Thread by @erikaheidewald

i know people are really trying to change Autism Awareness Month to Autism Acceptance Month but honestly, i don’t love it bc it still feels negative to me. it’s setting the bar too low. it’s like Put Up with Us Month. we’re fucking cool as hell, i want Autism Pride Month

accept me?? this isn’t neurotypicals’ world to accept me into or not. don’t accept me, appreciate me or get out of my way

people have suggested Autistic Pride Month, Autism Appreciation Month, Autistic Liberation Month, Autism Celebration Month, and Autistic Empowerment Month. i like the energy of all of these & i think it comes down to what will catch on best. @Imani_Barbarin do you have thoughts?

This started as a random tweet but I think the discussion it’s sparked is really important. It may feel crass but this is marketing. This is how we get our message out. Having a month that boldly asserts our identity is how we make people notice us & that we speak for ourselves

It’s important for our community too, of course. We are fucking amazing. We should get to feel that and to talk about it. We’re not deficient versions of neurotypicals, we are our own thing. We’ve spent our whole lives trying to fit in, be more socially acceptable, more tolerable

We can’t shrink ourselves down for others’ comfort anymore. We deserve so much more than to be tolerated or accepted. This is our world, too. They don’t own it. Accepting us isn’t optional, we are here and we aren’t going anywhere. We deserve to be fucking free.

Some people are uncomfortable with asserting ourselves loudly bc they feel like that’s asking for too much when we aren’t there yet but reasonable compromise doesn’t end in freedom and it is *not* how neurotypicals operate. We can’t negotiate ourselves down from the outset.

What we see as being reasonable and thoughtful, neurotypicals see as being weak and easy to crush. They will never give us anything we don’t make them give us. They’re competitive and they don’t respect people who don’t stand up for themselves. We have to be impossible to ignore.

Neurotypicals have conditioned us to seek their approval, to appease them, to make their oppression of us easier on them. If you are tempted to believe this conditioning, I urge you to remember that neurotypicals train autistic children like dogs. They trained you, too.

How did Autism Speaks get so powerful? Money and marketing. Advertising and lobbying. We don’t have the money but social media is leveling that playing field and we have to get better at messaging. We’re telling the truth and fighting for our lives. That has power. We can win.

The Autism Industrial Complex is fighting for power & profit. They will kill for those, they do all the time. We are fighting for our survival. The stakes are higher for us. We care more. This is bigger for us. Their pursuits are soulless. We can work harder than them, we have to

Autistic people tend to be pretty bad at advocating for ourselves but we are such a force when we advocate for justice. Think about the autistic kids being abused in ABA. How do you want them to feel about themselves? What message should we send them about our community?

Autistic people are expected to dislike ourselves and feel inferior. Loving ourselves, feeling pride in our identity - that is the most radical political act we can do. That is the message NTs cannot ignore because it is so shocking to them. This is how we change things.

We have so many social justice and civil rights movements we can learn from. Think about the messages that changed the world. Black Lives Are Also Important? Gay Tolerance? NO. We have to stop apologizing for our existence. We deserve to be here. We should be proud of ourselves.

Some people felt that Autistic Pride is appropriating Pride from the LGBT community and I don’t agree. Pride is exactly what we need and most autistic people aren’t cishet. We’re like 75% LGBT. NTs conditioned us to worry about appropriating disability and queerness to erase us.

That said, I can’t speak for all queer autistic people & I don’t think it has to be pride but Autistic Pride & Autistic Liberation are my favorites - I find them the most powerful. We need the pride to get to the liberation. I’m not a marketing genius though, I’m just loud online

Regardless of what the community settles on as our alternative, I think we do need to keep using the #AutismAwareness hashtag bc we need to drown out the oppressors who try to speak over us. They shouldnt be able to get a word out without us refuting it & advocating for ourselves

We’ve been polite and agreeable for a long time and they’ve used that time to get a stranglehold on our identity, our lives, our future. Respectability politics loses every time. This whole time NTs were fighting a war against us we didn’t know we were in. But now we do.

Approval from neurotypicals means they’re happy because they’re winning and them winning means abuse, oppression, eugenics, and genocide for us. Us winning means we get to survive and so do they. You don’t have to hate them, just don’t let them kill us. Start playing to win.