Heather King’s column in the Oct. 31 issue (“The Place No Human Should Go”) was disrespectful of people who are neurodivergent or on the autism spectrum. First, she lists a number of disorders, life conditions, and problems that have nothing to do with autism and then promptly describes them as being “behaviors on ‘the spectrum.’ ” Then she writes: “‘Neurodivergent’: give me a break.”
To diminish other people’s struggles or pain, to assume such a mocking tone is uncalled for.
— Gisele Fontaine
The author’s response:
What I wrote was “Neurodivergent, give me a break. Who isn’t?”
Neurodiversity is not a medical term, condition or diagnosis, but rather a nonmedical term that arose around 2000 for those who have differences in the way their brain works.
In a
July 5, 2023 article in “The Guardian,” Judy Singer, widely accredited with inventing the concept, called it a political movement and opined that “as a word, ‘neurodiversity’ describes the whole of humanity”: my exact point in asking, “Who isn’t neurodiverse?”
With all that, my profound apologies if I conflated neurodiversity with autism (which is apparently a subset of neurodiversity), and special apologies if I sounded flippant or uncaring.
Far from being insensitive to the plight of those whose brains may work slightly or significantly different than the norm, I thought I made it clear that I included myself in that group.
The point in naming just a few possible deviations from the norm — the point in fact of the whole column — was to express my horror at the thought of trying to engineer such differences out of the human person. Assuming the science and technology existed, what if the powers-that-be started testing embryos for alcoholism — a disease that took out 20 years of my own life, for example — or homosexuality, or neurodivergence, and discarding the embryos that didn’t make the cut?
Obviously many feel we’d all be better off, but I cannot share that view. My work for the last 30 years has constellated around the theme of the light that shines in darkness, including the darkness of my own lifelong emotional, mental and spiritual struggles. I would not be the person I am without those struggles, and I certainly have never wished not to have been born.
That is not to celebrate suffering: not anyone else’s, not my own. It’s to share the deeply Catholic view expressed by the French intellectual Simone Weil: “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural cure for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.’ ”
— Heather King
