so I was thinking about what I wanted to write for this month's post, and I remembered a tweet I made the other day, talking about how Autistic people have had a bad 2021 overall. Where a lot of people would argue 2020 was worse, for Autistic people, it was definitely this year.
Allow me to explain:
in January, we had Sia's "Music" movie, which perpetuated horrific Autism stereotypes through the character Music, who was played by a Neurotypical actress. The movie wasn't even focused on the Autistic character, but the neurotypical sister who is forced to "put up with her"
Funnily enough, the movie was advertised as a "love letter to the Autistic community" but it was the least Autism-friendly movie in history, with tons of bright and conflicting colours flashing all over the place during many scenes.
Music was nothing more than a two hour advertisement for Sia's music, under the cover of caring for Autistic people to sell tickets.
after that, it was a quiet few months. Then April came around, and #ColorTheSpectrum arrived. Mark Rober, a famous YouTube personality, alongside Jimmy Kimmel & several other celebrities from all over the place, began to raise money for Autism, since Rober's son is Autistic.
At first, this seemed really nice and wholesome, and as someone who actually enjoyed Mark Rober's content, I believed it was nice he was taking an interest.
Then it was discovered that the group being raised for, NEXT for Autism, was an ABA-supporting eugenics group, aimed at preventing and curing Autism (of course, it took a little while to find it, because they pre-empted Autistic people going looking on their pages and changed their entire website to remove any mention, meaning it took a while to find the older version of the website which still had that information on it from a few days prior)
Autistic people spent all of April, a historically bad month for us, fighting to be heard by Mark Rober and his many celebrity guests to try and stop Color the Spectrum. Many ignored us, some blocked us, Rober personally went around deleting replies on his videos and messages which mentioned the intentions of the group
in the end, Color the Spectrum still gave two thirds of the money it raised to NEXT for Autism, with the remainder going off to other groups approved by a small group of Autistic people. Not a great resolution to an already miserable problem.
we had another month of rest after that, until the JRC came around.
it was announced that the US court of appeals had revoked a ban placed by the FDA last year that was preventing a school in Massachusetts called the Judge Rotenberg Centre from using their GED devices.
The GEDs are little boxes which allow a user to issue an electric shock to the wearer. How intense is this shock? It can go up to 90mA. For context, a taser is 2mA, and a cattle prod is 20.
at 100mA, a shock is guaranteed to be permanently damaging and almost certainly lethal.
The JRC can and does shock Autistic children for any number of reasons, and it is a violation of our most basic human rights, which are conveniently being ignored.
For a country so obsessed with its rights, America failed to remember that their 8th amendment includes the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes in the 5th article "no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"
in 2013, the UN declared the JRC torture. This means that for the last 8 years, this place has been in direct violation of the most basic human rights we're supposedly all entitled to.
This implies that Autistic people are less than human, and therefore not entitled to our basic human rights.
the JRC is still an ongoing issue, and we have made no ground in the two or so months since the GED device was made legal again.
more recently, Spectrum10K started. The DNA gathering project run by Simon Baron-Cohen and a member of a group called 'Cure Autism Now' which promises it definitely isn't trying to cure Autism.
all of this while also still having to deal with the usual groups of Anti-vaxxers claiming the MMR jab caused all of us to exist, pro-ABA enthusiasts attacking us for painting Autism in a positive light and ABA in a negative one, "Autism parents" (people who make their child's Autism all about them) attacking us for offering corrections when they're blatantly wrong, or offering our feedback when they ask for it (just to find they don't like what we have to say) and general ableism as a whole.
not a single one of these issues has a happy resolution, out of all of them, only two could even be remotely considered "done" (Music & Color the Spectrum) and even then, they aren't resolved in any positive way.
the JRC continues to shock children at nearly lethal levels for being Autistic
Spectrum10K continues to try and cure Autism, while tricking people into believing it's only there to help our wellbeing.
and there are other things I've missed out here, purely due to not knowing enough about them to have a fully formed and educated opinion on them (such as a response to the original tweet talking about a bill in Canada. I have asked for elaboration and am waiting on a response, but I do not actually know anything about it right now, and hence will not say more on it)
thanks for reading everyone. Remember, if you like my content, you can subscribe to the mailing list to be informed when I post.
Here's to a hopefully less crappy September 2021 than what we've had for the rest of this year.
- Josh