Another player who was at the table during the incident sent me this meme after the problem player in question (they had a history) left the group chat.
Felt like sharing it here because I’m sure more people should keep this kind of thing in mind.
Another player who was at the table during the incident sent me this meme after the problem player in question (they had a history) left the group chat.
Felt like sharing it here because I’m sure more people should keep this kind of thing in mind.
Autism is a disability mostly for social reasons, not for intrinsic reasons. I guess you could say that I do want a cure, if the cure is society becoming more tolerant. But I don’t want a cure that changes my intrinsic nature, because there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being autistic.
What is a disability “for intrinsic reasons” or that is “intrinsically wrong”? Only disabilities that cause direct pain?
Per definition, a disability is something that gives you a handicap for living in how the world is.
A disability for intrinsic reasons would be something like paraplegia or deafness. There is no social relativity to whether people with these conditions can do less things. But whether something is intrinsically wrong with that person is up to their own judgement. They are free to set their own standard in that case, and determine whether they really should be able to walk or hear, just as I’m free to determine whether I really should be able to make eye contact or process speech. (It is my opinion that the loudness of public spaces is unnatural and unjust, and that people need to fucking speak clearly instead of being lazy and making me do the work of listening closely)
But I think you’ve ignored my point. Which is that I don’t want to be cured of my mind’s nature, but I do want to be free of a society that disables autistic people. My question to you is, do I want to be cured? Is social acceptance and accommodation a cure?
I don’t care. The definition of what a disability is, is clear. When all people would be deaf, would deafness be a disability? No.
It doesn’t matter whether you personally want to be cured or not. If someone has no legs and they like it, it’s still a disability because the person has a clear handicap in the current world. It doesn’t matter that, in a hypothetical world where heaving legs doesn’t matter, it wouldn’t be seen as a handicap.
I was having a conversation about this thing you said. Did you change your mind and decide you don’t agree with it anymore?
No, it’s something else than (instead of autism). Perhaps it a-symptomatic or someone has overcome it.
Imagine someone has a broken leg. It would not make sense to say they still have a broken leg but it’s not a disability because society could just change and make it a non-problem. It’s irrelevant whether it wouldn’t be seen as a problem when everyone had a broken leg or no one would care about it.
I disagree. Michael Phelps is double jointed. He’s the best swimmer in the world because he has a mutation that makes his feet more effective flippers. You said a flaw is still a disability even when everyone has it. Nearly everyone is single jointed, and that makes us worse at swimming than Phelps. Your argument would imply that single jointed people are all disabled.
You can’t define disability in absolute terms, or you’ll run into problems like that. You have to define disability in socially constructed terms.
Where did I wrote that?! I wrote that the hypothetical situation where everyone has a broken leg and therefore then it would be considered normal, doesn’t invalidate that a broken leg is a handicap in our (non-hypothetical) real life.
Also, being double jointed is not considered a disability.
And further, the word is clearly defined (this is translated from my language to English):
And what we categorise as a disability is grounded on the definition above. Since autism is categorized as a disability, it wouldn’t make sense to diagnose someone with autism if the above is not true.
I don’t see how this can not make sense. It seems so obvious that you do not have a disability when nothing is disabling you. When someone says “I have disability X but it’s not disabling” then congratulations, you are cured.
Nobody thinks being double jointed is a disability. You misunderstood the point I was making. So I’ll make it in clearer terms:
I can understand complex hypotheticals and you can’t. Does that make you disabled, because you can’t participate in this conversation as my equal? Or does the fact you’re not much worse at it than the average person make you normal, and therefore not disabled? Are we measuring disability against the average person, or against the most capable person in the room? Or the most capable person in the world, for that matter? Are you intellectually disabled by the fact that someone better at reasoning than you exists?
I wanted to ask this question using Michael Phelps as an example instead of myself, but you didn’t understand, so it’s clear I need to make the situation more relatable for your benefit. That’s why I ask a more personal version of the question. Are you disabled because of my existence?