Tag: autism linkspam

Media and Reviews:

• Elizabeth Cassidy reviews “Keep the Change”
• Lei Wiley Mydske reviews “Deej” 

Research and Science:

• An academic study of gender identity in AFAB autistic people
• Shanon des Roches Rosa on the CDC’s new autism prevalence numbers
• Shannon Rosa and Corina Becker interview researcher Laura Crane about how to support autistic people in education, criminal justice, and health

Other stuff about autistic women!

• The Autism Women’s Network is changing its name to the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network.
• On April 5, there was a United Nations event on empowering autistic women and girls. Here is Julia Bascom’s keynote from that event.
• Reese Piper interviews 12 women and trans people who discovered their autism in adulthood or in their late teens.

Politics:

• The White House joined the Light It Up Blue campaign this year, despite widespread criticism from self-advocates. Here is an ASAN statement about it.
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are considering barring immigrants with disabilities:
• ADAPT has been protesting to get other advocacy organizations to join with them in support of the Disability Integration Act, which prevents officials and insurance companies from denying community-based services to disabled people. The AARP called the police on them, but no arrests were made.
• Doug Ford, the recently elected premier of Ontario, has a lot of problems. The insulting comments he made about a group home for autistic people, including saying that autistic children and teens in such a home should not be allowed outside and that their presence ruined the community, are just one.

Posts about social masking and its costs:

• Robin Frolic lists the things they do in a typical conversation to put allistic people at ease
• Kieran from The Autistic Advocate on burnout [TW: graphic discussion of suicidal ideation] 

Posts about parenting and child care:

• MOM-NOS on age-appropriate interests 
• Real Social Skills on one thing that can happen when parents don’t tell kids that they are disabled
• Real Social Skills on how to babysit a child who doesn’t speak

Misc:

• Real Social Skills on autism and sexual orientation 
• Liz Jackson on disability design, and how disabled people’s contributions to their own assistive technology go unrecognized
• Real Social Skills explains why “helping people focus” isn’t the only valid way to use stim toys

Special Sad Things Section on the Judge Rotenberg Center and #StopTheShock:

• Jessica Banks on how absurd it is that the JRC is still using torturous electric shocks as aversives
• ASAN has joined the #StopTheShock campaign

Special Sad Things Section with a TW for Nazis:

• New historical evidence show that Hans Asperger, the discoverer of Asperger syndrome, collaborated with Nazi eugenics more than previously thought.
• Maxfield Sparrow and Steve Silberman discuss their changing thoughts and feelings about Hans Asperger and the Asperger’s label.

Other Sad Things:

• Emily Flores on #MeToo and disability
• Jamie Hale on why disabled people are worried by assisted dying laws

April is Autism Awareness/Acceptance/Whatever Month, so let’s start with two posts about that.

• Amy Sequenzia declares April the Month to Beware of Autism Awareness
• Morénike Giwa Onaiwu lists all the things she is already aware of

Posts about “Autism Uncensored”:

• Maxfield Sparrow reviews “Autism Uncensored”
• Aaron Kappel on Warrior Parents and abuse

Other media and reviews:

• A new Writing While Autistic post from Rose Lemberg: Theory of mind.
• Bogi Takács reviews “An Unkindness of Ghosts”
• Reese Piper reviews “Keep the Change” 
• J.R. Jackson explains why it’s okay for abled people to write about disabled people – sometimes.
• Gretchen Gales reviews “On the Edge of Gone,” “Wonderstruck,” and “The Mind’s Eye.”

Parent perspectives:

• In the wake of “Autism Uncensored” and “To Siri With Love”, Sarah Kurchak interviews her own mother
• MOM-NOS explains why she hasn’t written a book about her son

Posts about autistic people being treated terribly:

• Julia Bascom’s remarks on the Disability Day of Mourning
• Laura Dorwart on isolation boxes in schools
• ADAPT protested at the White House in March to call for an end to the use of contingent electric shocks at the Judge Rotenberg Centre
• Eric Garcia updates us on what happened to Arnaldo Rios, the autistic person Charles Kinsey was taking care of when he was famously shot by police in 2016
• An 8-year-old autistic boy in New Mexico was charged with criminal battery for hitting his teacher during a meltdown

Posts about autistic people being treated not-terribly:

• How Lisa Ann McKenzie opened a barbershop specializing in autistic children’s hair  (This post verges close to inspiration porn in places – heck, it is literally from a category called “inspired life” – but I did like reading about the effort and patience that went into figuring out how to provide a service that these kids need. YMMV.)
• A study at the University of London found that higher rates of autism acceptance predict lower levels of depression and stress (but not anxiety) in autistic adults

Posts about what life is like in general:

• A BBC special introduces us to the lives of six adult-diagnosed autistic women
• Oolong on executive dysfunction
• C.L. Bridge on the pressure to conform to stereotypes

Misc:

• Real Social Skills on when people with other disabilities stereotype autism
• Real Social Skills on the difference between disability and being trapped

An accidental trilogy of posts about intelligence, IQ, and oppression:

• Amy Sequenzia on why the concept of intelligence is irrelevant
• David M. Perry on how IQ test results are affected by racial bias – and how, paradoxically, prosecutors in the US are using knowledge of this bias to push for more executions of people of color
• Rachel Darnall on a couple who lost custody of their children because of their low IQs 

Other posts about disability and oppression:

• Annie Segarra and Jonathan Hume on why disabled people don’t have marriage equality 
• Matt Vasilogambros on how voter suppression affects disabled Americans
• The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Alabama still keeps hundreds of mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement despite a direct court order to stop doing so
• Rebecca Cokley on the dismantling of the Americans with Disabilities Act 
• Maxfield Sparrow on the extremely high unemployment rate among college-educated autistic adults  (CN: This article might be super depressing if you are preparing to seek employment soon. :-\ )
• Washington State was considering creating forms for the process of sterilizing disabled people under guardianship; after protest from disability rights groups, including ASAN, they have decided against it.

Elizabeth Bartmess on good autistic representation in fiction: a three-part series

• Part one: Interiority 
• Part two: Diversity in autistic characteristics and demographics
• Part three: Setting, plot, and character growth

Movie and television reviews:

• The Fantastic Autistic on neurodiversity and Doctor Who
• Maxfield Sparrow reviews “Please Stand By”
• Amanda Forest Vivian also reviews “Please Stand By” 
• Sarah Pripas Kapit reviews “The A Word” 

Posts about bad parents and their memoirs of their bad parenting:

• Lydia Z.X. Brown on how frequently bad parents get the spotlight while autistic people’s rights are ignored
• Shannon des Roches Rosa on how autism parent memoirs could be helpful – and how they usually do harm instead

Other media and reviews:

• Kate Ryan reviews “Things I Should Have Known” 
• Sarah Kurchak on how autistic headcanons fill the gaps in official autistic representation.  (I have a small problem with this article, which is that Kurchak inadvertently gives the impression that there’s less official representation than there is – many of the forms of representation she describes can also be found in books and stories I’ve reviewed! – but many of those books and stories aren’t very well known, especially among non-SFF-geeks, so, eh. Anyway, that’s a minor point, and the main points of the article are very good.)
• Kathryn Hedges reviews “The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily”

On the Parkland shooting:

• The Autism Women’s Network reminds us not to speculate about the mental health of school shooters
• Jessica Banks on why arming teachers won’t make neurodivergent or black/brown students any safer

On intersections within autism:

• Sometimes people say that neurodiversity advocates have “nothing to offer” to severely disabled autistic people (even though there is plenty of overlap between those groups). Emily Paige Ballou explains what people might mean by that, and what we do offer.
• Devin S. Turk on being autistic and transmasculine
• Francine Russo on how women mask their autism

Misc:

• Shira Rubin on autism therapy robots  (There is more pathologizing language in this article than I would like, especially at first, but it also has some interesting information, especially where it lists potential problems with the robots.)
• For Black History Month, Finn Gardiner tells the story of “Blind Tom” Wiggins, who may have been an autistic savant
• Amy Sequenzia on the difference between “independent living” and real independence

More from Rose Lemberg’s “Writing While Autistic” series:

• On autistic inertia
• On giving oneself permission to write – and permission not to write  (This one hit me especially hard; in fact, I have been changing aspects of how I schedule my time because of it and the conversations that came out of it.)
• On identity

Media and Reviews:

• Lydia Brown calls for a boycott of “To Siri, With Love”  (The article also ends with a great list of intersectional disability organizations that are taking donations.)
• Derek Budryk reviews “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”
• Elizabeth Bartmess on autistic-compatible plots (This was inspired by my “Mouse” review. 😀 )
• Ceillie Simkiss talks about cure tropes in “A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet”

Posts about treatments (and “treatments”):

• Alyssa Hillary on why you shouldn’t take away a communication device that someone is stimming with
• Reid Knight on why food restrictions as a treatment for autism are damaging
• Shain Neumeier on a new drug that can track when the patient takes it, and why this is a bad thing
• Kerima Çevik on the history of forced sterilization, and why Judith Newman’s musings in “To Siri, With Love” about sterilizing her son are especially horrifying for Black parents

Pan-disability stuff:

• Alaina Leary on how to support disabled loved ones during the winter holidays
• Cheri A. Blauwet on being both a wheelchair user and a medical doctor
• ASAN statement on Medicaid work requirements in the US
• Emily Morson on why disabled people are never sure how much to push themselves. (This article is from a year ago, but I read it in late December, and it’s been SUCH an eye-opener for me and my disabled friends IRL that I’m breaking my usual rule and posting it anyway.) 
• Elliot Kukla on how he learned to be interdependent 

Science:

• Autistic girls struggle more with routine tasks than autistic boys, even when they are matched for the apparent clinical severity of their symptoms
• Bilingual autistic children are better at task switching

Rose Lemberg is making a cool series right now about writing while autistic, and I am linking to everything in the series because it’s wonderful.

• On rules and guilt
• On productivity and stimming (This advice is about writing, but it might be usefully applied to many other stimmy, potentially unproductive tasks which one feels pressurd to make “productive”.)
• On ending a story when transitions are hard
• On reclaiming hyperfocus (I… need to think about this one some more. Oof.)
• On writing a story in multiple sessions

Politics and government:

• Betsy DeVos, the U.S. Secretary of Education, rescinded 72 documents outlining disabled students’ rights. 
• In Canada, it’s becoming more difficult for mentally disabled people to access disability tax credits and other financial help.  (CN: “sufferers of autism” and other unfortunate word choices.)
• Terrence McCoy on the agony of waiting for a disability hearing in the US (CN: There’s… um… I want to warn for a thing that’s in this article, but I don’t know what to call it. Really depressing situations happen and people are depressed by them. I don’t know. Also, slurs.)

Sexuality and relationships:

• Chrysanthe Tan on why it’s hard for queer autistic people to access most queer spaces – and what the queer community could do to fix it. 
• Dani Alexis Ryskamp on weird flirting

Pan-disability posts:

• More than half of disabled Black Americans have been arrested by the age of 28
• Frances Ryan reports on the everyday lives of disabled people in the UK
• Annalee Flower Horne on disability representation in the X-Men and how to make it better

Posts about safety and crisis situations:

• ASAN releases an Autism and Safety toolkit addressing bullying, abuse, and many other issues that affect autistic people’s safety.
• Maxfield Sparrow on dealing with a crisis when you don’t have reliable oral speech

Misc:

• Chavisory addresses autistic people who want to be cured
• Alyssa Hillary on pain tolerance
• Shannon des Roches Rosa on valuing intense interests
• Reese Piper on autistic women and executive dysfunction

I have once again managed to neglect my Autism News posts for a few months, so now you folks are getting a NICE BIG ONE.

Posts about how people treat us:

• Lydia Brown on ableist sexual harassment
• C.L. Bridge on special interests

Posts about personal experiences:

• Leigh Merryday on inexplicable tears (I can definitely relate to having emotions that are stored up to be released later!)
• M Kelter explains how he experiences music
• Kerima Cevik on using YouTube to communicate
• Finn Gardiner on executive dysfunction

Posts about online advocacy and the politics of language:

• Amy Sequenzia on people who use “person-first language” but still don’t “see the person”
• Alyssa Hillary on choosing between different problematic terms with different problematic histories
• Chavisory on “alienating allies”, and how there are two different things that phrase can mean
• Real Social Skills on responding to callouts

Posts about American politics and core disability policy:

• ASAN statement on the defeat of ACA repeal (in September…)
• ASAN statement on the more recent attempts to dismantle the ACA with executive orders
• ACLU statement on proposed changes to the Americans With Disabilities Act
• Sarah Jones on the ADAPT protests

Other pan-disability and policy stuff:

• Christopher Knaus explains how NDIS disability insurance is being rolled out too fast in the UK
• Russ Choma on how airlines and the Trump administration are delaying implementing improvements to how US airlines handle wheelchairs
• Mac McClelland on what happens to Americans who are found not guilty by reason of insanity (TW: institutionalization; medical/psychiatric abuse; descriptions of violent crimes, including sexual crimes and crimes against children.)

Media and reviews:

• Elizabeth Cassidy explains why having characters who meet all the diagnostic criteria for autism isn’t the same as having realistic autistic characters
• Eric Deggans summarizes autistic people’s reactions to “Atypical” and “The Good Doctor”
• Maxfield Sparrow writes a nuanced review of “The Good Doctor”
• Sarah Pripas reviews “Dina”, a documentary about an autistic couple getting married
• Nicole and Meadow Panteleakos review “A Boy Called Bat”
• Chavisory explains the problem with portraying autistic characters as naive. (This is one of those “I think I knew this, but I didn’t have language to say it” type posts for me. It’s a great description of a pervasive problem in a way I haven’t seen before. I might start linking to it in Autistic Book Party reviews once in a while.)

Misc:

• Bec Oakley has a good 101 post about fidget tools
• Jessica Wright on autism and anxiety
• J.R. Jackson explains why authors living on disability payments might not want to be paid for their writing
• Maxfield Sparrow on how to explain death and dying to autistic children. (This is really good and detailed. TW for death, obviously, and a couple of other things listed at the beginning of the article.)

Law enforcement news:

• David M. Perry on the criminalization of schoolchildren’s meltdowns
• And (same reporter) on police violence in Chicago and being black and disabled
• A new report says 1 in 5 autistic young people in Ontario have interacted with the police in the last 18 months. In a third of those interactions, the police made things worse.

Media and reviews:

• John Wiswell reminds us that evil isn’t a disability
• Kelly Robson on why her futures include disability

Australian politics:

• Karen R Fisher and Sally Robinson unpack the role of disability in the Australian census
• An Australian politician raised eyebrows by saying that all autistic students should be segregated

Canadian politics:

• The first ever Disability Pride parade in British Columbia, Canada:
• The Human Rights Commission of Newfoundland and Labrador, in Canada, says that most of the complaints they receive are about accessibility
• Andrew Russell and Brian Hill on how Canada’s immigration system discriminates against disabled immigrants and their families

Jobs:

• M. Kelter interviews Art Shectman about Ultra Testing, a tech firm that hires autistic employees
• Another company, EY, is also getting into the business of autistic hiring

On stereotypes and prejudice:

• Pascale Tosquano on the ideas of special treatment and positive stereotyping
• Martha Rose Saunders explains in great depth how all of the diagnostic criteria for autism can apply to a person who doesn’t “look [stereoptyically] autistic“
• Kerima Cevik on how people can pay lip service to acceptance while still insisting that they don’t have to accept their own child
• Real Social Skills on how a stereotype can be both positive and dehumanizing

Misc:

• Sonia Boue on autistic leadership
• A new study says autistic people make certain kinds of comparisons more rationally than NTs
• There is a new word for autism in Maori

Sad Things:

• Montgomery Cal on why disabled people in the US are protesting the proposed removal of Medicaid
• Kris Guin on being autistic, LGBT, and homeless

April is Autism Month – Autism Awareness Month to some, and Autism Acceptance Month to others, and sometimes just the annoying month where we have to listen to more Autism Speaks propaganda than usual – so there’s been a lot of news!

• ASAN condemns the U.S. President’s Autism Awareness Day proclamation
• How Apple is honoring Autism Acceptance Month (including discounts on AAC apps)
• Apparently, Lindt no longer supports Autism Speaks (YAY!):
• Would you like a roundup of as many posts explaining the problems with Autism Speaks as possible? Kirsten Schultz made one.

Shannon des Roches Rosa has been making some good 101 posts this month at The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism:

• Inappropriate approaches to autism science
• Eleven ways to make an autistic child’s life easier
• Five avoidable mistakes that autistic children’s parents make

Pan-disability politics and policy, from the US:

• Michelle Diament on how new U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch deals with disability cases
• S.E. Smith on why more disabled people are employed in some US states than others
• The U.S. Supreme Court recently made an important decision about disability and the death penalty. (For anyone who needs more evidence about why representation in fiction matters, this article describes how the state of Texas has literally been evaluating people’s eligibility for the death penalty based on their resemblance to a fictional character.)
• Elsa Sjunesson-Henry on protesting while disabled

From Canada and the UK:

• Alexandra Sienkiewicz on why disability claims over mental health in Canada are difficult to navigate
• Penny Pepper on how disability laws in the UK have encouraged bullying
• Helen Ries on why the laws around disability payments in Ontario need to change (I live in Ontario, but I’m pretty sure there are similar bad regulations in many other places.) 

Posts about ABA:

• Diary of a Birdmad Girl talks about what it’s like to be an ABA therapist (and how little training and regulation the profession actually has)
• Sparrow R. Jones on alternatives to ABA

Media and writing:

• Kim Broomall reviews “Queens of Geek” by Jen Wilde
• J.R. Jackson on writing “rules” that don’t work for disabled writers
• Julia Bascom, executive director of ASAN, talks about the new autistic muppet on Sesame Street

Sad things:

• Lifestyle Solutions, an Australian nonprofit that manages group homes for disabled people, is under investigation for abuse and neglect causing a series of deaths.  (TW: In addition to what it says on the can, there is also mention of sexual assault. I have not watched the video that accompanies the article but, based on the description, would not recommend doing so.)
• Amelia Hill interviews three autistic mothers of autistic children (TW: all three mothers discuss, among other things, a fear of social services taking their children away; abuse by third parties is also mentioned.)

 

For mental health reasons (I’m fine now, I just got overloaded by world events for a bit) I did not collect autism news during the months of January and February. I will not be making any attempt to retroactively collect news from this time: today’s Autism News post is for the news cycle starting March 1. Thanks for understanding.

Let’s start this cycle off with some political content: an ASAN toolkit on contacting your elected representatives.

Media and reviews:

• Sarah Kurchak on how the new autistic muppet on Sesame Street could help autistic people
• Sharon A. Mitchell reviews “Autism Goes to School“
• Bogi Takács reviews “The Someday Birds”

About diagnosis:

• Feminist Aspie explains why not “labeling” children is a mistake
• Lisa Daxer explains why people self-diagnose
• Shannon des Roches Rosa gives advice for parents who just learned that their child is autistic.  (This is a really good 101-level article. If you are new to this topic and looking for 101, it might be useful even if you are not a parent.)
• Shelley Lorraine shares her story of adult diagnosis – and how it didn’t change other people’s reactions as much as she hoped it would.

About fun and play:

• I don’t always share “someone did something nice for an autistic child” articles, but this soft immersive jungle gym is really cool.
• Lynn from Neurokaleidoscope on “appropriate play“

Misc:

• Alyssa Hillary suggests some new directions for autism research
• Dani Alexis Ryskamp on why you shouldn’t go to autism meetups looking for girls to date 

Sad things:

• M. Yergeau on the rhetoric of filicide.  (Um, this post is GRAPHIC. Take the filicide TW SERIOUSLY, please. If you can stomach it, it says some important things.)
• Lisa Daxer’s Autism Memorial has two new entries for autistic people who were killed this March: 1 [2] 

 

U.S. politics news:

• On Buzzfeed, 13 disabled activists talk about their reactions to the American election
• ASAN is joining the newly formed Modern Medicaid Alliance, advocating for the importance of Medicaid in American disabled people’s lives
• ASAN statement on the nomination of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General, and why this nomination is dangerous for disabled people (among others)
• The state of Michigan passed legislation to severely restrict and regulate the use of restraint and seclusion on K-12 students. (TW: descriptions of specific instances of restraint and other ableist treatment)

Posts about self-advocacy:

• Kimball Anderson on the optimistic “could”
• Sparrow R. Jones explains why self-advocacy is a verb, not a noun

Pan-disability news:

• Intellectually disabled workers in Australia won a court case against sheltered workshops which paid them far below minimum wage, and will now be given all the back pay they are owed
• Elizabeth Bartmess does a detailed review of accessibility concerns at Clarion West 2016, to help disabled writers decide if they can attend
• Jessica Monsell on the problems wheelchair users encounter when flying

Misc:

• Leigh Merryday on how to host a Sensitive Santa event that actually works as intended
• Caroline Hearst on teaching therapists to understand autism
• Amelia Hill on undiagnosed autistic mothers (TW: forcible adoption)

Sad Things Other Than Trump:

• The people who killed Alex Spourdalakis were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, even though the killing was premeditated.
  • Lisa Daxer responds to the news of the sentencing
  • Shannon des Roches Rosa explains how to prevent this from happening again