Permanently Deleted
They’ve had a history of emphasizing the perspectives of parents while downplaying the perspectives of autistic people, especially autistic adults. They’re also known to have taken a disease approach to the spectrum, their goals being to minimize symptoms (autistic behavior) by teaching aspie children how to pass as neurotypical and eventually to eradicate autism like the condition is cancer or AIDS. They’ve promoted the use of the puzzle-piece iconography (again, privileging the parents’ perspective of solving the riddle of communicating with their neurodivergent children), including the variation of a jigsaw pattern on a ribbon (which again leans into the “autism is a disease like AIDS or cancer” approach to autism “advocacy”). It’s comparable to pathologizing transness or taking a truscum approach of curing gender dysphoria while ignoring other forms of transness, or pathologizing homosexuality as a paraphilia.
emphasizing the perspectives of parents
if fascism begins in the family, why would they feel the need for eugenics? Parenthood must logically be a bourgeois slaveowner type relation,
The eugenics would probably come in the form of aborting fetuses suspected of being born with autism, and using CRISPR genome-editing tech (when that’s further along in development) to turn autistic kids neurotypical, rather than something more obviously genocidal like shoving them into camps or sterilizing them.
Actually now that I think of it, some of them probably do want forced sterilization of autistic people. At the very least autistic people have been caught in the same net as other groups considered “mentally unfit” or failing to sufficiently conform to societal norms (groups which originally included Black and Latina women) and thus sterilized. CW for extremely racist/eugenicist shit that actually happened in California:
http://www.autismpolicyblog.com/2017/04/buck-v-bell.html
http://www.autismpolicyblog.com/2018/04/eugenics-and-forced-sterilization.html
not OP but gonna jump in cuz i hate them
Theyr’e essentially an NGO grift for people who want to control autistic ppl. no autistic people on their board and spends most of their money and time on sketch shit like being anti-vax or promoting shock therapy for autistic people.
https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AutismSpeaksFlyer2020.pdf
Meanwhile there’s a somewhat better org, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, which instead emphasizes the voices and perspectives of autistic people and is more in line with an LGBTQ+ sort of approach to serving the needs of autistic people. They prefer the generally better rainbow iconography.
