Dear list:
There are many of us in the autism research community
who find Baron-Cohen's work on this topic
disquieting, to say the least.
I've been told that he feels it has been "mis-sold"
but if he's working it up into a book, that would
tend to argue otherwise.
What's sadly typical of this piece is its attempts to
define people with autism as "damaged goods" and to
measure them against an arbitrary norm, in this case
not just against "normal" but against arbitrary norms
of "maleness" and "femaleness."
I will make one observation though...as the daughter
of a man with Asperger's syndrome and mother of a son
with an ASD, and having spent many years as a writer
and activist around autism, I've spent an awful lot
of time around people on the spectrum. I'd have to
say that based purely on my own observations, people
with ASD are remarkable for their lack of attention
to social displays of gender-specific behaviour.
Judging these things as we tend to do, that means
that men with ASDs tend to appear "feminine" and
women with ASDs tend to appear "masculine" (I'm not
talking about physical characteristics here so much
as physical bearing, posture, gait, speech patterns,
and all the other social bits people tend to use to
communicate their gender to the rest of the world.)
Research also tends to indicate that a slightly
higher than usual percentage of men with autism are
homosexual, and I've run into a slightly higher
number of transexual people with ASDs.
All of which tends to tell me that the extreme male
brain theory of autism is extremely suspect...
just my 2 cents
--Mitzi Waltz
University of Sunderland
----- Original Message -----
From: Judy Evans <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, December 9, 2002 1:45 am
Subject: Autism
> This not-very-good piece is trying to get at women (usual stuff). I
> thought it was also anti- autistic people. What do people here think?
>
> It isn't just in the Spectator (yuck), it's also listed on a major US
> academic portal (which is where I saw it).
>
> http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issu
> e=2002-11-23&id=2520
>
> Judy Evans
> Cardiff, Wales (UK)
>
> ________________End of message______________________
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