On Writing Neurodivergent Characters
I had poured so much of myself into my protagonist. When my agent called my character childish, naive, and vulnerable, I couldn’t help but feel she was calling me childish, naive, and vulnerable.
Neurodiversity
We Need to Talk About Aspie Supremacists
Over-valuing certain abilities means looking down on people who don’t share them. Aspie supremacy is the ideology that follows from taking this to an extreme: ‘aspies’ have extraordinary powers which not only make their existence worthwhile, but make them better than other people.
Autism in Fiction: Reviewing A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll
Reading A Kind of Spark, I felt a part of myself represented and explained on the page that I’d never seen anywhere else before. I feel so much for Addie, the 12-year-old autistic main character: How she puts herself in the historical stories of witches, and how the injustice of their history upsets her, while others seem detached.
The Autistic Archive: New Project Documents 30 Years of Our Community’s History
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.”
Believing in Nonspeakers and the Right to Communicate: An Interview With Dr. Vikram Jaswal
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.”
Circular Reasoning and The Question of “Profound” Quadrilaterality
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.”
UC Davis Neurodiversity Summit 2021: Debate on the Neurodiversity Movement, with Shannon Rosa and Matthew Belmonte
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.
Why Elon Musk Being Autistic Isn’t That Great For Autistic People
My message to Elon Musk is this: If you want to be enthusiastically welcomed into the autistic community, act like a member of our community. Familiarize yourself with the issues facing less privileged members of our community, and pass the mic over to them. And, for goodness’ sake, stop promoting sci-fi solutions to our problems.
Autism: A Vision for a More Equitable Future
“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.”
Countering Neurodiversity Misinformation on KPCC’s Air Talk
Neurodiversity is incredibly inclusive, and as the parent of a high-support autistic teen, I think neurodiversity is MORE important for people like him—to have other people recognize his value as a human.