Way Cool!

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Thursday night, my local chapter of the Autism Society of America, of which I am a board member, voted to send me to Orlando Florida in July so to be our official representative at ASA's national conference.

Some Autism groups don't like autistic people much. Not the ASA! As I have heard, at ASA conferences there is even a quiet room so that we can recover! Yip! I LOVE the ASA!

That IS cool

Hope you will come back here and give us a report on the proceedings. Could be interesting.

Will do!

Although I don't post this in pride - want to show that there is an autie friendly autism society out there - I am so honoured by this. Rumor is that I will speak on a panel or two. Don't know what about yet. Yip!

I LOVE THE ASA!

That's great nutbag.

That's good.

Be aware that the ASA is only autie-friendly on some levels and not others, though.

I know an autistic person who was actually the target of an extreme and awful gossip campaign started by leaders of the ASA. It was because he was saying things they didn't like, and they wanted to prove he was not autistic. That was a long time ago, but I still hear from people who've heard that rumor mill, that he's "not autistic" when he's really obviously autistic.

Most autistic people I have known in the ASA, have had to work on a local chapter level (some chapters being more welcoming to autistic people than others), and many have had to fight a long time to get recognized as the equals of parents and professionals, and as having opinions central to the discussion of autism rather than a peripheral side-piece of it.

Generally the more political (as in, the more challenging to traditional power structures) the message of the autistic person, the more trouble they run into there. It's improving, but mostly because of the efforts of a few autistic people who have really stuck in there at the national level.

Unfortunately there's still a tendency for people elected to higher positions, who are autistic, to be the ones who are most likely to just go along with things.

There have been big problems in the areas of getting the ASA to realize that having a policy that says all autism "treatments" are equal allows for abuse to be considered treatment (I don't know if the Judge Rotenberg Center still advertises at ASA conventions but a lot of people I know have been trying to stop that because they use torture on autistic people there), people who have fought against aversives in general have gotten treated really badly or talked into milder positions on the topic, and when the Getting the Word Out advertising campaign went out (which had such awful statements as "The worst part of autism is that autistic children become autistic adults", and a heavily telethon-like pity-inducing message implying we break up families and such) it went out over the objections of autistic people who worked there (and they were ignored, although it's gone now, so I don't know if they managed to succeed in getting it canceled or what).

I'm not trying to be discouraging, I just want to point out that the ASA is not just a happy-happy-joy-joy sort of situation. It's got its good and bad sides, and a lot of the good sides for autistic people are not because they just happen to like autistic people, they're because autistic people have fought for those positions within the organization to be available to them. And it was a struggle, and people did get harmed in the course of it (mostly by things like the aforementioned gossip and the like, or extreme pressure to conform). And even the NAS in the UK, which has serious problems in some regards, is light-years ahead of the ASA in some ways.

So it's good that they've come this far, but don't forget how far they've come or how far they still have to go.

Nice going Nutbag!

That's wonderful!