Michelle Dawson: recommendation

Transcript context

…As you know, there’s a Danish firm called Specialisterne, right? And they make a point of hiring autistic people to do things such as programming. Is that, in your view, an instance of possibly unjust or harmful segregation? If you’re autistic and you want to be in the workforce in a way that is not very potentially harmful to you, you would be wise to seek out enterprises like this because they are . . . First off, obviously, they shouldn’t be necessary. Obviously, autistics should be able to go into the workforce like everybody else, be respected for their abilities. Not be discriminated against due to their job-unrelated atypicalities, job-irrelevant atypicalities. That is not the case, so you have autistic people who, as employees, are being very much underappreciated and undervalued. So you have these organizations. And it’s massive. You have these huge efforts to get autistics employed under the umbrella of these. “We will test these autistics. We will hire them out to firms. We will get the firms used to having autistics around. We will coach people through things.” And so on. This allows autistics to be in the workforce in a much less precarious way than they would if they simply went out in the world and then had to face this sort of problem of being denied basic rights and standards, which is just a very precarious situation. You may be lucky, but you would have to know it’s only luck. No matter how hard you work, no matter how good your work is, your situation is very precarious. Whereas under them . . . You know what? I’m trying to think of the right term. You’re almost endorsed. You’re an endorsed autistic, or you have this stamp of approval. And that indicates to the employer that they should treat you in a certain way. That will improve your chances greatly and make you in a much less precarious situation. And yes, it is a form of segregation, of saying “Yes, this is what we should do to get autistics employed.” Now, it’s very hard to argue against that in the current situation. If you think of the United States, there has been such a thing as gay identity politics. Those groups have fought for the legalization of gay marriage, and they achieved that. I would say that’s a very good thing. It’s spread to many parts of the world, often before the United States. Should there be some kind of comparable identity politics for autistics, given that in some ways it has helped gay individuals?…

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