Hurry up and wait.

Science research really seems to include a lot of hurrying up and then waiting. Seriously. I need to be right there when the half hour is up, but there isn't anything to do during that half hour. Or someone else is using the machine I need next. That's actually the story right now. I need the Dynamic Light Scatterer, and it won't be open for another 50 minutes or so. So I write stuff.
Research is going well, if slowly. I make some undergraduate newbie mistakes, like having half my liposomes leak out during extrusion, but the sample size I work with is smaller than the sample size I make because we KNOW things can go wrong like that. Or I wait and bother the professor about a question any of the PhD students would have known the answer to, because I DON'T know the answer. Or I don't realize that 10 millimolar is too concentrated for measuring surface charge, and that messes up my results. Whatever.
But they're OK with that, because they know I'm new. And I'm getting better at it. And no one cares if I stim in the lab, as long as I don't knock things over because of it. (All of the employers I've had where the job was not purely online have seen me flap. None cared. One of the purely online ones may have just found out that I'm on the spectrum from a conversation I had with a student about autism, but if they did, they show no signs of caring about that either.)
Anyways, that's my story. I spend a lot of time hurrying up in order to wait.

Apparently autism either means you get away with everything or you get away with nothing.

So far as I can tell, there are two main categories here: Autistic people who have gotten away with everything because their parents shielded them and used their autism as an excuse for not disciplining them, and autistic people who got away with precisely nothing. No flapping, no stimming, no perseverating, no nothing.
When I talk about getting away with everything, I'm not talking about people who won't force their kids to make eye contact or stop stimming. I'm talking about people who let their kids physically attack people and don't do anything about it, not even explain that you shouldn't do that. I'm talking about people who never made their kid apologize for hurting someone, ever, even if their kid does have enough words to do so. I'm talking about people who ACTUALLY needed to discipline their autistic kid, not ``oh hey, my kid is acting autistic, I guess I should make them stop" but ``my kid is actively hurting people, I should probably do something about that besides just saying that she's autistic and not even trying to figure out why it happened or explain why she shouldn't do that."
When I talk about getting away with nothing, I'm talking about not even tolerating levels of quirkyness that would be OK if the kid were neurotypical.
Neither one of these approaches really works. Just putting that out there.
What should work is something along the lines of ``I'm going to educate my kid, and I'm going to help them be better at being autistic, and I'm going to help them understand which things they really do need to do in order to not actively hurt people, and I'm also going to help them understand what probably is and probably is not autism related, and I'm going to let them stim all they need to."
That seems to be pretty rare, though. I think we should do something about that.

Can you guys keep disability out of the abortion discussion?

Trigger Warning: Rape, Ableism, Abortion, and probably Eugenics

At a pro-choice rally of some sort, there was a woman holding a sign that said that an autistic woman who was raped should not be forced to give birth.
Why is autism brought into this?
Does that mean it would be OK to force a neurotypical woman who was raped to give birth?
What if she was neuroatypical, but still not autistic?

I don't think it's OK to force any woman to give birth, and I don't think restricting that statement to cases of rape is practical. I mean, how would you PROVE that you were raped? How would someone go about PROVING that you weren't? We live in a society that seems to like victim blaming and claiming that it wasn't really rape, so I don't want to go anywhere near that.

But that's not the point. They didn't make any of the arguments about how forcing a woman who was raped in general should not have to give birth. They didn't make arguments about bodily autonomy, about self-determination. They didn't talk about how illegal abortions is the result of banning abortion. They didn't talk about how fixing rape culture and giving actually useful sex ed would reduce the demand, so the same people who are demanding that abortion be outlawed are the same ones increasing the demand for it. They didn't talk about how fixing the adoption system would lead to people being more likely to consider it a viable option. They didn't talk about the difficulty involved in showing that an abortion might actually be medically necessary.

They talked about autism.
So, why specifically autism?
We know that autism is largely genetic. We know that people tend not to recognize that autistic people actually can and do understand what is and is not in their own best interest. We know that people tend not to realize that autism is not the end of the world, and that an autistic person can (gasp) consent to sex and choose to have a baby.

That means that my suspicions are not exactly favorable.
I think that autism was brought into this because:

• They think the only way an autistic person could become pregnant is through rape.
• They think that autistic people should not have children.
• They think that autism is a tragedy and needs to be fixed.
• They don't realize that they are, in fact, infantilizing autistics when they make this argument. 

And these are some problems I think it can cause:

• People will assume that any pregnant autistic woman must have been raped. 
• People will assume that allowing a pregnant autistic woman to have her baby is akin to forcing her to do so.
• Then they will try all kinds of coercion to force autistic people to get abortions because of this.
• They probably won't even realize it's coercion.  
• People will continue assuming that autistic people can't make their own decisions.
• People will therefore continue to not let autistic people even try making their own decisions.

Seriously guys? (PFL)

There is no general consensus on how to describe autistic people/people with autism/autism spectrum folk, though surveys suggest that "autistic person" is preferred by a large majority. Understanding this is step one. Step two is realizing that we live in a society that is really bad about giving people with disabilities any sort of self determination at all, especially people whose disabilities are developmental. Autism is one of these. That means autistic people are going to be extremely touchy about anything that even smells like taking away self-determination, and not respecting language choices is one of those things. We have our reasons. And guess what? The more someone has had self-determination taken away from them, the more likely they are to be on guard if someone tries it again. That means that some people are going to care more than others. So how do you get it right?

1. If the fact that we are autistic is not relevant to the topic at hand, we might not want it mentioned at all. Respect that. We have the right to at least TRY to pass if we so choose. And you'd be surprised how much can pass for ``just weird," especially if you have enough other privileges or enough autism stereotypes that you break. On top of that, I'm fairly sure that only the autistic person themself can legally disclose unless they are a) a minor, in which case their guardian can, but really should listen to the persons wishes on this or b) the person/their guardian has given you permission to do so.
2. Many autism organizations (looking at you, Autism Speaks. I know for a fact that you do this) will insist on person first language. That's calling people ``people with autism" instead of ``autistic people." That's actually the norm for the disability rights movement, but within autism specifically, there is not a consensus on person first language. The majority of the actually autistic seem to prefer NOT person first language. And you should respect that. You should also respect those people who do prefer person first.
3. If someone tells you their preference, they do not also have to tell you why. You just have to go with it. (They can tell you if they want to, which is different from "if you are really really curious.")
4. Fourth thing: Some people just aren't going to care which you use. It probably won't happen that often, but in that case, it really doesn't matter. In that case, go with whatever the majority of autistic people in your audience prefer, followed by audience in general if there is a tie. (On the internet, that large majority of autistic people who prefer autistic person are the audience autistic majority.)
5. Fifth thing: The opinion of the autistic person you are speaking about overrides ALL other opinions in how they should be described. Period.

On labels

I've covered the medicating thing. Now for the question of labeling at all.
Me: I spent YEARS avoiding an official label, because that stuff about people being imprisoned by labels? Guess what. People can and do totally use labels to imprison each other. Sometimes people even internalize that. Having a label is a HUGE problem when people will do that with your label. But... once I was an adult, and in control of my own life to an extent that if someone tried to imprison me with the autism label, I could fight back, certainly exit the situation, and possibly even outright win? Once no one but me could easily disclose it and have the ability to prove it if need be? Yeah, at that point I figured it was safe, so I went in to see if the label I thought I had was accurate. It was. And I use it to describe myself, because it's accurate.
I work with my label, not against it. That doesn't mean I let it dictate my life. It means that I don't beat myself up over the occasional failure to pick up on social cues. It means that I don't worry about this perseverating thing. It means that I bring a stim toy with me so I can concentrate better. It means I use my pattern recognition to my advantage.
Not everyone can do that. Some people think that labels are inherently imprisoning. For them, maybe they are. It's their decision whether or not they want a label. Not mine.
Just like it's my decision whether or not I want a label. Not theirs.
They don't get to use misunderstood science to try and prove that my label is invalid and think I will listen. If they put it as something I should accept, they can deal with my taking down their logic hole by hole. You know, one of those things that being autistic probably helps with? Yeah, that.
Basically: Don't mess with my choice about labels, and I won't mess with yours.