Autism Isn’t Just A Medical Diagnosis — It’s A Political Identity
By Robert Chapman
At around the age of 6, I was utterly fascinated by the stickers that came attached to pieces of fruit. When at the shop with my mother, I would rush over to the fruit section and gaze, riveted, at all the fruits that we rarely or never bought — basically anything except apples, bananas, and oranges — until it was time to leave. For those fruits we did buy, the stickers would be duly plucked, arranged, and pasted in a precious little book that I either carried around the house or kept hidden under my bed.
In addition to such idiosyncratic interests — and I had many others, over the years — I was also odd when it came to socializing. I didn’t join in with many of the shared games other children played, and even if I tried to, I never seemed to understand the things they grasped intuitively. I was a happy child — my fruit sticker collection was an endless source of fulfillment — but to others, I always seemed a bit eccentric. Teachers often indicated that I must have had bad parents, that I was lacking intelligence, or that I simply didn’t care. Fellow students tended to shun me, or sometimes ridicule me.
I later learned, however, that I wasn’t indifferent, stupid, or even merely weird. I had a “disorder.” The psychiatrists’ diagnostic bible, the DSM, had recently…