Fuck Yeah Autism Spectrum

We are now accepting applications for travel grants to send a limited number of parents of children with autism, individuals with autism, special education teachers, and other stakeholders to attend theInternational Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR). This year the conference will be held in Toronto, Canada from May 17-19.

The awards cover up to $1,000 of expenses to be used for registration, travel, accommodations, meals and other directly related expenses, including childcare or special accommodations to enable individuals with autism to participate. Grantees are responsible for obtaining international travel documents.

Applications must be received by February 29, 2012.

Added :)

fyeahautismspectrum:

(obviously autistics are uncreative, because they’re MALE and creativity is a female associated trait). 

—Emily

(Emphasis mine)

Isn’t that a little bit sexist? I’ve never noticed males being any less creative than females. There are many male artists and writers, and those things both require creativity…

Or were you saying that that’s what the stereotypes say?

Yeah I meant that was the stereotypes.  IE creativity is associated with women, (except it actually is in really sexist and kind of creepy ways; which isn't really the point of this post, but suffice it to say that association is not remotely positive.), not that there's any actual truth to that idea, because there definitely isn't.

snailrevolution asked:

I've heard from various sources that people with autism are less creative and/or less empathic than non-autistic people. Is there any factual/statistic basis for this?

metapianycist replied:

No. Those are stereotypes of autistic people. The diagnostic criteria for no autistic diagnosis requires an autistic person to be “less” creative, whatever that means in a clinical sense. “Empathy” as is used in its clinical sense is additionally problematic because it differs from the common usage of the word. Being able to decode other people’s facial expressions and emotional responses intuitively (the psychological usage of the word) is not the same thing as (and is not required for) caring about other people’s feelings. Many of the most empathetic people I know are also autistic people.

I replied:

No, not really.

The empathy arguments are mostly propogated by Simon Baron-Cohen, who mostly gerrymandered to exclude autistic people.  He defines empathy as "Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion" [The Science of Evil, US edition, p16]

This is actually super manipulated; because it conflates both the ability to figure out what people are thinking (which is largely a learned skill) and the tendency to be emotionally effected by other people (which is what empathy is usually used to refer to.) And also by declaring the response to be an "appropriate" emotion this is subtly Othering autistic people's senses of empathy, when we, for example, respond to someone in pain with emotional overload and desperate attempts to do anything to make their suffering stop because it's hurting us.  Or the tendency to withdraw from people in pain because it's really uncomfortable to be around them.

This is then classified as Not Empathy because those emotions aren't appropriate; the Appropriate response is to be nice and take care of the person and be supportive, not to be completely overwhelmed by empathy.  When really, those are empathy overload (and I get them frequently; I don't know how universal those experiences are to autistic people; many other autistic people also experience it though)

So basically, he's manipulating the definition to create a very allistic centered concept of empathy, and then declaring that autistic people lack it or are impaired in empathy, which isn't really a very good interpretation of the evidence and requires a really weird understanding of empathy.

As for the less creative thing, it's pretty much entirely stereotype, and probably ties into the male-gendering of autism (obviously autistics are uncreative, because they're MALE and creativity is a female associated trait).  Some autistic people are not super creative, but that's not really any different then most people.  Personally I have an extremely hard time surpressing my constant stream of ideas.  It's actually kind of inconvenient how creative I am sometimes >.<

(This again means Simon Baron-Cohen is probably at fault.  But I don't have his book where he proposes that autism is an "extreme male brain", but yeah, that's also bullshit.)

[EDIT: Added in the ask and metapianycists reply now that I got permission to reblog his part of the reply]

  eateroftrees:

RECLAIM THE AUTISM TAG

From allistic supremacy, ableism, centering, and the general dehumanizing and ignoring of the self determination of autistic people

(if you reblog this, it will not appear in the autism tag; copy the image and make a new post with it instead.)

To quickly make a new post of this:

Click reblog (or ‘reblog manually’ if you’re using one-click reblogging)

Select the entire post (ctrl/cmd+a)

Copy (ctrl/cmd+c)

Paste (ctrl/cmd+v) into new text post

RECLAIM THE AUTISM TAG.

I got fed up with the tag being terrible, so, we're attempting to reclaim it

justjasper:

having an autistic child does not make you “autistic parents”

in the same way having a gay child doesn’t make you “gay parents”

you are the parent of an autistic child/person

this is about much more than language

autism is not about you

stop centring the discussion on you instead of the autistic person

I’m sick and tired of all this talk about autistic children Always children

NEWSFLASH: Do you know what happens to Autistic Children? We grow up and become autistic adults.

Please do! It sounds like they would be helpful.

Thank you to every single one of you.