I moderated a facebook group for a while for parents, with a focus on autistic girls.

I had to leave that facebook group because of the transphobic statements made by parents.

I was called "too aggressive" from other mods when I responded to bigotry & told it wasn't bad.
The parents were essentially telling other parents that the autistic kid questioning their gender identity (which is what the post was about) that autistic children are "often just confused, especially autistic girls." So I responded to that.
Another parent said cis women are more important than nonbinary people and should be "able to be represented" (which just meant "we should be allowed to exclude trans and nonbinary people from conversations and assume people's genders). One even complained about puberty blockers.
I didn't want that kid in that post to be told that they were "just confused" and to not be taken seriously, which is the only reason I got involved with that post. There were several parents all saying that it could just be a phase, essentially.
And at the end of the day I was told I was being the unreasonable one for standing up for myself and other autistic trans/nonbinary kids. So I left. I worry about what is allowed in that group, what parents are saying to other parents of kids who are questioning their gender.
The point of this thread isn't to call out this group (it's been maybe a year since I left? Or more? I don't remember).

I'm seeing a lot of journalist requests for autistic women and I think they're just going to be about white cis autistic women like they always are.
Please don't tolerate transphobia from parents of autistic kids. Please start widening your idea of autistic people, and especially start including people of color in your conversations. Autism can't just be about white people anymore.

People need to see themselves in media.

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More from @AutSciPerson

4 Aug
I'm watching Pray Away on Netflix,

a new documentary on gay conversion therapy.

One of the most interesting things to me is how being gay was seen (even by gay people themselves) as a "behavior."

i.e. If you didn't "behave" in certain ways, you weren't gay.

1/
Being autistic is definitely still seen as a set of "behaviors." I think this is why even research perpetuates the myth that you can "grow out of autism,"

as if being "like neurotypicals," speaking, not stimming, and being compliant makes you "not autistic" anymore.

2/
Right after I typed that -

"I based being gay on my behavior, not my feelings. It was my behavior that made me gay, even though I still had feelings."
- person who used to be a leader that told people they could learn not to be gay
Read 14 tweets
3 Aug
Everytime there is a new screening checklist or questionnaire I will ask this question:

Did autistic people help make the criteria?

#AutisticCritics
This is a Checklist for toddlers, called the Q-CHAT.

You can find the whole checklist within this paper -

core.ac.uk/reader/1110493…
I'm going to type out the questions here, to show you how many people they are missing (and how pathologizing this is).

1. Does your child look at you when you call his/her name?
2. How easy is it for you to get eye contact with your child?
Read 12 tweets
3 Aug
Don't you know that all shapes have social and cognitive emotions,

It's like neurotypicals want to design experiments just to tell us we're "deficient" in whatever it is they decide. Apparently we should know that shapes have emotions and intentions just like humans! 1/2
I'm imagining if neurotypical people didn't find intentions and emotions in shapes, and autistic people did, we would still be found to be "deficient" and told we were "off in our own world" or something. 🙄 2/2
Okay this gets even worse.

They used parents of autistic kids as a control group?! (UA = unaffected)

"Although the UA may also have a genetic predisposition to ASD, unaffected, first-degree relatives have been observed to perform better on social cognition tasks" [cont]

3/
Read 6 tweets
2 Aug
In honor of an autism journal telling autistic people to shutup,

I'm going to share critiques of autism research I've written.

This is my favorite one, allistic researchers saying we are Too Generous and therefore have a Deficit -
neuroclastic.com/2020/11/07/aut…

1/5
This one is about how neurotypical people have terrible social skills too and are also bad at figuring out someone's emotion with facial expressions, research shows it -
neuroclastic.com/2019/05/14/aut…
2/5
Do you remember when some non-autistic researchers got a $5,000,000 grant to create robots to annoy autistic people and tell them what they're doing wrong, which was somehow supposed to help autistic people acquire employment?
neuroclastic.com/2020/10/06/5-m…
3/5
Read 5 tweets
2 Aug
I love how "measuring autism" using questionnaires from decades ago created by cis white neurotypical researchers, & created with cis white hetero boys who don't mask in mind..

is seen as objective. 😂

Do they know how bad the AQ is?
"I usually notice car number plates"

1/9
Here are a few other gems:
"I am fascinated by dates." (??)
"When I'm reading a story, I can easily imagine what the characters might look like." (HOW is this related?)
"I don't particularly enjoy reading fiction."
"I am not very good at remembering people's date of birth."

2/9
I bet you people have not updated these questions in their research with this questionnaire. I bet you people still use the old AQ.

And oh, look! Turns out they're not actually helpful!

Link here - embrace-autism.com/autism-spectru…

3/9 Outdated In 2017, the following items were proven unrepresen
Read 21 tweets
2 Aug
I'm on the burnout chapter of "Laziness Does Not Exist" and uh..

oh..

oh no..

"they had also begun to see their work as meaningless. A pervasive sense of dejection and apathy had descended upon their lives, sapping the joy from everything they did." - by .@drdevonprice
I have not fully processed just how terrible (traumatized?) I have felt in the past year about my PhD project.. Not processed at all..
My advisor: *sets literally impossible expectations that even other faculty tell me are actually impossible*

Me: If I just try hard enough, I think I can do it.. It has to be possible, right?

Me months later: ...
Read 4 tweets

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