8:56pm April 22, 2015

A story from autistic advocacy past…

So there were these people who were pulling “Not Like My Child” on those of us at autistics.org, which is generally a bad idea because if you combined all three of us who worked there at the time, you’d cover pretty much every base of either “I am like your child” or “I was once like your child”.

So we did an “Actually, we are like your child” open letter to these people, detailing all this information about us from our speech delays to our toilet training and lack thereof. (Or, as in many of us, the fluctuations in such abilities over a lifetime.)

We also mentioned all the medical problems we had, because these parents were saying “You people who are adults now are different, you don’t have complex medical issues like the new autistic kids.”

Which made us fucking laugh because all three of us have major medical issues that aren’t easily solved. (In all cases, genetic and/or autoimmune as far as we know.)

So we listed those.

And.

Now it wasn’t “You’re not like my child.”

Now it was, and a guy actually told us this:

“Those medical problems are so easy to solve. Why should we listen to any autistic person who hasn’t put in the work to solve them?” [by going to DAN doctors, which, actually, I did in my late teens, and it made me seriously ill, but don’t confuse these people with the facts, apparently.]

It was kind of cool to list off our traits though because between us, and sometimes in just a single one of us, we covered all the high functioning stereotypes and all the low functioning stereotypes at once. Even our ages at diagnosis showed a nice spread (4, 14, 42).

But I couldn’t believe that.

They have sick kids that they work so hard to “recover” and nothing actually works.

And yet if we’re sick, it should be “easy” for us to fix those problems. Yeah. Please do, actually. Especially the adrenal insufficiency (which we didn’t know I had at the time)… but I’d better not ask for help with that; they’d confuse it with the non-diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue” and try bogus treatments on me. Makes me wish all quacks used was sugar pills.

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