Why not ask autistic people

Have you ever even seen someone with severe autism?

Strongly yes as per other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40329772

But she could talk? And touch another person without screaming? Because _severe_ autism is non-tactile and non-verbal.

Autism is a spectrum disorder, but while you may be picturing it as a continuum from less autistic to severely autistic, with nonverbal autistic people at one end and high functioning autistic people on the other, that is not the reality of autism.

Here is a good blog post written by someone, with a graphic that shows the difference between how people think of autism versus how others experience it.

https://themighty.com/topic/autism-spectrum-disorder/autism-...

As they write, this means some autistic people who are nonverbal can go to college, while the author doesn’t have that capacity despite being verbal.

I’ve seen many times in this thread people pointing toward nonverbal autistic people as a reason we should try to cure autism. But it’s not clear to me that people here even understand autism enough to be forming opinions on what we should do to “fix” it. I think if someone is not autistic they should first try very hard to understand a variety of autistic experiences before forming an opinion on what to do about it.

As for me, to answer the original question my neighbor growing up was nonverbal. We used to play legos together. He could communicate, but he didn’t talk and he didn’t like being touched.

Thank you for your candid comment. It is frustrating to engage via comments and I have learned something from your comments.

All labels including "autistic" are usually very misunderstood - often even amongst people with the same label. Hopefully commenters here are more understanding - given that if you work in the software field you very often deal with people with mild traits of autism.

All the best.

Yeah I think people who are autistic gravitate toward it. It's a very happy coincidence that so many things about computers attract autistic minds. It's a skill that's valuable enough and specialized enough that autistic idiosyncrasies are tolerated to a greater degree than in other fields.

I know deep in my heart if my special interest were birdhouses or windchimes, I would not be in the privileged position I am today. I also know that if my skin were not white, my gender were not male, and my orientation not straight / cis I would not have the same life experience as I did, which all things considered has turned out okay (others called my inability to live a typical life an objectively negative outcome, but I disagree!).

Many of my friends are POC or trans or gay and they face challenges I do not on top of their autism. I don't think I would be nearly as "high functioning" as I am if I weren't conventionally attractive and part of a majority race/ethnic group in my country.

Thanks for listening and learning something; I'm glad my attempt at spreading awareness has worked on at least one person!

In no way would I claim that the person does not have severe autism - but it is someone who consented to marriage.

What I mean is a person where this would never ever happen.

I don’t see why POC would mask this easier

IIRC it's not really masking, more that children of color are more likely to get labeled "disruptive" or "defiant" than diagnosed as autistic, at least compared to their white peers. Two kids could exhibit the same behavior, but one is correctly recognized as having a meltdown and the other is written off as a troublemaker.

I have autism myself and so do both my kids, I would love it if there was some way to lessen it. It's a great hindrance for me, all the time I want to do things that I feel I should be able to do, but then run into various walls.

My children (15 and 10) are learning about themselves but they haven't found an advantage of their autism yet.

But, we function well enough, I can hold down jobs and so will they, it's a set of things we're not good at but we can deal.

The severe cases I know, I have never heard them utter a word, or leave the house on their own. They live in a world inside their heads. I really can't see what they have as the same as what I have.

Thank you for sharing your experience, I agree there are so many walls!

I guess for me, I can't even perceive of a state of mind which would not see the walls. And I worry... what would change about me if I could see through the walls? Would I still be me? Because I like me, so I wonder what would happen. My great fear when I hear talks of a "cure" is that it will be used as an excuse to cleanse ahem I mean "cure" people like me and you and your sons. So you can understand why I don't want to go down that road. It's been done before.

Although I can't conceive of a world where I can see through the walls, I can picture a world where the walls are not there, and that's what I advocate for.

> I have never heard them utter a word, or leave the house on their own. They live in a world inside their heads. I really can't see what they have as the same as what I have.

It's true, we often wonder what those people would want. People have opinions as to whether they should have existed at all in the first place. I have a friend with Down's syndrome, and she's awesome, and I'm not sure what she would say in this situation, but I know as far as I'm concerned I don't want to live in a world where she doesn't exist exactly the way she is.

So as far as autistic people who cannot advocate for themselves, I'm not going to make the decision for them, and I don't think anyone else should either.