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: Neurodiversity
Those who would deny people access to their most effective method of communication because of concerns about the potential for false accusations should, as Rua Williams recently wrote, “ask [themselves] why a false accusation is more harmful than the ability to accuse.”
Disabled people deserve access to the supports they need, whether due to autism or to co-occurring conditions. But squares are not more quadrilateral than trapezoids. There is no such thing as “profound autism.”
Our senior editor Shannon Rosa was invited to participate in the 2021 UC Davis Neurodiversity Summit, on a panel debating the role of the Neurodiversity Movement in supporting and including autistic people with intellectual and communication disabilities.
It’s not okay to dismiss one autistic person’s lived experience as having nothing to do with “real” autism simply because you don’t understand what autism is like for them.
From its inception, not only did the neurodiversity movement’s values include the most significantly disabled, but those individuals themselves were among our earliest pioneers.
This is a mini-guide for parents to think about autistic matters and perspectives they may not know about, and which may help them and their kids live the Best Lives Possible.
As an autistic, the impression I was left with after reading Steve Silberman’s book NeuroTribes was one of enormous relief. The book not only avoids the usual pitfalls of fear-mongering and stigmatizing language that surround the topic of autism, but actually explains the origins of those pitfalls