Photoepilepsy is a disease. If that’s why they’re getting gene therapy, then great.

In my case, I have adrenoleukodystrophy, a genetic demyelenating disease, and I want nothing more than to get gene therapy so I stop losing the ability to walk (because my existing nerve damage will never heal, the most gene therapy can do is keep it from getting worse, which would still be very good) and being at risk of dying every time I hit my head.

I really do appreciate the value of gene therapy for treating diseases. But this isn’t being presented as a “photoepilepsy jab”, it’s being presented as autism jab, and autism is not a disease.

To be fair I’m not up to date on the debates among researchers nowadays, but I think it could be possible for there to still be a parallel. Until fairly recently the medical consensus on LGBTQ people was that they were mentally ill, and specific examples of people who were both mentally ill and LGBTQ were used to discriminate against the entire group.

But nowadays we have a different understanding that queer people are just people and the mental illness bit is just because people are often mentally ill (and also because of a lot of correlation with trauma, discrimination, bullying and social pressures).

I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar trajectory happened to autism and the classification of type 2-3 autism got reformulated into separate categories.

But even if my analogy was worse than I though, I think my point still stands. The most enthusiastic supporters of something like that won’t be actual autism advocacy groups, but shit like Autism Speaks, and legislators surely aren’t going to listen to actual autistic people. In the case of autism, they can even claim that “mentally ill people can’t consent” as they’ve already done with sectioning.

Since the title already has “autism jab” in it it’s worth noting that the very first “vaccines cause autism” study did a lot of unsafe, traumatic and anti-ethical tests on autisc children with basically no informed consent even from the parents.

There hasn’t been a historical drive to demonise blind people and their parents to this day, use of racially-driven pseudoscience to justify their mass incarceration and euthanasia or invent a whole conspiracy theory about vaccines that had massive consequences in the previous pandemic. And I’ve never met a blind person who prefers staying blind.

also are u forgetting many people with autism treat their symptoms.

I’m not, I’m only refusing to forget the many people experimented on without consent going all the way back to Hans Asperger, those who don’t wish for this treatment at all, or the historical pushing of drugs like risperidone for autistic children (often with lasting adverse effects) by the pharma-“advocacy group” alliance. And above all I don’t forget we currently live in a world where a bunch of countries can lock people up “for their own good” in medical institutions and apply treatments with barely any consent.

I don’t think it’s too outlandish of a scenario to imagine “experimental gene treatments” being imposed on a bunch of children due to pharma companies preying on desperate parents.

Cures for otherwise blinding conditions do exist (e.g., cataract removal, some gene therapies for retinal diseases) and they’re good. I have a condition that will eventually render me blind and I would seek to be cured if a cure existed for it.

But pursuing/promoting cures for disabilities, including blindness, is not without problems. See, in the US for example, the politics of the National Federation of the Blind vs. the Foundation for Fighting Blindness. Cures also raise class issues and threaten to further marginalize people who won’t or can’t be cured, for whatever reason. In particular, imagining a world in which ‘everyone’ is cured is dangerous and even inherently harmful ideology.

Also, while I have some reservations about the rhetoric and what I think it likely really means, there are blind people out there who will tell you they don’t want to be cured because it’s part of who they are and they’re getting along just fine. Such people do exist. A similar sentiment exists for some within the deaf community as well.