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- was meant to ensure school staff would be trained to support nonspeaking students before school starts

- would protect nonspeaking students who need AAC from segregation

- would prevent the use of IQ tests to deny access to AAC

IDEA is supposed to put these protections in place, but they don’t happen. This bill was brought forth because nonspeaking students are still being unfairly segregated and not offered AAC at all.

Teachers want to support nonspeaking people! They want the training!

And Autism Speaks just killed the bill that would help so many nonspeaking people.

So tell me again how they’re so great, because once more they are silencing autistic voices.

Autism Speaks doesn’t want nonspeaking autistic people to speak because it will break the carefully crafted tragedy narrative they’ve built up and struggle to maintain.

A link to the Twitter thread is under the cut so tumblr doesn’t eat this out of tags.

A mom to a nonspeaking child tried to advocate to help her child and people like him and was basically shot down by Autism Speaks.

Also, CASP has a ringing endorsement from the Lovaas Institute* on their website. Those are the kinds of people CASP regularly supports and interacts with.

The way he was treated is horrible and disgusting for anyone at all, but John Green has for years and years (along with his brother Hank) tried to make the world a measurably better place while living with a horrific mental illness. A mental illness that makes something like being called a pedophile over and over again horrific in ways that unless you have OCD, or are very very close to someone who does, you will never understand because OCD targets whatever you value and makes your world a living hell over it.

And you know what? He still writes his novels, and he is still out here doing absolutely everything he can to make the world a measurably better place. The cock monologue was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

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On the positive side, here’s two replies that are actually decent:

When it comes to disabilities and the people who have them, I wish some of those people would be more open-minded to the idea that not all of us love our disability or lets it define us.

If you’re in a wheelchair, and you’re fine with it, then awesome! More power to you! But don’t yell “Internalized ableism!” the second that somebody else in a wheelchair feels it would be nice to be able to walk if she felt like it.

I’ve seen people online say that “disabilities are just another form of diversity that we should learn to accept!” and that’s just not a fair view of it.

Take chronic pain. People with chronic pain suffer from depression, and commit suicide, more often that other people. Their disability is so awful that they’d rather die than have to endure it.

Or take poor eyesight. That disability is such a pain that practically everybody who can afford to get rid of it, with glasses or surgery, do so.

Being black, or gay, is not the same thing as, for instance, being blind.

It’s not internalized ableism if a blind person would like to watch a movie, or a deaf person wants to hear without a hearing aid, or a person with crutches feels it would be neat not to have to carry them around. Everybody on Earth has things they wish they could do. In my view, internalized ableism is when you regard yourself as defective, or broken, or inferior, because of your disability. It’s not ableism simply to think “doing that seems fun; I wish I could try it.” That’s how every human being feels about something.

It’s nice (and true) to say that “we disabled peeps can do much more than you think!” but at some level, we gotta accept that by definition, having a disability means there are things that you cannot do, and we gotta accept that some people might want those options. That’s not ableism in my opinion, because if it were, I’d be invalidating people’s right to want to try new things.

But I can only speak on my experience.

I’m fine with a disabled person hating that they’re disabled. This world seems built on making disabled people hate being disabled.

But I think they cross a line when they say all disabled people hate to be disabled and would rather die or be cured.

It’s like the autism cure debate. I got no problem with autistic people who want to cure specifically themselves, I got a lot of problems with autistic people who say all autistic people need a cure. (Especially since they point at autistic people with extensive support needs and say they need it most. Uh, that’s not their body or brain to decide on.)

At the end of the day, it’s the people who shout that they want to be cured or die who seem to get a lot of attention, and they’re the ones abled people seem to latch onto as “what everybody wants”. Just look at movies like Million Dollar Baby or Me Before You as an example.