Autism Speaks, A Disgraceful Organization That Do Not Speak For Autistic People

Originally posted to Facebook on April 6th

Imagine a world where everything is the exact opposite of what it was now. In this world, the sun would rise in the West and set in the East, hot snow would fall up, and gazelles would chase lions. In this imaginary world, what would advocacy groups for minority members of the population be like? In this world, we’ll call it Opposite Land, the NAACP would have supported racial segregation, Stonewall would have supported gay conversion therapy, and the Suffragettes would have opposed giving the vote to women. Autistic people do not have to imagine Opposite Land, it is real for us, because Autism Speaks, the biggest “advocacy group” for autistic people in the world, do not speak for us, in fact they have a problem with the fact that we exist.

This so called “Advocacy Group” published a video called “I Am Autism”, about how horrifying autism is. In the video, a sinister voice which is supposed to be the personification of autism, says such things as, “I Am still winning, and you are scared, and you should be.” “I don’t sleep, and I will make sure you don’t either” oh, and my absolute favourite, “I work faster than pediatric aids, cancer and diabetes combined,” so apparently autism is worse than diseases that kill a lot of people. Here’s the video:

And here’s another video called “Autism Every Day”. Which consists of parents talking about how awful it is to have an autistic child. Now I’ll grant that some talk about genuine hardships caused by raising a high support needs child, but there is one woman who talks about how hard it is to have an autistic daughter. Why? Because she got upset when her mother forced her to go on a swing. If a child does not want to go on a swing, don’t make them go on a swing, it is quite simple! But it gets worse from here. This same mother talks about how she wanted to drive her car off a bridge with her daughter inside, and the only reason she didn’t is because she also has a non-autistic (neurotypical) daughter. And Autism Speaks didn’t think, “well she just said in a video that we are about to broadcast to the world that she considered murderering her daughter, perhaps we shouldn’t include this in our video.” Here’s the video:

Autism Speaks have no autistic members. They are an example of how some Neurotypical people have no interest in asking us what we want, only in telling us what we want. They did have a token autistic member for a while John Elder Robinson, but he became tired of the organisation saying things like autistic people are defective and diseased and that we are part of an epidemic, and left. He documents his reasons for leaving here:

http://jerobison.blogspot.com/…/i-resign-my-roles-at…

Autism Speaks are a very well funded organisation. They are consequently very good at making it look like they are speaking for the needs of autistic people, but they are only interested in finding a cure for autism without asking us whether we want one or not. It’s true that they’ve backed off from some of the more extreme language they have used in the past, but they have not once acknowledged let alone apologized for any of the vile things they have said, so their backing away from these statements seems to be mere pragmatism, adopting to a world where autistic people are more accepted, rather than believing that any of these statements were wrong. Autism Speaks does not speak for me. And with no autistic members, I think it is fair to say they don’t speak for any of us. The only people they speak for is those who believe that autism is a vile disease rather than a different way of being human.