Conformance is an advantage, a way to progress and get what you need or want. I feel weird reading people saying that it would be wrong to try to help people with trouble conforming, conform: what would be the alternative ? Realistically, tolerating differences can only go so far as the other tolerates it: autists and transgenders have similar issues in accepting that the wider society is different from them and the compromise has to start at both ends. And I think nobody's really asking anyone to actually change behavior, but simply to hide it better in temporary/crisis/exceptional situations.
For instance, I think homosexuality's long combat to marry, a very VERY conforming demand, is helping it move away from the view others had of it being a non-conforming sexual behavior. Nobody's talking anymore of the physical act, the actual difference, but instead we talk about their attempt to conform, and it's very hard to find arguments against it.
Autism is literally defined by a deficit in social skills + restricted repetitive behaviours and nothing else so that is basically what gets treated - the symptoms gets treated with behaviourism and the underlying causes of that behaviour are ignored. GI problems are comorbid in like ~40% of autism cases. Do schools stress getting these autistic kids exercising and teaching them how to cook healthy meals so they can overcome these struggles, live a life without pain, so they can not only live a higher quality of life but have an easier and more pleasant time being social? Sometimes - but the overwhelming emphasis is simply making them act more normal in a very simplistic and direct and to the point way. The system isn't designed to improve autistic kids quality of life you see, it's designed to make them less troublesome for the people around them, and hold them accountable for the trouble they're causing, that's people's mindset.
There is a very cold and unemphathetic attitude towards autistic kids where they're just expected to be iron willed stoics who behave using a fake personality that pleases others around them while their underlying issues basically get no attention from the system. I think if autistic people were treated with more empathy, as less of a monolith, as being defined as being more than "social deficits + repetitive behaviours", we would go a long way.
I hesitate. I do see your point, but I find it maybe short sighted: see, pleasing other is self-serving, the more you please them the more they adapt to you. There is an advantage in making others enjoy your existence more, and if we're going to actually help, embracing what societies are, machines crushing difference for a reductive common compromise, teaching autists to pretend to play the game is going to work better than teaching current winners that they should lose a bit to help autists feel better.
I suppose our disagreement might be in how feasible each is: it is easy, maybe lazy, to try to make autists adapt to the rest of us and probably impossible, at best extremely expensive, to make the rest of us more atuned to their needs. Not that we dont want to, but we're all thermodynamics machines trying to save energy: we may never really massively expense some to their benefit, sadly, especially if they dont learn to go our ways, sometimes.
According to the CDC, 52% of schools exempted students with cognitive disability, and 86% exempted students with long-term physical and medical disability from physical education[1].
You talk about what I'm saying being short-sighted because of "extreme expense" and "massive expense", and how society serves to "Crush difference". I call absolute horseshit. Schools spend MORE on the physical education of normal students than they do with the majority of their disabled students. They do NOT crush difference, they alienate their disabled students from the rest of the student body. They discriminate against them, they make them sick though idleness, they set them up for failure, and when they fail to pretend to play the game it's all blamed on their sick minds and weak bodies. It's not the schools fault of course, it's that these students are such freaks that the school is blameless for them failing. Of course kids who don't exercise are failing socially - not exercising makes you ugly, mentally unwell, markedly different from the other kids, and culturally disconnected - if they gave a fuck about autistic kids social functioning they would make them exercise but they don't care.
> And I think nobody's really asking anyone to actually change behavior, And I think nobody's really asking anyone to actually change behavior
Literally regulating behaviors are punished in regular social situations, by parents, teachers, police, etc.
> homosexuality's long combat to marry
Strange tangent. Who is 'homosexuality' here? Demanding equal treatment doesn't necessary mean you need to exercise all liberties that are available. I'm certain there are many that didn't have a desire to marry that also believed in equal treatments and the affordance for those that did want to marry, that they could.
That's the trivial part. Conformance isn't about petty differences in lifestyle or ideas. It's about being able to function together.
Humans can't cooperate with other people if they're not predictable enough. The flip side of "theory of mind" is that you're going to have a bad time with me, if you can't intuitively grasp my reactions and behavior. And vice versa. The major job of culture and civilization is to reduce variance in people, because the easier it is for us to understand each other, the better and more peacefully we can cooperate.
Again, this is not about different learning styles or different personal preferences. It's about whether or not I can trust this person to work with me, to live around me. Will they melt down or get violent at slightest provocation? Are they telling the truth? Can I trust them with work, or with not randomly swerving their car into a crowd because fuck knows why? That's the other end of the spectrum of conformance, and people who are stuck there end up being segregated away - committed to prisons or mental institutions or otherwise pushed aside and kept away from civilization's more powerful toys.
In this broader spectrum, it's rather obvious that conformance is both an advantage and a necessity. Not total conformance - just enough to be able to be a part of society. And society itself can be accepting of only so much - there's only so much unpredictability our wetware can process before fight-or-flight kicks in.
> Will they melt down or get violent at slightest provocation?
Autistic meltdown can be made a lot worse if someone hasn't the theory of mind to understand when someone is experiencing it (i.e., the double empathy problem). This can lead to situations, especially where law enforcement is involved, where people get killed. Physical abuse from parents towards autistic children—once again due to lack of empathy—can cause outbursts to be excessively violent.
If you have difficulty reading autistic people, there's training for that, but on the other side, asking autistic people to not meltdown is akin to asking an epileptic person trying not to have a fit. If someone gets particularly violent during meltdowns, they essentially need to be kept away from other people. This can't be trained out with therapy.
> Are they telling the truth?
If they're autistic, likely answer is: To a fault. A higher IQ autist (archaically 'aspies') can learn social mechanisms, rarely even over and above a neurotypical, but with greater conscious effort and delay.
> or with not randomly swerving their car into a crowd because fuck knows why
Sounds like a conflation with psychosis. I'm not sure how it's relevant. Many autistic people do struggle with driving and may have dyspraxia, which may require more lesson time, or not qualifying a driving test. I wouldn't class that as exceptional 'conformance' for autists though.
But truth be told, autistic people are coached all the time by caregivers on proper behavior, because as you say they have to live in the world.
I think you have it backwards. The majority of people don't tolerate the minorities. Go on autism or trans reddit. It's full of people desperately trying to figure out how to fit in. It takes very little effort to respect people who are different from you.
> The majority of people don't tolerate the minorities.
The majority of people don't know, and don't care.
> Go on autism or trans reddit. It's full of people desperately trying to figure out how to fit in.
Obviously, beacuse people who figured out how to fit in just fit in, and don't hang out much on such subreddits. On those boards, you're dealing with a minority within a minority.
> Obviously, beacuse people who figured out how to fit in just fit in, and don't hang out much on such subreddits. On those boards, you're dealing with a minority within a minority.
Social difficulty is probably the most common affliction of autistic people. I've met extravert hypersocial autists, but they are very much the minority of the minority.
From the second line of the wiki article for autistic spectrum:
> Other common signs include difficulty with social interaction
It takes a lot of effort, actually. For instance, Im a minority in my current country: cant speak the language well (Chinese), cant write nor read much, dont look like them at all, work in high level jobs they cant relate to for the most part, and am European to a fault in almost every belief system that matters.
So, what should I or they do ? Tolerate me, they could try, but shouldnt I ... fit in more ? Learn more seriously the language, dress more like them, marry local, put my kids amongst them, or even leave and live amongst my peers ?
I think it s impossible to ask a majority to tolerate me beyond very basic human politeness. My religion, my culture, my beliefs are so foreign for the majority, 1.4bn people, that the most efficient way for us to live together is for me to change and adapt a lot more than for them to do so.
> Conformance is an advantage, a way to progress and get what you need or want.
How much should we expect people to conform? How much effort should we expect a nonconforming person to make, and what kind of social pressure should we apply to those people?
I am generally more in favor of letting people be themselves to the extent that they are happy with it (absent social pressure) and that it does not harm anyone. That means a social standard of accepting non-conformity, rather than expecting it or as is often the case coercing it.
I was born and raised in France. At 26, I emigrated to China, been 9 years.
How much do you think I have to conform vs being myself ? It s not that they re mean in refusing to accept my Frenchness, it's that they cant even care, and if I want anything done, I need to meet them halfway: learn how conventions work in China to not brush them off, how to speak their language, how to dress and behave in a way they can recognize, so many little details that transform me from an alien ghost-faced weirdo to a surprisingly enjoyable human to hang around with.
I wonder if it wouldnt be the same for other groups: maybe minorities in general would enjoy life more if they were given more chance to conform, rather than given more space not to change ? Im not even trying myself, Ill eat my croissant in secret if I want, but for most people, I m a rice noodle eater like every "normal" person here. I hate it, I still do it: I conform, and life goes on.
What are you talking about? Gay people want to and indeed do: marry all the time. It's the government that oftentimes makes such an act illegal and fails to gives the privileges of a lawful union that straight people are given without any issue. Gay people also want to raise children - to put plainly: they just want to pursue a happy life like anyone else.
Marrying is a government assurance that your assets will be distributed to the person you signed the marriage contract with upon your death, nothing much more.
The government MUST accept it, it s the ONLY value of marriage: it is not an "act", it s a legal contract.
Ofc it s stupid not to make it happen, and it has been a long combat. Most of humanity doesnt allow it yet, and maybe from the comfort of where you type from, it's done and away, but here in China, it an exhausting fight.
What were you finding so strange in saying it was a long combat ? I see 100 years at least before it happens here.
Perhaps it's a misunderstanding of your statement? From my perspective, what I understand from what you're saying is that gay people have long fought against the idea of marriage, which I have not seen as being true.
If you're saying it's government and culture (and many religions) that are against gay people marrying, I agree with that.
I grew up with the society value of live and let live (if ye do no harm, do what ye will). Not that it applies to everything (it is relative not absolute) but as a rule of thumb.
Yet there are societies where my wife would have to conform in the sense of having to hide her facial hair due to dominant religion even though she herself is an atheist. If we were to go to such society, we'd have to conform.
Conforming is sometimes necessary, but a trait of assimilation. It isn't as black or white as it is though. There are parts in USA where you cannot be openly gay, and there are parts where you can.
There are also two sexual preferences which have to conform in the West as they're not accepted by society: children and animals as sexual preference. I agree with not accepting these since they're predatory instead of equal terms. However it is relevant to mention as people with these preferences (as well as psychopathy) have to mask it.
Meanwhile, homosexuality is a spectrum as well. There are shades of gray (nuances) between gay and straight, bisexuality being one of them. To put it differently: one does not have to be either. In an ideal world, I'd have grown up openly bisexuality or at least bicurious.
My problem with transgender is very specific: fertile women are attractive to males because of their fertility which is deeply related to their behavior (look, smell, act, etc). This is something transgender females cannot (yet) offer and it firmly puts them outside the definition of being female _for_me_. However, it is irrelevant to me nowadays as I am (the cliché) married with children. I believe it is the root underlying issue related to acceptance though, akin to con-artism. For me it is. But that is my problem, not theirs.
A lot of undiagnosed women with autism conform/assimilate by masking. It is considered harmful on the longer term (as you put: the short term might be beneficial). You get people who are acting as if they're something they're not. And they will fail their act. Then you get a situation like Girl, Interrupted. A temper tantrum, diagnosis borderline (what I believe to be often a undiagnosed autism among females).
The M.O. should be you are yourself at the very least at home. And that requires acceptance and embracing of how you are as a starting point. Masking is going to be required more tgan enough, it shouldn't be the target goal.
I'd like to end my post with an open question: Do you believe we as Western society benefit from people with a sexual preference for children, animals, and psychopaths in general masking themselves?
For instance, I think homosexuality's long combat to marry, a very VERY conforming demand, is helping it move away from the view others had of it being a non-conforming sexual behavior. Nobody's talking anymore of the physical act, the actual difference, but instead we talk about their attempt to conform, and it's very hard to find arguments against it.