11:01am September 24, 2014

I’m posting this to actuallyautistic tag to ask for your help.

Laura Tisoncik was one of the earliest people to form an entirely politicized group of autistic people. By which I mean, not a social group, not a support group, but a group that saw autism (and disability in general) as a political issue. She started autistics.org, the first wholly political autism website, as well as the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical and the Autistic Liberation Front. Many ideas that are mainstream now in the autistic community, are ideas that we at autistics.org came up with and had to fight to get accepted by other autistic people. For instance, the idea that functioning labels are a bad idea that doesn’t actually make any sense anyway, that was one of ours, and now it’s quite widely accepted among autistic self-advocates.

Anyway, Laura now has cancer. It’s in an early stage where the standard treatment is hysterectomy. Her oncologist is refusing to do a hysterectomy because she’s fat. Hysterectomies are done on fat people all the time, this is pure sizeism and fatphobia. And it could kill her.

tumblr saved my life once before, and Laura was instrumental in making that happen. She had people contact the hospital and make sure they knew that people were watching them, when they were trying to talk me out of life-saving treatment (a feeding tube). Within days, the hospital suddenly gave me the feeding tube.

I want tumblr to save Laura’s life too.

Here are the relevant posts:

http://webmuskie.tumblr.com/post/98271256074/apparently-fat-is-so-scary-it-would-be-better-i-die

http://webmuskie.tumblr.com/post/98308163829/theyre-telling-my-friend-she-cant-get-routine-cancer

If you don’t want to help, or if you want to yammer on about how fat is unhealthy or that she ought to lose weight (if she lost weight she’d still have cancer, so shut it – and there is no way for her to lose weight given her medical conditions, anyway) just don’t bother, keep your thoughts to yourself. We’re trying to save her life. What she needs is a hysterectomy, not strangers who don’t even know her situation, pontificating at her from afar about what her life ought to look like.

So if you can help, help. If you can’t help, that’s fine. If you don’t want to help, don’t help. If you want to do harm, just stay away and don’t be an ass.

I’m posting this to #actuallyautistic because I think there’s people there who remember her, or who understand what she’s done for the autistic community over the past 15 or so years. Which is a lot. Not just the political stuff, she also helped a lot of autistic people in need (well, that is a part of any decent political organizing). And now she’s the one in need.

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