WHY THE CURE NARRATIVE FOR AUTISM MUST BE STOPPED.
With the controversy surrounding Israel Folau's Instagram post that saw him dismissed from playing football dividing Australians into those who claim that religious freedom is under threat and those who say that he has crossed the line (I'm in the latter camp) it is worth considering the most important people in the debate. The most important people are not the church leaders, nor the shock jocks, nor the politicians, but the very people who are likely to be most affected by the language, LGBTIQA Youth.
Imagine if you were a youth who was LGBTIQA. Hearing your peers at school making homophobic remarks would make you uncomfortable, as you would most likely be a target. Now, imagine you're growing up in a conservative family, a church-going family, and you heard the minister or pastor of your church telling you that you'd go to hell if you were like that. How would you feel? Frightened? Uncomfortable? Now, imagine you like football. Just because someone is LGBTIQA (male especially) doesn't mean to say they're effeminate. Indeed, several codes of football have LGBTIQA players.
Now, imagine you're an autistic person. If you have parents who accept you for who you are (or a parent who does), your home life will probably be quite nurturing. If you, however, have parents who are judgemental, or pushing for a cure, your home life may not be so good.
Just the other night, the show, "Are You Autistic?" was screened on the ABC. My parents had been watching a documentary with Benjamin Liaw, when my mother made the erroneous statement that Chinese people had settled around the Herbert River and Palmer River because they were olive skinned and wouldn't get sunburnt! Well, no, Westerners in Australia were renowned for having dark-skinned people, such as the Kanaka Labourers, work on the sugar plantations because they were dark-skinned and the white people considered themselves superior, and they considered the Chinese beneath them, too. Anybody who knows anything about Chinese people, knows that their skins are in various shades, some are very fair and others more olive. As soon as it came on, my mother said, "I don't want to watch this." Hoping for a miracle, I hoped she might watch it to learn something about autistic people, and why I tend to avoid large family gatherings and after mixing with people, choose to take time out to replete my energy stocks. But, no. And when I said that I was proud to be autistic she told me it was crap. My mother has also made the hateful statement that it would be wonderful if there was a cure for it, when she knows damn well that I would not want it nor have it!
The month before last, I went to hospital for an infusion for my CIDP and there was a man there who was listening to Sky News. Hell will freeze over before I subscribe to Foxtel or watch Sky News, but I knew I had no right to go over and tell him that the show was garbage! It had to be, "You watch Sky and I'll stick to ABC." So, my mother should refrain from her hateful speech regarding autism in front of me.
As has been said by some, the world needs different brains. If we all had the same brains, nobody would specialise.
What parents need to do, and this does not mean that you necessarily push one thing, is show their kids examples of famous autistic people and say, "Look at these people. Like, Albert Einstein, Daryl Hannah, Courtney Love, Bill Gates." Your child might not become the next entrepreneur, but they might do well for themselves or have a skill that is very useful at some point. I pride myself on my memory and date calculation skills, as well as my interest in foreign languages.
The cure narrative is about forcing people into a cookie cutter mould, and the cookie cutter mould is wrong. It is time to embrace the quirkiness, intelligence, compassion of autistics in this world and allow us to be no different to blue eyes rather than brown.