7:41pm January 15, 2012

This does not make sense.

So on the autism tag, someone wrote about that video that keeps popping up.

They said something like “We always hear about autism from the outside. Now we can finally hear about it from an autistic person.”

HELLO CAN ANYONE HEAR US?!?!?!

Autistic people have been talking publicly about autism since at least the seventies when one of Kanner’s original patients was interviewed for a medical journal.

Autistic people have been writing books about being autistic since 1985. There are now so many that I am running out of shelf space (I collect them).

Autistic people have been on various TV and radio programs talking about autism probably since the 1980s or early 1990s at the latest.

Autistic people have been talking about autism on the Internet since the early 1990s, possibly late 1980s.

Autistic people have been talking about autism on Tumblr since Tumblr existed. According to some autistic people I’ve talked to, autistic people used to actually dominate the autism tag.

There is nothing new about autistic people talking about autism.

There is nothing new about autistic people with limited or non-useful speech typing about autism.

This. Is. Nothing. New.

So why is it that every time one of us gets on the news or has a video go viral, people act like it’s the first time?

Why is it that every time they do this they act like the rest of us are invisible or don’t even exist at all?

WE’RE RIGHT HERE.

(Saying it really loud because apparently people can’t hear our voices at all.)

We’ve been here all along.

Why do you treat each one of us as if we are the first?

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