Ira Eidle is the curator of the of Autistic Archive, an online resource that responds to “a need for better preservation of information related to the Autistic Community and Neurodiversity Movement’s history.”
Category: Autistic
At a time when there remains widespread confusion about autism and cannabis and developmental disability, it is imperative that responsible platforms make a more serious effort to educate the public and to more regularly share valid, up-to-date information.
As an autistic person, I decided to watch “As We See It” to see how autistic people are represented. After watching the whole season, I concluded that “As We See It” should be called “As Non-autistic Caregivers See It.”
Pro tip: it’s fine to want to understand your autistic friends’ sensory and accommodations issues, etc., but please don’t frame it as a “Gotcha.”
Disabled people deserve access to the supports they need, whether due to autism or to co-occurring conditions. Just as squares are not more quadrilateral than trapezoids—they are all four-sided shapes–there is no such thing as “profound autism.”
For a person with heightened sensory sensitivity, clothing and accessories can make or break an entire day out; here are suggestions for clothes, accessories, and miscellaneous accoutrements that might work.
Jordyn Zimmerman’s story, as told in the new documentary This Is Not About Me, is an example of how non-speaking autistic people can blossom when communication becomes possible.
“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.