Published on 12, July, 2020
I can't stand stereotypes and do not wish to be defined by my condition. I would rather people saw me as an individual with strengths and weaknesses, some of which can be explained by me having Asperger's syndrome, rather than defining me by a label. This is why I can't stand the word 'aspie'. While having Aspergers is an important part of my identity, it is no more important than me being female, no more important than my sexuality or my age. I would hate it if someone did not see past me being a woman or past my age, why is having aspergers any different? The disability movement campaigned for disability to be seen not as an individual affliction or difference, to move beyond individualising disability and to see it as a societal problem: people with disabilities should campaign collectively to change society, making it imperative to see the person before the disability. I am a person with asperger's syndrome, not an aspie. I share traits that other people with AS may have, but I don't share all the traits, just enough to have aspergers. We are all different, to say I am an aspie suggests conformity with other 'aspies' and obliterates the part of me that defies easy categorization.
Hope said:there are more differences between women than there are between women and men
If you analyse that logically, you'll find that it can not possibly be true.
And that is kind of the point of stereotypes - they're stereotypes precisely because they roughly describe a typical member of a subset of a wider group of inidividuals.
If you have a diagnosis of Asperger's then you share something with all other's with that diagnosis.
Sure, we don't all share all traits, but that's irrelevent.
It's like saying "Apples are green" - yes, not all apples are just green - some are red, some yellow, and some are a mixture of green, red, and/or yellow - but, the proportion of green to non-green apples is weighted so greatly on the green side of the equation that it makes sense to shorten "Apples are mixture of colours, including some that are all red, some that are all yellow, and some that are mixture of red and/or yellow and green, but the majority are predominantly green" to "apples are green" - it's not a statement of absolute fact, just a simplification to prevent haven't to say, or type, long-winded explanations of all the possible combinations of all possible properties of a thing when the majority of instances of that thing display a small subset of the larger set of possible properties.
I can also guarentee that you use stereotypes all the time. You just don't think of them as sterotypes. Why? Well, precisely because all words that label a 'subset of a larger group' are, by their very nature, stereotypes - so when you say "rabbit" you mean something like "a subset of the mamalian class of animals that has features X, Y, and Z" - not all rabbits share all the same traits - but everyone knows what a 'rabbit' is and that though one might say "rabbits have long ears and eat carrots", not all rabbits actually have long ears, and nor do they all eat carrots.