properly memorized some definitions than to test whether or not I was a safe driver - so that’s what was tested. I suppose it shows that I paid attention to the definitions during the class, and, thus, I likely paid attention to the rest. The problem, however, is that the test still has nothing to do with my ability to safely drive an automobile.

Defensive driving isn’t the only area that gets this wrong. In school, we find out that it is easy to test facts, but very difficult to test actual useful learning. So, often, we end up testing for some fact that may not even have any practical use in day-to-day application of the learning. Some of us do quite well when tested on facts, yet can’t actually perform any of the skills being supposedly tested. But it’s easier to give multiple-choice tests and similar measurements than to actually figure out if someone mastered a subject!

IQ tests are well known to measure all sorts of things other than “general intelligence.” We see this quite clearly when different types of IQ tests are administered to non-typical people or cultures other than the one the test was designed for - the variations between tests is astonishing, especially when all the tests are supposedly measuring the same thing. (granted many of these tests, when used on non-typical people, are being used in ways specifically warned against in the test’s instructions)

This can be particularly bad when it comes to assessments of daily living skills. Right now, living skills are most commonly assessed, in adults with an obvious way of communicating and no obvious physical disabilities, by asking whether or not a person understands what steps are involved in performing tasks. So, for instance, “How do you wash dishes” is asked. Yet knowing how the skill is performed is quite different than being able to perform the skill - someone might know how to wash dishes, but be unable to do it. Often, even this approach isn’t used, and an even worse approach is used: that of making an assumption about someone’s living skills on the basis of other skills the person has (”Oh, he can drive a car, he must be able to do his dishes!”). Often these types of “assessments” are made on the basis of prejudice (”All people who can drive a car can wash dishes”), which makes them particularly hard to disagree with - people don’t like having their own prejudices pointed out! (it goes the other way too - people assume that if someone can’t do one thing, then something unrelated can’t be done by them either - for instance, “She’s blind, so she wouldn’t be able to dishes.”)

So how do you assess daily living skills? I don’t know. Even direct observation isn’t necessarily the best way of doing it (observation can make people more or less able to do these tasks). It might be as simple as believing someone when they say they can or can’t do the skill. But until we get past, as a society, worrying about whether or not someone is claiming a benefit to which they aren’t fully entitled, I doubt we’ll end up with anything better.

But one thing is for sure: the way we do it now is worse than useless. We’re measuring something else entirely.

A very common question on online forums with US autistic people is whether or not an autistic person can or should be excused from jury duty. In other words, are we good jurors?

I’ve served once, although I have been called twice (the other time, the defendant failed to show up, so we were all dismissed). The one I served on was for a relatively short criminal trial (one day), with about 6 hours of deliberations (we couldn’t agree for quite a while). It was a tough job, but one that I felt as prepared and able to do as I imagine others on the jury felt - that is, realizing it is very serious work and we are fallible humans, but realizing equally that everyone else is too.

One of the common concerns autistic people have is that we are bad at reading facial expression. This isn’t necessarily true, and one finds quickly if one studies societies that different cultures express emotion and even “lying” differently. The difference between many of us and many neurotypicals in this is simple, though: we expect people to be different than us. If anything, that might help, not hinder, when one of the main players in the trial is a different race, is from a different economic strata, is an immigrant, or otherwise has a very different culture than ourself.

My experience (albeit quite limited) was that my job was not just to see “Is someone lying”, but more importantly, “Is there sufficient evidence to convict?” The case I was on was not cut and dry - it involved a man charged with drunk driving, but without any clear “black and white” evidence (he declined to take a breathalyzer or other sort of BAC test, so we didn’t have a “number” to tell us if he was drunk). Instead, we had an officer and defendant’s recollection of roadside sobriety tests (”Touch your nose”, “Count backwards from 65, stop at 57″, etc) - which mostly agreed. So, the question became, “If he flunked these tests, was he drunk?” In the end, we decided that the fact he flunked six made it very likely he was drunk (medical reasons for failing were ruled out by the defendant himself). We did discuss the truthfulness of answers, but I never heard people saying (that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a factor, of course, just not one that was conscious) “He ‘looked’ truthful”. Instead I heard, “Hey, the cop said he didn’t stop for about 2 miles after the cop started trying to pull him over - he claims he didn’t drive that far, but his kid and girlfriend both testified that they saw the lights well before he did, and their stories match the cop’s - and they were defense witnesses!” It wasn’t body language we were discussing. What was far more important to us than whether our “gut” told us the guy was truthful was whether or not someone who had no reason to collaborate a story did, in fact, collaborate it.

Do I think we did a good job? I do. I also think being autistic gave me a view into the case that was different than other people’s views, and I saw some things others didn’t. It did work the other way, too, and I don’t think that was bad. In an ideal world (sadly we don’t yet have such a world), a criminal justice jury would have a wide enough diversity that very few biases would be shared by everyone on the jury - after all, conviction in the US requires everyone on the jury to feel that it is right to convict, so having some people who are willing to stand behind their opinions (autistic people are famous for that!) while holding different biases than others may be the difference between convicting an innocent man or freeing him. It also means that everyone on the jury, because we all do see things differently, will need to explain reasons for their views to each other, not just say things like, “It’s clear the defense were liars. Let’s convict.”

So, I’d serve again. I’d also recommend other autistic people do. One question that each autistic person will need to answer for themselves however is, “How will I answer if I am asked, ‘is there anything else that is relevant that we should know’” during jury selection. For me, I would typically keep quiet about my autism as I don’t think it interferes with my ability to be fair (the exception being if it was a case involving an autistic criminal or victim, or some sort of service provider, in which case I may not be able to be fair, due to my background). I keep quiet about tons of other things that impact my thinking, such as my religion, my career, my economic status, my race, etc, all of which certainly affect how I see crime and criminals, perhaps even more than my autism (that said, if any of these things - including my autism - would prevent me from giving someone a fair trail, I would hope I would mention them; for instance, if someone was accused of harming someone at my workplace).

Yep, there was a question about mental illness on the pre-selection questionnaire. Since I have none, I wrote “no”. I do not believe myself to be mentally ill, I believe myself to have a different neurology.

Likewise, with elections approaching in my area of the world, people are asking, “Should I vote if I’m autistic?” Being autistic doesn’t render someone incapable of holding views on politicians, ballot initiatives, etc. Nor does it mean that we are incapable of fairly selecting candidates. Sure, I don’t know if a candidate’s facial expressions show deceit. Personally, however, I think most are likely lying (about the only thing I believe a politician about is when one says “I will raise taxes for the common man” - that part is likely true, since it doesn’t help one get elected). Instead of trying to figure out facial expression, I try to find out how that person has acted in life prior to the election and campaign - if they were an elected official previously, how did they actually vote (or did they even bother to show up to vote)? Have they been involved in any major projects? Were they fiascos? I would think that people would see this as better anyhow - heck, we tend to elect actors to office, so I would sort of expect some acting (and maybe even good acting that NTs can’t figure out).

Sure, not everyone approaches elections this way, and that may not be a bad thing - different people care about different things. For example, I know many voters who will pick the presidential candidate based on one issue they care strongly about - they too aren’t paying too much attention to facial expression, but perhaps party affiliation, abortion stance, stated views on the Iraq war, or feelings about who will increase their personal tax. All this said, someone who doesn’t pick based only on appearances is probably better than someone (my mother did this, unfortunately) who picked someone because they had a “nice smile!”

So, I encourage autistics to consider voting and serving on juries. Certainly, this is a personal decision, and we do need to follow the law (some places may specifically exclude autistic people from juries, for instance - which is law we should be trying to change). But if you feel you can fairly evaluate the evidence or select a candidate, there is no good reason for you to not participate.

I got through reading a bunch of comments to a news story, regarding whether or not people with disabilities should be able to be part of society (the “main” society, not some sub-part hidden behind walls). In the end, it was clear: there are two views. The first is that the human race has a duty to everyone to at least try to find a place for people that allows inclusion, not segregation, from society. The second is that this duty only exists while it isn’t upsetting or inconvenient. This second view is often justified on the basis of “safety”.

I am constantly amazed how non-violence acts can be treated as if they were violent, simply because someone says, “Well, they do scare me, and I have a right to not be scared.” Actually, no, you don’t have a right to not be scared. You do have a right to be safe, although that right isn’t a guarantee. Sometimes there is a difference between true safety and the perception of safety (in fact, people confuse “safe” with “familiar” - that is why flying on a plane feels unsafe to some people, why some city people feel uncomfortable in the woods when they hear an animal at night, or why another person might reach up to lock their car door when someone of another skin color is standing on a corner nearby). In other words, we (as people) get this wrong a lot of the time (we probably get it wrong most of the time). Unfortunately we typically can’t see that our own fear may not be based in reality - and so our feelings of fear, rather than an objective measure of safety - become the standard. Ironically, using this standard often misses true danger, while discriminating against people who are not a danger at all.

Listen closely the next time someone wants to keep someone from participating in society - how long does it take before “safety” is brought up, and is safety brought up in a logical, objective way or is it brought up in the context of feelings, stereotypes, and “personal experience” that can’t be argued against without bringing the discussion to a personal (rather than logical) level?  Certainly there are times and places where people must be segregated, but I’ll bet that the next time you hear this in the context of disability, you’ll see feelings of safety, not real safety, as the real issue.

And note: I’m not confusing “participating in society” with “participating exactly the same way as others do in society”. Clearly that wouldn’t be any more acceptable than the things I’m talking about here.

Every year, an Ugly Dog Contest is held.

This year’s pick?  A one-eyed, three-legged dog.

One might ask…what does this say about people’s view of disability? If a dog was picked for this based on what sex the dog was, I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly as funny to many people. Interesting.

That said, personally I think the pick was pretty cute.

I’m going to officially (well, as official as this unofficial can) declare today “Break a Stereotype Day!”

So, today, as you are going about your business, find a stereotype to break. It doesn’t need to be an autism-related stereotype, although it is fine if it is. It doesn’t need to be a “big” stereotype either, sometimes the small things are where the real prejudice waits. It just has to be a stereotype that people apply to people like you.

Once you break one, tell someone about it - you can do so as a comment to this post if you want, but you can also write about it elsewhere or just call up a friend and talk to them about it. That way your stereotype-breaking does even more: it not only will affect people when they see you doing it, but it will affect others when they hear you talk about it.

For myself, I think I’ll appreciate the beauty in the area of the world I live - it’s amazing high plains landscape. Of course the stereotype is that us autistic people can’t appreciate beauty…

Autistic people face tremendous prejudice in the world. We might not be hired by an employer, simply because we disclose we are autistic. We are bullied in school. We have to fight for our right to eat, if we dare negotiate the world of social services (our other option is often starvation). We are subject to forced, involuntary confinement - and a world that understands that, “of course”, locking more people up in institutions is a good thing (and refuses to understand that there are other ways of meeting the needs of people and society).  We aren’t believed when we tell others about our problems. We are even sometimes murdered, simply for the crime of being different.

So, I don’t mean to dismiss these things - they are real examples of prejudice in the world, and these are some of the main things we must fight against. Any reader of this blog knows I talk about them all the time.

But we also need to be careful. Sometimes an autistic doesn’t get something they want not because of prejudice towards autistics (or disabled people) but for another reason. Sure, it still might not be a good reason, but that doesn’t make it prejudice automatically, either.

I’ll give some hypothetical examples, based on things I’ve seen in real life.

We’ll call a man Mr. Aspie. Mr. Aspie is 24 years old, and just recently received a degree in Computer Science from the university. He did well in his academic studies, and participated in a couple open source software projects over the internet, adding useful blocks of code to the projects. Now, having graduated, he is looking for a job, and applies where I work, for a programmer position. The position asks for several years of work experience.

Chances are, I wouldn’t consider Mr. Aspie - he probably doesn’t have the experience I’m looking for in this position.  Sure, he has some volunteer, open-source experience, and I value that greatly.  But at the end of the day, I am probably looking for corporate experience.  Is that good or bad?  Well, it could be either.  But the reality is that when I don’t hire him, it isn’t that he is an autistic.  I wouldn’t have hired a neurotypical with identical experience, either.  It has nothing to do with his social skills, his eye contact, or his perseverations.  It’s not a sensory issue.  In fact, it’s nothing to do with anything related to autism - it is simply that his resume doesn’t include the things I’m wanting on it.

Yet, I can see frustration and anger when Mr. Aspie finds he didn’t receive the position.  In fact, many people - neurotypical and autistic - are upset when they don’t get a job.  But having a protected disability doesn’t guarantee employment anymore than being neurotypical does.  And there just may be reasons other than prjeudice for my choice.

The problem is that autistic people face prejudice in many, many areas of their lives.  Like others that experience tons of prejudice, we begin to assume that outcomes we don’t like are always a result of the prejudices we fight all too often.  95% of the time prejudice is the cause, so we start assuming that “almost always” and “always” are the same thing - so we treat 100% of bad outcomes as if they are caused by prejudice.

Unfortunately, that 5% of the time is a different cause.  And when we assume it is prejudice, and respond as if it is prejudice, we harm ourselves the other 95% of the time.  We turn people who held no prejudice against us into people who are now seen by us as the enemy - and that causes them to have at least some sympathy for the other people we claim are prejudiced against us, the ones that truly are. We lose the 5% (and many others) as allies when we wrongly accuse people of prejudice.

We need to tred softly in determining the motivations for other people’s behavior so long as another possibility exists, and also recognize that there are often motivations that we may not have even considered as a possibility.  Yes, much, even most, of the time it may actually be prejudice.  But before we label it as such, we should be sure. We can’t afford to lose the battle against true prejudice.

Autistic people don’t have social skills - well, that’s the conventional thinking anyhow.

Of course this assumes a few things…such as the existence of a coherent group of things you can call “social skills” and the idea that “neurotypical” social skills are the only kinds of social skills.

Of course nearly any autistic person knows that there are plenty of “socially skilled” neurotypicals who lack the basic skills needed to work with autistic people. Yet, if an interaction between one of these people and one of us (autistic people) goes sour, it is assumed that the problem must be the autistic person’s social skills - and almost never a lack of flexibility and social finesse on the part of the neurotypical.

As for the idea that we either have or don’t have a group of things called “social skills,” I was thinking of some of my own strengths today. One of them is very clearly a social skill: I have the ability to remember small details and recall them months later. Now, I think a lot of autistic people are probably reading this and saying, “I can do that too, but I wouldn’t call it a social skill!” Yet, I see it helping me in social situations on a daily basis, especially in my profession. It is what lets me tell one of my customers, “Hey, Is your data circuit still running well since we had the phone company check out the bridge clips in August?” This may be one of a hundred minor problems that I learned about in August, and may even be a relatively minor one. Yet, six months later, I can remember the problem - a problem that likely was very memorable to the customer who experienced it - and ask some intelligent questions.

But that’s not the kind of social skill that seems to matter. No, that is hard to measure and test - it’s much easier to just see if I make eye contact. Yet, somehow I suspect my customers care more about whether or not they can get to the internet than whether or not I look them in the eye!

I suspect we have many different examples of strong social skills within the autistic community. I wonder how many are not noticed simply because we’re looking for failure, not success?

There seems to be a renewed trend from people who either want autism to be cured or who want to emphasize how awful autism is (sometimes to win the “I have it worse than you” argument). They want to redefine autistic disorder and Asperger’s.

So, you see, there’s something that is missing in the current criteria, something that distinguishes autism and Asperger’s, according to them. No, it isn’t the different spatial abilities that some researchers hypothesize are the difference. Nor is it the presence or absence of a speech delay early in life, as others suggest. No, it’s much simipler.

Autistics are people who agree with me and I believe have autism.

Aspies are people who disagree with me and whom I don’t believe have autism.

(of course you can switch these around if you are an Asperger’s Syndrome Expert rather than an Autism Expert)

It’s really that simple. Sure, you can add another measure in if you need, so that you can make sure you are classifying people rightly - just ask if the person has any area of their life where they have had success. If they have, then they are also not autistic. The key issue is whether or not they agree with the person doing the “diagnosis” - that is, do they want a cure and do they think that autism is nothing but misery?

Make sense? Well, apparently this does make sense to some of the cult leaders in the fringes of autism “advocacy.” No one who has “real” autism, for instance, would not want a cure, while people with Asperger’s really don’t have any significant problems - certainly not a disability.

This is of course a rather obvious tactic of “divide and conquer”, and another example of people trying to prevent all autistic people from having a voice in the autism debate. After all, we’re all Aspies if we disagree with these people, and thus don’t know what we’re talking about, certainly not when it comes to real, full-spectrum, full-blown, tsunami autism.

Yes, there’s sarcasm in this. I’m feeling particularly sarcastic today, but those who know me know that I have a bit of a dark sense of humor sometimes - it keeps me sane in a world where we are excluded, abused, murdered, raped, and otherwise mistreated. So I hope you understand that the sarcasm is my way of dealing with these things (and, yes, autistic people can use sarcasm, and, no, that wasn’t sarcasm).

For people who think “real” autistics would want a cure, nothing else, I suggest exploring the following two links, because I know I won’t fit your stereotype of a “real” autistic but some of these people very well may:

1. Eugene Marcus, specifically, On Almost Become a Person. Gene has a wonderful sense of humor (you can see a sampling at The Jenn and Gene Comedy Hour), and can write quite eloquently and clearly. But he also wouldn’t be mistaken as “non-disabled” or non-autistic.

2. Larry Bissonnette is another person who fits the “classic autism” stereotype, but who has at least a bit to say about being autistic and the issue of a cure.

You see, it’s possible to have real and significant problems in life, yet still enjoy life. We live in a society where many people feel they have the right to their idea of a “normal” world, and any violation of “normalcy” must be “misery”. It’s not. It’s possible to be both not-normal and happy. Seriously. Even if you can’t find a wife, can’t work, can’t get a college degree, need help with daily living needs, communicate differently, or whatever else.

It’s also possible to be autistic and have a degree, work in a good career, have a happy marriage (and kids), and not receive any non-normal outside help with daily living needs - and this can still be called autism too, and may even be “more autistic” than the person who has none of these things. Autism isn’t success and failure, nor is it happiness or misery, nor is it agreement or disagreement about science or cures.

There are some - even within the autistic community - who would prefer a simpler world where “real” autistics all agree with what they are saying (or the “real” autistics “lack ability to form opinion” - that’s fine for these people’s purposes, too). But the world isn’t that simple. People who disagree with me, have abilities I don’t, or have different feelings about being autistic aren’t non-autistic. Nor are people who are happy they are autistic. You don’t have to be suffering to have autism. Nor do you have to agree with me. They aren’t faking it. They simply are different, but maybe not in any way other than circumstance.