BBC Newsnight special on the clash between autism researchers on the controversial Spectrum 10K project, and the terminally-online “neurodiversity” activists who have halted the project on grounds it is “harmful” and doesn’t reflect their “lived experiences.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FbR3K4L2XnA

Christina Buttons’ latest piece on how ASD symptoms are often mistaken for “gender dysphoria” and how gender activists try to shut down inquiry into this on grounds it is “harmful” and doesn’t reflect their “lived experiences.”

https://buttonslives.substack.com/p/how-autistic-traits-can-be-mistaken

James Lindsay on how q~eer theory branched into “crip theory” and produced the dysgenic discourse that could otherwise be called Woke Scientology (with some pretty jarring results).

https://newdiscourses.com/2022/07/queer-theory-cripping-incest-discourses/

What do the most militant TRAs have in common with the actually-autistic hashtag mob (that doesn’t represent all actually autistic people):

• A driven desire to quash clinical research for being insufficiently woke, and to hijack it for their own selfish and existential identitarian purposes by demanding that they alone should be “leading the conversation” on grounds that only they can speak to their “lived experiences.”

• A desire to move fast and break things by “q~eering” everything in sight (making the abnormal normal), and a desire to excommunicate members of the group and brand them heretics (or fascists) for not adhering to the dogma (detransitioners / autism and mental illness sufferers who do want researchers to develop a cure). Our “lived experiences” are deemed immaterial if not harmful to the “cause”; it’s all “nothing about us without us” until someone breaks from the herd.

• A strong push to insert their preferred in/out-group neologisms as accepted terminology (“cisgender” / “neurotypical” instead of just normal).

• A hijacking of the LGB rights movement, its language (coming out got appropriated and became self-ID and now self-dx) and symbols (the chevron pride flag / the rainbow infinity sign), and an insistence that therapeutic interventions aimed at helping afflicted persons to lead a more normal life (exploratory counseling for dysphoria desistance / applied behavior analysis) are tantamount to “conversion therapy.”

• A reflexive and hyperbolic thought-terminating collective howl that not giving into their destructive demands or internalizing their dogmas is “genocide.”

• A mobilization that has taken place largely thanks to the Internet binding subcultures of misfits into hyperpoliticized cancel mobs, with the ability to ride a wrecking ball into “offline” society and major institutions.

—

I have written here many times before about how I suffer from this, how it has destroyed my life and made it not worth living, and how because of my own lived experiences, I am most definitely on side with research into prenatal prevention, even if a “cure” for those already afflicted remains ever elusive. I am also probably one of many who feels “seen” in Buttons’ writings, about ASD sufferers who would likely have been placed on the gender treadmill had I been a kid in this day and age.

And so I want both of these movements, the “genderq~eer” ideologues and the “neuroq~eer” ideologues, to be vigorously pushed back and their entrenchment in the academy reversed. No child deserves to suffer because woke Twitter mobs and postmodernist idpol academics took over science, and shut down or perverted the efforts of well-meaning institutions attempting to improve or cure difficulties of mental health.