… Yeah, I see how you could take that away from it. Thanks for explaining.
There are treatments for specific issues associated with autism (e.g. ADHD medication, noise-filtering headphones, AAC tools), but autism is a form of human polymorphism. Like allism and situs inversus, it's a developmental condition, so any research programmes with the capacity to "cure" autism are eugenics research programmes. That's a literal description, not a normative one.
Your desire to avoid suffering is independent of this fact. It's a very much understandable desire, and almost universal among humans. If you make the distinction clear, then well-meaning people won't attack you for expressing that desire. (This has nothing to do with eugenics.) Queer and autistic communities are usually quite big about the right to self-modify.
If you face exclusion or opposition even when it's clear you're talking about your desire to have something available for yourself, and not advocating for a particular approach to be taken (within the context of our sociopolitical environment), I would like to be made aware – ideally with details –, because that's the sort of thing I care about putting a stop to.
Fwiw, I am very, very sad that modern humans cannot be trusted with eugenics. I would like it if that option were available to you. You are not wrong for wanting it. But in the world we currently live in, it's not worth it.
Depends. Cool cyborg eyes, better glasses, cataract surgery, retinal detachment surgery, etc. are not eugenics, so they're fine to advocate for. Heritable genetic modification, embryo selection, sterilisation campaigns etc. are eugenics, and advocating for them will do more harm than good.
Visual impairment isn't, afaik, something the eugenics bad guys are focusing on at the moment – though it was in the past – so they're not likely to twist research into the sorts of things that get bowdlerised out of history textbooks. (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5225285/ exists, but there's no organisation seeking legal permission to electrocute non-compliant blind children.*) So even if you keep it vague, advocating for "curing" blindness is unlikely to be seen as, or act as, advocating for eugenics; likewise, research into the developmental origins of (say) congenital cataracts is mostly safe.
Eugenics is when you take measures that improve the overall fitness of the human population. In other words, eugenics is when you decide which kinds of people should and shouldn't exist.
There are people with skin so fair that it burns in even moderate sunlight – even through clothing –, leading to an increased incidence of melanoma. This is associated with the Asp294His polymorphism in the MC1R gene. This would be very easy to "cure"… and I really wish, as a species, we had the capacity to say "hey, option's available to anyone who wants it, but we won't force it on anyone". But if we had that technology today, you know it would be used in some tired plan for ethnic cleansing, where the cruelty is the point and the costs don't matter. Every time we have some scientific (or cultural) advance that can be construed as legitimising such actions, people attempt it.
And maybe we'll grow past that.
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*: since they've come up in the thread before, I feel obliged to note: Autism Speaks' PR machine is, surprisingly enough, on the right side of this particular child torture issue.
