Thread by @ekverstania

Now that the musician Sia has revealed that she too is autistic, let's remind everyone of why her movie, Music, was a problem: it was NOT primarily because she hired a non-autistic actress, but because NONSPEAKING AUTISTIC PEOPLE were misrepresented. #ListenToNonspeakers

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1360724255906873344

This page, created by @Communica1st and its partners at the time, is full of resources about how best to represent nonspeaking autistic people in media.

communicationfirst.org/listen/

This counts more than ever.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1333458963128590338?t=ao9N1rCf7HR3J-RGTTj98A&s=19

Anyone want to point a finger? Are you sure you have enough fingers?

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1484284212421267466?t=f_apkwwDEvHD7m7v6UGkVA&s=19

There's a line from LISTEN (the award-winning short documentary made in response to MUSIC) that keeps coming up like a refrain.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1660545960370372609?t=BIftgNH2FFH2NnL_9moolw&s=19

So do you want to #ListenToNonspeakers now and do something eminently useful, like learn from them why they struggle to communicate, and what helps them—and do you wanna spread that news, so that the millions of other nonspeakers worldwide can be liberated from silence?

Or not?

You could start here. It'll take less than 5 minutes, and you may end up learning something that saves someone's life.

Which do you think is a better idea?

A. Autistic people who speak creating the characters and making up the plotline and the script and doing the casting for movies about nonspeaking autists, for a general audience; or

B. nonspeakers in control of that?

If you voted B, here's something for you to promote.
fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/theater-of-pos…

By the way... this is a common problem for nonspeaking autistic people too, because with apraxia, your body sometimes does exactly the opposite of what you intended. It can happen with vocalisations as well, where you say yes when you mean no.

https://twitter.com/Forgot_About_It/status/1664254042510356482

Nonspeaking autistic advocate Ido Kedar describes how this played out for him in ABA:

"My mind might be screaming, “Touch tree! Don’t touch house!” and I would watch, like a spectator, as my hand went to the card my hand, not my brain, wanted. And down in the data book it would be marked that I had not yet mastered the concept of tree."

Source: idoinautismland.com/?p=376

And this is why (with rare exceptions) you should NOT give binary choices to non-/minimally/unreliably speaking apraxic autistic people--not until they have mastered the movements needed for more complex communication.

Read that again. (You too, therapists--particularly you.)

More about this:

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1659337343898210305

If you saw Sia's movie MUSIC like I did, you wil recognise how vastly different the thoughts and concerns of that FICTIONAL character were from those of the REAL nonspeaking people quoted in this thread.

It's vital to #ListenToNonspeakers.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1649368767606972417?t=IQDZ-h3tLBH6Ju6fEwCctQ&s=19