Why I Reject Autism Speaks

A couple of months ago, my brother sent me a text. Did I want to go to the Autism walk with him and Em?

I did a quick google and found, as I had suspected, that the benefactor was Autism Speaks, and I responded in the negative. I also did my quick bullet points of reasons not to support them- not even the in depth version, just the elevator speech version. I also did another focusing on their media presence. Here’s a transcript:

Me: They promote a tragedy model of autism and act like the desire to murder your kid is understandable to have? Also they refuse to have any autistic people at all on their board and the one guy who was on their advisory quit because they didn’t listen to anything he told them. Only 4% of their budget goes to families. Most of the money doesn’t make it back to the communities it comes out of. Instead it goes to their media machine.

Wil: I see that’s lame as hell we were going to go but not anymore that’s way messed up.

Me: Next [time] you are on YouTube google Autism Every Day to see a mom talk about wanting [to] drive herself and her kid off a bridge IN FRONT OF SAID KID and not doing so because of her non-autistic child. Or the I Am Autism one where they took film from families not telling them that the voice over would be about autism destroying families. ❤ [heart emoji] Thanks for listening!

Wil: Yeah I’ll check ’em out thanks for the info. We were gonna take her parent’s car and go ‘n bring you along but after hearing all that we were both like nooooope.

This was one of the LEAST difficult attempts at educating people, and I didn’t even have to drop in too much detail.

I didn’t have to talk about their allowing the JRC to advertise at their events. The JRC uses painful skin shocks on students with disabilities. It deprives children of food as punishment for even small behaviors. It has been called a human rights violation by the UN’s torture investigator.

As for the guy who left their advisory: He posted an open letter when he left. (He might still retain hope that they could reform, but I don’t.) It was the science advisory, by the way- not the board. I have seen some people thinking that it was the board, but it wasn’t- there’s never been an autistic on their actual board.

While I mentioned that only 4% (really less than) of their budget goes to helping autistics and our families, I didn’t go into details about how they spend more on catering. I didn’t note that “fundraising” makes up 25% of their budget, and Advertising and similar “awareness” another 30%.

I didn’t note that the research they fund goes towards eliminating people like me. I didn’t mention the prenatal testing research that they’ve supported, or how if they find a successful test it will eliminate people like me before we are born. (Similar tests for people with Down Syndrome? 9/10 times, the parents become convinced to abort the fetus, often due to misinformation about Down Syndrome.) I didn’t mention that their research projects don’t take privacy of autistics seriously. It doesn’t take the idea of autistics giving informed consent seriously either. Only between 1-2% of their research funding goes towards quality of life related research that would help autistics today.

I have a strong belief of “Nothing about us, without us.” And that alone would be enough for me to reject Autism Speaks. But the way that they treat us, the way that they treat hating us, pitying us, and getting rid of us? The way that they manipulate our families? That really does seal my rejection of them.

Please check out the #BoycottAutismSpeaks flashblog for other people’s reasons to oppose Autism Speaks.

Here’s the most recent letter from ASAN to Autism Speak’s Sponsors about why they should drop their support.

Here’s GoldenHeartedRose’s Master Post about Autism Speaks.

Here’s the stuff AutisticHoya has written about Autism Speaks.

Here’s my older post about rejecting Autism Speaks, “Why I’m Not Blue.“