#dd stuff

forever tired of thorough medaocrity in the AAC business. how that is rewarded. How it fails us as users. how not robust and only robust by small small amount communication systems always chosen by speech therapists and funded by insurance.

forever tired of profit over people.

forever tired of how companies collect data on every word we’ve ever said and sell to people.

forever tired of paying to communicate. of how uninsured disabled people just don’t get a voice many of the time. or have to rely on how AAC is brought into classrooms — which usually is managed to do in every possible wrong way.

forever tired of the branding and rebranding of how we communicate. Of this being amazing revealation over and over that nonspeakers are “in there” and should be able to say things. of how every single time this revelation comes with pre condition of leaving the rest behind, who can’t spell or type their way out of the cage of ableist oppression. or are not given chance & resources to. Of the branding being seen as revolution so many times and of these companies & practitioners making money off this “revolution.” of immersion weeks and CRP trainings that are thousands of dollars and wildly overpriced letterboards, and of that one nightmare Facebook group g-d damm it. How this all is put in language of communication freedom. 26 letters is infinite possibilities they say - but only for the richest of families and disabled people. The rest of us will have to live with fewer possibilities.

forever tired of engineer dads of AAC users who think they can revolutionize whole field of AAC with new terrible designed apps that you can’t say anything with them. of minimally useful AI features that invade every AAC app to cash in on the new moment and not as tool that if used ethically could actually help us, but as way of fixing our grammar our language our cultural syntax we built up to sound “proper” to sound normal. for a machine, a large language model to model a small language for us, turn our inhuman voices human enough.

forever tired of how that brand and marketing is never for us, never for the people who actually use it to communicate. it is always for everyone around us, our parents and teachers paras and SLPs and BCBAs and practitioners and doctors and everyone except the person who ends up stuck stuck with a bad organized bad implemented bad taught profit motivated way to talk. of it being called behavior problems low ability incompetence noncompliance when we don’t use these systems.

you all need to do better. We need to democritize our communication, put it in our own hands. (My friend & communication partner who was in Occupy Wall Street suggested phrase “Occupy AAC” and think that is perfect.) And not talking about badly made non-robust open source apps either. Yes a robust system needs money and recources to make it well. One person or community alone cannot turn a robotic voice into a human one. But our human voice should not be in hands of companies at all.

New radiohusk fic drop!!!! Midnights In October

Main CW: death, woundfucking, "unconscious" sex, dd stuff. But its at the end and can be skipped if people don't want to specifically read about Husk's dick straight up in Alastor's head.

First fic of the year. Only took me like a year and a half to actually finish something lmao. I love my bastard cat husband and his bitchy deer wife.

 Yep. He’s totally got the advantage there. It’s not like this small setback is that serious, lol, it’s just a bomb, a blind man could— 

My child has complex neurodevelopmental disabilities and requires full-time, hands-on care. He is the joy of my life, and being his parent is a privilege that fills me with contentedness.

Given the opportunity, I would not change my child’s neurology, decrease the “severity” of his autism, or make him not autistic. His neurology, his disabilities, are defining factors of who he is as a person. To “cure” him would eradicate everything about him that I know and love and I would experience it as an unbearable loss.

Autism, even and including presentations of autism where needs for support, accommodations, and adaptations are least well-matched with how we function as a society, is not medically dangerous or inherently painful. Suffering is not inherent to autism, but suffering can be caused when we treat autistic people badly.

I am angry with, but more over, bewildered by parents of children like mine who are participating in the eugenic rhetoric that is once again surfacing to threaten our community. I want to interrogate those parents, hold them accountable, make them understand, ask them to explain how they can hate my child and their own so much. I am furious and sad.

However, I am reminding myself that leveraging the internalized ableism in parents to turn them against their own children is one of the most horrific and frequently used strategies in the ableism playbook. And while protecting disabled children must always be the top priority in situations where this horror manifests as risk to those children—which is often—this is also a violence perpetrated against those parents.

A society that will train you to hate your own child is truly a nightmare beyond comprehension. And yet it has been with us, showing itself in different ways, different intensities, using different mechanisms, for at least as long as modern society has existed. It has always been here, and an unimaginable number of disabled children have died—have been murdered —as a result, directly at the hands of their parents, or at the hands of the state with passive or explicit consent from their parents.

For a decade I have been doing bridge building work at every possible opportunity to build relationships with parents even when I fundamentally disagree with how they see or respond to their child’s autism. Yes, there are those—usually with platforms, sometimes monetizing the suffering they inflict on their children—who are beyond my reach. They are a loud minority. Many parents are confused, scared, exhausted, and looking for any narrative offered that may help them craft a life story for themselves and their child that brings more ease, more joy, more connection, and less fear and isolation.

Often those in the neurodiversity movement berate and criticize them, and those in the “profound autism is a burden and tragedy” camp provide empathy, connection, support.

Losing those parents to that camp is not a strategy that is good for autistic children with complex care needs, and it’s not good for our movement goals of access, acceptance and belonging for autistic people.

And, while this may not matter to everyone and that’s okay, it’s not good for the parents who are essentially sleeper agents for the state. Those parents did not opt in to performing acts of oppression against their children, they are being manipulated and conditioned by systems of oppression that essentially work like ABA. They are rewarded when they dehumanize their children, punished when they love and defend their children. They are being used, and it’s not okay.

It is not impossible to have an autistic child with significant needs for support and love them to pieces without caveats or pity. I do it. My wife does it. I personally know many people who do it. In general, we just call it “parenting”.

And because we know it is not impossible for us, we know it’s not impossible for ANYONE. I often think, what would the world be like if all parents of autistic kids were as in love with their children as I am, felt as fiercely defensive of preserving their kids’ authentic selves as I do, got to enjoy their children the way I am blessed to enjoy mine?

So anyway, I feel like if you mixed smol Charlie who grew up in a cult with her weird dad who kinda hates everyone and is very possessive of her in every possible way and then smol Allie who's the biggest velcro baby on the planet and has horrible experiences around adults and sexuality, you'd get the most corrupted childhood friends to corrupted marriage pipe line lmao

The way Charlie's sheltered traumatized brain is gonna see Alastor murder and fuck a dead deer and go "no this def seems fine. For sure."

My very firm belief/hc that Charlie and Alastor are soulmates because she matches his freak to such catastrophic degrees that it makes him believe in love is either really sweet or absolutely horrifying lmao depending on the situation

Im also just very pretentious and have a lot of uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh experience? With childhood sa and how it fucks up your brain and associations with sex and I want to put them through the horrors.

it feels like there are many different “traditions” of nonverbal / nonspeaking activists and each small community all says same thing, same origin story same definitions same words same talk points. and I understand this because we are all autistic! we are all echolalic we all echo language and ideas from the community we surround selves with. but find it really hard when echo words becomes ddogma becomes thing you can’t say differently and just assume everyone thinks same thing or else not really in group.

(going to try to use “nonspeaking” for first community and “nonverbal” for second community because that’s what each one of these communities usually prefer. language hard so sorry if don’t do this consistent.)

like if I go to one of I-ASC (international association on spell to communicate) conference or one of their neuro lyrical events online. as a nonspeaker since birth who does have experience of “learned language without having speech”, of people assume don’t understand anything until finally found way to express self that world understands, and people still doubt am really the one saying this. in some ways relate to these people much much more than people on here who mostly became nonspeaking later in life and have very different upbringing not raised as a person with a DD not grow up without speech. places like the I-ASC and the Spellers community and the syracuse ICI zooms, and even ‘mainstream’ AAC groups like the impAACt voices zooms and local meet ups for nonspeakers feel like family to me, feel like my people who move and talk and live like me.

and people absolutely have right o identify with whatever but see lots people uncritical words “ functions / understand at level of (young age) “ or profound autism low functioning. sometimes exact words used against me now that sound more polite kind of like intensive behavioral needs or complex or significant when people not want say low functioning or say r word. but meaning the same.

or even say things like living in the community isn’t for everyone institutions good for some people restraint seclusion good for some people. people who say that people with high support needs are also high control needs / high caregiver authority needs. and can’t know people’s histories and unfreedoms and needs through internet posting but see many people use term to refer not selves but some Other group autistic people or theoretical “some “ autistic people in these words