“I have no doubt that the individual researchers I have encountered are well-meaning and sincere in their desire to positively impact the world. However, there appears to be a total lack of awareness of current reproductive medicine practices’ bias against neurodivergent people, never mind the implications.”
Category: Autism
What if the headlines had read, “Autism doesn’t have to be a problem if children are understood and supported”?
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.
“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.”
I could only feel was what was missing. I couldn’t hear his voice. I couldn’t smell him near me. There were no more cuddles and no more hugs. That the sensory input of love and family that I had known every day since I born was no longer in my life.
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.
We need to highlight the plight of autistic people in Kenya, especially in rural areas where many autistic people are kept hidden and abused. It helps for information about autism in Kenya to appear in blogs and videos.
I truly do not know why some parents don’t want to listen to autistic adults. There is so much good autism information for parents from autistic adults, and so much of it is freely available, and yet the parents choose not to know.
All humans deserve to be able to do energy budgeting in ways that make sense for us, and I hope to see the day when support for autistic people toward this end is considered a matter of basic ethics and decency.
Autistic people generally have different social skills, not broken ones. Yet we see paper after paper saying our social skills are broken, and the research teams don’t even bother to mention all the new research showing it’s not true.