Just wondering what the source is for Stallman being autistic? I see people saying he's autistic, and I even see people saying he has called himself "borderline autistic", but that's not quite the same thing as a diagnosis. I don't see a reliable source making that claim; even Wikipedia says nothing about it (except a backstage talk item about there not being any source on the claim).
I admit, the circumstantial evidence is, uhh, indicative, but I don't see it being a matter of public record. Then again, I only did six and a half minutes of internet research, though, and I could be wrong, thus the question mark.
> Just wondering what the source is for Stallman being autistic? I see people saying he's autistic, and I even see people saying he has called himself "borderline autistic", but that's not quite the same thing as a diagnosis
If you understand the concept of the broad autism phenotype (BAP), it is hard not to see it in his behaviour. He obviously has autistic traits.
Now, is it BAP (sub-clinical ASD) or is it clinical ASD? Nobody can answer that unless they are actually a qualified diagnostician (psychiatrist/psychologist/etc) personally evaluating him.
But I'm not sure how much that matters. The boundary between BAP and ASD is vague, it varies from clinician to clinician and is changing over time.
If you choose to view things dimensionally [0] rather than categorically, you have "super-neurotypical" people at one extreme, you have "severe ASD" at the other [1]. And somewhere in between the two, you draw a line (the diagnostic cutoff), and say people on one side of the line have "mild ASD" and people on the other side of the line don't have ASD. And the people who are on the "neurotypical" side of the line, but still close to it rather than far away, that's BAP.
And I think the point is that RMS obviously is somewhere near that line, whichever side of it he may belong on. (And as I said, the line doesn't have a single fixed location anyway, he might be on one side given some clinicians' ways of drawing it and on the other given others'.)
[0] I've drawn an oversimplified one-dimensional model here. In reality ASD is a multidimensional construct. But, treating it one-dimensionally is a simplification which aids in explanation
[1] I know some people don't like phrases like "mild ASD" or "severe ASD" (or their close relatives "low functioning" and "high functioning"), but how else do you explain the difference between someone diagnosed with "ASD Level 1 / Level 1 without intellectual or language impairment" and someone else who is diagnosed with "ASD Level 3 / Level 3 with intellectual impairment and language impairment"?
If the line is that blurry, when do we begin holding people accountable for being apparently deliberately inconsiderate and rude? Most people don't have a problem with social cues, are we to quietly accept abuse and harassment even from people who have been told they're hurting others and don't change?
Do we quietly accept not being listened to by the deaf? Do we quietly accept our visual cues not being correctly interpreted by the blind? Do we quietly accept our grandmothers forgetting our birthdays? Do we quietly accept service animals (well I suppose a lot of people don't)?
But it's okay to treat autistic people as less than human because they are not a politically powerful group. You learn a lot about people from how they treat politically disadvantaged, and we have learned a lot about you.
I admit, the circumstantial evidence is, uhh, indicative, but I don't see it being a matter of public record. Then again, I only did six and a half minutes of internet research, though, and I could be wrong, thus the question mark.