I get my emotions by draining them from allistics as I feed upon their blood, and I will never stop
I’m sorry but, what the actual fuck is wrong with allistics?
a fucking revelation?! shape better therapy strategies?! how about shaping a more holistic approach to understanding people and interacting socially and allowing neurodivergent people to be themselves? how about spend an hour talking to an autistic person while actually considering how they react to things rather than assuming we’re emotionless computers just because we don’t use the same social cueing criteria as allistics?
jesus fucking christ this headline got me riled.
study author in article:
“We spend all this time problematizing autism, rather than doing the work to understand what it’s like to be autistic,” he said. “The popular idea that autistic people don’t have rich, emotional lives is simply not true.”
[…]
Instead of urging changes to how autistic people communicate, he said, anyone who has an autistic person in their life should work instead to improve mutual understanding between those who have diverse modes of experiencing the world.
as always, ignore headlines
the fact that the article takes a more sympathetic tone is nice, but does not negate the fact that the headline is both offensive and just downright awful.
also kinda absurd to think we should go to the effort of finding and reading the article when it’s not linked in the OP or the linked tweet and the headline is this fucking hurtful already.
you should be aware that headlines are often written by an editor, not the author. This is why I don’t pay much attention to them, especially in science journalism. You’ll get a paper published like “In vivo effect of XYZ on telomeres” that says XYZ extended rat lifespans by 1%, an interview with a scientist that says “nobody has tested this on primates yet, but helpful molecules in XYZ class could conceivably be discovered within a few decades”, and a headline that says “XYZ PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE WITHIN THE DECADE”. Whatever gets clicks and/or outrage gets published.
I think that hurtful and inflammatory posts are the ones we need to double-check before sharing more widely. Especially screenshots like this that have a reaction built-in.
There’s that meme about being a woman who is trip-sitting a man in his 30s who has just come to the realisation that other people have feelings.
This is like the allistic researcher version of that meme.
I’m trying to find it. It popped up on my Tiktok feed a couple of times from different accounts but apparently it’s pretty niche because I can’t find it on searching. Tiktok’s search is pretty shitty though.
I’ll keep an eye out for it. Hopefully it will appear again soon so I can post it for you.
A few months ago my grandmother got incredibly angry at me over some perceived slight due to not responding correctly in some interaction, and I tried to explain to her that as an autistic person I often do not pick up on or understand social expectations in social situations, and her response was “So what you’re saying is that you don’t have emotions?” and I just ???
I do not understand why this assumption is made.
There is this mindset “If I can’t see it it doesn’t exist”. I saw a discussion on lemmy.world where an anti-vegan claimed that animals don’t have emotions since they can’t speak, so it’s ok to kill them if it can be done painlessl. They stopped arguing that point when I pointed out that by his logic I could eat my newborn.
Not too long ago the mentality was that babies can’t feel pain and so they underwent surgery without anesthetic, in general there is a lot of horrible child abuse that was seen as normal child rearing since the baby/child couldn’t articulate themselves in a way they were used to.
The current “therapy strategies” is ABA which is literally abuse. They didn’t even bury the lede. They just flatout omitted that part. “[…]shape better therapy strategies” implies making the current ones better, but the current ones are abysmal. So it’s pretty obvious that they think anyone on the spectrum that isn’t passing as a “normal human” is subhuman trash. I just can’t fucking believe that this title basically reads like “It turns out dumb autistic kids are pretty close to functioning humans, please disregard how fascist this sounds. Have a good day.” Who fucking let this get published?
I was lucky and suffered my entire 41 years of existing going undiagnosed and never experiencing ABA but a lot have. And Autism moms/parents remain willfully ignorant about it.
