THINKING PERSON'S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Autism news and resources: from autistic people, professionals, and parents
Why does the media keep letting parents of autistic kids exploit those kids’ most vulnerable moments? Autistic writer Sarah Kurchak talks to her mom Jane about why such stories aren’t parents’ tales to tell, and why Jane will never write about raising Sarah.
Kerima Çevik intersecteddisability.blogspot.com theautismwars.blogspot.com Kerima Çevik, photo courtesy the author [image: Gray haired Afro-Latina woman next to a windowshade, looking to the left.] [Content note: Contains descriptions of involuntary medical procedure, including sterilization, on Black and disabled people.] I am trying to plow my way through Judith Newman’s autism parenting book To Siri with Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines. It is slow, painful reading. How can I explain my serious ethical concerns about yet another bestselling autism book that capitalizes on presenting the experience of disability from a parent’s reduction of a disabled individual’s worth to how he makes his mother and those around them feel? I can tell you that Newman’s passage about looking forward to acquiring a medical power of attorney so she could involuntarily sterilize her autistic son Gus tainted the rest of the book for me. A vasectomy, she says. That…
Maxfield Sparrow unstrangemind.com [Content note: possible triggers include: forcible sterilization of minorities including Autistic people, forcible gynecological experimentation on minorities, Judge Rotenberg Center, electric shock, stereotypes about Autistics lacking empathy or a sense of humor, stereotypes about Autistics or Black people lacking the ability to feel pain, snakes and feeding live rodents, harmful Supreme Court verdicts, dehumanizing of Autists, getting drunk, preferring drunkenness to talking with Autistic children, humanizing the author of a grossly dehumanizing book.] Come mothers and fathers / Throughout the land And don’t criticize / What you can’t understand Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one / If you can’t lend your hand For the times they are a-changin’. -Bob Dylan [image: Book cover: A blue background with informal font white text reading, “To Siri With Love,” with a photo of a…