Please, avoid this deceptively heartwarming tale. It mostly only models how to make questionable choices as a parent of an autistic child, and that can only hurt autistic children.
Author: Shannon Des Roches Rosa
“The way we diagnose kids overwhelmingly leads to Black and Latino kids getting diagnosed with behavioral disorders instead of autism. It also excludes a lot of women and femme people, to say nothing of transgender males and nonbinary people. We also ignore a lot of people for whom English is a second language.”
For the most part, autistic people and our families do not want funds to be used on genetic research, and would prefer them to be used to focus on services and societal interventions that can impact the wellbeing, quality of life, and mental health of autistic people across the lifespan.
[image: Neurodiversity flag at Toronto City Hall, April 2019. Photo by Anne Lesserknaus.] Anne Borden King twitter.com/againstcures twitter.com/a4aontario a4aontario.com In the summer of 2017, five of us launched an autistic-led advocacy organization in Canada, called Autistics for Autistics (A4A). Our mission was to fight for the rights of autistics to have safe childhoods, communication rights, inclusive schools, trauma-free housing, fair employment, accessible health care and community equality. We centred both children and elders in our work, following the UK model. We took a grassroots approach, eschewing hierarchies in favour of a multifaceted strategy, working to make as much change as we could. What we lacked in funding, resources, and relationships, we’ve made up for in vision and persistence. In one of our first meetings with a Member of Parliament, she told us that our group “should just represent the autistic adults,” and leave the matter of children’s rights to Ontario’s…
Cover of the book We Move Together [image: Book cover with an orange background. An illustration of the lower halves of five folks is at the top: A yellow guide dog, a person with brown skin using a cane, a person with brown skin standing with their hand on their hip, a person with white skin and crossed ankles standing with their hand on their hip, and a person with brown skin using a wheelchair.] Review by Kate Ryan We Move Together is a new picture book by a diverse team of authors (Kelly Fritsch, Anne McGuire, and Eduardo Trejos) who have come together to write a love letter to the disability community. It is, in a word, fantastic. It is empowering, it is interesting, it is understandable, it is relevant—I could go on all day about how much I love this book. Unfortunately, as I discovered to my dismay, it…
M. Kelter theinvisiblestrings.com CN: Physical abuse A few months ago, I was contacted by an autism support organization in Tanzania, and asked to follow their upcoming public events on social media. The group is called the Living Together Autistic Foundation (Li-TAFO) and created these events as a way to share autism education and reduce stigma in communities that otherwise have little to no resources available. As these efforts began to unfold, it was clear from their Instagram page that audiences, initially small, were growing into much larger crowds. To better understand the purpose of these events and their potential impact, I communicated via email with Li-TAFO’s creator, Shangwe Isaac Mgaya, who is currently endeavoring to create an autism center in her area that would be the first of its kind. Photo © Li-TAFO. [image: Photo of a group of Tanzanian adults and children, in front of a LI-TAFO banner.] M: On…
Photo © Shannon Des Roches Rosa [image: Orange and purple flowers among green leaves.] Cal Montgomery montgomerycal.wordpress.com twitter.com/Cal__Montgomery For Mel Baggs and Phil Smith, who knew, and know, communion with the wild places better than I can imagine. Do you remember how you learned to communicate? If you communicate pretty typically, odds are it wasn’t perfect, but it included something like: you reached out socially, and people reached back. You looked at them; they gazed adoringly back at you. You smiled; they smiled back and waved. “Hi, Baby! Hi! Oh, what a beautiful face!” You laughed; they reveled in your chortles and giggles and were silly in the hope that you would laugh again. You cried; they held you and comforted you and tried to figure out what was making you miserable. You called out at night; they pulled themselves out of exhausted slumber, scooped you up, and blearily cuddled…
“Elon Musk oveseeing the construction of Gigafactory” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0[image: Elon Musk, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a reflective chartreuse safety vest.] Sarah Kapit twitter.com/SarahKapit Elon Musk announced to the world that he’s autistic on Saturday Night Live. Some people have claimed that this represents a noticeable step forward for autistic people in public life. But I’m not celebrating. My interest here isn’t to rehash all of the reasons why Musk is an obnoxious public figure who has done damaging things to his employees and the world at large—although I hold this opinion. Other people have already written about the litany of his misdeeds. Instead, I want to consider Musk’s shortcomings in the specific context of autism and disability politics. First, Musk did not describe himself as an autistic person. He said he had “Asperger’s,” which is a term that is rooted in ableism. In the U.S., “Asperger’s” is…
“For too long autistic children have been just taught what they should do to fit in a neurotypical mold, instead of being taught who they are as autistic people, and who neurotypical people are as a neurotypical people, and how to appreciate both, and build translations between the two.”
Photo © Emma Dalmayne [image: Emma Dalmayne, a woman with brown skin and dark hair wearing a nose ring and a blue sundress, looking into the camera.] by Emma Dalymayne twitter.com/EDalmayne They say to autistics: Make eye contact Look at me How am I meant to know you can hear me if you don’t look at me? Not like that Not like that! Ok you’re staring now… Why are you staring? That’s inappropriate eye contact! Stop staring you look like a freak. They say to autistics: Talk to me You are rude when you don’t answer Can’t you talk? No I’m not looking at your text on the screen you need to learn to talk! Stop talking so much! I’ve heard about this Janice it’s called “info dumping” So rude. They say to autistics: Express yourself No stop moving like that it’s weird! Why are you rocking? You look…