Michelle Dawson: commitment

Transcript context

…But they are the most influential group, right? Sure, but you can’t extrapolate from that to parents in general. You just absolutely can’t. The literature is different from what you get from the very loud advocates, and, of course, you have a lot of autistic parents of autistic offspring. This is still very poorly studied, but this definitely happens. The reproductive fitness, as they call it, of autistics has been wildly underestimated, I think. This is, again, my own views, a nongenetics person. So, you have that, but I think you have to be very careful not to confuse advocacy and autism with any group in particular, like parents, or autistics for that matter, their views. I think that’s a real problem. Now, the segregation thing. I have a massive bias against segregation. See, this may be one place where I’m — as an autistic, I have not just a bias, but I have a profound segregation deficit, and anybody who’s tried to segregate me is going to run into that. If you try to segregate me, I’m not going to go there. So, it should not be segregation. DSM should not be segregation, DSM-5 autism, DSM autism is segregation. Why? Because the diagnosis segregates autistic people into lower standards of science and ethics than would be acceptable for anybody else. That’s what your diagnosis does. Now, you may be lucky anyway. You may encounter extraordinary individuals who know you’re autistic and who will apply good standards of science and ethics to you. That certainly happens, but you must be lucky. It will not be the more taken for granted, where the exception is that you’ll be denied these standards, and if you are, there will be recourse. In autism, that is not the case. So, to me, that is a segregation. I can’t speak to the other diagnoses. I’ve looked very hard and have not found a situation like you have in autism, where you have these unacceptably low standards that are universally advocated for, and that there was no advocacy in the other direction, and the influence of advocacy is just completely determinative. 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?…

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