10:47pm July 30, 2014

madeofpatterns-twistmalchik-a-fucking-aspie

youneedacat:

twistmalchik:

madeofpatterns:

twistmalchik:

A fucking aspie supremacist made a comment about how people choose to be nonspeaking. I’m using AAC today, and it’s made me feel really unsafe. That kind of comment silences people like me, who are not always able to speak.

AAC gives me a voice when mine…

He approached a presenter that had presented about a method for working with nonspeaking students. He told her basically that there is no such thing as someone who is unable to speak. And “what about the police? How do the police know AAC is not a gun? I’m a [profession] and I know everything about my field, speaking, and police.”

It felt really unsafe.

I totally understand that some people choose not to speak, but saying everyone who does not speak is able to if they want to is absolutely dangerous. And is totally not something I expected to hear in an autistic space.

The board did address it very subtly, I think, by bringing up the no discrimination policy, which includes method of communication.

That would make me feel like melting into the floor on the spot. I can’t stand when people say things like that. No such thing as unable to speak? This reminds me of this woman who whenever an autistic person reported being temporarily or permanently unable to speak, she’d snap at them, “Well we all know that speech has nothing to do with autism anyway though right?” Her implication was that we were all describing speech difficulties because we thought it made us ‘more autistic’ and that we’d stop describing such difficulties if she could convince us that speech difficulties weren’t really an autistic thing. Except they are, and we continued to have them whether she said shit like that or not. By the time she stopped being an ‘ally’ to the autistic community, she was convinced most of us were fakers. She and my stalker would’ve made a great pair — an autistic person and a nonautistic person who each believed most of the autistic community were fakers.

I was shaking a ton, and I had to take anxiety meds to do the rest of the day. But I was able to walk up to him, hand him my emergency disclosure card (I intended that to answer his “what about the police?” thing, which I know is more complicated, but it’s what I could do at the time) and used my talker to say that what he was talking about was a problem of the police (and society) not disabled people. I don’t even care that it was really too loud to hear the iPad at full volume. I was livid.

I might be painfully shy, but I was so offended to hear that in a space where I thought I was safe, that I couldn’t just walk away.

Thank you for doing that. I mean really – thank you so much for standing up to someone who thinks like that, it’s horrible. I hope I would’ve done the same. My ability to communicate around people who distrust me is extremely variable. But I hope I would’ve been pissed enough to override that.

Notes: