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How can you know that? I mean, you seem to be just restating the status quo against this article, but they've provided evidence against it, and you're not providing any evidence for it.Hi, autistic person here.
I was always relatively high-functioning, in some ways. I was always better than my peers at math and reading, but my social disability was crippling. In retrospect, I had a lot of the standard characteristics--repetitive movements, ADD, obsessive behavior, freaking out if things didn't fit my plans or expectations--but the inability to recognize social cues was the one that caused me the most trouble and pain.
And I fixed it. At some point in middle school, another autistic boy in my special-ed class was really annoying me, and I realized that he was acting exactly the same way I did. I could recognize it in him, but not in myself. So, to gloss over 20 years of effort and practice and failure, I taught myself to see myself as an outside observer, to judge my own behavior--first broadly, and slowly narrowing down to tone, word choice, and body language--as I would judge someone else's.
I'm pretty social these days. Most people don't know I'm autistic unless I tell them (which I do if it comes up; I'm not ashamed of it). A lot of the folks in the article would probably say that my autism had been cured. And they'd be full of shit.
I still obsess over minutae. Properly focused, it can be a genuine joy. It still really, seriously troubles me when plans are changed at the last minute, but most of the time I can take a deep breath and move on. I still stim, but I can suppress it around strangers. And, sometimes, with the right sort of data-analysis problem, I can apply the sort of absolute, crystalline clarity that people normally associate with Rain Man.
I am an autistic person who has learned good coping strategies. So are "B." and Mark Macluskie and Matt Tremblay and the rest. The article repeatedly mentions lingering autistic traits, like Mark's tactile aversions and Matt's flapping, but somehow they don't count. In this mindset, autism is a sickness, and if you're no longer visibly sick then you must not be autistic. That's bullshit. Autism is in the way your mind is shaped. It has good sides and it has bad sides. Some people, with the right treatment and insights, learn how to accentuate the good and minimize the bad. That's not a "cure," it's dealing with life.