|
Whose Planet Is It Anyway? has moved to Blogger. To read
this article on the new site, click here.
I had a major WTF moment this morning while I was wading through
the noxious morass generally known as discussion of autism on the Internet. I came across a forum thread entitled, "Asperger
Positive? Check in here!" It's a good thing I wasn't drinking any coffee, or I would have spluttered it all over
my computer screen. And believe me, I'm not easy to shock, after all the garbage I've read online and elsewhere, but
about all I could do for several seconds was just sit there shaking my head.
That thread was not referring to positive traits, or to positive
attitudes, or anything along those lines. Rather, it was using the word "positive" in the clinical and diagnostic sense
of the word, in the same way that a test for the presence of cancerous cells shows a positive result if it detects cancer,
or a person who contracts AIDS is described as HIV-positive. And whoever posted it apparently thought it was a perfectly
acceptable way of describing Aspies.
Now, I don't intend any disrespect toward HIV-positive individuals,
who certainly deserve better treatment and more tolerance than our society has given them, but holy crap, something is seriously
wrong when the same terminology is used for those who have an unpopular personality type as for those diagnosed with a deadly
infectious disease.
There is, of course, no such thing as a scientific medical test
that can yield an "Asperger positive" result. Indeed, an article written by a professor of psychiatry describes the appalling lack of anything remotely resembling the scientific method as follows: "Autism is a vast wastebasket
of syndromic disease classification, and Asperger's addition has done little to improve the science."
We are talking about a completely unscientific label that is based
entirely on subjective judgments about personality and behavior. (For a thorough deconstruction of the illogical nature
of the Asperger's diagnostic category, I recommend this essay by a Swedish autism rights activist.)
The widespread use of disease terminology to describe the natural
characteristics of a genetic minority group is both wrong and extremely dangerous. If we don't fight it now, while we
still can, and in every way we reasonably can, the world's last use of the word "positive" in relation to autism and Asperger's
is going to be the results of prenatal tests designed to exterminate us. Those tests are only a few years away, and the clock is ticking.
|
