Autism News: 2016/12/04

Well, I haven’t made an Autism News post since before the American election, so we need to address that. All of you have presumably already read a million thinkpieces about the election, but there is less being spread around from a disabled point of view than from some others, so here are some important election-related posts by disabled people.

(Note: I’m not completely sure how to TW this section properly. Please assume, as with the Sad Things section, that everything that sounds like it might be negative/triggering is what it says on the can.)

But not all of us live in the US! Here are some slightly less terrible things that are happening in the UK.

Some useful psychological information:

Some posts about personal experiences:

Intersectionality:

Some activism, and some posts about how to do activism:

Misc:

  • Autism Speaks removed the word “cure”, and many other pathologizing/stigmatizing terms, from their mission statement. (While this change is too little too late for many autistic people, it’s still really interesting news!)
  • Brent White and Lindsey Anderson give a presentation on understanding and coping with meltdowns.

And finally, the Sad Things section. (Or should that be Sad Things Other Than Trump?)

  • The fire in California which killed four disabled men and their caregiver has been confirmed to be arson-related, and potentially a murder-suicide.
  • Lisa Daxer’s Autism Memorial logged six known times in October and November when autistic people were killed for being autistic: [1] 2 3 4 [5] [6]

Autism News, 2016/10/09

I’ve been so busy that somehow there wasn’t an Autism News post since June. But news has been accruing at an astonishing rate! So we’re going to have a REALLY BIG news post today. Hold on to your hats.

Intersectionality:

  • Lydia Brown on the intersection of autistic and trans experience.
  • A Fusion video on the intersection of race and autism
  • Dani Alexis Ryskamp on emotional labor and autistic women. [I’m really glad to see an article on this topic; I’ve been wondering about autistic people’s experience of emotional labor ever since I was introduced to the concept.]

Science and technology:

Reviews:

Some writing advice:

Some good posts about ableism:

Misc:

Sad things:

We have a doozy of a Sad Things section this time, partly because of a few well-publicized cases of attacks on autistic people in the news. A man named Charles Kinsey was shot by police in the US, who later claimed they had meant to shoot the autistic person Kinsey was caring for. Meanwhile, an autistic man named Abdirahman Abdi was killed by police in Canada. A person in Japan performed a mass shooting in a facility for disabled people, claiming he wanted a future without disabled people in it. An autistic boy named Austin Anderson in the US who was killed by his mother also made the news.

The Charles Kinsey case got enough media attention to merit its own section:

Meanwhile, other sad things:

Autism News, 2016/06/23

Posts about childcare and education:

Reviews:

Sadly, the murder of autistic people by their caregivers is back in the news again, so here’s a section about that. Everything in this section has the usual TWs that you would expect given the topic.

Misc:

Autism News, 2016/05/12

With an important autism research conference coming up, Shannon des Roches Rosa and Carol Greenburg have put together a recommended reading list for people attending a conference and wanting to be able to think critically about autism research.

The provincial government of Ontario in Canada recently changed its rules for what kinds of autism therapy it will pay for and at what ages. A lot of parents are up in arms about it. Here’s Anne McGuire, Patty Douglas, and Estée Klar explaining why both sides of the debate are wrong when it comes to actually respecting autistic people. (As a resident of Ontario who has seen a lot of local NTs throwing around articles and petitions about this issue lately, I was very grateful for this article.)

Posts about traits, impairments, and accommodations:

Posts about attitudes and social change:

And in other news, the Disability in Kidlit team is still doing important work:

Autism News, 2016/04/05

Today is a very big Autism News post! Partly because I procrastinated harder than usual, but also because there is genuinely a lot of autism stuff in the news, especially as we gear up for the Awareness/Acceptance Month of April.

Since everyone is lighting it up different colors for autism right now, we should probably start with Real Social Skills’ post on what autism awareness means to them.

There was a lot in the news lately about euthanasia, murder, death in general, and other medical problems for disabled people. Everything in this section has a TW for these and related topics.

Meanwhile, autistic self-advocate John Elder Robison wrote a book about his experiences with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

  • Here is a post by Robison about his book, and on the difference between “having feelings” and “reading social cues”
  • Sonia Boue lists objections that many autistic people are raising to the promotion of TMS in Robison’s book
  • This interview with Robison responds to some of these objections, and goes into more depth on Robison’s feelings about the potential risks and drawbacks of TMS.

Posts about adult diagnosis:

Pan-disability posts for the SFF crowd!

Other pan-disability posts:

  • Erin Human on why she says “disabled”, not “special needs”
  • Feminist Aspie on food policing
  • Clarissa Krikpe on community living for people with high-support/ developmental disabilities. (Note: There is a lot of parent-centric language in this article, but if you can deal with that, it has some pretty interesting information.)
  • Karen Hitselberger on why the “How Do You See Me?” campaign doesn’t work

Misc:

Autism News, 2016/02/17

Posts about books, writing, and media:

Events in the actual news:

  • For the first time, a U.S. court ruled that it was illegal to pay disabled workers less than minimum wage in sheltered workshops.
  • Shannon des Roches Rosa on Hillary Clinton’s autism plan
  • Kayden Clarke, an autistic self-advocate whose video about a support dog went viral, joins the long list of autistic people killed by police.

Other things:

Autism News, 01/01/2016

A few weeks ago, Elizabeth Bartmess wrote the best post on autistic representation I have ever seen. In academia, we would call this a “survey paper”: it lists and categorizes all the most common problems with autistic characters in fiction (along with links to book reviews that show each of the problems in action), then links to non-fiction articles explaining why each one is a problem, what real-life problems and narratives it connects to, and what we would like to see instead. It’s geared towards writers of YA/MG fiction, so the examples are drawn from YA, but every single point is a thing that crops up in fiction for adults as well.

I am not joking when I say this is REQUIRED READING. From now on, whenever someone asks me how to write an autistic character without failing, I am linking them to this post FIRST.

Here are some other good posts on How To Do Activism:

There was a protest called #CrippingTheMighty recently against a site called The Mighty, which aggregates disability-related content in sometimes problematic ways (inspiration porn, “warrior moms”, etc). Here is an overview of #CrippingTheMighty (with more links!) by Savannah Lodgson-Breakstone.

  • Dani Alexis Ryskamp on why The Mighty should also be paying its writers
  • Although The Mighty has had issues for some time, a lot of the talk in #CrippingTheMighty was triggered by a specific problematic post. Shannon des Roches Rosa and others at the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism have a very important point here about that post’s author, who is autistic herself and has apologized.

Misc:

Autism News: 2015/11/17

Some book news to start us off this news cycle!

The CDC recently revised its estimates of autism prevalence to 1 in 45, which is a higher prevalence than the previous estimate after a long period of prevalence estimates continuing to rise.

An ABA therapist published an article on a site called Autism Daily Newscast about “perks kids with autism get from bullying”. The article, rightfully, got a lot of critical responses from autistic people who had experienced bullying as children. Here are some good ones:

Here’s some pan-disability stuff:

Misc:

Autism News, 2015/09/06

This autistic linkspam episode has some links that should have gone in the last one except I forgot to check my feed reader again before posting. 😛 I blame the post-LARP brain that I had that day. Anyway, here are more links.

  • Last news post I linked to a petition about Sharon Joy Kochmeister. Here’s Evil Autie explaining some complications to that case that I didn’t know about [TW abuse]
  • Also here’s a follow-up to Dani and Emma’s post about imposing behaviourism on oneself [TW more abuse]

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of buzz about a book called NeuroTribes. It’s by an NT author who has extensively researched the history of autistic community and activism.

Also:

Autism News, 2015/08/24

To start with:

Dating and sex:

Pan-disability posts:

Misc:

Sad Things:

  • Kerima Cevik on how we respond inappropriately to hate crimes against autistic people [TW, um, descriptions of hate crimes?]
  • Sharisa Kochmeister, an autism activist and non-speaking person, was recently put into a nursing home against her will and denied access to the devices that allow her to communicate. Here is a petition to free her
  • Jim Jacobson on his inner autistic child [TW for… I actually don’t know? like I don’t know how to tell if this is literally about Dissociative Identity Disorder or if it is a metaphor? But either way, it’s difficult and important?]