@ASHAWeb Imagine that a family of faith believes in creationism. They have autistic children who are receiving services. Would it be ethical for practitioners to bully and defame that family for years, calling them "charlatans," "anti-science," and equating them with perverts?
Would you credential people who have encouraged groups of thousands of people to dogpile on those children? Who paint their families as "post modernist ideologues" and who wield their academic privilege to publicly shame them and call into question their sanity and intelligence?
Would you allow those people to be of major influence in your policies and procedures? What if they decided to run "dissemination" campaigns by employing extremist online trolls to promote their ideology?
But what if it was something that was much more tangible and observable than faith? What if it was a rigorous process to teach communication similar to most physical therapy and behaviorist approaches? What if it was based on neuroscience principles?
What if, despite some abuses and misapplications of the early iterations of those processes, the techniques had actually worked for a large number of people and had empowered them where other approaches had failed?
And what if those people had learned to type independently or hand-write eventually, so that their authorship could not be questioned-- but those behaviorists continued to discredit and bully them publicly?
And what if they generalized their fanaticism to the vast majority of the autistic community, and promoted wide-scale "dissemination" of propaganda to invalidate most autistic people as irrational and illogical and not worthy of being heard? Extremists?
And what if they regularly lauded how influential they were, like ivory tower bullies, touting their degrees and credentials, condescending to anyone who contradicted them? Would you empower those people to make decisions?
Like how in August of 2017, Jason Travers knew about insider ASHA policy making on RPM before any SLPs knew about it. He knew what the decision would be and who was involved in the decision before the decision was even made or announced. 
Jason Travers first entered my trajectory when he retweeted this comment of mine. He reduced me to a "blogger."Not only am I credentialed, but I'm autistic. I have a large team of respected scientists in various fields. I am experienced and credentialed in psychology & education.
I would soon learn that he is one of the few people who have terrorized my personal friends and people I love for many years... not just with his aggressive claims of "woo," but also personally. He is involved in the "Guerilla Skeptics" crew that edits Wikipedia.
He made this comment right before he responded to me, insulting the competence and credentials of a brilliant, educated, insightful Black woman who has been a career advocate. Her son is a Black nonspeaker directly impacted by Travers et al.
Even if she didn't have academic privilege, and even if she weren't a gifted writer, her voice as a mother, as a Black woman, and as a disabled woman should not be silenced by someone who constantly touts how he is one of the "top experts" from a "top school" in his field
He authors a lot of research about race and autism, but his antipathy towards autistic people of color, like Soma and Tito Mukhopadhyay, calls in to question his motives. Likewise, his inextricable affiliation with white supremacist Twitter trolls causes ethical concern.
My guess, though I can only make a logical inference, is that PBIS & PRT are easy to sell to urban school districts with high minority populations.
ABA is VERY effective at marketing, PR, & venture capitalism, but we autistics are generally averse to advertisements and coercion
ABA is VERY effective at marketing, PR, & venture capitalism, but we autistics are generally averse to advertisements and coercion
When I responded to one of his Tweets about my friend Tito Mukhopadhyay, he reported me for threatening suicide. This is a tactic used as an emergency bailout by Twitter trolls. It kicks the person off Twitter for a period of time-- unless they delete their reported Tweet.
That person has to either remove the reported Tweet or appeal it and wait up to three days. I chose to appeal.
Do you want to empower this person to encroach into other fields, like AAC and SLP, so that his anti-autistic attitudes and bullying can further entrench the human rights crisis in which he has further entrenched autistics, especially non-speaking autistics?
If anything I have posited seems to be too strongly-worded or biased, I will be happy to provide reams of evidence. I will continue these threads with other people whom ASHA will be empowering with new certs.
Perhaps you didn't know. There's time to do the right thing.
Perhaps you didn't know. There's time to do the right thing.
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