To this day it is often stated that autistics are ill, unsound. Is that true?
It is just as true or false as the assertion homosexuality or sinistrality to be unsound or ill. The term „unsound/ill“ is a cultural one, not one that´s fixed in nature.
In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) effaced homosexuality due to an enactment from the previous year off the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders code: DSM, the previous version DSM-II – not least owing to the scientific results of Evelyn Hooker. Until then homosexuality was considered to be a mental-health problem.
But apart from philosophic considerations everyone should be aware, that those classifications as well reflect society´s sway. Related to autism the term „unsound/ill“ is therefore without a doubt affected by hostility against the different (Xenophobia). Who marks autistics or autism as „unsound/ill“ discloses him/herself to be unsound oneself or at least unreflected, sotosay.
Homosexuals, like autistics today, have been alleged that they were less capable, a point of view that most would consider absurd today:
And 1935 he wrote in a letter to his mother, that even homosexuals – through analysis – can obtain „harmony, peace of mind an full capability“.[24]
ibidem
That what makes homosexuals fall ill isn´t their homosexuality but the social marginalisation. Nothing different applies to autistics either, essentially.
Something near it was aimed at women not too long ago, who weren´t considered ill but completely retarded:
In those days in Berlin reigns the Kaiser, in Paris the Eiffel Tower amazes, in London the tube causes quite a stir – and women have to wear tight dresses, must neither study nor work without permission of their husbands, nor have independent means, let alone vote. In the second half of the 19th century young girls are laced in menacing corsets and prepared for the sole purpose of their life: They were to be married off as advantageously as possible. They are considered weak and unable of intellectual achievement.
Thomas von Aquin, one of the most important philosophers, are amongst others accredited the following statements (we didn´t verify it so far!):
Woman is an error of nature […] a kind of maimed, botched man […] the highest consummation of humankind is only the man.
Girls sprout from faulty semen or clammy breezes