My autism diagnosis was 8 years ago at this point, so the novelty has worn off. In daily life, I do my job and my hobbies. I don’t need to think about being autistic very much. My sister is one of those “being New Age turned me fascist” people, and we don’t talk.
I haven’t felt the need to write about how RFK Jr is bad, because it’s obvious. The man doesn’t believe in germs. The situation is preternaturally stupid.
Scratch a liberal, though, and a fascist bleeds. Over at Slate, the “profound autism” people have Jill Filipovic’s ear. They’re basically the anti-neurodiversity lobby, a movement of people who hates the “spectrum.” They want to restore a distinction between autistic people who talk well and those who don’t, so they can ignore us when we say ABA is dehumanizing or whatever. While they aren’t exactly on the same team as RFK, they’re a different flavor of Autism Mom.
The real danger is that, in opposing RFK, liberals might listen to actual autists:
Liberals have to respond to this dismantling of public health and this scaremongering about autistic people. But they also run the risk of overcorrecting and losing our credibility by arguing that trying to find autism’s cause (or causes) and either prevent or treat it is ableist.
Those liberals would be stupid, because it’s possible to beat RFK in an argument without saying anything controversial at all.
What the scientific method can’t do, though, is make moral claims about right and wrong. And that seems to be where this debate is headed. Already, many progressives are arguing against not just this administration’s profoundly unscientific advice on Tylenol and vaccines, but the very premise that autism needs a cure or prevention at all. Treating autism as a problem that needs fixing, some claim, is eugenics.
I mean…it’s the definition of eugenics, and eugenics is part of the ruling ideology. It’d be pretty weird if fascists took over the government and didn’t try to impose eugenics, right?
Trying to find a treatment or cure for psychological disorders like schizophrenia does not mean that people with schizophrenia lack dignity or personhood. Trying to find a cause or cure for, say, intersex conditions does not mean that people who are intersex are less worthy than those who are not. It does mean that human beings have long sought to prevent or diminish suffering, as we should. I suspect that most Americans would indeed like to prevent autism in their children if they could, and would be interested in determining the condition’s root causes—and not because they see autistic people as subhuman or in need of elimination. Progressives can fight the stigma against autism—the assumptions the public makes about autistic people, the kind of blame that gets assigned to the parents of autistic children—and press for a more open society that meets the needs of neurodivergent populations without arguing that there is no downside at all to profound autism beyond the social circumstances within which the condition exists.
Medicine is increasingly a polarized issue thanks to the right. The left shouldn’t turn research into autism into the same.
The real enemy is Jill Filipovic’s ability to be honest with herself. Being totally psychotic is, in fact, undignified and people don’t like it. Infertile people are worth less as partners to people who want children. If there were simple genetic test for it like Down syndrome, we’d ALREADY be on the way to eugenically eliminating autism the way we are with Down syndrome.
“Profound autism” isn’t a medical term; it comes from a lobby. Using it is already political. It expresses opposition to the neurodiversity movement.
Of course, nobody seriously argues there’s “no downside at all” to being autistic. The disagreement is about whether as much of our misery has social origins as we say.
It’s also clear that exploding rates of autism are spurred in large part by more-expansive definitions of the condition and loosened-up diagnostic criteria. Many of the very people arguing on behalf of autistic populations would not have been diagnosed as autistic a generation ago. The criteria is now so broad that the same psychiatrist who led the diagnostic expansion now argues that although the results have been overwhelmingly positive in getting autistic people much-needed services, “we should be concerned about the increasing tendency to mislabel socially awkward behavior as autistic.”
This is really the crux of it: “Not like my child.” Notice how the article doesn’t really get into the details of any specific disagreement between neurodiversity and “profound autism” people.
In other words, we shouldn’t take RFK Jr.’s fearmongering at face value and adopt his seeming position that the average autistic person is highly disabled or somehow living a worse life than a neurotypical person. But we also shouldn’t assume that every autistic person is a version of Elon Musk, a socially awkward prodigy with a few charming or useful special interests.
You can’t find a way to write an “RFK bad” article without calling Elon Musk a prodigy, and this is supposed to be a warning against liberals making unforced errors?
Autistic people have long argued that they don’t need to be cured: Their autism is not a disorder so much as an integral part of who they are. And they’re right—but given the breadth of the spectrum, they may not represent all of it…And there is an ocean of distance between “This is a condition that causes significant suffering for some people who have it, so we should figure out what is causing it, how to treat it, and how to prevent it” and “We should get rid of autistic people.”
Again with the intellectual dishonesty: if you “prevent” autism, autistic people won’t be born, and therefore they’ll cease to exist. That’s generally what it means to “get rid of” something. The essence of eugenics is making that precise call: that I’m alright because I have economically useful special interests but the guy who just plays Pokemon and doesn’t talk should’ve been aborted. Jill Filipovic is too comfortable deciding where that line is.
Liberals have long prided ourselves on holding an ideology of nuance and rejecting demagoguery. But our era of political polarization and political capture by extremists does not allow for much of that. That’s how we’ve ended up in a position of arguing about not only whether Tylenol causes autism, but whether we should even care what might.
Welcome to this topic that people have been discussing since long before the last election.
If progressives go down this route, we may wind up fomenting even deeper distrust with a public that might be skeptical of RFK Jr.’s claims about vaccines and Tylenol but will find it flat-out absurd to argue that there is no problem with 1 in 31 American children being diagnosed with autism, even if only a minority of them are living with conditions severe enough to require around-the-clock care for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, well, that’s what all the activism and “reducing stigma” and Love on the Spectrum are supposed to be about. Am I worse than measles or not?
We are the ones who want more medical research, who want a healthier society, who have a proven track record of fighting the big corporations that harm our health. The key here will be to stick to our principles and stick to the science, rather than polarizing ourselves into irrelevance in reaction to the bad actors currently in the White House.
Jill Filipovic is pro-trans, a standard liberal. She’s supposedly worried about liberals undermining their credibility by saying autism is fine, but the same doesn’t apply to saying even dumber things, like men are women.
And if you’ve ever listened to an anti-vaxxer at all, the idea that liberals have a proven anti-corporate track record in this area is absurd. We, like, mandated vaccines, which happen to be manufactured by big evil corporations. Anti-vaxxers believe that WAS harmful to our health. So ending the article on that note is socially retarded. Oh the irony.