 Good day, fellow human, and welcome back to the Thomas Henley YouTube channel, your home for autism, mental health, self-improvement-related content. Today we are going to be talking about controversial topics within the autistic community. Anything ranging from language use to particular topics to particular concepts, we're going to be covering all of my views, my opinions on these very controversial things. Is my experience of autism a disorder? Is autism in general an inherent disorder? How best can we categorize the good things and the bad things about the autistic community? What are my personal feelings and thoughts about self-diagnosis? What is eugenics and why I don't particularly agree with it? What teaching or parenting approach do I believe is the right approach to have? Is masking social camouflage a good thing or a bad thing? Is assortative mating the act of autistic people or neurodivergent people finding other neurodivergence and autistic people to have relationships with actually a thing? And is it really something that we should be striving for? And lastly, which language should we use? Is there any particular way of talking about autism which is considered the best way of doing it? We shall see, we shall debate all of this within this video, but before we do that, let us go into some of the caveats. Now this is going to be a long one just down to the fact that we are talking about controversial things. Number one, I'm not a licensed doctor or psychologist. I am a lived experience advocate. I'm not an expert. I am definitely just a voice out of many. Throughout this video, I will not mention particular organisations, people or pages because I don't particularly like the whole aspect of fighting people and, you know, highlighting certain creators as being bad examples of how you should conduct yourself in the autistic community. And I also don't want to be sued. Big, big, big highlights in the red text. Do not watch this and do not engage or read the comments if you don't feel able to talk about these sensitive topics. The reason why it's a controversial topic is because there's a lot of emotions, it's very, very emotionally charged sort of topics that we're going to be talked about and it's very nuanced and there's a lot of different conflicting opinions from both sides of any said debate. I do want to highlight before we get into this that I do not want you to repeat my views. I feel like it's kind of a given. I think a lot of people out there on the internet think that just because they are expousing their certain opinion on a certain topic that people are just going to mindlessly adopt said opinion and topic, I have a little bit more respect for the people who are out there in the world on the internet. I think a lot of us do have more critical judgments and personal personal sort of independent thinking than a lot of creators and advocates think that we do. But just as a caveat, of course, please do not replicate and copy and paste my views to use in your own life unless you really agree with it. I'm even before then I would highly recommend going and checking out the other side, trying to understand the varied sort of amount of opinions that people can have on these topics and make up your own mind. You know, what do you think? Apart from eugenics, that's probably one of the only ones on this list that I would strongly recommend you try not to agree with. We will get into why of course. Let's start off with something a bit more tame, a little bit more about my own personal experience. My autism as a disorder. Do I see it as a disorder? I do want to highlight that in the past I have made comments related to whether I believe that I am disabled or not. I have done some thinking about it and I have done some research around it and it does seem like being disabled and the whole idea of disability is very much like a reclaimed term, something that people use in their life and they don't particularly want to use it negatively. The reason why I tended to use that was not because I view being disabled as a bad thing. I was using it in like the literal meaning of what's being said like not being able to do something. That was why I was using that term, but I have realized that people don't particularly like it when we use disability in that way. So we're going with disorder. It's important to highlight before this that my lived experience does not equal your lived experience. I'm not trying to speak over other people or comment on the general state of autism and whether it's a disorder or not. I'm literally talking about my own experiences and I would really like to hear your own experiences and your own perspectives on autism. A little bit of a background. I was formally diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome now considered to be ASD1 at the age of 10 years old. I suffered with and still suffered this day with significant mental illness related to depression and anxiety particularly, sometimes related to dissociation too and ED, eating disorders not a rectile dysfunction. The reason why I bring up mental illness and mental health disorders is that a lot of my own support needs, my own functionality in life tends to be very highly correlated with my mental health, the quality of my mental health at that time, meaning that my support needs range from being very, very low at the point I can be almost completely independent up until very, very high support needs. The important thing here is that it's not necessarily related to autism. Autism changes how my own mental health, my own mental illness symptoms express. Not necessarily cause me difficulties with functionality and cause me to need more support than perhaps my neurotypical peers. It's very much to do with the way that my mental health expresses when it gets very severe. For you imagine, for most people it's usually the things that we find hardest in life that tend to diminish when we are going through a bad period in our life. The things that we find quite enjoyable and quite easy, they don't tend to be as affected. It's always those things that are kind of more difficult for us to manage in life that tend to drop off when we feel bad. And that is basically the way that my mental health expresses when it comes to autism, things like executive function tend to drop off fairly significantly. My tolerance for sensory and social things tends to drop very significantly too. And also my interceptive awareness tends to fluctuate quite widely depending on what my mood is like. Whilst I've been talking about the state of disorder in my life, I've very much been speaking about it in an isolated sense, a very independent sense. When factoring in environments of a people into whether I consider myself to be disordered or not, it's a little bit different. I do very much highlight the social model of disability as opposed to the medical model in a lot of cases in my own life because it tends to be that a lot of the difficulties that I have outside of mental health to do with autism tend to come from other people, people not understanding, people not, people making thin slice judgments about me, people not really understanding autism and understanding who I am, what I'm capable of, the things, the blind spots that I may have, the difficulties that I may have, all of that very much rolled into one, as well as even sensory things related to how we construct our society and our spaces. Sometimes the sensory environment does tend to be quite overwhelming, but in a lot of cases of course like sensory supports and stuff exist, but a lot of this disorder, if not related to mental health, tends to come from the environment, the social things. Autism is 100% a disability, it's my disability. When we're talking about the ability to do things and whether it's something that I see as a good or a bad thing, I think it's a little bit of a different question, perhaps more talking about disorder in most people's eyes, but if I was to condense this slide into a nutshell, it would very much be that I don't necessarily see my autism talking about it like it's some separate entity, like it's not my own brain. I don't necessarily see my autism being autistic as an inherent disorder. However, there are definitely some disabling aspects of me being autistic in life, which in most cases either come from mental health or the social environmental stuff that is it in a nutshell. That's how I view myself. I view the fact that I'm autistic as a difference and not necessarily a disorder. Some good things, some bad things, just like if I was to approach and sort of understand and characterize someone who isn't autistic. Some things they can't do that I can do, other things that they can do I can't do. It's very very difficult to say in general autism is or isn't a disorder because it's very much down to the actual individual. I want to highlight that in the past when I have talked about things such as this when I've talked about my own personal experiences and how I view my own autism. Some people have said that I have basically my line of thinking, my line of reasoning is close to this idea of aspecy primacy, which is basically something that has come out very sort of recently as opposed to like the history of autism. It's a very recent term that people have started to use. Basically saying that because I have ASD1 because I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome that I think that I'm better than people who aren't. I think that I am better than other autistic people or neurotypicals basically. What I would really want to highlight here is that I'm definitely not making a value judgment saying that I'm better than people with higher support needs or I'm better than people who aren't autistic. When I talk about autism being a disorder for myself or in fact in general, I'm not making a value judgment on someone's waviness of living life and being human as opposed to myself. Because disorder and disability is characterized by their medical system, it's somewhat relative to and based on cultural social norms to a certain degree. Perhaps if you had a room of people or a society of people who were experts at perhaps algebra, they could do very, very complex mathematical problems and that was seen as the norm. People who couldn't do that would be seen to have some kind of disability in that sense. Some kind of disorder in that sense. So it's all very, very relative and based on norms and I don't think that we should be making value judgments based on what society deems to be right or not normal or atypical. I don't think we should necessarily be putting those value judgments on people. But we still can have a conversation about certain aspects of being disordered. There's another factor in this that we all do have diverse skills and to a certain extent, as much as we would like to think, we are not independent. We are codependent, a lot of us. Unless you're living out in the woods, sort of crafting your own supplies and tents and everything, even if you were to bring along like a knife that was made by a company, you are being somewhat codependent on somebody else. When the amount of dependency that we have on other people is outside of the norm, so it's a bit more than usual, that is when we tend to highlight it as being something that requires support needs, something that requires some adjustment, something that is a disability, something that is a disorder. You wouldn't say that, I don't know, one of your friends is disordered because in the morning they have to get up and use their car. You know, they have to drive to work. Like it's not a very independently made thing, is it? Like someone has gone out of the way to buy and make this. Sure, you've purchased it off somebody, but they have made it for you in a certain degree. You wouldn't know how to make it or most people wouldn't. You wouldn't have the raw materials for the metal. You wouldn't, you know, you'd have to go to a place to get fuel. You know, perhaps you could have an argument or a discussion about whether that class is as independent because you're working yourself and getting money to buy that thing, but to some degree we are all independent, like codependent on each other to function in our modern society. But that's talking about me and it wouldn't be a controversial video without talking about autism in general. And I'm going to try and I do want to preface this by again stating that I do not want anyone to copy and paste what I say as in like adopt my own sort of mindset just because I said that this is my opinion. I very much want people to have discussions about this to talk about it. With all those even more detailed caveats out of the way, I do want to cover exactly why I think sometimes it can be difficult to say autism is inherently disordering or not. Number one, when I'm talking about autism, I'm talking specifically about high masking, ASD1, non-intellectually disabled individuals. This is of course an opinion and not a fact. And even just having this discussion, I'm not really completely sure one way or the other because there is so much individual variation that having one answer to this would be very silly. And it's also not really important because in the grand scheme of things it should be how an individual feels about themselves. Whether we were to agree on a certain position about whether autism is inherently a disorder or not, it doesn't really matter because the fact is that we're living wherever you are in the world, you are living in a society which is not built for you. You're living by social norms, social codes, cultural things which aren't necessarily the most helpful for you. There are going to be things about life that you're just going to find quite difficult. So having a conversation about the inherent disorder of autism can be somewhat freeing to a certain extent and can highlight definitely the amount of disorder that comes from other people and perhaps the need for adjustments and changes to maybe a new society. But it's not necessarily that important to have a solid answer to this question. I think it's important when we are talking about autism to remember that psychological diagnosis is not perfect. And even when we're talking about genes and brain structures related to autism, which is like the best way of telling conclusively, it's pretty difficult to characterize something which is so varied in its presentation from person to person. And there could be the case where perhaps there is a portion of autistic people out there who don't particularly have the expressions that we look for in the diagnosis that are just not really seen or perhaps characterizes something else. And perhaps maybe some of the traits of ADHD in the presentations in that are somewhat similar to autism. The thing is we don't necessarily know. We can only guess, we can only make up a concept and try and put some boundaries to it and then assess people to know if perhaps they fit these certain boundaries that we've made. So it's inherently quite difficult for me to talk about because it's so varied in its nature and also the way of most people telling if they are autistic is based a lot on subjective culturally related things. I mentioned before about the social model of disability. Social model of disability is basically an approach where you basically shift the source of disorder or the source of disability. I know people don't like using it in that way, so disorder to the environment and not necessarily to the person. The way that our medical system works is by isolating things that are issues and then solving them. Quite often, for a lot of autistic people, or some autistic people, we don't always feel like autism is necessarily disordering us to that significant degree when we're on our own, when we have agency over our own life when we're independent. It's only when you mix in other brains into the mix and have those social elements and the sensory elements that it starts to get a bit difficult for some people. Perhaps a good parallel would be to conceptualize or try and make up this idea of an autism world. A world where autistic people are the norm and perhaps neurotypicals are not the norm. The one, two percent, whatever percent of the population, they are the minority in that situation. A lot of our society would be designed with autistic social communication, autistic needs, autistic sensory sensitivities in mind and not necessarily for neurotypicals. You could ask yourself, in a world like that, would you feel disordered? I don't think you probably would. It would be the norm. It wouldn't be an issue. It's just when you have a deviation from the norm where people, and it's seen as something that can be problematic and cause some level of difficulty in terms of functioning and need for support, that we label something as being disability, as being a disorder. There's also the fact that when we're talking about autism as being inherently disordering, are we factoring in the co-occurring conditions that often come with autism? There has been some studies about the correlation between autism and certain conditions, certain disorders, certain neurodivergencies. It's whether you think of autism as autism and that stuff combined into one, or whether you just isolate autism on its own. I think in my opinion, when you isolate autism on its own and you remove all these social and environmental factors that definitely have an impact on us, that the idea of autism being inherently disordering starts to become a little bit more murky or a little bit less certain in my head. Definitely for myself, that is the case. It's how I view myself being autistic. It might not be how you view it, though. One of the biggest criticisms that I get is that, okay, sensory difficulties. Okay, we design a society that's good for autistic people. But what about nature? What about humans developing in nature? I think it's a pretty good criticism. You can imagine like the sun perhaps having sweat on the back of your neck and struggling with insects and stuff sleeping on the ground and like huts and all that sort of back then in the past. You could argue that autistic people would be disordered in that sense and it's not necessarily due to these social, cultural factors, these environmental factors. But I would like to highlight that you know, autism has not just sprung up out of nowhere. There has been autistic people in the past throughout history. I would hazard a guess that it's been around for quite a long time, even to the point where we don't really have this kind of modern sort of industrialized sort of world. I mean, this is just a opinion, just a thought. I don't have any evidence to back it up. But I'd assume that due to the way that humans develop in the nature of genetics, that the would definitely be autistic people back in the day, could they struggle with the sensory environment a lot more than others possibly. But I do think there is an element of getting used to things to seeing things as the norm. I've had many situations in my life where I've like gone to the beach and had like sands between my toes and almost had like a panic attack, because I just hate the feeling so much. I've also been backpacking for a significant amount of time, and had that experience quite a few times and sort of got used to it. I think it's very dependent on what you're used to. I think in situations where autistic people are in nature, it would kind of just be part of life that these sensory things would happen, and it wouldn't be as much of a difficulty in my opinion. And lastly, I do want to highlight again that disorder is very much relative and based on the norms. So, you know, asking if autism is an inherent disorder or not, it comes with, you know, what exactly do we see as disordered? Is it just something that's not normal, that pairs function abnormally? You know, how exactly do we define what is considered to be disordered? Well, it's based on norms. It's like I was saying before about people in the world naturally just being excellent at mathematics and equations, but then there's like a portion of the population who are not like nowadays in our modern world, that wouldn't be seen as a disorder, but because everyone is so good at maths and algebra in this other world, if you weren't like that, it would definitely be seen as a disorder. So, it's all very, very relative and based on norms. And is there really much point to me talking about this? I don't think so. I think it's more important for me to talk about my own experiences. And I definitely love to hear about what your thoughts are like in the comments. I'm not saying that this is the right answer. I'm not sure. I'm leaning more towards that it's not. But I'm also not so bigheaded to think that I have the right answer in this situation. I think there's a lot of factors involved in this. And I'd like to hear what you think. Maybe you can suggest some things that I haven't thought of that might be pretty applicable to this kind of question. All in all, in a nutshell, autism is a disability. Whether it's inherently disordering or not, I think it varies person to person. Talking about it in generalities is always going to isolate off particular people who have different experiences, of course, because I'm talking about things in general. And so it's a very, it's a question that I don't think will ever really have the answer to because of all of those multitudes of different variables. Now that we've got that big complex one out of the way, let us talk about the autistic community. One thing to note here is that the autistic community is not a monolith. It is many, many different communities, both within certain social media platforms and online forums, and between different social media sites and online forums. People tend to differ based on where they are located and also within those certain groups. Saying there is one autistic community is a bit of a silly thing to do. There is also a lot of infighting within communities, a lot of mergers with different movements and communities with other communities, and a lot of splintering off from said communities. As you can imagine, it's very, very difficult to characterize the autistic community as one monolithic entity, but I will try my best. The community has been integral to both my well-being, myself development, and my autism journey. It has pretty much been one of the top things that have changed my life for the better. It's allowed me to engage with other autistic people, make friends, learn from other people, understand other people's experiences of autism, so many, so many different things which, even given the fact that I was diagnosed when I was 10, I didn't really understand as much about autism until I joined these communities. It really, really did have a massive impact on my life. Overall, it has very much been a net positive for me, and the key word there is net. In the autistic community, there are definitely some things which are not the best. There is a lot of social dogma, meaning that there is a prevailing narrative being pushed by various groups of individuals, whereby if you don't particularly agree with uncertain things or hold different opinions or different experiences, that those people will be very, very hostile towards you, throw slurs about, ones that you can imagine like ableist and all that, as well as a lot of heavy policing over people engaging with the community. I've had a lot of experiences in my past and also in the present with people being pretty nasty to me online just because I differed in the way that I perceived autism or my own autism even or different opinions that I held which went held by other people. These individuals that I'm talking about, these ones who are very radical, sort of, I would classify as militant advocators, are in the minority, I would say, and I think most people do have a generally quite moderate view and generally approach topics like this with a lot of nuance and a lot of respect for individual differences and variability, but there are some people who are like that and this is one of the bad things because it can be incredibly hostile to new members, to new creators, people who are wanting to share their experiences in order to help other people and people who are wanting to find a group, find their tribe, find somewhere where they belong and people sort of understand them and accept them. I've seen and I've heard and people have DMed me about instances where the autistic community, again, a portion of these individuals have been bullying them, harassing them, throwing slurs at them, assuming intentions, just all around being incredibly awful to them because of very, very minor things like the way that they talk about autism, the way that they prefer to talk about their own diagnosis, little things like that, if they don't fit into this social narrative, this social dogma, people can be very, very hostile towards these individuals, even if they're not necessarily aware of it, like they're just only recently sort of getting into the autistic community, they didn't realise all of these socio-political things that were happening and they just go and they're trying to make an impact and try and share their experience and help people and raise awareness and raise acceptance, all of that stuff, but because they don't use particular language that people like, they are bullied, they are shunned, they are uvred, they are cast out, people try to cast them out from the community and it really does leave people in emotional bits, mental bits, just absolutely destroyed by this experience. You have to remember, for a lot of us, we can have a lot of negative experiences in life with people and when we find the autistic community, we kind of find that we feel accepted, we feel somewhat warm, we feel like we've found our place, our tribe, where although it's just a section of the internet that we can relate to other people and we don't feel so alone, that's incredibly important and when you get socially outcasted from places where you feel like you belong, after all those horrible experiences that you've had in life, those negative experiences, it can be so, so, so damaging, so horribly damaging for people. A lot of individuals who do tend to take this very militant advocacy, kind of social dogma, kind of radical approach to autism advocacy, definitely tend to assume people's intentions. Take this example, someone refers to themselves as an aspie in their profile on the social media pages, they make a post, people realize that they are called an aspie and so, so they assume that this person is a yartsy, is all sorts of horrible things based on the type of terminology that they want. In one case, they might be thinking to themselves, okay, it's what I was diagnosed with, I'm okay with this, I'm comfortable with this diagnosis, I know about the history a little bit, but also, I feel like we've reclaimed the term somewhat within the community. That might be their position on it, but to people who do sort of try to enforce this social dogma, they'll say, it's wrong for you to refer to yourself in that way, it's a bad thing for you to refer to yourself in that way. They will assume that this person is inherently ableist, inherently aspie supremacist, making all sorts of sort of wired accusations about what their intentions are with referring to themselves in that way. I think when we're having a conversation about things like this, it is important to approach it with a degree of sensitivity and also approach online discussion with the knowledge that we don't know someone's intention and trying to be aware of that and remind yourself of that when you are engaging with people, I think is a really important thing. Let's take another example, you are out in the world and you meet somebody, you're kind of at a group party, you tell them that you're autistic and they say to you, oh man, being autistic must be so hard, I couldn't imagine being autistic, I think I'd just, it'd just be the end of me, I just wouldn't be able to cope. They might be meaning it in a way because they're outside of the community, they're a bit ignorant to how you feel about being autistic, they're assuming that autism is a bad thing for you and so they're trying to somewhat validate how you feel by saying this sentiment. It's not a good thing to say, like it's definitely not a good thing to say, but is this person an ableist person or is this person expressing an ableist sentiment? There is a difference there because in one case you are talking about the person, who they are, what their intentions are, what they think about the world and in the other side, you are talking about what exactly they said, you're not assuming their intentions, you know what they said and you've classified it and you've understood it as a very ableist sentiment. There is a difference between those two things and there is a tendency for people online when you say something like that to assume the worst about you, to assume the worst intentions, to think that you are saying this because you're an ableist, rather than you're saying something which has an ableist sentiment. So in most situations, instead of shouting at them and saying that they're horrible people and saying that they're an ableist individual, you would say, well actually, you know, I don't really see being autistic as necessarily worse. I should quite like being autistic sometimes. Sometimes it's hard and you know, I think it's somewhat deriving from like an ableist sentiment to think that life would be worse if you were disabled too. Perhaps if you had that conversation with that individual, they might go like, hey yeah, I didn't think of it that way. That is a good point. I'm sorry for assuming that it is necessarily a bad thing. Most people, if you were to say that to them, I'm hoping would have a good reaction to that because you're not necessarily calling them out and criticizing them and labeling them with this very powerful word, but you're also calling them out on like the sentiment that they're expressing. There is a big difference between these two things. I hope that these examples have kind of given you sort of an insight into how I try to approach the autistic community. One last thing that I do want to talk about is social dogma should never be more important than your own preferences for yourself, the only way that you view yourself. I think you can definitely develop that over time, but you should never let someone tell you that your own lived experience is not as important as the prevailing sort of social narrative. That is one thing that I'm very, very, I feel very, very strong about. And if someone tells you, change the way that you refer to yourself, I would challenge that as well. I don't think that that's okay. I think if we're talking about things in generalities, it's a little bit different for talking about the general idea of autism for talking about the general language use. There is some debate to be had around that, but it's definitely not a debate where you immediately label people as horrible evil human beings because they express a sentiment that you don't agree with. So that was a bit more hard hitting than I expected. Let's talk about something which is a little bit different, perhaps more sort of within the social dogma, I guess, something that more people within that group would agree with, which is self-diagnosis. Now, I am a man of science to some degree. I did a biomedical sciences degree. I also think it's important that we're clearing careful around language. I prefer using the term self-identification because self-diagnosis generally has a pretty negative connotation in any other circle, in any other in the medical community specifically. Self-identification does not and it basically doesn't mean the same thing as self-diagnosis. It's just a little bit more accurate to what's going on. Diagnosing is generally something that is done by professional. Identification can be just as powerful and just as important and I see it on the same level when it comes to engaging with the autistic community and living your life but it is a little bit different to diagnosis because it just is. You can't diagnose if you're not using some kind of psychological manual and you're not a diagnostician yourself or else the system would just, the medical system would just plummet to the ground. It's important when we talk about self-diagnosis or self-identification to remember that accessibility and the quality of diagnosis varies very, very much country to country culture, place to place, person to person. Diagnosis in general is extremely subject to culture, the diagnostician and also the stigma. There is a lot of people who are diagnosticians, who are medical professionals, who do not know the first thing about modern-day autism research. They're not as well read as you think they are and a lot of them have some very old stigmatized, stereotyped beliefs about autism which definitely get in the way of them doing their job properly. You only have to search on the internet to find the numerous amounts of testimonials from the reasons why diagnosticians or doctors have told them that they're not autistic. You get it even in your social circles and things of that nature. The stigma and the stereotypes and the lack of education is very, very apparent. But I'm not trying to highlight doctors or psychologists in general, because it just vary on the person. There are a lot of good diagnosticians and good doctors out there who really do understand the research. But I just find in general that it tends to be a little bit behind in that sense. There doesn't tend to be much of a social, political understanding of autism from these medical professionals. They're not particularly friends or in with the autistic community, seeing what's happening, what people are talking about, how they're talking about preferences and the experiences of over autistic people. It's very much just seen through this medical lens for a lot of them. They don't really pay attention to much outside of that. And I think they definitely should. The other important thing to highlight is that some don't see any disorder in their life. They just don't. There's a lot of autistic people who go their whole life not really feeling like there is any issue. There's any disorder, there's nothing that they have problems with. I'm not saying that that's the criteria in order to be autistic. I'm saying that that's the criteria of the medical system and what it does. The medical system is there to diagnose problems and offer treatment and solutions and all sorts of different things. If you don't have any disorder, it's very unlikely that people or doctors or psychologists will put you forward for a diagnosis. There is a lot of people out there who just want better insight into their lives. They perhaps want to understand why they feel so different. They perhaps want to make adjustments to their life which will increase their life quality. The medical system does not diagnose someone for their identity. There is also a lot of use in self-identification, self-diagnosis, if not only for the accessibility and the things that I've detailed, the reasons why, but just to find somewhere where they can receive advice that works for them. Find somewhere where when they talk about experience that they have that people understand them. A place where you can read up about people who are similar to you and how they've experienced life and the things that they've done to help themselves, how to self-advocate, how to make adjustments to your environment, how to do all sorts of really, really positive things for people's lives to put a limit on people to have the diagnosis to enter that space, I think is a very silly thing to do. That's why I don't particularly feel that diagnosis should be needed in that sense, to say that you that you are autistic and to join the communities and to be a part of the discussions. But I love to hear what you think about that, because I do think that when it comes to distribution of support, when it comes to the integrity of the scientific method, I think there can be some blurry lines. But I'm not too sure. All I know is that when it comes to the community that self-diagnosis or self- identification should be accepted, shouldn't be something that is questioned. Because a lot of people will say that this whole idea of self-diagnosis and self-identification is used as sort of a fashion label, or it's used as something to garner attention. And it's often something that is very flippant, very impulsive, a self-label that people give themselves without any thought. And I do not agree with that. I think the majority of people, large majority of people who are self-diagnosed or self-identified, they spend a lot of time trying to understand themselves, trying to understand autism, listening to other people, reading up about certain aspects of autism. I think it does those people a discredit to say that self-diagnosis is this very impulsive, silly thing. It can be for some people just like with everything, but for the majority of people, it's not. Let us talk about something which perhaps is a lot less gray, perhaps a little bit more on the black and white side of things, and that is eugenics. If you don't know what eugenics is, it is basically the philosophy of improving the genetic quality of the human race. Very, very broad term, I think to most people when they hear that, it's like, they don't know whether to say if it's good or bad, like it kind of sounds like something good while we're improving things. But there is a lot of history behind it that I definitely want to go into and a lot of caveats, I guess, to the ways that people go about this. It's got a lot of awful history, particularly in World War II, lots of other places. It's got a lot of misguided roots to it in terms of the history behind it and the reasons to why people believe it, as well as a lot of scientific flaws in the idea of improving genetic quality in order to improve the human race. Eugenics can come in many, many different forms, such as selective breeding, and in the case of autism, it tends to be looked at in the lens of prevention. The thing is, when we're talking about things like an autism cure, which is something that a lot of autistic people are very, very, very against, including myself, that this cure is not going to be something which is consensual. It's going to be prevention. It's not going to be a tablet that you take as an adult, or some minor surgery that you have as an adult to change your brain into a non-autistic brain. It's something related to whether or not you're born, which is pretty awful. You may have seen a lot of news around the autistic community fighting back against a lot of genetic research that goes on with autism. You might have heard of things like the Spectrum 10K. The worries around this is that once they understand the genetic profile of autism, that they will be able to test for it. They'll be able to test for it in utero. They will be able to prevent autistic people from being born in this act of eugenics. Even if you were to suggest that just the fact that we have a way of testing for autism and the fact that we have sort of a sequence genome of autism, that in the UK, in the US, perhaps this wouldn't be enforced. Perhaps this would be considered ineffable. But the issue is that this research occurs from multiple countries working together, meaning that the ethics and the culture in different places might mean that this type of prevention, this type of eugenics, will be something that's mandatory, or will be something that is allowed even. It's very violating to me, if I was just to speak about my own feelings about eugenics, for people to think that people like me and a lot of the autistic people that I know and some of the autistic kids that I've worked with should not be here, should not be born, we should not have more of us. I think it's an incredibly violating, sort of hard-hitting idea, the fact that other people have considered our neurotype to be inadequate, something that we need to get rid of. When we're talking about something as complex as the human brain and neurotypes, you have to tread very, very lightly. It's not as simple as perhaps treating cystic fibrosis. This is something about people. This is an autistic brain. This is my life. This is other people's lives. When you make value judgments on whether we should be here or not, it's an incredibly insulting, sort of horrific idea. Because at what point do we consider something to be worthy of removing from the human race? Who gets to decide that? It's definitely not us. It's definitely not the actual autistic people. It's other people. It's the governments. It's the scientific community. That's not a very promising, comforting thought for a lot of us. When it comes to consensual optional support and treatment that an adult can make who has agency over their own being, then perhaps if they were prevented with this miracle, almost crazy, sort of into the future sort of idea of changing your brain, then maybe we could have a conversation about that. But it's not going to come across in that way. It's not going to be this pill. It's not going to be this surgery that changes an autistic person. It's going to be prevention. I don't think until we can get to a point where this whole thing is consensual and optional, that it just shouldn't happen. And we shouldn't be doing this. Disability is very, very complex. And the human brain is too. And to excise autistic people from the world, I think we'll both have a lot of detriments for the world. But also when it comes to basic humanity, I think it's an incredible sort of violation of that. Some of the more critically minded people are there might be asking, okay, so if we're not going to cure autism, not going to prevent autism, what are scientists and researchers going to do? Well, I would say looking into ways of mitigating the negative life quality statistics that autistic people have is probably one of the best things to do. And also looking at the reasons to why and see if we can mitigate some of the impacts of co-occurring conditions like mental illness, like insomnia, like OCD, like gastric issues, all of these things which are somewhat tied to autism. I think if we were able to look into these things, these things that really do have an impact on the life quality, that would be a lot more fruitful than trying to get rid of us. Moving past that very intense difficult subject with perhaps not as much grayness to it, let us look into a little bit more of a gray area, which is the teaching and parenting aspects. I get asked so often so much by parents of autistic people about which parenting method they should use, how they should go about educating their autistic child. I highly recommend looking at my podcast, where I was talking to my mom and how she brought me up, how she parented me, because I believe that she is like the gold standard when it comes to educating as a teacher, but also parenting. She has so many amazing qualities which make her such a good teacher and such a good parent to the point where she was once the overseer, the manager of a pretty large part of England, in terms of special needs education. Whenever I see her doing her job, meeting another autistic kid, she's just absolutely amazing. She just knows what to do, she understands them, she's very kind, she's very expressive, she's very emotional quite often. The kids just love her and arguably coming from a very biased standpoint, I think she's been absolutely amazing to me as a mother, both understanding my difficulties and empathising with me and trying to make adjustments to things, but also pushing me to step outside of my comfort zone when I feel able in order to progress in life. I mean, there's just nothing better than that. I would like to highlight that fixed methods, which I'm not going to get into detail on, which are very structured, very sort of, there is one ideology and we have to teach all autistic people this way, is a bad way to go, because although it may work, there can be a lot of negative consequences to it. I'd recommend looking at the testimonials of autistic adults who went through certain practices and see what they have to say about it. There tends to be a lot of negative experience from that and I also know a lot of professionals who have gone into using these very fixed methods of teaching and they've just seen how horrific and how like horrible and negative the outcomes can be for the autistic kids. I highly recommend taking more of an individualized approach to parenting and teaching, using what works, using what works out of a list of effective and safe methods. I don't think it's a good idea to suppress non-harmful things, things that don't harm the individual themselves or don't harm other people around them and definitely utilize sensory supports. The reason why I say don't suppress non-harmful things is because a lot of programs, a lot of things out there which are designed for autistic kids, quite often try to get rid of things which people view as socially unacceptable, as weird, as strange, as as abnormal, but not necessarily things which actually impact anyone in a harmful way other than perhaps social stigma. When it comes to sensory supports, you might say, oh well they'll use it as a crutch, they'll get used to it too much and that would be a good argument for most kids because humans do tend to habituate quite a bit, we get used to things in our environment, but with autistic people we don't have so much of a tendency to habituate, we don't really get used to our environment as much as you think and over time sensory supports can really really help improve our life quality, improve our ability to go do things throughout the world without risking overwhelm, risking meltdown and shutdown. Just because kids are using it when they're younger doesn't mean that it's bad for them to continue using it into adulthood, I mean if you see me at all sort of outside of videos or something, to be honest even in this video, I've always got some sensory supports for me, sometimes I don't have them and I can cope just fine, it really depends on my mood, but having these with me allows me much more access to the world, it definitely doesn't impact me positively if I was to get rid of them all and just deal with things, it doesn't work like that. I'd also say try not to change something that is inherent to autism, inherent to your child, unchangeable things, the fact that we are monotropic in our being, the fact that we need a little bit more time to process, the fact that we need a bit more time to transition, the fact that we do get very very intensely focused on something and breaking us out of it very suddenly and aggressively does tend to cause us a lot of stress, that's not something that you can teach us not to experience, so those three things are definitely important and I would also highlight teaching your child some self-advocacy tools as being very very important, it's not really something that I went through life doing very much and I wish that perhaps I had advocated for myself a lot more in different circumstances but in a lot of times in life we will come across people who don't understand us, people who don't agree with us and being able to advocate for our needs and doing that very early on I think is a really important key thing to do, to have the skills for to utilize. So that's a little bit about parenting and teaching, I'm not going to go too much into DSL and that because I tend to focus a lot of my work around autistic adults but I did think it was important to talk about that because there are a lot of autistic adults who have very very bad experiences with certain educational teaching practices important to mention. What about masking, social camouflage, the act of convincing people that you're not autistic? The thing is masking to a lot of people, to a lot of autistic people even, can be very confusing and used wrong in a lot of cases, it's kind of used as an umbrella term and it does have an actual definition, it is mechanisms in order to stop people from realizing you're autistic but people use it a lot in lots of different loosely defined contexts. The thing that I hear the most when I talk about on masking is that masking is essential, I definitely disagree with that, I don't particularly mask myself but social camouflage, masking does have benefits for some people in some situations to a point. This could be things like progressing in Korea, there is a large social component of progressing in the working world, it can also be about protection, making sure that you're not picked on, bullied, all sorts of horrible things and also sometimes in dating or trying to socialize and make friends, some people interpret our way of being sometimes in a wrong way as sort of making these thin slice judgments assuming what we are like even if we're completely the opposite. So there are some benefits and I do concede on that and I can't say that in all circumstances that masking is always going to be an inherently net negative thing, sometimes it might be useful for some people and within certain jobs or in certain life situations, certain environments, certain cultures, it is very much individualistic. And if you do want to hear more about masking, I highly recommend that video that I was talking about. If you go through the autism university playlist, you'll be able to find it quite easily. There are also a lot of negatives to masking, which I think people don't really take into consideration when they say oh mask is important. And that is issues with self identity, mental health, energy, relationships, self advocacy, finding your tribe, feeling at one with society or a community. These are all key negatives to masking long term around everybody and everyone for your whole life. When it comes to self identity, a lot of people who have masks for a long period of time often can't even feel connected to themselves when they look in the mirror. They don't feel authentic and genuine. And over time, if you do that even within intimate interpersonal relationships with people that you really care about, it can have a lot of long term issues when it comes to said relationships. But also with finding people who really enjoy your company for you and who love you for you and not for this kind of mask kind of facade, it's one of the most important things in my own autism journey for me to unmask and for me to be able to like approach the world as myself. It's the most freeing wonderful thing that I've ever experienced because for the majority of my life it was the opposite and it was constantly in efforts trying hide and fit in and be accepted and not be myself. Your mental health can definitely take a toll from that too. And the act of masking itself in social interactions can increase the amount of energy demand that that social interaction has. So one of the weird things about me unmasking is that actually, I have a little bit more capacity to socialize than I did when I was masked because I'm not constantly monitoring myself and other people and trying to figure things out. I'm using communication styles and ways of communicating which are a bit more me that I use that I like. I have to multitask whilst having a conversation with somebody. It's great. It can really increase the perceived social reward that I get from interacting with people and also self-advocacy because if you're not being yourself and you are not letting people know that you're different, you're definitely not informing people of what your needs are and enforcing those and advocating for those needs. It is important to do because it can really have a positive impact on our life quality when we do unmask and when we do self-advocate for ourselves in these types of situations. You can also find your tribe, find your people, you know, if you are masked then it's likely that you won't empathize with or agree with a lot of other autistic people in their experiences but perhaps when you take a deeper look into yourself, to your psyche, to your experiences, you might find that you actually share a lot in common with other autistic people. I have talked about this idea of integrated masking which is a term that I've come up with myself which basically means choosing when you want to mask and what you want to mask at certain times. I'd highly recommend trying to unmask around people who you're very close to. You might have situations related to work, related to interactions with people that you don't know very well, strangers, confrontations where you might want to mask but it's very up to you and if you can handle the negative impacts on your energy, on your mental health and you want to do that then I can't say don't do that but just be aware that long-term it can definitely contribute to things like autistic burnout or fatigue. I would also like to point out that if you have been masking for a large period of time you might actually not know what you're masking, not know which part of you you is real and which part of you is fake and that's an experience that I've had quite a bit in my own unmasking journey. Being able to spot and identify which behaviors of yours is masking or not, I think even if you do want to mask it's still important to be aware of because you might not always be aware of the fact that you are putting on a front because it might just be so ingrained in you from years of putting this front up that it's hard to separate from the true you. It can be very fruitful to try and understand yourself in that way and see the reality and see who you truly are. Even if you do go back to masking in a lot of circumstances at least you know, at least you can be yourself around people that you love. So let's move on to something which is a little bit more of a funny kind of interesting out there concept. This is a sortative mating, the act of dual autistic people naturally finding themselves and having a relationship and dating and having kiddies. I first heard this from Professor Temple Grandin. I do believe that there might be some further sort of roots in history before Temple Grandin. I'm not too sure about that. It's not really something that I can necessarily disagree with because it's more of an observation just from looking at the way that people behave like you can't really disagree with what's happening. But I think a lot of people think that the ideal for autistic people for them themselves is to find another autistic person. And that is something that I don't agree with. It's true that not a lot of inclusion work or true education is given to the masses. And so it does kind of leave us somewhat isolated from the majority of non autistic people or listics. But the thing is, there are good things and there are bad things about dating within your neurotype, dating another autistic person. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, you're sure you empathize with each other a bit more, actually social batteries a bit more aligned, have all of these different things. But your neurotype is one part of the relationship. Other things, traits, values, personality, culture, goals in life, goals in a relationship, those things are so much more important than having a similar neurotype to your partner. I don't think that this should be like the main focus. I think it can be a nice aspect. But I definitely wouldn't shut yourself off to dating people who aren't autistic, because you might find someone who you really vibe with, someone who really is curious about you, wants to understand more about autism, is willing to make changes, is lovely to be around, is supportive, good sort of direct communicator. You can find that in people who aren't autistic too. I'd say that it could be a good thing for some people. I think for a lot of us, it really depends on those other things. Those are the most important things. When it comes to pairings, I do think that, because obviously there is some cross-overs between autism and OCD that could work quite well in terms of routine and organization. I think the OCD individuals that I know tend to have similar thinking patterns when it comes to organizing their life and themselves as to me. And also, I do find that I generally get on quite well with ADHDs. We just kind of vibe off each other. I'm very kind of direct and to the points and keep us on track, whereas the ADHD might sort of divert and sort of change topics and such and sort of add a bit more interest and sort of excitement to the conversation. So I think it usually works quite well for me whenever I've interacted with an ADHD. But anyway, assortative mating, you know, can't really disagree of it, but I'd say if you are glorifying it as like the only option, I think you're wrong. Personally, I think that other things are much more important than someone's neurotype. Lastly, let's talk about language use, which is probably one of the most difficult, annoying aspects of the online world. I think my stance on language use can be whittled down into individual preferences being more important than the prevailing social dogma, what people want you to say, basically, versus how you want to refer to yourself. Personally, I prefer identity first language, saying I'm an autistic person rather than I have autism, mostly because it doesn't really feel inseparable. Like I can, I can separate it out from me. It's pretty inseparable from like who I am as a human being. Like I can't say, okay, this part of me is autistic and this part of me isn't autistic. I'm just an autistic person. I have an autistic brain. The thing is, when we come to different opinions about the sort of language use that we have, there isn't a general consensus and people have tried to get a consensus and opinions have varied very, very widely between individuals who are autistic. So it's difficult to enforce one way of speaking about autism because everybody has their own ideas of it and their own preferences. Again, this comes back to lived experience. This comes back to the individual. If someone wants to use language to describe themselves and they're happy with it and they feel comfortable, it is their disability, it is their difference, their neurodiversity. You cannot tell them how to change that. When we're talking about their language use in general, I think it's a little bit different. But again, it's always in my head trumped by what preferences the individual would have in that circumstance. It doesn't matter what everybody else thinks. Personally, again, never opinion. I prefer neutral language. I have a pathological kind of medical based language chiefly because I don't think it's good to put value judgments on things like that. If you're struggling to understand what I mean by pathological language, take example like PDA pathological demand avoidance. It's kind of characterized as being something wrong, something that's bad. For some autistic people, it can just be sort of a more inherent sort of needed form of self advocacy and independence. So they call it persistent drive for autonomy. There's little things like that, little pieces of language that are used to characterize different aspects of autism that people don't necessarily deem to be bad. Another good example would be sensory processing disorder. Some people think that their sensory processing and their experiences of the sensory world is beautiful and is great and it brings them lots of joy and they stim and they love it and it's great. Sometimes it's bad, but sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it can be good. And so we say sensory differences. We say a different sensory profile. That's kind of the neutral verse pathological kind of side of that. So I'd highly recommend looking into that a bit more because it has definitely been a lot more transformative with me. Another opinion here, I don't particularly like the term aspergers or aspie. Some people, within the autistic community, think that you are a supremacist and you are basically supporting a Yahtzee agenda if you like the word aspie and you call yourself an aspie. I do not think that. I think to a certain degree we have reclaimed that word and I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand the history and such behind it and they just like the word and it's just something that they were diagnosed as. I don't think that it means all of those social connotations that some people think it does. I think that if you want to use that word then you should be able to and you shouldn't be labeled as such horrible things just because you like a certain word. And it's important when we're talking about language and our particular preferences and how we want other people to talk about autism that there is a big barrier for people outside of the socio-political world, the autistic community and that is ignorance. They don't know, they're not aware. There's a lot of companies out there who start, a lot of charities who start out there who use pathological language, who use outdated terms like Asperger's Syndrome, who use identity first or they use person first language. There's a lot of variation in the way that they do things but they're a charity, they're trying to help. They're not trying to make autistic people feel bad. I think there's a lot of importance on remembering that everybody is going to understand the world that we live in, the terms that we use within the community and to take more of educating mindset towards this kind of thing rather than labelling and shunning people and bullying people and harassing people and calling people names. And individual preferences, lived experience, should be the biggest priority for us as autism advocates. We want to highlight that before we highlight our general preferences and views on autism because that's what advocacy is all about. It's all about the advocacy of the individual, what they want for their life, how they want to be referred to. That's what we want to focus on. That's the roots of the work that a lot of people out there do. That's why it's here. It's to give the lived experience perspective and if you're going to give a lived experience perspective, you need to remember the individual is important in that. So we've got a conclusion here and I just want to highlight some things again. I'm not a deciding voice. A lot of these things are just opinions, apart from the eugenics one. Don't you dare trying to disagree with that. Oh my god. We definitely do not want that. But in general, a lot of these are opinions and I would like to hear your opinions on this. I definitely do not want to be labeled as all sorts of horrible things if possible. If you can hold yourself back, perhaps have an open sort of honest discussion or conversation about these types of things. That would be great. I'm also not really trying to convince anybody of as much. I'm just wanting to discuss these things because I know that they're very controversial topics and a lot of people stray away from them because of the nature that they're controversial. But I think we definitely do need to talk about these things and have a dialogue about them just because they are like so emotionally charged and we should really try to figure this stuff out. Please do not copy and paste my views, etc. I think my, in this conclusion, my overall message here, if anything, is place people's lived experience above social dogma. Make sure that we highlight individual preferences over group preferences. Remember, people can be ignorant. Remember, people can have different opinions. People's language, what they say, although could have some connotations, does not necessarily mean that they are intending it in a bad way. Do not assume people's intentions but challenge what they said rather than the person. Because we all want to come together. We don't want to talk about autism. We all want to learn and share advice and be a part of a community. I think the more that we can make it a more safe place, more that we can open it up to be a bit more mature, a bit more understanding, a little bit less judgmental even. I think the community can really, really thrive and we can really get some valuable work done on the world to make society a bit better for autistic people and also educate people more about autism in a very understanding way. I think if we can all do that, we can all make this place a little bit calm, a bit less crazy and fighty and all that, then perhaps we can sort of band together and make some real changes to the life quality of autistic people, the adjustments that society makes help people within the mainstream understand autism more and have more of an insight into the experience to perhaps accept us for who we are and understand what we are trying to do, then I think that would be great and that would be lovely. And yeah, I realize that by airing out my opinions on such controversial things, I'm opening myself up to a fair bit of criticism and a fair bit of people labeling me as all sorts of different things so I hope that this has been somewhat valuable for you and if you have enjoyed hearing my opinions and you like me doing my stuff, please let me know down in the comments, perhaps offset some of the negative comments that people might bring and let me know your experiences on these and your thoughts on these different topics, I'd be really interested to know and I'll also be really really interested to know what your lived experience and what your preferences are related to autism related to life, please do that. Anyway, I hope you guys are doing well, it's been another video and I will see you next week for another presentation, make sure to check out my channel, give a subscribe, maybe join me for one of the live streams sometime, pitch in, we all have a good time, fun time and yeah, take care guys, see you later.