The whole “person with autism is better because it puts the person first” sounds exactly like the kind of BS that autism can lower patience for, anyways.
The choice is more between ‘Sally has autism’ (some people think this makes it sound more like a disease, more distancing and separate from the person), and ‘Sally is autistic’ (sounds more like a character/personality trait, a way of being).
I think that there are some groups of people who prefer person-first language. For example, “person with epilepsy” is generally preferred to “epilectic person” (n.b. I do not have epilepsy). I also just looked into the history of person-first language and apparently it first arose in the context of people with AIDS, who were sick of being referred to as “AIDS victims” or similar.
In that light, I can understand why some people prefer person-first language. Myself, I am in accord with the general autistic community in calling myself autistic (as an adjective). Occasionally, amongst friends and kin, I may even call myself “an autistic”.
There are others on this wider thread that capture some of my reasons why: I remember, shortly after I was diagnosed, I pondered whether I would take a cure for autism, if one existed. I concluded that I wouldn’t — not because being autistic was a strictly positive thing for me (it certainly made my life harder in many respects), but because I didn’t think that it would be possible to extricate the autism from what is intrinsically me — in short, any “cure” might as well be death.
The whole “person with autism is better because it puts the person first” sounds exactly like the kind of BS that autism can lower patience for, anyways.
it’s just a linguistic quirk, english just so happens to put adjectives first (i.e. “autistic person” instead of “person autistic”)
The choice is more between ‘Sally has autism’ (some people think this makes it sound more like a disease, more distancing and separate from the person), and ‘Sally is autistic’ (sounds more like a character/personality trait, a way of being).
I think that there are some groups of people who prefer person-first language. For example, “person with epilepsy” is generally preferred to “epilectic person” (n.b. I do not have epilepsy). I also just looked into the history of person-first language and apparently it first arose in the context of people with AIDS, who were sick of being referred to as “AIDS victims” or similar.
In that light, I can understand why some people prefer person-first language. Myself, I am in accord with the general autistic community in calling myself autistic (as an adjective). Occasionally, amongst friends and kin, I may even call myself “an autistic”.
There are others on this wider thread that capture some of my reasons why: I remember, shortly after I was diagnosed, I pondered whether I would take a cure for autism, if one existed. I concluded that I wouldn’t — not because being autistic was a strictly positive thing for me (it certainly made my life harder in many respects), but because I didn’t think that it would be possible to extricate the autism from what is intrinsically me — in short, any “cure” might as well be death.
although this hits kinda different when you’re also depressed enough you wouldn’t mind disappearing