Thread by @ekverstania

Childhood isn't only about preparing for adulthood, you officious ableist fools. And if the child is disabled, even preparing for adulthood should mean preparing to live effectively as a disabled adult, not learning to fake being non-disabled.

If you feel inspired to make a career in the autism industry, why aren't you #AskingAutistics about the many unmet needs? Why enter the fray of abusive therapists all vying to fan and cash in on parents' ableist fears?

Imagine you ran a therapy centre for women, and all your glowing testimonials and endorsements were from husbands, brothers, fathers and sons.

No actual women.

But your therapy is advertised as being 'evidence-based'.

What's wrong with this picture?

In fact, let's make a concession:

930 positive testimonials from men on social media,
2 positive testimonials from women,
70 negative testimonials from men, and
900 negative testimonials from women.

Plus, FORMAL research done by men shows that this therapy is good for women!

Look at those numbers. The majority of people who expressed an opinion said the therapy is good, and so did the formal research. Great, eh?

OK, so money is not your primary motivation for choosing this career? You want to "help" people? Check your emotional privilege: what do you like about "helping"? The gratitude and recognition that comes from an ableist society for your tireless work with "those" children?

Or maybe you LIKE children and you have strong ideas about what's good for them. And in your zeal, you believe that children "like that" who grow up and are still "like that" are the ones who sadly didn't get converted, so you ignore their heathen objections to what you do.

"Shut up, you unfixed, unconverted, misguided lost cause, this is not about you, it's about the children. You don't have empathy, so you couldn't possibly be motivated by concern for them. Since you can type, you must be wealthy and self-sufficient. Go be a compliant role model."

"Oh, you're nonspeaking and need help going to the toilet? Sorry, I don't buy that. Nonspeaking people never type their own words. There are empty-headed bodies that type 'independently' based on telepathic signals. You must be one of those. Actual typing is pseudoscience."

Listen to yourselves. Where is the evidence for profoundly impaired people with intellectual disabilities responding to remote signals and pressing the exact keys on a keyboard to form coherent sentences with correctly spelled words? Is this an actual thing? How does it work?

But sure, keep telling yourself how your convoluted hypothesis of nonspeaking autistics typing is more scientifically plausible than the idea of apraxic autistics with no cognitive impairment being able to type for themselves thanks to purposeful motor skills development.