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10:37pm June 10, 2014

Autistic History: Attention Parents

I wrote this during a fight with Lenny Schafer, who controlled a major autism newsletter and organization called FEAT.  Some people in individual FEAT chapters were okay, but the overall organization was pretty awful.  It was basically a parent-led community with everything that entails.  And Lenny Schafer had a serious beef against autistic adults, who he considered “impostors with Asperger’s” at best and total fakers at worst.  He attacked multiple, specific autistic people throughout his career as the FEAT newsletter person.  In the following, he had just said that he wanted all autistic people fact-checked for diagnostic papers before anyone could call us autistic.  This was our response (in this case, written entirely by me, but there were other similar responses later that were written by a group of people and merely blamed entirely on me, because people had a habit of doing that at one point).  Also note that at one point I did supply huge amounts of medical records online and it only served to get people to call me an impostor more, so it’s a really bad idea to open yourself up that way.  Also by this point Frank Klein had all his medical records up, so Lenny’s idea that none of us had, was wrong.  This took place sometime 2004 or shortly after.  Understand that my use of personality disorders was satirical and based on the fact that Lenny was always accusing autistic people of having personality disorders – it’s not a tactic I’d ever actually use for real:

Attention Parents

Please don't actually send us this information. We have no clue what we’d do with it. This is a satirical piece.

Lenny Schafer, who has participated in the defamation of autistic self-advocates in the past, wrote the following recently in the Schafer Autism Report:

The New York Times reporter failed to do a journalist’s most basic homework. She failed to check the credentials of those doing the complaining, despite my urging. Anyone can call themselves autistic and write cranky letters to the editor. So how does someone determine if a person is truly autistic, or is an autism imposter with Aspergers?

Ask to see their diagnosis.

If someone claims to have autism for purposes of making some political statement, ask them to prove it.

In any of the correspondence I have had with the autism “imposters”, not one has ever supplied such documentation. Of course, it is highly unlikely to ever see it.

The irony here is that if someone has enough language skills to effectively complain about the treatment of autistics, then they themselves cannot be autistic.

While Harmon has my diagnostic papers, many of us find this breach of our privacy insulting, especially when he does not demand the diagnostic papers of autistics who agree with him. He has even demanded autistic self-advocates who engage in real-life dialogues with him to present him with their diagnostic papers on the spot. So we have decided to take a stand against the “horrible imposters” in the parent community.

Notice to Parents

It has come to the paranoia attention of those in the autistic community that many of you are probably phonies. After all, we don’t really know when you’re going to agree with us and when you aren’t whether you’re genuinely parents concerned about your children, or whether you’re selling something or attempting to make us look bad to bolster your horribly fractured self-esteem. We are not doctors, but we like to pretend to be the traits that you display in your dealings with us resemble borderline, paranoid, histrionic, or narcissistic personality disorder. Put bluntly, we know there are a lot of people who disagree with us messed up impostors out there in the world who would love to feel part of something, and therefore enjoy joining in the feeling of being the hard-working and saintly but persecuted caregivers of autistics.

Because of this, we will no longer be paying attention to you unless you either agree with us already (in which case we’re willing to ignore all this) or provide us the following.

  • Photographs of yourselves and your alleged ‘children’, and at least three forms of valid photo ID.
  • Your alleged 'child’s’ complete medical records including diagnosis.
  • Your and your alleged 'children’s’ birth certificates.
  • Proof of guardianship of your alleged 'children’.
  • If you claim these are your 'natural children’, DNA-based proof of maternity and/or paternity.
  • Blood, skin, hair, or stool samples, taken in front of us by a physician we choose, so that we can verify the above independently.
  • If you claim these are your 'adopted children’, adoption certificates.

We will scrutinize these carefully and make sure that we each personally approve of the particular doctors who have diagnosed your alleged children and performed any other tests. We will also have to run everything through a complete and detailed authenticity check to make sure you are not someone who disagrees with us fooling us. We will also need to know if your child now or has ever had spoken, written, typed or signed communication, because if they have we’ll know they have Asperger’s syndrome and not real autism.

Thank you, and we know that if you are genuine and have nothing to hide you will have no problem with providing all of this information in full to complete strangers. You must understand that there are so many people out there attracted to the glamour, martyrdom, and attention associated with being high-profile parents of autistic children, that we have had to raise our standards unless you agree with us already in which case we’ll overlook all this. We are certain you will find this invasion of your privacy perfectly reasonable and not at all objectionable. Have a nice day.

The Autistic Liberation Front

Link to the original article on autistics.org.