#ActuallyAutistic #WalkInRed
WHY AUTISM SPEAKS IS BAD
No reasonable person would dare suggest that an organization comprised entirely of men represents women’s interests or that an organization led entirely by white people represents the interests of people of color, yet the same standard evidently does not apply to disability organizations despite the existence of many cross-disability and autism-specific organizations led by actually disabled people. ~ Lydia Brown, Autistic Hoya
1. They support eugenics. Alongside salaries, most of their donations go to a genetic test for autism so that parents can abort their children or fetuses when they test positive for autism in the womb. Yes, the test can be useful to plan for a child’s life, but let’s admit that with society’s attitude right now, most women would abort an autistic fetus. They just want to wipe us from the gene pool. One woman who worked for CRDI (formerly the West Montreal Readaptation Centre/ Centre Readaptation de l’Ouest de Montreal) told me she wouldn’t abort a kid because he didn’t have the right color eyes, but that it’s a woman’s right to abort an autistic fetus because it is autistic. When I told them I considered boycotting the facility, they told me I needed to work on agreeing to disagree. However, I say that agreeing to disagree does not mean letting the opposition walk all over you and giving in to them.
2. They are against autism… something that we ARE.
3. They are in it for the money.
4. They don’t have any autistic on their staff. The one they did have on their staff, John Elder Robison, resigned in disgust when he realized what he was supporting. He was a pawn anyway. He was a well-known author who was for neurodiversity when they weren’t.
5. They spend most of their money on themselves. Most of their money goes to salaries.
6. They silence autistics. They threatened to sue a 14-year-old autistic girl once for making a parody of the site. Parodies are perfectly moral and, under the Fair Use Act, perfectly legal. Then they threatened to sue an autistic named Zachary Lassiter for selling t-shirts that said “Autism Speaks does not speak for me. I am autistic. I can speak for myself.”
7. They don’t pay autistics for writing about their own experiences, but they pay thousands to so-called parents to complain on the Autism Speaks website about how their children are such a burden and a waste of space.
8. They support the murder of autistics, including the children. Allison Tepper Singer, a mother of a little girl named Jodie, said in the video Autism Every Day that she had fantasies of putting Jodie in the car and driving off the George Washington Bridge, and that the only thing stopping her from doing that was her other daughter… the typical one.
9. They have double standards. They say we should be positive about Autism Speaks and not bash it because that’s negative. Well, we’re bashing them because they’re not being positive about us. Autism Speaks, how about YOU say something positive! This also goes for the agreeing to disagree thing I mention in the first point in this list.
10. They tell people to donate first and read their pamphlet later.
02 Apr 2015, 1:01 pm
