1-3v9i7lwakxnckqdqb8fsmq-8743516

The Stories We Don’t Tell: My Mom On Raising An Autistic Child And Why She’ll Never Write About Me

Sarah Kurchak and her Mother Jane Kurchak  [image: Cheerfully geeky selfie of the author, a white Canadian woman wearing glasses and also goggles on top of her head; and her mother, a white woman also wearing glasses plus a pinstriped blue collared shirt, tie, and white jacket.] Sarah Kurchak www.riskyfuel.com When I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my career, I offer to ghostwrite a memoir for my mom. It’s a slightly bitter, semi-serious joke. I’m mostly taking a shot at the fact that the memoirs that non-autistic parents write about raising their autistic children have a much better shot at getting published and selling than anything that I, as an autistic person, could ever hope to write about autism. But there’s also a little part of me that just wants that payday. (I can’t extend this offer to my dad, because he’s a fellow autist and no one seems particularly interested in…

fb_img_1516656592463-8941307

#AutisticWhileBlack: To Siri With Love’s Shallow, Dangerous Take on Forced Sterilization

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…

51bobqwyctl-_sx329_bo1204203200_-7879282

Why To Siri With Love Is a Wrecking Ball of a Book

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…