Autism as Immutable #
October 13th, 2009 | In Worth Reading
While tidying up, I found this draft post from June of 2008. It was still interesting to me, and the link still works, so here it is:
I found Andrew Solomon’s piece on the various stripes of autism activists fascinating, and this idea intriguing:
These activists argue that autism is not an illness but an alternative way of being. The preferred terminology among disability activists is to speak of a “person with deafness” rather than a “deaf person,” or a “person with dwarfism” rather than a dwarf. But Sinclair has said that “person-first” terminology denies the centrality of autism and has compared “person with autism” to describing a man as a “person with maleness.”