SaraTonin

I wonder if you’ve thought about considering what autistic people themselves think on the subject?

https://autisticnotweird.com/autismsurvey/#cures

Given the way autistic respondents have answered the other questions in this survey, you’ve probably worked out where this is going.

Yep, less than 10% of autistic respondents wanted a cure for their autism, and over 80% did not.

And, because if you’ve read this article all the way through you know how much I love pre-emptively addressing counter-arguments, here’s the bar graph in response to those thinking “yes, but this doesn’t represent those poor nonverbal people with learning difficulties”.

It really was surprisingly how near-identical these two graphs are. Experience told me to predict a similar result but even I didn’t expect it to match up quite this well.

Of course, even then there’s a counter-argument – that people who want to push back even further will argue this doesn’t include autistic people with extremely profound complex learning disabilities who don’t know what a survey is.

Leaving aside the inbuilt ableism in that assumption (and the fact that even if the survey didextract the opinions of those with complex disabilities, some people would still argue against any results they don’t want to acknowledge), I’ll say the same as I did in 2018- that:

To me, it seems illogical to say that just because an autistic person can’t access this survey, their opinions on a cure will suddenly become the polar opposite of their autistic peers.