2:58am June 14, 2014

A thought

-One of the big objections to Autism Speaks among the sector of the autistic community with which I’m most familiar is their pro-cure agenda.

-Practically every debate about why Autism Speaks sucks more or less, sooner or later, turns into a pro-cure vs. anti-cure debate.

-In some ways, this is missing important key points, and also probably serves to alienate autistic people who are, in fact, really unhappy being autistic for not necessarily bad reasons.

-I think you really don’t have to be anti-cure, necessarily, to be severely troubled by Autism Speaks and opposed to their tactics and representation of autistic people. Their treatment of and exclusion of and the way they talk about autistic people would still be appalling and unacceptable even if the majority of us were in favor of a cure. They’re a bad organization for so many other reasons.

-The reflexive focus on the cure issue (from both sides) can wind up feeding into the straw man argument that the “high-functioning” people who are against a cure don’t care about making things better for the “lower-functioning.” (Regardless of the fact that it’s not true at all and that the vast majority of the neurodiversity proponents who I know are very much in favor of research into better therapies and treatments for specific autism-related issues.)

I really think we can do better in this debate. Some autistic people really do favor a cure. Even more do want some kind of alleviation of specific aspects. Autism Speaks still treats those people incredibly badly.

It’s not just the cure issue. It’s the lack of meaningful representation, dehumanization, pseudoscience, infantilization, plagiarism/misappropriation, job discrimination, fear- and stigma-peddling, erasure of adult issues, and the financials, good lord.