Thread by @ekverstania

For many years, powerpeople have blabbed about 'evidence-based (early) intervention for autism'.

If you don't know what they're on about, you'd think it seems sound and sensible. After all, who'd want to do something for which there's little or no evidence of success?

But...

There's something foundational missing from a lot of these 'evidence-based interventions for autism':

A rights-based approach to autistic people.

I've had people (including #ActuallyAutistic people who studied the evidence deeply) argue with me about the neutrality of science, saying science is unbiased and doesn't favour a particular outcome, saying even undeclared conflicts of interest among the researchers don't matter.

So... what if there was research about, say,...

'Evidence-based interventions for homosexuality'

...and the researchers were hypothetically sponsored by the governments of...

...Chechnya and Ghana?

Science is science, isn't it?

People's beliefs, values, goals and allegiances shape what they study and how they frame their research questions, and even how they design their studies.

These factors determine whose input or influence they will permit at any of the stages of their work, and the lengths to which they will go to accommodate these inputs.

Is your work with disabled people rights-based?

One of the most perplexing arguments I've heard (it's not even an outlier argument, from what I can tell) is that interventions which force disabled people to accommodate nondisabled people's prejudices are rights-based, because disabled people have a right to fit into society.

A term that's popular in these arguments is 'real world', as in, "We need to prepare them for the real world."

This morning a video appeared on my Facebook timeline, part of the algorithm to keep me hooked on social media. It was a complication of the Miss Universe winners over the decades, morphing into one another.

As I watched to see when the first Black winners would appear, I thought about a certain passenger who sat next to me on a plane about ten years ago, on the way to Malawi.

These days, beauty contestants are supposed to promote charity work, and I learned that the Miss Malawi contest was being used to drive awareness of the need for prison reform in Malawi.

The woman who sat next to me told me that her father had been a politician. As a result of some political goings-on, he was accused of something and imprisoned for some time.

Although he was eventually released, the conditions he experienced in prison had harmed him to such an extent that he didn't live very long.

I want to tell you what some of these conditions were, because this is the 'real world'.

But first, a deep breath. I'll be back later to continue this story.

Meanwhile, here's an irrelevant plant, with variegated leaves, from our garden. (This is also the 'real world'.)