Thread by @ekverstania

Social skills include things like boundaries and consent. So why are ABA people involved in social skills training for vulnerable disabled children?

They say 'high functioning' people like me can't understand why 'low functioning' people need such 'therapies'. Here's what I understand: those therapies would be cruel even if imposed on me, so why would they be LESS cruel if imposed on a MORE disabled person?

The greater the support need, the less the mercy.

The more careful the listening required, the louder the powerpeople speak over the ones they claim to care about.

I am too autistic to understand their rationale, they say; but not autistic enough to understand those less disabled than I am, they also say; so they, who have sufficient distance to be objective (a rather odd rationale) think that they can understand both of us.

The reasoning has become irrelevant. These people don't make sense, and there's no point in going through the convolutions of logic to point out their fallacies, because to them our very logic is part of our pathology. This is just about one thing, really: power.

See, I chose to undistance myself from people who need a lot of support. I chose to listen to them. I chose to act on what they said they need. I chose to listen to MANY autistic people's experiences, and to learn about things I do not experience myself.

So here is where we are, now: professionals grasping at logical straws to defend their power.

I don't think they deserve a logical argument anymore, a carefully crafted academic treatise presenting the opposite view to what they have been saying about us for decades.

Those things are needed, but not for them. They are for us, because they are a celebration of our craft. @DrMBotha wrote a beautiful, painful essay, which will become part of our culture, like poetry, like exquisite music, like detailed sculpture.

They don't deserve that heart and mind wrenching into coherently organised expositions.

They disguise their blunt unbudgingness with a thin and shoddy vernier of justifications, going through the motions of "ethics" approval, all the usual bureaucracy, without soul.

The reason why they get the social media mob and the swearing and the irrationality is because they deserve no better. They don't honour anything better. It is no use investing in explanations to make them understand. They do not care. They will not relinquish power.

It's all about power.

There's a way to take that power back.

Can you see it?