#autism hate

What You Say: I don't vaccinate my kids because I don't want them to get autism.

Soo... when this news first came out a week ago I was too angry and distressed to write much about it.

I wrote a short explanatory rant on over this study on Facebook (partly to reeducate my family since a while ago my cousin Went Blue For Autism and I had to explain why not to do that)

*Okay, I am horrified "a debilitating disorder" is a fearmongering phrase that isn't, or at least, doesn't have to be remotely true. AND THIS STUDY IS SUPPORTED BY AUTISM SPEAKS - DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS SH*T!!!!

(For those who don't know, Autism Speaks is the hate organisation that parades as a charity, it seeks to "cure" autism through such methods as forcible drinking of bleach, please never give money to the blue puzzle piece who would rather kill autistic people because we're oh-so-hard to understand, a truly unsolvable puzzle! {hence their logo} which isn't remotely true, yet again)

Rant over.

…

So, now I've had the chance to calm down a little and not cry when I look at the things that I learned about all on the same day.

Okay, as an autistic person I get it, I've seen the way anti-vaccers and various other haters fear their kids being autistic. I've seen those videos of children being forced to drink bleach cos it will “cure” them.

I've reached the point of numbness about it.

So if a study calls my way of thinking “debilitating”, and says that it can now be identified before birth, fine, I know what this means. Call up the pro-choice brigade cos abortion rates are gonna skyrocket.

Now, I'm an avid pro-choicer, I think the right to decide what happens to you based on your own emotions/principles/circumstance/etc rather than preset laws is one of the most important human rights there is. But it's going to be a load of uneducated and fearful people deliberately killing off autism.

Part of me is okay with this, autism can suck, and the way society views it is horrible, so in a way I'm happy with the fact that less people will have to suffer. But the part that screams “they're targeting us” is naturally horrified, because the other way of thinking about it is that people are so afraid of something they don't understand that they're ready to kill it before it even exists.

Trump claims autism is on the rise and blames various things that makes no sense as usual. I'm too tired to care anymore. I left a protest early on Monday because I was bored of the walking around and rallies, the weather was awful and I just really didn't want to be there. But if he's gonna start targeting autistic people, this is gonna get bad fast. Because other groups he's targeting can fight back.

Autism is a spectrum as we all hopefully know, and not everyone on it will be able to defend themselves from whatever the future may hold. I am extremely privileged to be what is still sometimes diagnosed as “high-functioning” though the functioning labels have been decided outdated and ableist as fuck, I know that I am capable of many things that others aren't in terms of what I can do for myself day-to-day. Hell, even the well known issues of social communication are something I'm much better at then most, as much as I complain about it.

But yeah, back to my point. If autism gets the blame for something from the esteemed POTUS, it's gonna get nasty. Not that it already isn't, what with the other thing I saw on the same day that distressed me so much – a sixteen year old was beaten to the ground and her attacker only let up at the comment “I think she's dead.” We all know the cliché of a mother's love that our mum would know us regardless what happened. Her own mother didn't recognise her, and I get why.

I wouldn't want to recognise that it could be anyone I love that that had happened too either.

If I had written this a week ago it would have been angry and deeply emotional. As it is now I can read it myself as being tired and defeated. I don't want to be pessimistic, fatalist or even realist about this, I know that I catastrophise and it's something I'm working on. But in this situation I genuinely don't know what to do. I don't see any way of this getting better

Probably a better vent for my emotion at the time was a parody poem I wrote of Brave New Voices poet Ash's “An Open Letter To Cis People” 

It's still a work in progress but it's an important part of this tired response to hate I suppose:

An Open Letter To Allistics

Neurotypicals and Divergents!

Someone once mentioned a door

A door opening out, extroversion

A door opening in, introversion

A door that open both ways, indecision

Anxiety? It's a revolving door

Door locked and no-one has the key, depression

Suicidal? That door is really a bottomless pit

Autism: Noun, a mental condition from early childhood, renowned for its affect on social interaction

Social interaction: Noun, communication between two or more people, identified by written, spoken, or body language used to convey a message

Social interaction is the task of deciphering all the muscles of the human body's possible symbolism all whilst having to translate someone speaking in your third language

Language: A body of words and systems aiding humans in understanding one another

Understanding: Simply, something you don't try to do.

To you our struggle is a nuisance you don't try to aid, you have no consideration for how hard it is to paint a picture when the subject keeps moving

And you wonder why I cry when you ask questions too quickly that I just say “I don't know” - because maybe I would if you gave me time to figure out what the fuck it is you wanted!

Well I have some news for you allistics,

You aren't the only people who exist!

I know, you just had a heart palpitation, you're fluttering around like you always tell me not to do

But now that you're perfectly still and orderly again you must be wondering how this is possible

Fear not allistics

I'll be your Allying Aspie,

Your Doting Divergent

Your Advocate with Anxiety

Your Depressed Declaimer

Your Stimming Spokesperson

And your Wriggling Representative!

So hear me allistics all

I, your messenger of ACD shall guide you through our troublesome talks

The world isn't black and white and it never was

It was always a rainbow of hues

Give yourself a spectrum like Dulux

A colour chart to include everyone

Regardless of: Gender, race, ability, physicality, weight, beauty, ethnicity, background, nationality, class, mental health, physical health, education, verbal skills, stimming propensity, special interests, hobbies, “productivity in society”, and how many friends you have!

But on that colour chart one shade should be missing

A dark shade of Navy called Puzzle Piece Blue,

Autism Speaks is a network of hate aiming to destroy us

They seek to find us at birth and neutralise

And when they find us grown up it's cures and bleach and drugs

Vaccine's don't cause autism!

And they won't cure it either.

You can't cure a mindset as if by magic

You can only teach and train it

Let us learn away our ignorance

Like anyone else with a prejudice it can be remedied with education

Though for us our ignorance stems not from our own hate but yours

You don't teach us to speak or act like you, just yell until we do

But how can I get back on the horse if you've not taught me how to hold the reins?

Allistics, think of our brains as computers, we're electricity and coding and we're amazing at what we do

You are PC but we are all Macs

We have a specific and finite purpose,

Not for the faint heart or for general use

But those who want us adore us

Treat us with the care we deserve

Adapt to our programming

Instead of changing our core to fit theirs

We all know that without fences and walls we wouldn't need Gates and Windows

How was I so naive? Until this month, I never truly realized how many people want autistics cured or silenced or dead. And now that we have Donald Trump in the White House, we could be in even more trouble. When I was doing research for a satire article in which I reversed the rhetoric used to describe autism towards Neurotypicalitis, I found something that said that a Facebook page posted something along the lines of this:

“Once we get 50 likes, we’re gonna go out and set an autistic kid on fire.”

There’s a video of an autistic kid having a meltdown and the comments on that video are beyond cruel.

School shooters are pinned as being autistic. One of the biggest asshole TV show characters is probably the first person people think of when they hear “autistic character.” Someone commented on a watchmojo about autism that police enjoy shooting autistic people.

And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Do you know what hatred like that does to an autistic person? It forces them to suppress who they truly are. Remember in “Fantastic Beasts” how an obscural is caused by a wizard being forced to suppress their magic and how miserable and mistreated Credence was? When you teach autistic people that who they are is a disease or a burden or unacceptable to society or a sin, you are implanting internalized ableism. All of the hatred can make autistics suicidal. I found a tumblr post in which the user’s autistic brother told them that, because of how people were treating him, that he wanted to die. Do you know how old he was? Ten. Ten fucking years old and he wanted to die. I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me that suppressing hand flapping or berating them for not making eye contact or for smiling at the wrong time does no harm.

I’m scared for myself and other autistics. I’m scared that someone who listens to the rhetoric that Autism $peaks has been spreading will murder an autistic person. What scares me even more is that there will be a fair amount of people who will justify the murder because the victim was autistic. The vast majority agree that murdering a person of color for being a person of color isn’t acceptable. If someone said it was acceptable, I’m pretty sure a lot of us would tell them they’re racist. If most of society agrees that it’s not okay to murder a person of color because they are a person of color, why do they turn a blind eye to, or even condone, the murders of autistic people for being autistic?

I googled “autism and murder” to see if I could find the statistics for how many autistic people are murdered and the first thing that popped up was this 2014 article title from “The Washington Post”:

“Study: ‘Significant’ statistical link between mass murder and autism, brain injury.”

I did read that they say they’re not suggesting that autistic people are serial killers, but in this day and age, most people don’t really look beyond the titles.

People know that we’re silenced by the majority of society and asshats use that to their advantage. It’s things like this that enforce the idea that we’re broken or diseased. I’m probably one of the last people I know who would kill anyone, even in defense of someone else. But society is pushing my buttons, which makes me feel like my life is a villain origin story.

There’s support for children, but it seems once you’re an adult, there’s no support for being autistic.

We still get boxed into the stereotypes of autism.

People still avoid vaccines because the myth that autism is caused by vaccines is still prevalent. I used to not really mind it because I fucking hate needles, but this kind of rhetoric can be fatal.

There are no search results about actual autistic murder victims, only about the idea that there’s a connection between crime and autism.

All of this makes me sick and suicidal. I’m sick of us being silenced and being resented when we try to speak up for our rights and lives. It’s as if, to society, we’re not even people. They think of as dolls, porcelain dolls, that can be smashed at any moment. Both the smasher and the protector are justified in their actions or, in the protectors’ case, idolized for loving and protecting us as though no one else can do the same.

And us dolls? We have no voice. If we try to speak, we’re silenced because dolls don’t talk. The only times we’re allowed to is when it makes the “protectors” look good. They give us pre-recorded phrases to echo back at the pull of a string or the press of a button.

We’re not dolls. We’re not murderers.

Please, if an autistic person is murdered, don’t let the media erase their story. Don’t let it become okay to murder someone for being autistic.

[Top Picture: “We are giving the autism community a voice in health policies and federal research priorities through our collaboration with government agencies and organizations that include the National Academy of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the CDC.”

Bottom Picture: “Autism Speaks works closely with partners, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to investigate and measure autism prevalence in diverse populations.”]

You think Autism $peaks actually stopped looking for a cure? Oh no. You are sorely mistaken. These screenshots were taken from the actual A$ website on the “Autism Speaks Global Autism Public Health Initiative.”

First off, the top photo is a joke. Since when have they given us a voice in ANYTHING? They’re determined to silence us. 

The second photo; Control and Prevention of Disease. It’s very subtle, but it says a lot. That phrase from the bottom photo was under “Epidemiology Research.” According to the World Health Organization, epidemiology is defined as “the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events (including disease), and the application of this study to the control of diseases and other health problems.”

Or, alternatively, from an online medical dictionary “the science concerned with the study of the factors determining and influencing the frequency and distribution of disease, injury, and other health-related events and their causes in a defined human population for the purpose of establishing programs to prevent and control their development and spread.”

Wake the fuck up. 

They didn’t stop looking for a cure. They just counted on people taking their info at face-value. 

They still want us to be dehumanized.

They still want us to be stigmatized.

They still want us dead.

I’d like to remind you that those phrases are straight from their website, so if you still think that Autism Speaks is a good organization for autistics, even after this, then get the fuck out of my blog and my life.