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Field Notes From an Inbox: Four Years of Autistic-Led Advocacy in Canada

[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…

Autism Parents, Self-Advocates, and Shared Concerns

Shannon Des Roches Rosa Let me tell you something that may or may not surprise you: When it comes to public discussions about autism, parent and professional voices tend to dominate, and autistic voices tend to be excluded. While that dynamic is changing, primarily due to autistic advocates’ refusal to be sidelined in stories about their own community, and in part through the many communities that encourage parents to discover, listen to, and respect the experiences of those who have lived autistic lives — autistic voices too often still get dismissed, ignored, or outright disrespected. I’m not begrudging parents of autistic kids the right to tell their own stories from parent perspectives, obviously, being that I’m one of those parents myself. But I do find it unsettling when parent stories mention autistic perspectives only to belittle or reject them, as Anne Spence did recently in her otherwise thoughtful story When…