Thoughts on Finding Myself Differently Brained, by Jane Meyerding

In an often-quoted article of 1998, significantly entitled “Thoughts on Finding Myself Differently Brained,” the autistic self-advocate Jane Meyerding wrote that she “was surprised to find [herself] moving into the realm of neurology.” Since the 1990s, indeed, autism advocacy has organized itself largely around “neurology” or, more accurately, as a neurodiversity movement.

So far the movement has been dominated by people diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and other forms of high-functioning autism (although some prominent self-advocates, such as Amanda Baggs, do not speak and define themselves as “low functioning”).7 Asperger as a formal diagnosis has disappeared from the DSM-5 and is subsumed as the high-functioning end of a new “Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

Vidal, Fernando and Ortega, Francisco. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (Forms of Living)....

A murder, a mystery and a glimpse of the face of autism (Interview with Jane Meyerding)

planetautism.com/jane/

Thoughts on Finding Myself Differently Brained, by Jane Meyerding

In 2002 Jane Meyerding explained that, since publishing her well-known 1988 essay “Thoughts on Finding Myself Differently Brained,” she had realized that classifying people under different categories within the autism spectrum was “seriously misleading” and declared her preference for seeing herself “as autistic, period.”

Vidal, Fernando and Ortega, Francisco. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (Forms of Living)....

Amanda Baggs

On the book notes, Vidal and Ortega write of Amanda Baggs:

Amanda Baggs, who speaks through a voice synthesizer, became one of the best-known autism self-advocates after posting, in January 2007, her video In My Language (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v​=JnylM1hI2jc). There is controversy over whether Baggs is really a person with autism and if she really made the video herself.

You can watch the video below, as well as find a website that further explains the controversy:

amandabaggscontroversy.blogspot.com/