well there were lots of places where these things were actively embraced, iirc there were some quite significant muslim places where they fully recognized a third gender and even considered people belonging to it somewhat holy.

people in villages to a large extent just accepted queer people as their own category and moved on. They were tangentially aware of some people doing some unusual stuff on the sidelines, but unless it were shoved in their face they didn't really care afaik

Sailling the ND seas...

I would argue that psychiatry and psychology does not make this claim. if anything modern psychiatry and psychology along with autism foundations led the push to educate early childhood development associated caretakers, eg pediatricians, elementary and preschool teachers, etc for signs to look for and led to development and revision of specific screening tools throughout the 1990s that started to greatly increase the number of cases that diagnosed early on when they would’ve otherwise would’ve been considered “socially awkward” and ostracized for much of their lives without any support offered at all

Granted there are certainly professionals that reject this now. The field is diverse and you certainly have varying opinions on things. And one weird phenomenon no one saw coming is that in this day and age staunchly conservative viewpoints would be disproportionately platformed. So sometimes those dumb shitheads get a huge platform because when they soapbox on social media saying “too many kids are getting diagnosed with autism” there are forces behind that realize they can be a useful idiot to legitimize awful views, like limiting health care spending (more people diagnosed with autism means insurance companies spend more) or anti vaccination nonsense (autism always attracts the loonies). And a bit of fame will often easily go to their heads, especially if it means they can now make a decent clip of money from speaking engagements and selling books.

But remember those people don’t define the field. They are a sore on the field. The Jordan Petersons and Lisa Littmans are scum that are propped up by a propaganda network and powerful forces. They are outnumbered. That’s why their research keeps getting retracted (or in petersons case why he simply sticks to podcasts and hasn’t authored a paper since 2007), because there are more people with ethics and integrity that will call them out. At least for now, until our institutions surrounding social science are fully dismantled

People of the land https://youtu.be/hYTQ7__NNDI

There are bad-faith actors trying to convince people that autism is "caused" by vaccines and similar garbage. They see the growing autistic population as a "woke epidemic"