Toxic Myths About Autism

The most common response I get when I talk about Autism is -- "You aren't really Autistic. Or at least not very much.  You can (speak coherently/empathize/more or less put on your own clothes/or insert whatever the speaker thinks Autistic people can't do)."  It is often followed by the suggestion that my pride in my neurological difference is somehow insensitive to the parents of people who are "really Autistic."   The fact that I can pass in some situations as neurotypical doesn't diminish the reality of my Autism and the gifts and struggles it brings me.  Neurotypicality exists at the level of performance.  Autism is a fundamental set of factors shaping my experience of the world.

But the most common discourse I encounter about Autism in spaces where my neurological difference is invisible is built around the idea that Autism is an epidemic caused by vaccinations or aluminum cookware or GMO's or whatever toxic bogeyman is in vogue at the moment.  Now to be clear, there are real issues involved with the safety of some vaccines, aluminum cookware is not good for anyone, and I am highly skeptical about the safety of GMO's especially when developed in a capitalist context.  But the idea that my neurology is a pathology caused by toxicity is highly offensive.

I spoke to the issue of the pathologization of Autism in my last blog post on Autism as neurological Queerness.   And there are actually some strong parallels between discourses around endocrine disruption and sex and gender and around neurotoxins and Autism.

Popular discourse around endocrine disruption tends to focus on the idea that xeno-estrogens are feminizing male bodies.  Its telling that such discourses often refer to xeno-estrogens as "gender bending" compounds -- language that conflates gender (a socially constructed category based on performance) with sex (a socially constructed category based on perceived biological difference, similar to race in its origin and its problematic claim to scientific reality), and defines expressions, experiences, and bodies that fall outside the accepted male/female binary as "bent" and aberrant.  The anxiety about feminizing male bodies reflects both a misogynist bias and an implied pathologization of Trans* bodies.   This is not to say that endocrine disrupting compounds are not a huge public health problem  -- but rather that framing the problem in terms of the bending of gender further marginalizes people who fall outside the bounds of culturally sanctioned gender expression while deflecting focus from the real problem of the non-consensual altering of our endocrine makeup by corporate polluters.

Popular discourse around Autism and neurotoxicity puts forward stories of parents who either experienced their children "becoming" Autistic after a toxic exposure or witnessed a decline in symptoms and behaviours they saw as undesirable after detoxifying their children's bodies in some way.  (Ever notice that people only talk about Autistic CHILDREN and Autistic adults are generally invisible in the culture?  But that's a rant for another day.)   These stories frame Autism as a disorder, Autistic traits as something to be reduced or eliminated, and parents as victims and protagonists in the drama of Autistic peoples' lives.

There is a possible grain of truth to the relationship between toxicity and physical health problems in some Autistic people.  Many of us do seem to have slower detoxification pathways than the general population -- and especially reduced methylation.   I theorize that in an ancestral context this may have served to help us process phytochemicals from the environment over a longer period of time, rendering us more sensitive to some forms of communication from the living world.  But in a contemporary context it does render us vulnerable.   If I can't methylate mercury and other neurotoxins as rapidly as most people it is conceivable that I would experience symptoms of mercury toxicity from lower levels of exposure than than other people -- such as the levels I experienced breathing in the air in an area with three incinerators, or maybe, maybe, maybe the levels contained in now sidelined vaccine adjuvants, especially if that mercury was added to a high load from ambient sources.   But that does not mean my Autism was caused by neurotoxins or can be "treated" by their removal.

But you know what else causes an increase in inflammatory diseases and neuro-endocrine dysregulations?  Trauma.  And that is something we Autistic people experience plenty of:  bullying by peers as children, feelings of alienation, harrowing experiences with the medical world to name a few experiences most Autistic people I know share.    And when our experience is pathologized, we experience deeper alienation.

So instead of "searching for the cure" to Autism lets search for the cure to environmental and emotional toxicity:  remaking the society that has become the coal mine where we Autistic people are the canaries who are punished for showing the mine owners that we can't breathe the air.

Autism: Neurological Queerness

William Blake famously spoke of the doors of perception which, if cleansed, opened into infinity.  For me, those doors of perception, my sensory gating channels, have always been wide open -- though I am often a bit far sighted, seeing the laticework underlying the structure of this world while missing parts of the human exchange going on around me. And I sometimes get overwhelmed.

It changed my life to find out that this experience is called Autism.

While Autism is classified as a disorder, it is actually a set of neurological variations that allow for a profoundly different experience of the universe.  Autistic people have always existed and we serve a fundamental ecological role in a healthy community, mediating between worlds.  Some of my Autistic predecessors were the people who lived at the edge of the village, maintaining connection between the human, the wild, and the divine.  My herbalism and my magic are in many ways an inheritance from these ancestors of the Craft.

The variation in human neurology is as profound as the variation in human sexuality and impacts our experience just as deeply.   As with sexuality and with gender, monotheistic religions and their capitalist descendants (the relationship between monotheism and capitalism is one brilliantly pointed out by Rhyd Wildermuth) decreed only a narrow band of neurological experience and expression permissible, and demonized or pathologized variatiom from the norm.

The way in which hierarchies are created within Autism diagnoses designating some of us "high functioning" and some of us "low functioning" points to the role of capitalism in establishing and enforcing compulsory neurotypicality.  Functionality is defined largely in terms of ability to play economic functions.  "High functioning" Autistics are those of us who were and are verbally precocious and able to give name and voice to complex layers of reality.  To the extent that our creative perception can be harnessed for lucrative purposes, we are tolerated as eccentrics.  More so if we learn to mimic neurotypical traits, putting on a convincing performance of social fluency.  That performance has its cost, however, in the form of stress-induced illnesses like the hypertension I struggle with.    Those whose expression does not include language are deemed "low functioning" and their silence is presumed to reflect a deficiency in mental processing.  But I can tell you that I have those silent places in me too, and sometimes using words at all feels like a betrayal, and I recognize those places when I see them.

For me, Autism is a neurological Queerness, a way of being in the world rendered transgressive by a culture intent on total control and infinite growth.

But we cannot be controled, and our power grows at the edges.

Author's Note:  9 months after writing this piece, I discovered that a number of people have actually been thinking and writing about neurological Queerness for a while.  See:

http://neuroqueer.blogspot.ca/2015/05/neuroqueer-introduction-by-nick-walker.html