Insulin Signaling and Autism

Abstract: It's a catch-22 to say that only people with autism who can communicate a desire to not be cured want not to be cured, and that people who cannot communicate must want to be cured. Also: None of this is related to the article, any more.

It seems a bit... errant, for one thing, to argue that it's right to change something because it's very different. I mean, a friend of mine is a girl who can't live independently, has banged her head against walls to the point of needing glasses because of brain damage, often cannot use spoken words to talk to people. I can describe those traits and say that they Need To Be Cured without mentioning that she's my best friend, we talk about politics and fandom and remind each other that we're people. I can talk about her friend, who used to eat out of garbage, doesn't talk, had everyone convinced he couldn't read for a very long time. He speed reads; he uses vivid metaphor in writing.

It's because of that that I feel frightened when people say that only the "low functioning" autistics need to be cured, that it would be a mercy. It's possible that in the days before keyboard technology, my friend could not be perceived as anyone's friend. I'm sure people would say, then, that were she capable of communication she'd want to be fixed, made right. (She doesn't.) Lack of communication really, really does not unequivocally imply lack of higher cognitive function, and actually receptive language skills are often a lot higher than spoken language skills in autistic people.

I know that if my friend could choose to not be afraid of people to the point of self-harm, she would. She says the reason for her fear is having been taught to have quiet hands, and I have no reason to doubt that. I am not yet willing to accept that it is intrinsically a bad feeling to be autistic, to any degree of functionality. Analogous events suggest heavily that the problem is that the modern world is not advanced enough to understand autistic thought, to any degree of functionality, whether that understanding requires peering through blunt syntax or a neurally implanted Augmented/Alternative Communications device.

My diagnosis, as an aside, is not high-functioning Asperger syndrome. It was PDD-NOS complicated by hyperlexia, and while I am not absolutely positive if the former diagnosis is still valid (I was six, and I think perhaps that the behaviors they were using to diagnose PDD-NOS had to do with me being extraordinarily literal and having auditory processing trouble,) I am sure that the latter is. ("Autistic" is a lot easier than all of that, I apologize for the imprecision.)

Read up, all of these have standard answers. The best answer to this argument is probably the Oak manifesto.

Low-functioning people do not seem to want cures more, inasmuch as functioning labels make sense at all and aren't missing more important aspects.

The idea of a cure has problems.

"extremely low-functioning autistic individuals" lumps a lot of things together; many people can and do express political views while unable to live independently - that is, to depend on other people to grow, prepare and transport their food, but not to feed it to them.

And I realize that seriously gruesome things have been done to left-handed people in some times and places, and that many people suffer because of attempts to train them to be right-handed, but compared to things like being beaten for fidgeting when you can't possibly stop fidgeting without having a metdown, it comes off a bit like "I have a tan so I understand black people".