“Be an advocate and a communication partner to help your child make their own voice heard. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.”

Small, but happy things that I enjoy about being autistic

Feel free to reblog and add your own!!

I’ve been seeing a lot of inspiration porn lately and I just wanted to say something really quick

Disabled/neurodivergent people are not here to help you be a better person. We’re not put into your lives to teach you how to be more patient or how to be kinder or how to never give up or whatever bullshit y'all talk about.

Disabled people are here because they’re here. They’re disabled because they’re disabled, not to teach you some moral lesson(that you could learn yourself).

Able-bodied/neurotypical people can and should reblog this

Viral, please 🙏🏽

Remember the 19 lives lost today #Sagamihara19

I refuse to let this be forgotten, for a hate crime to go unacknowledged, for ableism to go unacknowledged.

This was the loudest silence I’ve experienced in regards to ableism; the most painful erasure.

I feel the erasure all the time.

I experience it when people are cruel before they are understanding of my disabilities & when laws that impact our daily lives are a shock when I mention them.

I witness disabled activists’ work going ignored.

#ListenToDisabledPeople

I got this pin sometime after it happened, holding it down for them, holding them with us.

[Image Description: a pin of a red flower with a banner under that reads “Lest we forget”]!

Society: It’s okay to be different

Autistic Person: (stims)

Society: No not like that!

I have to have surgery in a few weeks please help me out😊

“What people are really doing when they’re trying to determine if I’m a real autistic is figuring out if I make them uncomfortable or sad enough to count. If I show any coping skills, any empathy, any likability, any fun—essentially any humanity—I must be dismissed. “

you know what sucks? that disabled seating is always the worst at concerts. i’m disabled and it’s difficult for me to stand up for 3+ hours straight for a concert (ngl imma still do it for Taylor even tho it hurts) and it’s just a bummer that accessible seating always seems to be the last priority for stadiums over people who can pay 1000 dollars for a front row seat

Today is the anniversary of the Capitol Crawl, an event in 1990 in which disabled activists pulled themselves from their wheelchairs and quite literally crawled up the steps of the Capitol Building. This was done to protest the living conditions for disabled people in the United States, and it was done to pass the ADA. And fuck yeah, they did it.

These activists along with hundreds of others managed to secure rights for disabled Americans for decades to come. However, all that heroic work is now being threatened by H.R. 620.

I’ve been talking a lot about H.R. 620 lately because frankly, it scares the shit out of me. It’s a bill that’s designed to strip rights from people with disabilities, and it has already passed the House of Representatives.

A little background:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, the year I was born. Because of that, I have lived under its protections for just about my entire life. When my high school tried to prevent me from graduating because of my medical struggles, we were able to use the ADA to procure a 504 plan. When my dorms and classrooms were inaccessible, it was the ADA that got me accommodations. I am afforded extra assistance when traveling, when voting, at the doctor, and the only reason I can do any of these things is because of the ADA.

I now have a college diploma and a full-time job. I would have neither without the ADA. It’s not a perfect solution, but the protections it does provide have been invaluable in my life and the lives of my family. (My family members with a different disability have also Gone Through Some Shit but that’s really their story to tell.)

I think most of Americans know that some semblance of protections for PWD exist. I’m not sure most Americans understand how difficult they are to use. It’s not like the ADA provides, idk, inspectors who go around looking at buildings to see if they’re accessible. They don’t take complaints from PWD if the elevator in their building stopped working and their landlord won’t fix it. There is no safety & health inspector of the disabled world. The ADA is instead enforced via lawsuit.

To put it simply — if a disabled person has been discriminated against, they have the right to get a lawyer and sue the establishment that has discriminated against them. They cannot sue for damages. They can only get the place to change. (Though some courts have levied additional monetary damages for noncompliance.)

This is already a pretty arduous process. I mean, you have to get a lawyer and go to court. No one enjoys doing that, especially when you know there is no financial reward. But H.R. 620 aims to make this process much, much harder. It requires PWD to gather a ton of evidence and documentation, it requires a system of letter-writing and complaints, just a mess of things that many PWD will not have the time, money, energy, and/or know-how to be able to do.

More importantly, though, H.R. 620 changes how businesses need to comply. H.R. 620 aims to change it so a business or institution has six months before they even need to start showing a plan to change. I repeat. This is not six months before the work is done. This is six months before they even need to start moving. Six months would have been an entire semester when I was in college! And even then, all they need to do is show “progress”. Progress can mean anything! It sure doesn’t mean that I can get in the building!

In effect, this would strip PWD of their ability to actually have the ADA enforced. It puts a very onerous process on the back of the people being discriminated against so they’ll be too confused, tired, or burdened to exercise their rights in the first place. And then, if they get through that wholly unnecessary roadblock, the place they need to get into may not actually become accessible for — well, ever. There is no part of the desired amendments to the ADA that would actually require accessibility. Ever. Which is mind-blowing.

H.R. 620 is popular amongst business conglomerates and real estate developers, for obvious reasons. They don’t want to deal with the extra expenses that come with making their properties accessible. Because of this, they have started a misinformation campaign saying that PWD are using the ADA to attack small businesses with frivolous lawsuits, which puts undue burden on people ~just trying to make it~.

The long and short of it is that the businesses who make money off of our oppression are trying to turn us into the villains of the story so they can pass legislation that will remove their financial responsibilities and take away our civil rights.

H.R. 620 has already passed the House. It moves on to the Senate shortly. Please, please call your senators and tell them that you support the ADA and want them to vote against H.R. 620. So few people are even talking about this issue, but it is a matter of life and death for a lot of people. This, paired with our current administration’s other crimes against the elderly and disabled, is looking to make this country uninhabitable for PWD. And that’s terrifying.

Please help us.

(Note: If you’d like more info on H.R. 620, the ACLU has put out a handy guide on myths and misconceptions about the bill.)

March 12th 1990

I checked (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620) and the Senate hasn’t done anything with it yet as of this writing (May 7 2018) so keep an eye on it and start educating those senators!

asking for straight pride is like asking for able bodied parking spaces

thats a really good comparison because there are about seventy able bodied parking spaces to one disabled and able bodied people still insist on using the ones that arent theirs

this is seriously a great post 

As someone with a long term health condition I would like to appeal to any parents or future parents of people with health problems. Don’t just dismiss your child when they call themselves disabled, sure, it might not be the exact right term but I’m sure as hell not able-bodied and it makes you feel like you’re nothing and your identity isn’t valid. Basically, support your fucking kids because they bloody need you.

Autism acceptance month, day 12

To celebrate autism acceptance month, I’m going to post something positive about autism every day through April.

Allow me to introduce the Japanese classical composer Hikari Ōe:

Ōe was born in 1963 with a herniated brain, autism, epileptic seizures and visual impairment. The doctors described him as “severely disabled” and strongly urged his parents kill him, claiming that he would become a vegetable otherwise. His parents (including his father, famous author Kenzuburo Ōe) refused the offer and Hikari Ōe survived the birth thanks to surgery.

Ōe didn’t speak a word until he was 6 years old when he identified a specific birdcall on television as that of a water rail bird. After buying him a record with tracks of various birdcalls, Ōe’s parents noticed his talent at memorizing specific sounds, so they hired a private piano teacher for him. While Ōe still doesn’t speak much to this day, he quickly learned to express himself through classical music. In the following years, he learned to play both the piano, flute and violin expertly.

He began composing his own music when he was just 13 years old and released his first album when he was 29. The album sold over a million copies and won Japan’s top prize for classical Japanese music. All his later albums would become commercial successes as well, both in Japan and America. 

You can hear his first album on YouTube. Give it a listen, it’s beautiful:

While his music in itself is worth celebrating, there is a specific reason I wanted to talk about Ōe in particular.

Whenever anti-neurodiversity people try to argue against neurodiversity, one of their main arguments is usually the good ol’ functioning label. “Think of the severely autistic!” they say, as if being “severely” autistic means you can’t be happy or successful.

I wanted to share Ōe’s story because it goes direcly against that toxic ideology. Despite being “severely handicapped”, Ōe went on to live a highly successful, happy life. After his birth, he became one of his fathers biggest influences for all his later books. Absolutely nobody can argue that the world would be better off if the doctors had killed Ōe at birth like they wanted. His existence changed both his parents lives and the world of classical music for the better.

It doesn’t matter if people are “low-functioning” autistic or “high-functioning” autistic. We’re all human beings and we all deserve respect. Even the most “severely handicapped” like Ōe can often go on to do incredible things.

Happy April to all autistic and neurodiverse people! I hope you all have a wonderful month.

(Day 12/30, follow #aprilautismpositivity for more)

listen we’re always pushing back against anti-vaxxers with the science showing that no, vaccines don’t cause autism, but can we please talk about the underlying problem here which is that people hate autistic children? 

even if the poorly researched pseudo-science was right and vaccines had any link to autism in children, i would still want myself and my children vaccinated because guess what, there’s nothing wrong with autistic people.

 what i hear when people say they don’t want their children vaccinated against deadly illnesses because they believe that vaccines cause autism is not just that they’re horribly misinformed, but that they’d rather have a sick, dying, or dead child than an autistic child. and honestly, that’s pretty fucked up and just goes to show that neurotypical people don’t view us as people who are equally entitled to life.

*PUNCHES REBLOG BUTTON*

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

- Stephen Hawking

RIP

[Image is of Stephen Hawking looking into the camera while in his wheelchair.]

My tummy doesn’t have to be cute. It holds my internal organs. My thighs don’t have to “crush men’s skulls”. I use them to carry myself. My stretch marks don’t have to be tiger stripes I earned. They came when I grew.

Stop.

feeling this

This!

I feel like even body positivity is too focused on, like, the appearance of the body. I know I became a whole lot happier with my body when I started thinking of it less in terms of how it looked (to me or anyone else) and realized, that, like…

When I feel cool breeze on my skin on a really hot day, my body did that for me.

When I step into a bath after a hike, and my muscles ache, but in a good way, and the steam all around me makes me feel like a flower blooming, my body did that for me.

And the hike before it, and standing on a large rock breathing the raw winter air seeing the power of the half-frozen river. That too.

When I’ve had a plate of pasta puttanesca, and I chopped and sauteed the ingredients and now I’m full-but-not-uncomfortable, and warm all over, and perfectly content, my body did that for me.

My body doesn’t have to look awesome to be awesome. It’s awesome because it’s where I live.

Best comment.

As a wheelchair user if I go to open a door on my own please let me do it. Please don’t tell me to stop or chide me for trying to open doors on my own. I’m already in a wheelchair, please let me practice what ever control I have left in my life. Besides I’ve gotten pretty good at opening doors in my chair.

I don’t mind and appreciate when people do it without me asking. It’s when people tell me no, stop, don’t do that, let me do that, etc. when people treat me in a way other than any other person needing the door opened for them. What frustrates me is being treated like I’m incompetent.

As an able-bodied person, I want to ask.. if I see someone struggling with a door or something, is it okay for me to ask “Hey, do you need help with that?” And then if they say no I’ll apologize and leave them alone. I wouldn’t want to be rude by asking, but I wouldn’t want to be rude by ignoring if it seems they do need help.

I would sorta wait to see if they are having some obvious trouble then at least ask. But seriously don’t just walk up and take the door out of our hands. Many of us have been seriously hurt by people doing that.

Always ask first. If the person says no please don’t be offended and become passive aggressive with us. Many of us simply wish to retain what independence we have left. Please don’t take it personally. Asking “would you like some help with the door/s?” Is perfect. If we say no. Just be like “ok but if you need help later just let me know”.

Disclaimer. Even as a wheelchair user I do not speak for all of us.

This is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in myself for years, and I wonder if any other spoonies have noticed it too

You would think that being chronically ill would make you more in-tune with your body since you have to think all the time about what you’re doing, evaluate how much energy you have to do a thing, figure out what triggers which symptoms, have to explain stuff to doctors in excruciating detail over and over again, etc. And, to be sure, that is true for me to an extent. 

But the other thing I’ve found is that when you have chronic illness/chronic pain, you get so used to tuning out the unpleasant sensations that are just a normal part of living in your body that you forget to listen to your body signaling you to do stuff? Like I’ll notice that I have to pee, and then immediately forget about it, and then like 6 hours later it reaches the point of like actual stabbing pain and I’m like oh my god I really have to go to the bathroom what the fuck how did I forget about this? Or I’ll go a long time without eating because I just… forget to notice that I’m hungry. 

My body is like “hey, I need a thing” and I’m usually like “body, shhh, I’m busy”

Sometimes that signal is my nerves going “AAAAHHHH HELP SWEATER IS TOUCHING SKIN ALERT ALERT EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE” and so me being like “wow body, shut up, we’re wearing clothes today, this is not up for debate” is 100% the right course of action. But then sometimes it’s my stomach going “yo, food is good for you, we haven’t had any in a long time” and I’m like “shhhh don’t worry about it” and then hours later I’m like “wow why do I feel so awful? Why am I shaking? OH maybe because I haven’t eaten today, lol oops, sorry about that one, body, let me immediately overcompensate by eating ALL the snacks while I wait for my dinner to be ready because now that I have noticed I am STARVING”