Do we have room to wriggle? I hope so, but sometimes I can be a terrible predestinationalist because I don’t seem to have a lot of room right now in so far the multiple impacts of difference, class, employment status have put me a long way downmarket from where I would like to be.

I don’t agree with normal, it is a construct which ever way you look at it, and whatever way I were differenced, autistic or otherwise within the multiple societal cleavages you have already pointed out with regard to identity I would always be some way off normal.

I look at things the way I do, partly because of my cognitive infrastructure, but also because of the various intersections I have had in the past with different groups trying to establish an identity and a positive and valued place for that identity.

But, look, I do think that we can pick and choose, to some extent, between the identities that are available to us. I am British, Pakistani, Muslim, secularist, tall, I wear glasses, I like clothes by Dries Van Noten. I’m being slightly flippant here but I do feel threatened by your talk of being ‘psychologically and culturally embedded in this phenomenon called autism’. No doubt I am, and I’m not unhappy about that, but I also have some room to wriggle, don’t I?

If, for example, there are elements of ‘autistic identity’ that I take issue with, I am able to say so without negating myself. And hence I do think that the neurodiversity vs neurotypicality debate is pushed too hard sometimes by autistic people. I can’t help but observe that most neurodiversity advocates do not have symptoms towards the severe end of the range. Neurodiversity is fine but we shouldn’t let it get in the way of research and intervention that helps severely autistic people get ‘closer to normal’.

Similarly, I think there must be a point ‘closer to normal’ beyond which it’s neither fair nor illuminating to use the term ‘autistic’ as either a self-description or a description of someone else. That’s my personal dilemma.

Though I certainly think that the broader, policy dilemma stated in the antepneultimate paragraph is more significant.

I will repeat my main comment here.

“Ah the perils of googling on ones name, well I usually end up at the top of the google page so I must be famous.

Nazeers book has not turned up on the shelves at Birmingham yet inspite of my having ordered it so I can’t comment on the book. Nadesans social construction of Autism has and that is a not a very good book because it is an outsiders book not an insiders. That is why I am more interested in reading Nazeers book.

As to what he should think. Well I would suggest of course that he read more and become politicised and realise how he is both psychologically and culturally embedded in this phenomenon called autism, which is experienced largely through the media for most. The way you construct your own way of being is not independant of the media unless one happens to be one of Levi Strausses Nambikwara, or Malinovsky’s Trobriand Islanders and I am willing to bet they are much more sophisticated than they used to be in Marshall Mcluhans global village. “

You discuss here the issue that I have found the hardest to come to terms with in thinking about (my) autism. I have, in fact, become more and more reluctant to describe myself as autistic. This is not because of shame - not at all - as I say in the book, I think that my autism or my autistic characteristics, how ever you wish to call them, are central to how I think, how I feel, how I approach new experiences and so feeling shame about these characteristics would mean feeling shame about almost all of myself and what I do. Luckily, I’m not in that situation!

The primary reason why I have become uncomfortable in using the tag of autism is that I have met, both whilst researching the book and since then, people with autism for whom autism is a very significant barrier to what they may wish to do. For example, I’ve met autistic people who are my age and cannot speak - at all. So much of my enjoyment of the world and other people comes through words and so meeting such people engages all of my empathy. I don’t feel sorry for them in any insulting way. I realise that there are other forms of expression and I argue quite extensively, in my book, that, for example, autistic people are not emotionally damaged, as some experts assume, but are capable of having and do have an emotional life.

Having met people, including my former classmates, whose autism is so much more pronounced than mine, makes me hesitate then before using the tag for myself. It feels like I’m asking for special attention and yet I’m not the one who needs it - they are. It also tends to confuse people. If I am autistic and someone who can’t speak at all is autistic - then what on earth is autism? I want to engage in the enterprise of explaining autism better to people and sometimes I feel that focussing on my own autism, at the expense of that of other people, makes that enterprise more difficult.

What do you think?

She got the post, however the irony is that before she could take it up, she died in the care of the same hospital she had been appointed a non exectutive director of.