James Damore displayed a surprising lack of judgement and common sense in sharing and promoting his opinions in the way that he did. If he has a formal diagnosis of autism and his employers were aware of that diagnosis then IMO he would have a strong case that accommodations were not made for his "disability".
Unfortunately, according the article, he
hadn't made Google aware of his diagnosis, so he hasn't a leg to stand on there.
Of course, autisic people are at a big disadvantage in the workplace, and often lose their jobs for
behaving like autistic people,
not because they have a dx of autism . It's not the
label that pisses people off. Undiagnosed spazzes have all the same problems that diagnosed spazzes do...with knobs on, because without the dx, other people see no reason to make allowances.
Might be a good reason for going all-out to get a dx? and yet I've heard teachers and others advise that it 's better not to stick a label on a person. just as if they actually believe that the label is the main cause of prejudice. I n Britain it's getting ever -harder to get diagnosed under the NHS (Yeah, mostly because mental health is drastically underfunded, but "ooh . he might face prejudice if we label him" will do as an excuse) and,. of course. impossible to pay for a private dx, if you're unemployed (as most autitic people are)
So anti-discrimination legislation fails to address the problem in most cases. And t's the wrong tool for the job anyway. Discrimination against autistic people isn't usually based on some prejudice against the target grioup as such , just the tendency to write us off as "asshats" in the absence of any kind of obvious disabilty. If some genetically "black" person looked white, passed for white and kept their heritage secret, but then suddenly accused their white employers of racism against them , would we take that seriously? of course we wouldn't. We're in a closely analogous position.
I think that whenever we do take advabntage of anti-discrimination legislation, we're feeding that misconception that the label is the real problem, bercause that
does effectively assume that the label is the problem .
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe wider tolerance for socially inept asshats is the only thing that could realistically address the problem? Because
that's the thing that peopl;e actually see and react against, not the "autism" pigeonhole.
For my own ,part I would love to see more tolerance for socially inept asshats. And not just because they're probably autistic, but also because they're nowhere near as harmful , IMO, than the kind of people who hide their real opinions , and will happily spout any glib BS that will serve get them liked and/or promoted.
Anyway, WTF are we doing on this board if not tolerating a bunch of socially inept asshats? Hmm? I couldn't help noticing that the guy would totally fit in here
Heck, he might actually
be one of us, for all we know.