How would you respond to this?

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I'd tell them that I'm autistic and proud to be so.

"Well! Let's all be thankful we're not autistic!"

"Yeah, let's be thankful! Otherwise we might have to get help from my husband or someone like him! Ick!"


Just a thought.

This is the type of situation that I tend to escalate, and usually it doesn't deserve that. As someone said above, probably she was just trying to shut down the conversation because maybe she felt it had run its course.

When I looked at the post in this thread where the word "ret*d" was used, I didn't think it was meant to be derogatory. I could be wrong, but I thought that the way it was said was to express the incorrect things that people who don't know about autism think, not to express contempt for people who are mentally ret*d.
I know for me, there's also such an element of frustration. I spent my life being blamed for the things I couldn't do because nobody knew what was wrong with me-- and the reason that nobody knew what was wrong with me was because they had the misconception that autism was synonymous with mental retardation. The problem doesn't lie with the fact that some people with ASDs are mentally ret*d, but rather with the fact that other people assume that because some people with ASDs are mentally ret*d, only mentally ret*d people could be autistic.

Long before I knew I had it, my son was diagnosed as a toddler. I had to educate my relatives that yes, my son had AS/HFA, but no, he WASN'T like Rain Man!

Rain Man is the Autism stereotype.[i][u]

I believe his exact term is idiot savant, and I have no idea if it even falls under the Autism category.

I don't know if sinsboldly was referring to me, but I was the first one who brought up MR in this thread, and I meant it exactly like you perceived it.

I certainly wouldn't "throw people with MR under the bus". My job is working with people with MR, and hence I understand it quite well.

in social situations, people make general, casual, uninformed sounds in the shape of words.

that's pretty much most of socializing.


your response was absolutely perfect.

she wasn't talking about you, of of you, or mostly even *to* you (believe it or not), she was just saying some words that seemed right in response to a topic she knows nothing about.

and you did what any thinking person would do: moved on.


good job!