By Sinead Murphy at Brownstone dot org.

Mattel has launched Autistic Barbie. Because children with autism should be visible, including to themselves.

'Every child deserves to see themselves in Barbie.' So goes Mattel's blurb.

It is a theme of our times: being visible, seeing ourselves, coming-out into the light. Launched in the domain of what is called 'sexuality,' it is now a general possibility with multiple pathways.

And everything gives way before it. There can be no objection to coming out. It can only add to the supply of what is good.

It is a lie, destructive of health and happiness. Out is truth, and promoting of health and happiness.

But while we busy ourselves with one or other modes of coming out, we overlook the usefulness of coming out, not to us who do it but to those who seek to manage us who do it.

Because coming out implies a number of useful effects.

First. Coming out implies that there is something in, something that shrinks from the world, something there – not discerned by the senses or the sciences but divined by new-style experts appointed by fiat for the task.

These experts – psychologists, educationalists, therapists of various kinds – describe for us our modern soul, our 'identity.'

In doing so, they arrogate to themselves a power to invent characters for people that are allegedly defining but that do not necessarily manifest themselves at all. There is something there, though there is no sign of it. The more there is no sign of it, the more there it may be said to be.

Second. Coming out implies that there is an essential in-ness, an essential invisibility, about what is there. This can denigrate any or all visible evidence of a situation or condition – its possible causes as well as its symptoms – as inessential or beside the point, not linked to what is there with any necessity.

Third. Coming out implies that strategies that elicit what is there are neutral in themselves and acceptable in their outcomes, for they merely uncover a truth and uncovering a truth can only be true.

Fourth. Coming out implies that in whatever mode what is there ventures forth, with whatever attributes it roams abroad, it cannot be offensive or destructive but only healthy and right. The power to dismiss existing evidence of a condition is matched by the power to promote manufactured evidence of a condition.

As a device for the insertion and normalization of any number of effects, the conceit of coming out could not be more useful.

And Autistic Barbie is a case perfectly in point.

Autism in its true form comprises exclusion from the conditions for involvement in human life, as I have argued in What Autism Is and What Autism Is Not.

The US CDC reports that 1 in 31 American children now receives a diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder by the age of 8, an almost four-fold increase since the beginning of the century.

This epidemic of autism points to the poisoning of children on a scale heretofore unknown. And social and political strategies to address autism typically exacerbate its destructiveness, amplifying the most anti-human characteristics of autism under the aegis of its inclusion.

But laundering autism through the rigmarole of coming out neutralizes what is a crime against humanity – more than neutralizes the crime, it actually washes it in a kind of virtue.

First. As what must come out, autism is framed as something there, where its there-ness is prised away from the many ways in which autism is painfully evident to the senses and to the sciences, and made the province of pronouncements by experts in the fields of education, psychology, and various therapies.

Autism is thereby grafted onto the modern soul, with all the specialness, the truth, that that involves, transformed from a physical and social harm from which our children suffer to a divergent form of identity from which our society can only benefit.

In this regard, that Mattel's first autism-themed doll is Barbie and not Ken is significant. Autism is a co...