Behaving poorly or being “defiant” simply by stimming or being themselves
Diseased or sick
In need of ABA therapy
Unable to have a voice and speak for themeslves
Cold, callous, unempathetic robots/monsters
Like Sheldon Cooper
What Autism $peaks and TACA tells you they are!
Autistic people are:
Awesome, creative, interesting people
Diverse
Allowed to stim and act autistic in public without being judged
Good enough as they are
Able to have a voice and speak out against their oppression, whether that be with actual speech or sign language or AAC or the Internet
Able to be adults
Simply people with a different structured brain, that’s it
Human beings with thoughts and feelings
Living breating people who can SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES
Hella cute
Super brave for surviving in such an ableist world
Autistic People Don’t:
Want your pity
Need a cure
Need ABA therapy
Have to speak in order to be considered valid
Deserve the ableist way they are treated
Like Autism $peaks or TACA
Want to be all treated like children
Want to be invalidated and told they’re “not autistic enough”
Want to be called or treated like burdens by their own families
Need “rescuing” from their own neurotype
Autistic people do:
Need acceptance, not awareness
Want ableism to be recognised in society as a legitimate method of oppression
Need support and accessibility
Want to be respected and treated like people
Want to be heard
Autistic people are not silent monsters.
Listen to us.
edit: i’ve had some angry comments saying how they’re an autistic person who DOES want a cure. that’s valid and i’m sorry life put you in such an unaccepting situation where you want a cure. the thing is, if a cure was made, autistics would start being forced to take it.
“oh you want that job? get yourself cured!”
“non cured autistics aren’t allowed to come to this school”
“autism is a pre-existing condition so we won’t give you any accessibility/benefits. you can just get yourself cured”.
also Autism Mommies will start giving it to children with autism without their consent.
Having been forced to deal with them and organizations like them, I can safely say “No.”
It is obscenely worse.
You see, any idiot can look at things like “we need a cure” and their anti-vaccination advocacy and realize how ridiculously stupid that it.
But that’s not what they sell to children’s hospitals. Instead, they push extremely unconventional medications to “help” autistic children (usually by sedating them into a catatonic state). I mentioned earlier that Risperidol eases overstimulation, but Autism Speaks doesn’t like Risperidol because it’s not controlling enough.
Autism Speaks absolutely loves “treatments” and “counselling” based around controlling everything autistic children do. Stimming, self-coping mechanisms, even strange and oddball quirks like kids who wear gloves everywhere, all of these are taken from them and doled out as privileges. It’s all about turning anything an autistic child likes into something they can control.
They treat these children like fucking animals and really enjoy forced isolation as a punishment. The IWK has several “Secure Isolation Rooms” that they will place autistic children in their care into for hours at a time unsupervised when they start acting out. And not “having a meltdown and might accidentally hurt someone” kind of acting out, even just mouthing off or getting lippy with a nurse.
I am personally convinced that the whole “cure” motto is a sham, because studies into Autism long ago disproved the theory that it was something that needed curing. Autism Speaks behaves more like a eugenics organization. And they are slippery bastards about it too.
I’ve had the displeasure of having to interact with them directly because they have such a stranglehold on Nova Scotia’s youth mental health that any counseling group inevitably gets calls from them. Speaking to them and hearing the tone with which they spoke about these poor kids made my fucking skin crawl.
If you’re an autistic child and they’re talking to your parents or counselor about you, they won’t even use your name. The Child, The Patient, and The Boy/Girl are all common ways to refer to these kids. On several occasions they’ve referred to some kid as “it.”
I’ve said before that Tumblr especially doesn’t quit know what Autism Speaks is, and that’s because their public persona is very carefully crafted. Their reputation is so cartoonish that doctors who don’t know better won’t believe it, and so they swoop in with a lot of pretty language and faux-politeness. The skeezy, contemptuous way they behave when they think they’re doing business is enough to make you fucking vomit.
You quickly learn why so many hospitals willingly work with them. They are very good at getting their claws into health care organizations because they have this almost sinister “Friendliness” to them, and when you combine this with the fact that a lot of child psychologists have absolutely no concern for the actual well-being of children (just making the parents happy so they continue footing the bill) you have a recipe for a truly horrifying experience.
I can’t fully articulate just how sickening they are. Take however bad you THINK they are, multiply it by a hundred, and then think about how Quentin Tarantino would inflate that to make a movie out of it.
That’s how fucking gross and vile they really are when they think nobody is watching.
today a regular customer came into my store and told me she’d ‘finished candy crush’ and tbh i didnt think that was possible. i thought it just generated levels forever, but apparently it has 4000 odd levels and it took her 4 years to complete. she even emailed them asking when there would be more levels and they told her she could play their other games or replay the existing levels jklsdkflsdf
Anythinggoes12 