Thread by @ekverstania

With appropriate therapy, most nonspeaking autistic people would be able to communicate using words. Depending on the extent of the disability, their ultimate mode(s) of communication could include pointing to a letterboard, typing, signing, partial speech, and other means.

So why DON'T most nonspeaking autistic people communicate in clear sentences like the one you're reading right now? I'm going to tell you one of the main reasons, and it's horrible.

In a country like the US, it's not because of lack of funding.

The government already funds therapy for autistic children.

There are schools.

There are even therapists who come to your home.

If you don't want them to, the court may order it anyway. neuroclastic.com/2019/07/03/mot…

The reason why most nonspeaking autistic people don't have access to the therapies that would help them within a system that has money to pay, is because autistic people, both speaking and nonspeaking are silenced.

For years, there have been speaking and nonspeaking autistic people trying to create awareness of what nonspeakers say helps them. Existing programmes for autistic people with high support needs could have been transformed according to these insights.

But powerful parents and professionals decided that disabled people are too disgusting and damaged to be consulted on these matters, and only the ones who flattered their mediocrity would be allowed to speak words of vague inspiration.

And so autistic people, desperate to avoid abuse and to prevent the abuse of others and to be heard so that others could be saved, started screaming and going silent and screaming and going mad, and self-harming, and having meltdowns, and going silent, and stimming, and breaking.

And they more desperate they became to stop the silencing and the abuse and the silencing and the bleach, the silencing and the ABA, the silencing and the gaslighting, the discrediting, the seclusion, the more desperate they became, the more the powerful experts knew:

"These people are so damaged. We were obviously right to patronise and silence and gaslight such ranting miscreants. But we'll call them 'people with autism' rather than 'autistics' just to remind ourselves that they are people first. (Just not human enough to listen to.)"

So, nearly two decades of life after the Wright family founded their various organisations and led their brave parent armies to silence autistic people, these parents have "discovered" that there's therapy out there by which nonspeaking autistic people can communicate.

What a freaking miracle.

Knowing his father's power to change lives, the nonspeaking son of such a silencer then urged his father to write a book about how their lives were revolutionised through a means of communication that helped him push through his motor planning problems.

And suddenly now, now after all these years, all the people who silenced autistic people for all these years are calling it a breakthrough, and guess who's the hero?

Make no mistake, this is big news and it's good news.

But good grief, where's the apology for driving us to self-harm, where's the apology for silencing nonspeaking and speaking people all these years, where's the apology for cascading the institutional entrenchment of ABA?

Where's the apology for pushing parents into such desperate fear that they would feed their children BLEACH?

Yes, that has not stopped, actually. There are still thousands of people out there on nearly every continent, bleaching their children, because you cascaded that.

You enabled that and you CONTINUE TO ENABLE THAT THROUGH YOUR NETWORK OF ALLIES.

And people are still children dying of preventable diseases because you told them that vaccines would turn the chikdren into Horrible Beasts Like Us. You made us into the bogeyman. You did that. You and your friends did that.

You think you're listening now, but you're not listening. You're listening selectively.

When you needed editorial reviewers for your book, you chose the people whose names carry weight in the silencing-and-abuse industry. And hey, that's not a bad strategy, maybe; it really drives the message, and this IS an important message.

And you were clever: the therapists who had grave but unspoken misgivings about your autism cure rhetoric and your ideas about vaccines, you made sure that you praised them to the skies, because who would be so impolite as to raise concerns with someone who's this nice to them?

Here's what you managed to achieve, by your lack of engagement with the community you harmed for so many years: those of us who wanted to say, "This is GREAT, but can we please talk about the trail of damage and abuse too, now that you're listening?" are STILL being silenced.

And I am being repeatedly accused of being against...

...wait for it...

...access to communication for nonspeaking autistic people.

THAT is how they're twisting it now. That is what communication therapists with whom I have collaborated for YEARS have decided my motivation is.

I had repeatedly stated BEFORE they made this accusation that I completely agree with taking on any client, regardless of what their parents may have done. Never withhold communication access from a nonspeaking autistic person.

I don't even hate the guy who has cascaded so much harm. What I see is someone who has some basic decency and is on a path of change and growth.

Or, he was.

But we can't coddle this.

We have to speak about the hard stuff too, because it needs to go all the way.

When a Nazi has a change of heart and becomes a supporter of marginalised people, and writes a book, whaddyagonnado, say ooh it's great, while he brings half-Nazis who haven't renounced their crimes into the fold as endorsers of his work?

That's a metaphor, by the way.

We have to be able to say, this change is great, but we have to be able to also talk about the years of silencing and the ongoing abuse, BECAUSE OTHERWISE WE BRING ABUSE CULTURE AND SILENCING INTO AN INDUSTRY WHICH IS ALL ABOUT SPEAKING THE TRUTH. tania.co.za/to-the-communi…

So I'm now faced with bemused parents and therapists saying things like, "I haven't heard of Generation Rescue. Who are they?" and, "Are you sure he's connected to Kerri Rivera? He just seems to have attended a conference where she's a speaker."

And I sigh and my words dry up. It's like all these years of history, the under-cover investigations to expose the abuse, done by volunteers, all these years of being hated for being too high functioning or too low functioning to ask people to stop their ableism, all that...

...we now have to prove to our ALLIES that it actually happened. Do a PowerPoint. Pull up records of communication with the police, FDA, gardai, investigative journalists. Prove that when people are lambasted as vaccine-damaged deranged crazies, it kinda hurts, actually.

Let me give you an example of what the fearmongering and the not-listening to autistic people, and the incessant focus on vaccines leads to.

In 2014 an autism-focused doctor found that a man was bleaching his autistic kid to cure autism and said if he doesn't stop, the child could get cancer.

He walked out with the parting words, "Better cancer than autism."

And the doctor did not report him as it is her duty to do.

That is where your rhetoric leads, JB, and you may not have meant for this to happen, but if you are now on a path of change, you really need to own this part of the change too.

Because we autistic people can't fix what you created.

We tried.

They don't listen to us, you saw to it.

So the abuse continues, and it's in YOUR power to say to your followers, the thousands you don't even know, but who have followed your movement: stand back.

And then:

Listen to as many autistic people as possible. Not just the few in your circle now.

If you and your friends had done this ten years ago, you would have encountered nonspeaking activists, and your children would not have gone through ABA.

Many of those children (and people now adults) could have started communication many years earlier if you'd listened to Amy Sequenzia and Larry Bissonette, Mel Baggs, Tito Mukhopadhyay and others.

The mainstream narrative is: "Listen to all the parents and experts, and if you reeeaaally feel you must listen to actual people with autism, then there's Temple Grandin, Raun Kaufman and Stephen Shore for you."

And that's where it stops.

https://twitter.com/GinaGHarrison73/status/1375297827786661894?s=19

In case there is any doubt about this:

I am VERY glad that Jamison Handley has access to S2C.

I was VERY impressed with the 1-hour interview with his father, about all he has learned and how life has changed. (I rate it 96% -- loses 4% for not quite understanding meltdowns.)

I am VERY glad that as a result of this one family's epiphany, others will get communication access for their children too.

I agree with JB's take on the autism industrial complex. I have used very similar words myself. tania.co.za/global-autism-…

But if you won't have a conversation with me because you can't handle the meltdown risk and the way I manage that, then I can't talk to you. And the therapists who kinda see my point ARE DEAD SCARED to deal with this, and that's why we're not having this conversation.

There are people (non-autistic ones) who say, "You don't start a conversation by saying, 'Hey, I've been fighting your friends for, like, 10 years, but I look forward to a path together,' because then people don't wanna talk.

Really?

Because what I heard is that when you're having a war and you want to have a ceasefire and discuss things, you call a meeting, and you don't pretend you're not from the opposite camp and that the war never happened! What kind of bizarre illogical people would do that?

Oh yes, I remember: people who pathologise honesty.

Now let me assure you that I am capable of lying if I must. Under-cover investigations require of me to pretend to be some sockpuppet persona.

But why would I want to lie when I am trying to establish common ground and a basis for some semblance of TRUST?

Glyphosate? When I found out how it's used in harvesting, I was glad I'm wheat-free.

Vaccines? A few friends had adverse reactions. Bad ones.

Big Pharma is dishonest? Certainly. J&J and Risperdal are the tip of the iceberg.

But...

NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE ON OUR PRIORITY LIST.

In all the years you were chasing the scapegoats for your ableism, you could have instead been learning from #ActuallyAutistic people.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1231945790593130497?s=19