Autiebibliography Part II - Non-Autobiographical Works by Autistic Authors

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a list of books (ongoing as I discover more --- I'll probably never know if it's finished) written by autistic authors which are not autobiographical or explicitly about autism. It includes fiction, non-fiction about all sorts of subjects, poetry and drama.
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While I was compiling my list of autistic autobiographies, it occurred to me that I might have been inadvertently feeding one stereotype (autistic people have no imagination; autistic people can only write about themselves) while trying to demolish another (autistic people can't tell their own stories).

That thought, followed by this comment Erika Hammerschmidt left on the other post, wondering if there were (m)any autistic science-fiction writers, convinced me I should make a similar list of fiction, non-autobiographical, non-autism-related nonfiction, poetry that is not explicitly about being autistic, and plays by autistic writers.

Within the fiction category, fantasy and science fiction are both well-represented.

These books are a bit harder to track down, since writers who aren't writing about autism or being autistic don't have as much of a reason to broadcast their autistic status. There also aren't anywhere near as many, or as extensive, already-existing lists of non-autism-related books by autistic authors.

Accordingly, I can't be as certain that this list is anywhere near complete, and will probably be adding to it as I discover more autistic writers.

Fiction

Will Hadcroft, Anne Droyd and Century Lodge (2002; re-released by Jessica Kingsley Publishers in 2004); Anne Droyd and the House of Shadows (2008)

Coral Hull, Gangsters (2001); The City of Detroit Is Inside Me (2001); Work the Sex (2002)

David Mamet, The Village (1994); Passover (1995); The Old Religion (1997); Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources (2000)

Jane Meyerding, Everywhere House: A Mystery (1994)

Caiseal Mór, The Circle and the Cross - Book One of The Wanderers (1995); The Song of the Earth - Book Two of The Wanderers (1996); The Water of Life - Book Three of The Wanderers (1997); The Tilecutter's Penny (1998); The Harp at Midnight (1999); Carolan's Concerto (1999); The Meeting of the Waters - Book One of The Watchers (2000); The King of Sleep - Book Two of The Watchers (2001); The Raven Game - Book Three of The Watchers (2002); The Well of Yearning - Book One of the Wellspring series (2004); The Well of the Goddess - Book Two of the Wellspring series (2005); The Well of Many Blessings - Book Three of the Wellspring Series (2005); Lady of the Lamp (2007)

Franklin Newman, The Sorceress of Shandigore: Book 1 of the Knights of Callistor (2006); The Princess of Flourae: Book 2 of the Knights of Callistor (2008); The Abjurationess of Rex Terra: Book 3 of the Knights of Callistor (2009); The Prophetess of Bromfryel: Book 4 of the Knights of Callistor (2009)

Dawn Prince-Hughes, Adam (2001)

Will Rogers, The Stonking Steps: A Journey Through ING-ONG-UNG (2004)

Robert S. Sanders, Jr., Mission of the Galactic Salesman (1996); Mission Beyond the Ice Cave: Atlantis-Mexico-Zotola (1999); Heritage Findings from Atlantis (2000); Walking Between Worlds: A Novel of an American in Mexico (2001), written under the name Robert Alquzok; Galactic Salesman Trilogy Synopsis (2003)

Gilles Tréhin, Urville (2006)

Ryan Wilson, The Legendary Blobshocker (1999)

Non-Fiction

Temple Grandin, Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals (1998); Animal Welfare and Meat Science (1999); Livestock Handling and Transport (2000); Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005); Humane Livestock Handling: Understanding Livestock Behavior and Building Facilities for Healthier Animals (2008); Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (2009); Improving Animal Welfare: A Practical Approach (2010)

David Mamet, Chicago Performs: A Guide to Theatre and Dance (1977); Writing in Restaurants (1987); Some Freaks (1989); On Directing Film (1991); Make Believe Town: Essays and Remembrances (1996); True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (1997); Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (1998); On Acting (1999); Jafsie and John Henry: Essays (1999); Directions: South of the Northeast Kingdom (2002); The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews (2006); Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business (2007); Theatre (2010)

Jane Meyerding, We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (1984)

Caiseal Mór, Scratches in the Margin: Wisdom from the Celtic Tradition (1996); The Moon on the Lake: The Renaissance of the Celtic Spirit (1997); What Is Magic? How to Get What You Want without Losing Your Soul (2009)

Dawn Prince-Hughes, The Archetype of the Ape-Man: The Phenomenological Archaeology of a Relic Hominid Ancestor (2000); Gorillas Among Us: A Primate Ethnographer's Book of Days (2001)

Robert S. Sanders, Jr., Dr. Seat Belt: The Life of Robert S. Sanders, M.D.: Pioneer in Child Passenger Safety (2008)

Vernon L. Smith, Investment and Production: A Study in the Theory of the Capital-Using Enterprise (1961); Research in Experimental Economics (1982); Papers in Experimental Economics (1991); Bargaining and Market Behavior: Essays in Experimental Economics (2000); Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms (2008)

William Stillman and Jay Scarfone, The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History (1989, with John Fricke); The Wizard of Oz Collector's Treasury (1992, with Tim McGowan); The Wizard of Oz: The Film Classic Comes to Life with Sound and Stunning Three-Dimension (2000); The Wizardry of Oz: The Artistry and Magic of the 1939 MGM Classic - Revised and Expanded Edition (2004)

Mary Margaret Britton Yearwood, In Their Hearts: Inspirational Alzheimer's Stories (2003)

Poetry

Coral Hull, Broken Land (1997); How Do Detectives Make Love? (1998); Zoo (2000, with John Kinsella); Bestiary (2002)

Drama

Anemone Cerridwen, Jock the Unicorn; SARsquatch; True Confessions of an Alien Groupie; Farmer's Son; Susannah of the Mounties --- these are all screenplays, I don't *think* any have been made into movies yet, and I don't know when she wrote any of them. Some of them --- Jock the Unicorn and True Confessions of an Alien Groupie --- are being serialized on Anemone's film blog, Genius with a Parachute

David Mamet, Lakeboat (1970); The Duck Variations (1972); Lone Canoe (1972); Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974); Squirrels (1974); American Buffalo (1975); Reunion (1976); The Water Engine (1976); A Life in the Theatre (1977); Revenge of the Space Pandas (1978); The Woods (1979); The Blue Hour (1979); The Postman Always Rings Twice (screenplay, 1980); The Verdict (screenplay, 1981); Edmond (1982); The Frog Prince (1983); Glengarry Glen Ross (1984); The Shawl (1985); Vint (1986); The Untouchables (screenplay, 1986); We're No Angels (screenplay, 1987); Things Change (screenplay, 1987); Speed-the-Plow (1988); Bobby Gould in Hell (1989); Oleanna (1992); The Cryptogram (1995); The Old Neighborhood (1997); Boston Marriage (1999); Romance (2005); The Voysey Inheritance (2005); Faustus (2006); Keep Your Pantheon (2007); November (2007); The Vikings and Darwin (2008); Race (2009)

Autiebibliography!

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a list (as complete as I could make it) of every piece of autobiographical writing ever published in book form by an autistic writer. Lots of different types of writing are represented here --- poetry, essays, vignettes, long non-fiction works dealing with other subjects --- as long as they include significant autobiographical content.
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This is the full list of books I included in my chronology of autistic personal narratives. I compiled it in a series of steps: first, I went to Amazon.com and searched for autism memoirs --- using that website's search function, the related books that appear on every book's individual page, and user-generated lists of autistic autobiographies --- then Googled autism memoirs, and discovered several earlier attempts to catalog them --- this list at Everything2.com, this bibliography put together by Amanda Baggs for autistics.org, this list at neurodiversity.com, this list from the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, and this list put together by Donna G. Stevenson --- and finally I went to the websites of every autism-themed specialty publishing house I knew of --- Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Autism Asperger Publishing Company, Future Horizons and SAGE Publications's Lucky Duck imprint --- and paged through their entire inventories. This list includes every English-language title each of those steps yielded (Amanda Baggs's list includes some as-yet-untranslated works in other languages).

Wherever possible, I have included links to each title on its original publisher's website. (If I cannot determine who the original publisher was, I'll link to whichever publisher currently selling the book in question has the fullest description available. This may lead to a conflict between the publication date listed here vs. on the publisher's website).

The definition of "autistic autobiography" I used is accordingly pretty lax; I had thought to restrict it to prose accounts of individual autistic people's own lives, but that proved impractical. Some books blur genre lines, including poetry and short essays dealing with autobiographical themes, or treating general-nonfiction themes in a way that draws heavily on personal experience, as with Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation, which is ostensibly about animal behavior but also draws an extended analogy between its author's experiences and those of the animals she describes and claims to understand. There are also books that, while written and generally categorized as autobiography, contain just as much material about other subjects, like Dawn Prince-Hughes's Songs of the Gorilla Nation, which describes her life with autism and her time working with gorillas in a zoo, and her observations of those gorillas. There are also works that combine different people's perspectives, like Judy and Sean Barron's There's a Boy in Here, and Kamran Nazeer's Send In the Idiots, a collective autobiography of five autistic classmates including himself, and anthologies including lots of different kinds of pieces by lots of different people. There are also, especially among the older autiebiographies, books about which little information is given anywhere on the Internet except a title, author and date of publication. So, in the face of so many challenges to my rigid scheme of classification, I went for the most inclusive option.

The books:

Sean Barron and Judy Barron, There's a Boy In Here (1992)

Sean Barron and Temple Grandin, The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships^EX (2005)

Jen Birch, Congratulations! It's Asperger Syndrome (2003)

Lucy Blackman, Lucy's Story: Autism and Other Adventures (1999)

John Brine and Patricia Brine, Two-Stepping in a Waltz World (2000); It's the Only Dance I Know - Asperger's Syndrome: The Journey Continues (2006)

Sofie Koborg Brøsen, Do You Understand Me? My Life, My Thoughts, My Autism Spectrum Disorder (2006)

Andrew Brown, Autistic Shoes - Evolution of Behaviour (2007)

Michael John Carley, Asperger's From the Inside Out: A Supportive and Practical Guide for Anyone with Asperger's Syndrome (2008)

Eric Y. Chen, Mirror Mind: Penetrating Autism's Enigma (2005); Autism and Self-Improvement: My Journey to Accept Planet Earth (2007)

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, The Uncharted Path: My Journey with Late-Diagnosed Autism (2010)

Sharon P. Cowhey, Going Through the Motions: Coping with Autism (2005); Going Through the Motions: Coping with Autism 2 (2006)

Kate Noelle Downey and Martha Kate Downey, The People in a Girl's Life: How to Find Them, Better Understand Them and Keep Them (2002)

Dominique Dumortier, From Another Planet: Autism from Within (2004)

David Eastham, Understand: Fifty Memowriter Poems^P (1985)

David Eastham and Margaret Eastham, Silent Words: Forever Friends^P (1990)

Gay Eastoe, Asperger Syndrome: My Puzzle (2005); Asperger Syndrome: Reflections^P (2008)

Judy Endow, Making Lemonade: Hints for Autism's Helpers^{P, EX} (2006); Paper Words: Discovering and Living with My Autism^P (2009)

Jennifer Fan and Autumn Fan, Cinderella with Wrong Shoes: Poems by a young women with autism^P (2001)

Marc Fleisher, Making Sense of the Unfeasible: My Life Journey with Asperger Syndrome (2003); Survival Strategies for People on the Autism Spectrum^EX (2005)

Gunilla Gerland, A Real Person: Life on the Outside (1996); Finding Out about Asperger Syndrome, High-Functioning Autism and PDD^EX (1997)

Temple Grandin, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986); Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1995); Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior^OT (2004); The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's^EX (2008)

Temple Grandin and Kate Duffy, Developing Talents: Careers for Individuals with Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism^EX (2004)

Lincoln Grigsby, The Light Within^P (2001)

Will Hadcroft, The Feeling's Unmutual: Growing Up with Asperger Syndrome (Undiagnosed) (2004)

Alison Hale, My World Is Not Your World (1998)

Charles Martel Hale, Jr., and Mary Jane Gray Hale, I Had No Means to Shout! (1999)

Kenneth Hall, Asperger Syndrome, the Universe, and Everything (2000)

Erika Hammerschmidt, Born on the Wrong Planet (2004)

E. Antonio Hernández, No Duty to Retreat: The Stories of Tourette's Syndrome and Asperger's Autism^EX (2003)

Ppinder Hundal and Pauline Lukey, "now you know me think more": A Journey with Autism Using Facilitated Communication Techniques (2003)

Luke Jackson, Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome: A User Guide to Adolescence (2002); Crystalline Lifetime: Fragments of Asperger Syndrome^P (2006)

Nita Jackson, Standing Down Falling Up: Asperger's Syndrome from the Inside Out (2002)

Quinn Koeneman, Through My Eyes: A Life with Asperger's (2007); Marching Out of Time (2008)

Wendy Lawson, Life Behind Glass: A Personal Account of Autism Spectrum Disorder (2000); Understanding and Working with the Spectrum of Autism: An Insider's View^EX (2001); Build Your Own Life: A Self-Help Guide for Individuals with Asperger Syndrome^EX (2003); Sex, Sexuality and the Autism Spectrum^EX (2004); ASPoetry: Illustrated poems from an Aspie Life^P (2006); Friendships: The Aspie Way^EX (2006); Concepts of Normality: The Autistic and Typical Spectrum^EX (2008)

Grant Manier and Julie Coy-Manier, Dear Journal, I Have Autism (2006)

Nicky "Angel" Mann, And Wake Me with the Morning Light (2003)

Michal Maoz, The Alien in Me: Poetry By a Person with Asperger's Syndrome^P (2008)

Jason "J-Mac" McElwain, The Game of My Life: A True Story of Challenge, Triumph, and Growing Up Autistic (2008)

Thomas McKean, Soon Will Come the Light: A View from Inside the Autism Puzzle (1994); Light on the Horizon: A Deeper View from Inside the Autism Puzzle (1996)

Desmond Meldrum, Growing Up with Asperger Syndrome (1994); Coping with Asperger Syndrome (1997); The Asperger Experience (1999); The Alternative Personality (2001)

David Miedzianik, My Autobiography (1986); Now All I've Got Left Is Myself^P (1996); Taking the Load Off My Mind^P (1996)

Jean Kearns Miller, Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism^A (2003)
Chris Mitchell, Glass Half Empty, Glass Half Full: How Asperger's Syndrome Changed My Life (2005);Asperger Syndrome and Mindfulness: Taking Refuge in the Buddha^{EX, OT} (2008)

Caiseal Mór, A Blessing and a Curse: Autism and Me (2007)

Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, Beyond the Silence: My Life, the World and Autism^P (2000, released in the U.S. in 2003 as The Mind Tree: A Miraculous Child Breaks the Silence of Autism); The Gold of the Sunbeams, and Other Stories (2005); How Can I Talk if My Lips Don't Move? Inside My Autistic Mind (2008)

Kamran Nazeer, Send In the Idiots: Or, How We Grew to Understand the World^M (2006)

Krishna Narayanan, Wasted Talent: Musings of an Autistic (2003)

Krishna Narayanan and Jalaja Narayanan, Quest: Search for a Quality Life (2004)

Jerry Newport, Your Life Is Not a Label: A Guide to Living Fully with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome for Parents, Professionals and You!^EX (2001)

Jerry and Mary Newport, Autism-Asperger's and Sexuality: Puberty and Beyond^EX (2002); Mozart and the Whale - An Asperger's Love Story (2007)

Jasmine Lee O'Neill, Through the Eyes of Aliens: A Book about Autistic People (1998)

Michael J. O'Reilly, And Love Was All He Said: Growing Up Autistic^P (2001)

Thomas S. Page, Caught Between Two Worlds: My Autistic Dilemma (2003)

Tim Page, Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger's (2009)

Jessica Peers, Asparagus Dreams (2003)

Dawn Prince-Hughes, Aquamarine Blue 5: Personal Stories of College Students with Autism^A (2002); Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism (2004); Expecting Teryk: An Exceptional Path to Parenthood (2005)

Jeanette Purkis, Finding a Different Kind of Normal: Misadventures with Asperger Syndrome (2006)

Chammi Rajapatirana, The Vial^P (1999)

John Elder Robison, Look Me In the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (2007)

Adriana Rocha and Kristi Jorde, A Child of Eternity: An Extraordinary Young Girl's Message from the World Beyond (1995)

Craig Romkema, Embracing the Sky: Poems Beyond Disability^P (2002)

Therese M. Ronan, Therese: Living with Autism (2003)

Clare Sainsbury, Martian in the Playground: Understanding the Schoolchild with Asperger's Syndrome^{EX, M} (2000)

Robert S. Sanders, Jr., Overcoming Asperger's: Personal Experience and Insight (2002); On My Own Terms: My Journey with Asperger's (2004)

Jesse A. Saperstein, Atypical: Life with Asperger's in 20 1/3 Chapters (2010)

Edgar Schneider, Discovering My Autism: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (With Apologies to Cardinal Newman) (1999); Living the Good Life with Autism (2002)

Marc Segar, Coping: A Survival Guide for People with Asperger Syndrome^EX (1997)

Birger Sellin, I Don't Want to Be Inside Me Anymore: Messages from an Autistic Mind^P (1995); In Dark Hours I Find My Way: Messages from an Autistic Mind^P (1995) - both translated from the German Ich will kein inmich mehr sein, botschaften aus einem autistichen kerker (1993) by Anthea Bell

Stephen Shore, Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Asperger Syndrome (2001); Ask and Tell: Self-Advocacy and Disclosure for People on the Autism Spectrum^{A, EX} (2004)

Rich Shull, Autism, Pre Rain Man: Pre Rain Man Autism (2003)

Chris and Gisela Slater-Walker, An Asperger Marriage (2002)

Starfire M. L. Soledad, Spectrums: A Collection of Poems^P(2003)

William Stillman, Demystifying the Autistic Experience: A Humanistic Introduction for Parents, Caregivers and Educators^EX (2002); The Everything Parent's Guide to Children with Asperger's Syndrome: Help, Hope, and Guidance^EX (2004); Autism and the God Connection: Redefining the Autistic Experience Through Extraordinary Accounts of Spiritual Giftedness (2006); The Autism Answer Book^EX (2007); The Soul of Autism: Looking Beyond Labels to Unveil Spiritual Secrets of the Heart Savants (2008); Empowered Autism Parenting: Celebrating (and Defending) Your Child's Place in the World^EX (2009); The Autism Prophecies: How an Evolution of Healers and Intuitives Is Influencing Our Spiritual Future (2010)

David Strumfels, Wondering About: Curiosity, Imagination, and Science: A Personal Journal by an Unusual Mind^OT (2010)

Sophia Summers, Asperger's - If You Only Knew: A Family's Struggle with Asperger's Syndrome (2007)

Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (2007); Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind (2009)

Matthew Tinsley and Sarah Hendrickx, Asperger Syndrome and Alcohol: Drinking to Cope?^EX,OT (2008)

Liane Holliday Willey, Pretending to Be Normal: Living with Asperger's Syndrome (1999); Asperger Syndrome in the Family: Redefining Normal (2001)

Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic (1992); Somebody Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism (1993); Not Just Anything: A Collection of Thoughts on Paper^P (1995); Like Colour to the Blind: Soul Searching & Soul Finding (1996); Autism: An Inside-Out Approach^EX (1996); Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct^EX (1998); Exposure Anxiety: The Invisible Cage: An Exploration of Self-Protection Responses in the Autism Spectrum and Beyond^EX (2002); Everyday Heaven: Journeys Beyond the Stereotypes of Autism (2004); The Jumbled Jigsaw: An Insider's Approach to the Treatment of Autistic Spectrum 'Fruit Salads'^EX (2005)

Sondra Williams, Reflections of Self: Poems and Short Stories^P (2005)

Zosia Zaks, Life and Love: Positive Strategies for Autistic Adults (2006)

Annotations:
^P - poetry
^A - anthology
^M - incorporates the stories of multiple autistic people, even though it's written by just one author
^OT - mostly about topics other than autism, but includes enough of the author's personal experience that I'm counting it as autiebiography anyway
^EX - mostly expository writing about autism in general or one aspect of autistic experience in general, but incorporates the author's personal experiences

By the Numbers: Autiebiography and Gender

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: I did some research to try to identify every autobiography ever written by an autistic person, of which the first seems to be David Eastham's 1985 book of poetry Understand. I tabulated the number of autobiographies by male vs. female authors from 1985 to 2009 (see graphs below) and found that those numbers were very close to equal. There were slightly more books by male authors overall, and within every five-year interval within the period I looked at. The total number of books being written also increased dramatically in the early 2000s, peaking in 2003.
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Ever since I first started reading autobiographical works by other autistic people, I noticed that most of the books I saw fitting this description had been written by women.

While this was a bonus for me, being an autistic girl and mostly wanting to read about other girls, it did register as odd that so many of these chroniclers of their autistic childhoods should be female, when so many more men and boys than girls and women have diagnoses of autism, and when autism is so widely understood as a boy thing.

So now, with the help of Google and Amazon.com, I've decided to see if this preponderance of Lady Autism Writers really existed, or was an artifact of my choosing to read more women's stories.

As far as I can tell, every first-person narrative ever written (as of now) by an autistic person identifying themselves as such, is represented as a dot on this timeline:

(Red dots represent books written by female authors; blue dots are books written by male authors.)

You can see that, quite contrary to my initial belief, there isn't any such preponderance of autistic women's autobiographies at all! At every point along the timeline, there are either a) approximately equal numbers of books being written by men and by women, or b) slightly more being written by men.

Overall, too, slightly more are written by men, as this second graph shows:

You might argue that this is still an overrepresentation of female autistics, since there's only supposed to be one of us for every four male autistics, and I'd go along with that, although with the caveats that we're still not sure how much of the gender gap is due to diagnostic biases favoring men and boys, and that autistic autobiographies include the stories of people who were not diagnosed until middle age --- a group that probably has a male/female ratio closer to 1:1.

(Why should I have perceived an imbalance when none really existed? Well, part of the reason might be the selection bias I already mentioned, but Amanda Baggs names some other factors that might help to give lots of people this impression: books by male authors tend not to be as well known --- there's no male equivalent of Temple Grandin, for instance --- and to be self-published or published by very small and obscure publishing companies, and to go out of print. Amanda also mentions that most of the non-speaking authors are male; that may also contribute to the male authors' relative obscurity).

Justice Department Launches Investigation of JRC

Good news from Left Brain/Right Brain: In response to a letter of complaint written by disability advocate Nancy Weiss, who is co-director of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities and an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Delaware, and signed by thirty-one disability organizations (including Weiss's organization, the NLCDD, TASH, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, and the National Disability Rights Network, but not including the Autism Society of America, which Weiss says, was contacted but refused to sign), the U.S. Department of Justice says it's opened a "routine investigation" of the infamous Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts.

The investigation will seek to determine whether the JRC's practices violate Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against people because of their disabilities by any government agencies, nonprofit organizations, or private businesses that serve the public.

The initial letter of complaint that Nancy Weiss sent to the Justice Department (and also to the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Office on Disability within HHS, and to committees within both houses of the U.S. Congress whose areas of focus include education, and also to three international human-rights organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights) spoke of the electrical shocks meted out to students every day at the Judge Rotenberg Center in broad terms as human rights violations; the language specific to the Americans with Disabilities Act and nondiscrimination appeared later, after the Justice Department responded that it may not have jurisdiction to enforce human-rights laws in a private facility, since the relevant law --- the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act --- applies only state-run institutions.

The logic in making this a claim of discrimination goes as follows:

(Quoted from Nancy Weiss's letter to the co-signers and other supporters of her September 2009 letter of complaint).

I suggested to [the Department of Justice] that they consider jurisdiction under the ADA on the basis that people with disabilities are being treated in ways that are neither legal nor would be tolerated if applied to people who do not have disabilities ... .

There's no way of knowing how long the investigation will take, but I am enormously glad the federal authorities are at least looking into it. What goes on at that "school" is nightmarish, and no living thing ought to be subjected to such treatment.

In or Out? Using Spatial Metaphors to Describe Autism

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: People often use spatial metaphors to talk about autism. Ian Hacking, in his article "Autistic Autobiographies," points out that autistic autobiographies are often described (sometimes even in their own titles) as attempts to "go inside the mind" of their autistic authors. That expression compares "the autistic mind", which is usually considered interchangeable with the author's own mind, to an exotic foreign country rarely visited by outsiders. I would add a few other categories of spatial metaphor to Hacking's observation: first, autism (not "the autistic mind," but Autism itself, whatever the speaker imagines that to be) as foreign country; second, autism as fortress, prison cell or container --- the autistic person is "inside" while the world is kept "out" --- and third, autism as vast, uncrossable distance between people. I think all of these metaphors can be seen as outgrowths of a larger metaphor that linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss in their book Metaphors We Live By: that metaphor compares communication to sending physical objects from one person to another through physical space.
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I've noticed this trend for a while --- the trend of speaking and writing about autism like it's a place or a container that you can be inside or outside of --- and have long been planning to write about it, so I figure I might as well (start to) do that now.

The philosopher Ian Hacking mentioned this as well in the talk he gave at a 2008 conference on cognitive disability and moral philosophy, which has now been rewritten as an article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, on autistic autobiographies, parents' stories of raising their autistic children, works of fiction featuring autistic characters, and the media and journalistic commentary about all of these, and about autism in general.

My own list of autistic fictions has approximately 200 books, and counting. Especially important are the stories for children, some for autistic children, some for non-autistic children, and some for all children. They take great pains to describe behaviour and thereby serve as role models. The young adult category is also influential in determining what autism is like and in some sense should be like. They illustrate 'the norm' and thereby help stabilize what the norm should be. Detective stories, spy thrillers, science fiction, gothic horror and Harlequin romances all help to reinforce a way of talking about autism.

(The article, as it appears in print, is titled "Autistic autobiography"; in lecture format, it was called "How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism." I think the latter title is more accurate, since Hacking deals with conceptions of autism in non-autobiographical writing as well, even though he does spend lots of time on autistic autobiography and award it special significance).

The story-tellers learn from autobiographies how to tell their tales. But that is a two-way street. Temple Grandin's Emergence was written before the genre got underway, so her self-descriptions are unaffected. Today's autistic child, brought up on children's stories about autistic children, and who in later years goes on to write an autobiography, will give accounts that are textured by the early exposure to role models.

Hacking goes on to list examples of one particular metaphor that recurs throughout autism autobiographies, and especially in the text used to describe them: the back-cover snippets, the capsule summaries, reviewers' summation, etc. --- the expression of going 'inside' autism. Sometimes autism might be a container or vessel, with mysterious contents that are only now being revealed and made accessible to us, the readers; sometimes it's a place we can visit.

In his foreword to Grandin (2005) [link], Oliver Sacks wrote that her previous book, Emergence, was

Unprecedented because there had never before been an 'inside narrative' of autism; unthinkable because it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no 'inside,' no inner life, in the autistic. (Sacks, foreword in Grandin 2005, p. 11)

Even before we dip into these books, we find that word 'inside' over and over again --- on their covers. On the back cover of a current paperback of Grandin's (2005) Emergence:

A remarkable story ... uniquely valuable in helping us to see autism from the 'inside'.

A quotation from People magazine on a paperback of [Donna] Williams' Nobody Nowhere [link]:

By turns fascinating and harrowing ... a riveting autobiography that describes how autism feels like from the inside.

The subtitle of Mukhopadhyay's (2008) [link] is:

Inside my Autistic Mind.

The subtitle of the American edition of Tammet (2006) [link] is:

Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant.

'Inside autism', in such phrasings, tends to be used more or less interchangeably with 'inside [Individual Autistic Person]'s mind', which Hacking finds terribly problematic:

When 'inside' connotes written or spoken by a person with autism, and 'outside' connotes written or spoken by an observer, parent, clinician or friend, then the metaphor is benign. But it is also, once the point has been made, rather banal, and hardly worth the constant repetition we have encountered.

Aside from such benign uses, I am cautious about 'inside the mind', for reasons presented in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This is not the occasion to argue the case or even sketch what is at issue, but it does motivate my approach. It is certainly not a hankering after behaviourism.

A first danger of the 'inside' metaphor needs only be stated to be scotched. It is the idea of 'a unique insight into the autistic mind': as if 'the autistic mind' were a species of mind. Our four autists [Temple Grandin, Donna Williams, Daniel Tammet and Tito Mukhopadhyay] have very different minds! Grandin described herself as thinking in pictures. Mukhopadhyay is dominated by sounds. Tammet sees abstract objects in colour. Hence Williams' (2005) metaphor of autistic spectrum 'fruit salads'. To quote a common adage: 'If you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person.'

Talk of getting inside the mind of another is apt in its place, but unreflective use out of context often suggests a misleading picture of mental life. It suggests that looking inside is much like looking outside, in the way that looking inside a cardboard box after opening it is no different from looking at it from the outside, except for a change in point of view. This goes along with the sense that our own minds are transparent to us (subject to Freudian reservations). We look inside them all the time. That generates the question of how we ever know what is going on in the mind of another person.
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There can always arise particular difficulties in understanding another person. But the puff writers who talk of getting into the mind of an autistic person do not, for a moment, think that there is the same general question for most people, as there is for autists. I cannot recall an 'inside the mind' (or any variant thereof) being written on the cover of any non-autistic autobiography that I have examined lately. It could certainly occur, of course, with a biography. 'Finally we have got inside the inscrutable mind of Vladimir Putin.' But that is not the norm.

I have more to add to Hacking's cursory listing of examples of the 'inside autism' metaphor:

The subtitle of the anthology Women from Another Planet? is "Our Lives in the Universe of Autism".

The synopsis on the back of my copy of Judy and Sean Barron's There's a Boy In Here (Simon & Schuster, 1992; hardcover) says, "Autism From the Outside In... / ... And From the Inside Out"; on the front cover there's the text "A mother and her son tell the story of his emergence from autism." The jacket text of There's a Boy In Here is especially full of in/out metaphors:

[T]hough nothing seemed to work, [Sean's parents] sometimes caught fleeting glimpses of the helpless child inside the stranger who shared their home. They were determined to free him, and somehow their love, their rage, their patience, their sheer humanness reached him at last ... [H]e remembers ... the terrifying isolation, the desperate desire to reach out ... until his family's indomitable and courageous resolve finally released him. ... [T]he poignant self-portrait of a boy trapped in a maze of compulsion and obsession.

In Nobody Nowhere, Donna Williams talk about living in "[her] own world" as a child; she draws a distinction between her world and The World, which is outside her, around her and mutually exclusive with her world. In a poem that acts as an epigraph to the book, she writes of "a world under glass" where sensations are dulled, and you think nothing can reach you, but where you're utterly alone:

In a world under glass, you can watch the world pass,
And nobody can touch you, you think you are safe.
But the wind can blow cold, in the depths of your soul,
Where you think nothing can hurt you till it is too late.

The titles of a lot of books, too, reflect a spatial metaphor: There's a Boy In Here; Emergence; The Siege --- all of these rely on a metaphorical understanding of autism as something that people become trapped in and have to be rescued, or rescue themselves, by a heroic effort (their own, someone else's or both); autism is not only a place, it's a place that's very hard either to get into from outside or to get out once you're inside. Autism as Death Star.
A later edition of There's a Boy In Here has the subtitle "Emerging from the Bonds of Autism."

Finally, all the images I have included in this post appeared when I did a Google Image search for "autism" --- all were illustrations for (sometimes mis-)informational websites on autism. I chose ones that I felt reflected the metaphor in a visual way: metaphors are not just for verbal thinkers!

Particularly, I feel there are subspecies within this category of metaphor that are worth identifying more precisely. Right now, I can think of three:

(1) Autism as prison cell/container
(2) Autism as (very large) distance between people
(3) Autism as unknown territory

I would also date the usage of the parent metaphor to all three of these --- autism as a discrete part of physical space --- earlier than the earliest autiebiographies; there was writing about autism for some decades before Temple Grandin wrote her first book, Emergence. While this earlier writing may or may not have influenced her way of thinking about her autism, it had certainly been informing the larger culture into which her story has become assimilated.

Even the title she chose for this work partakes of the metaphor whose ancestry I'm trying to trace here --- what is she emerging from? Is it autism in general, or one particular aspect of it she had to transcend to come into herself?

(This latter possibility occurs in Dawn Prince-Hughes' much-later autiebiography, Songs of the Gorilla Nation, in which she describes herself moving within the metaphorical terrain of autism, from its dark regions into its "beauty." So that's another possibility for the autism-as-geography subtype of autism-as-place/container: movement occurring within "autism". It also raises the possibility that "autism" is not a flat, uniform piece of terrain, and that different autistic people might inhabit different parts of that vast country).

Anyway, before Grandin wrote her hugely influential works, there was already a body of literature on autism: books written for popular consumption by clinicians, and personal narratives by parents of autistic children, of which the oldest is (as far as I know) Clara Claiborne Park's 1967 book The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child. Both the title and subtitle suggest that Jessy Park's autism is a physical place to be ventured into; calling that process a "siege" implies that this hidden realm has walls that its besiegers have to breach, and defenses they have to overpower; that autism is not always an inert landscape -- however forbidding --- but sometimes actively resists exploration.

One thing the autism-as-container metaphor tends to leave muddled is where the autistic person dwells in this metaphorical space. It's quite eloquent on the position of the parents, peers and teachers struggling to relate to this strange being --- we're given to understand quite clearly that they feel locked out and exhausted from battering at the door --- but what's not always clear is whether the autistic person is in the metaphorical Fortress of Solitude, or whether they are it.

Judy and Sean Barron's 1992 book There's a Boy in Here makes it unusually clear: Sean is inside his autism, his thoughts, feelings, desires and self obscured from his mother's sight by his intense anger, his tantrums, his reckless, aggressive and often-destructive behaviors. But in other books, like The Siege (which I haven't read) or Bruno Bettelheim's mother-blaming opus The Empty Fortress (which I likewise haven't read), it's not clear whether the walls that the authors advocate tearing down imprison the child, or whether they constitute a part of hir, like a protective cocoon or exoskeleton. The act of trying to "break through" to an autistic child becomes a violent one if the latter construction is implied, but, for Bettelheim at least, it would be logically impossible --- a bad metaphor, to say the least --- for anything to be in the "empty fortress", so it looks to me like the only way to interpret that one is that the autistic child's mind is the fortress, and Bettelheim was trying to tear it down and rebuild it to his liking.

Sometimes autism might be spoken of metaphorically as distance; I listed this as a third subtype of the autism-as-place metaphor, since in this case autism is not where the autistic person is so much as it the space between the autistic person and everyone around hir who isn't autistic, but now that I think about it more I've decided it functions more or less identically to the autism-as-container subtype. In both, autism is the barrier between the autistic person and the people seeking to understand or relate to hir; in both, the barrier must be overcome.

The autism-as-distance and autism-as-container subtypes of the autism-as-place metaphor also seem to me to be related to the larger, implicit metaphor described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By: the "complex metaphor" of communication as sending bits of meaning packaged in language along a conduit to another person. If communication is thought of as analogous to sending things through space, it makes sense that anything that makes communication harder (like a difference in neurotypes between sender and receiver) will be translated into this metaphor as a physical barrier.

More Proposed DSM Revisions

Besides the unification of all the autism-spectrum conditions under a single, simplified definition (which I generally consider a Good Thing, despite the reservations I mentioned in my earlier post; this post of Amanda Forest Vivian's captures what I think is good about it quite well) and the elimination of Rett's Disorder from the DSM entirely, the DSM-V revisions include lots of other interesting ideas.

These include:

- Adding Binge Eating Disorder to the Eating Disorders category

- Eliminating amenorrhea (loss of one's mentrual period) from the criteria for Anorexia Nervosa, which would finally allow men who meet all of the remaining criteria to be diagnosed with full-blown anorexia rather than with the vague, often-minimizing label Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified

- Adding a childhood mood disorder called Temper Dysregulation with Dysphoria, which would be characterized by irritability and frequent temper tantrums; this disorder is meant as an alternative diagnosis for many of the children who are (or would be) now diagnosed with bipolar disorder

- Consolidating the personality disorders into five broad, yet-to-be-determined categories

- Adding "Hypersexual Disorder" and Paraphilic Coercive Disorder (in which the person is turned on by the idea of raping another person) to the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders category

- Expansion of the DSM-IV's Substance-Related Disorders category (which included substance dependence and abuse) to a broader Addiction and Related Disorders category, which will include non-chemical, "behavioral" addictions like gambling; Internet addiction was considered for inclusion in this category, too, but ultimately discarded

Some of these proposed changes --- the two eating-disorder changes I mentioned, as well as the decision to remove some problematic wording from the criteria for anorexia, for instance --- are unadulterated Good Things, and were very much needed. (I'd actually argue, along with Rachel and her commenters, that the reforms to the anorexia criteria didn't go far enough; that BMI should not be the gauge of severity of anorexia because it misses those people who might be restricting their eating and obsessing about food, weight and body image just as severely as someone with diagnosable Severe Anorexia, but who, due to individual metabolic variation, never become underweight.) Others, like the addition of Temper Dysregulation with Dysphoria as a new childhood disorder, the concept of "risk syndromes" for psychosis and dementia, are a mixed bag. They might be helpful, or they might result in more people being marginalized, losing autonomy and/or being pressured to take powerful antipsychotic medications for illnesses that, in the case of the risk syndromes, aren't even present and may never be.

Also in the mixed-bag category is the DSM-V's formulation of Gender Identity Disorder (renamed Gender Incongruence, in an attempt to be less stigmatizing), which it splits into two main categories, one for children and one for adolescents and adults. Good things about the new criteria include the aforementioned move toward value-neutral language, its acknowledgement that sex and gender, even for transgendered people, aren't always binary (there's a long history of doctors "gatekeeping" sexual reassignment surgery, hormone therapy and other medical procedures associated with transition, restricting these things to those trans people who conformed most rigidly to the conventional role of their chosen gender) and its stress on whatever the individual trans person wants as the desired outcome. What's not as good is the retention of the notion of autogynephilia --- sexual fetish as motivation for transition --- in the category of Transvestic Fetishism, and the presence of stricter, gender-binary-enforcing language in the criteria for pediatric Gender Incongruence.

Finally, the creation of Hypersexuality as a new sexual disorder strikes me as colossally wrongheaded. Like sexual addiction --- which is not recognized in the DSM-IV, but which has gained popular acceptance in the addiction-recovery community --- this category would be inherently biased against people with unconventional sexualities: kinky people, swingers, polyamorists, even, depending on how conservative a community the person being evaluated comes from, gay and bisexual people. I also disapprove of the existence of this category for the same reason I disapprove of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: merely wanting/having sex to a greater or lesser degree than most people do isn't pathology, it's variation.

DSM-V Draft Posted Online

The American Psychiatric Association has posted its proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on its website, where specific disorders are grouped by category.

Here are the (current, subject to further revision) proposed criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder in the DSM-V:

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Must meet criteria 1, 2 and 3:

1. Clinically significant, persistent deficits in social communication and interactions, as manifest by all of the following:

a. Marked deficits in nonverbal and verbal communication used for social interaction;
b. Lack of social reciprocity;
c. Failure to develop and maintain peer relationships appropriate to developmental level.

2. Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least TWO of the following:

a. Stereotyped motor or verbal behaviors, or unusual sensory behaviors
b. Excessive adherence to routined and ritualized patterns of behavior
c. Restricted, fixated interests

3. Symptoms must be present in early childhood (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities).

This category includes everyone who, under current DSM-IV guidelines, would be diagnosed with Autistic Disorder, Asperger's Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. Rett's Disorder is also included in the DSM-IV section on pervasive developmental disorders, but is slated for removal from the DSM-V:

Rett's Disorder patients often have autistic symptoms for only a brief period during early childhood, so inclusion in the autism spectrum is not appropriate for most individuals.

Like other disorders in the DSM, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is defined by specific sets of behaviors and not by etiology (at present) so inclusion of a specific etiologic entity, such as Rett's Disorder, is inappropriate. To ensure that etiology is indicated, where known, clinicians will be encouraged to utilize the specifier: "Associated with Known Medical Disorder or Genetic Condition." In this way, it will be possible to indicate that a child with ASD has Fragile X syndrome, Tuberous Sclerosis, 22q deletion, etc.

This strikes me as reasonable; autistic-like behaviors that are part of a wider, underlying syndrome should be recognized as part of that syndrome, rather than considered or treated in isolation. Michelle Dawson, noting that "the vast majority of named neurodevelopmental disabilities do not appear in the DSM, past, present, or future", suggests that autism doesn't belong there, either.

Back to the revised criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder: I noticed that there are now two, rather than three, symptom domains --- communication and social interaction have been merged into one category, leaving a "social communication and interactions" domain and a "restricted interests/repetitive behaviors" domain. The criteria seem to be vaguer, more flexible versions of the earlier autism criteria, which, as Shiva has written about recently, dwell excessively on social and communication impairments while ignoring other areas of difference that are just as important, if not more so, in the lives of individual autistics:

IMO, the existing "triad of impairments" [which the UK's National Autistic Society defines, somewhat differently from the APA's DSM-IV, as "difficulty with social communication," "difficulty with social interaction," and "difficulty with social imagination"], even with the additional "related characteristics" [of, among other things, "sensory sensitivity," "special interests," and "love of routines"] ... fails at defining autism both by inaccuracy in what it does contain and by failing to include what many autistic people consistently report as among the most significant components of what distinguishes us from neurotypical people.

Michelle Dawson criticizes this reductiveness, too, although her criticism deals more with the DSM-V workgroup failing to incorporate any understanding of autism as a separate cognitive phenotype, rather than one fundamentally equivalent to the standard, neurotypical cognitive phenotype, but missing some very important social and communicative bits.

I don't think, nor does much of the research on autistic cognition and perception suggest, that anything like that is the case.

A Popular Mis-Conception

This post of Urocyon's, about zoologists who can't seem to stop describing animal behavior in terms that reflect the values and norms of one particular human culture*, reminded me of the chapter in Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography about the ovum and how its role in reproduction is commonly (and wrongly) understood in terms of traditional Western conceptions of gender: Man acts, Woman is acted upon; Man creates, Woman nurtures, etc.
One of the more obvious, and literal, examples of applying this gendered binary to human reproductive biology is the understanding of conception shown in Book I of Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals:

That, then, the female does not contribute semen to generation, but does contribute something, and that this is the matter of the catamenia [menstrual blood?], or that which is analogous to it in bloodless animals, is clear from what has been said [earlier in the passage], and also from a general and abstract survey of the question. For there must needs be that which generates and that from which it generates; even if these be one, still they must be distinct in form and their essence must be different; and in those animals that have these powers separate in two sexes the body and nature of the active and the passive sex must also differ. If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male would not be semen but material for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, for the catamenia have in their nature an affinity to the primitive matter.
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[W]henever one thing is made from two of which one is active and the other passive, the active agent does not exist in that which is made; and, still more generally, the same applies when one thing moves and another is moved; the moving thing does not exist in that which is moved. But the female, as female, is passive, and the male, as male, is active, and the principle of the movement comes from him. Therefore, if we take the highest genera under which they each fall, the one being active and motive and the other passive and moved, that one thing which is produced comes from them only in the sense in which a bed comes into being from the carpenter and the wood, or in which a ball comes into being from the wax and the form.

This understanding dominated biology from the days of ancient Greece until the 18th century; some early biologists, like Nicolaas Hartsoeker, took this idea of sperm-as-seed/womb-as-flowerpot to its logical extreme of thinking there was a tiny person already fully-formed inside the sperm cell! (Hartsoeker is the one who drew the cute little sketch shown near the top of this post. There's even a little star inside its tiny head, which I'm guessing represents a soul).

Even once the actual mechanics of fertilization became known, and people realized that women's ova also contain genetic material**, there was still a tendency to describe the male and female gametes' roles in Aristotelian terms of passive, receptive egg and moving, active sperm. The sperm are said to compete against each other to reach the egg, thereby ensuring that the hardiest, best one goes on to develop into an embryo.

The truth is actually more complicated, and involves more of an interplay between egg and sperm.

I don't currently have Angier's book on hand --- my partner, a sometime anatomy teacher and amateur sex educator, is borrowing it --- but I do have my developmental-biology textbook from college, Scott F. Gilbert's Developmental Biology, Seventh Edition. It ought to include everything Angier mentioned, and probably more, too.

Anyway, four processes that occur in the egg stick out to me as giving the lie to the notion of the female gamete as an inert substrate, awaiting the action of the "winning" male gamete:

1) In order to find the egg at all, sperm depend on signaling molecules secreted by the egg, which allow the sperm to track where the signals are coming from and adjust their trajectories accordingly.

2) Sperm undergo a chemical transformation called capacitation once they've been in the uterus for a while, without which they're unable to pass through the cumulus, or layer of ovarian follicular cells associated with the egg. During capacitation, the sperm cell membrane changes composition: uterine proteins remove cholesterol, and some of the proteins and carbohydrates embedded in the sperm cell membrane are also stripped away. The membrane also hyperpolarizes (i.e., the difference in net electrical charge between opposite sides of the membrane becomes bigger), which somehow triggers a cascade of protein phosphorylations (which, as I've mentioned before, can either activate or inhibit a protein) which ultimately allows the sperm to recognize, bind to and fuse with the egg.

3) For the sperm to be able to release its genetic material into the egg, a protein in the egg's zona pellucida, or thick outer coating of glycoproteins, has to bind to the sperm and initiate a process called the acrosome reaction, which is a signaling cascade involving G proteins (I've written about them before, too) and a mass influx of calcium ions, set off by surface proteins on both sperm and zona pellucida weaving together, and which results in the release of the protein-digesting enzymes contained in the acrosomal vesicle. These enzymes bore a tunnel through the zona pellucida that allows the sperm to reach the egg cell membrane.

4) Once a given sperm cell has fused membranes with the egg, another chemical reaction takes place, modifying zona-pellucida proteins so that they can no longer bind to any additional sperm-cell surface proteins. This causes the swarm of sperm cells that has gathered around the zona pellucida to lose their grip on it and disperse before any more of them can deposit genetic material inside the egg.

So, the egg guides the sperm toward it, draws it in as it approaches, triggers the acrosomal reaction that allows the sperm to penetrate the dense zona pellucida, and, once that sperm has fused with the egg and deposited its genetic material inside it, it prevents any others from doing likewise.

"Material for the semen to work upon," indeed!

*Have a guess as to which one. No prize if you said "white Christian Anglo-American capitalist patriarchy," sorry!

**The egg actually contributes a bit more DNA to the eventual embryo than the sperm does, for two reasons: 1) sperm cells can have either an X or a (much smaller) Y chromosome, while the egg always has an X; and 2) sperm cells are super-streamlined, containing only a nucleus and a sac of cell-membrane-dissolving chemicals called an acrosomal vesicle within their cell bodies, while the egg has a normally-sized and -populated cytoplasm, which includes mitochondria, which have their own vestigial genomes. (Sperm have mitochondria, too, but they're associated with the flagellum and do not enter the egg during fertilization).

In Which A Quaint American Folkway Is Alluded To

He saw his shadow! Woohoo!

(Announcement and photo courtesy of National Geographic Daily News website).