"What if I'm the normal one and the rest of society is wrong"

This kind of framing-inversion might work as a coping mechanism to get you through some dark times as a spergy adolescent. But eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the reality of autism: it really is a neuro-developmental disorder and you actually do have deficits in social understanding, which you might be able to improve with deliberate effort. You have a lot stacked against you, but if you're well into adulthood and still stewing in this self-defeating resentment, that is a moral failing.

The linked article is old so it pre-dates the "neurodivergence" idea, but the comments here are using it uncritically. "Neurodivergence" de facto just means "autistic and/or ADHD", usually with a particular kind of autistic taking a dominant role in discussions and advocacy. It has always been a political coalition (quite an esoteric one).

But when you take ADHD on its own terms, the social-model extremism of "neurodiversity" advocates is particularly silly and harmful. ADHD people are perfectly happy with the disability-model; there clearly is something wrong with our brains, it's measurable with brain scans, and the symptoms can be improved with drugs. Don't tell me that ADHD is some equally-valid "attention orientation" or whatever social-model pretzel phrase you might come up with.

As for autism: try telling someone with severe autism, someone who can't speak or clothe or feed themselves that what they are living with is just another perfectly valid neurotype. Try telling it to their caretakers. It's a risible luxury-belief enjoyed by autistics only slightly on the spectrum, and indulged by people who don't know better.

> "What if I'm the normal one and the rest of society is wrong"

You do realise they’re not saying that in earnest, right? The point is to demonstrate the absurdity of it.

> But eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the reality of autism: it really is a neuro-developmental disorder and you actually do have deficits in social understanding, which you might be able to improve with deliberate effort.

The reality is that what you just wrote is just as true in the non-autistic → autistic direction (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286). Blaming one side for this bidirectional mismatch is not a universal truth.

https://neuroqueer.com/throw-away-the-masters-tools/

“If we start from the assumption that neurotypicals are ‘normal,’ and Autistics are ‘disordered,’ then poor connections between neurotypicals and Autistics inevitably get blamed on some ‘defect’ or ‘deficit’ in Autistics. If an Autistic can’t understand a neurotypical, it’s because Autistics have empathy deficits and impaired communication skills; if a neurotypical can’t understand an Autistic, it’s because Autistics have empathy deficits and poor communication skills. All the frictions and failures of connection between the two groups, and all the difficulties Autistics run into in neurotypical society, all get blamed on Autism. But when our vision is no longer clouded by the illusion of ‘normal,’ we can recognize this double standard for what it is, recognize it as just another manifestation of the sort of privilege and power that dominant majorities so often wield over minorities of any sort.”

> As for autism: try telling someone with severe autism, someone who can't speak or clothe or feed themselves that what they are living with is just another perfectly valid neurotype.

As for womanhood: try telling someone with severe endometriosis or menstrual pain that what they are living with is just another perfectly valid gender.

>This kind of framing-inversion might work as a coping mechanism to get you through some dark times as a spergy adolescent. But eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the reality of autism: it really is a neuro-developmental disorder and you actually do have deficits in social understanding, which you might be able to improve with deliberate effort. You have a lot stacked against you, but if you're well into adulthood and still stewing in this self-defeating resentment, that is a moral failing

You do realise Neurodivergent people have spent their life trying to make sense of the rest of the world in a way that NTs don't need to.

You call it "deficits in social understanding" I call it not understanding why people lie, and not mean what they say.

Do you term it "deficits in social understanding" when someone thinks it's wrong to murder people?

Do you term it "deficits in social understanding" when you don't understand a Neurodivergent person?

You're just equivocating statistical frequency with 'normal' and then with 'correct'.

The point of the article is to point out those flawed assumptions. Obviously your 'deficits in social understanding' prevented you from realising that.

.... Or is that a moral failing?