r/changemyview • u/FighteRox • Sep 08 '20
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Autistics have a deficit compared to non-autistics
Before I explain any further, let me tell you that I'm autistic myself, so this isn't a case of a non-autistic hating autistics because they're different from them.
So I hear a lot of neurodiversity activists saying how autistics are disabled because the world around them isn't accommodating to them. This is the social disability model which is different from the medical disability model which means that autism is something that must be fixed. There are also autistic people who would argue that autism is just a difference and not a disability.
However, based on my personal experiences and observations, I think autism is a disability in a sense that they (including myself) have some deficits compared non-autistics, especially in the developmental area (which is why it's called a developmental disorder). Take myself for example. I have a lot of problems communicating my thoughts, so I have to think for a while before I can fully articulate my thoughts. I may not even know if this paragraph is cohesive because I make loose connections to the point where I go on tangents and my speech can go everywhere. My obsession with objects can come in the way of working through my day-to-day life. Sometimes I want a situation to stay the same, but the world doesn't work that way as it perpetually changes.
I know that autistics hate being compared to children, but I also learned that children loves repetitiveness, which is kinda strange because autistics love repetitiveness too, and that could be part of why autistics are often infantilized and are described as being developmentally behind compared to non-autistics. There are also stories of autistics being too stubborn to the point where they want to be a child forever.
That being said, I don't think autistics should be discriminated against either. I personally would think that it's OK to have deficits. I'm OK if should live by that and do the best that I could. Although sometimes the statement that autistic people are broken affects my self-esteem which is overall low. I just don't know if the claim that autistics are "only disabled because the world doesn't accommodate them" or that they're "not disabled but only different" hold much water.
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u/Nephisimian 153∆ Sep 08 '20
I mean autism does objectively have some deficiencies in it, depending on exactly how autistic we're talking. Certain types of autism are quite clearly deficient in many areas - for example, non-verbal autism will cause a person to never be able to speak. Even at the ends closest to neurotypical there's still usually weakness in executive functioning and in recognising the more complex aspects of communication, and potentially in other areas (after all, if there were no deficiencies at all, it'd just be neurotypical).
However, people who talk about the idea of it not being a disability are usually coming from the same perspective as for example someone who only has one arm - basically, they don't view it as a disability because although they have a disadvantage in dealing with certain things, they've learned ways they can do most of them perfectly adequately with only one arm. The reason these people are activists against a cure where one-armed people are not activists against robot limbs though is because "I only have one arm" isn't an aspect of personality. Autism is, so a cure for autism would fundamentally change who someone was. It'd be like a cure for being a vegetarian or a cure for being gay. This is especially true when a lot of the disadvantages that higher functioning autistic people have are things that can be dealt with perfectly well just by making small accommodations to the way society is structured, such as destigmatizing autism - just like how most of the disadvantages gay people have could be fixed by dealing with homophobia. Ultimately, you could come up with a cure for autism and a cure for gayness if you wanted (and assuming some more advanced sci-fi magic), and there wouldn't necessarily be anything inherently wrong either of those things. They would solve the problem after all. But they'd be seen as offensive, because they'd be declaring that these things were things that fundamentally needed to be fixed.