According to the ever amazing New York Times, people with asperger’s syndrome refer to themselves as “aspies”. My 21 year-old brother has asperger’s, knows it, and has never once called himself an “aspie”. He just says he’s “different” and “cool”. He even went to a special school for kids with developmental disabilities and he doesn’t call himself an “aspie”. Way to make a neurological disorder sound like a puppy dog.
“Aspies”? Seriously? It makes it sound so cutesy - like they have a support group that meets every Thursday at 6:30pm. They don’t need a support group, they just need other people to understand them.
While the article was clearly written for laypeople with little knowledge of autism spectrum disorders, it is riddled with pointless sentences. My favorite probably being “they often have normal or above-average intelligence”. This is really a pointless sentence altogether, seeing as how people with asperger’s are just like anyone else as far as intelligence goes: there are just as many intelligent people as their are dumbasses. Like almost everyone else in the world, 99% of people with autism spectrum disorders have things that they are good and bad at. They’re called skills - or even strengths and weaknesses. I thought we had killed this whole “autistic savant” stereotype?
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