The other day my mom asked me about my opinion regarding Autism Speaks.

You should first understand that I spent most of my life completely unaware that I had autism, and it was really only after learning that this was the case that life began to make any sense at all.  My dad taught me to fight to defend myself before sending me to school because he knew life was going to be hard for me, and I’m glad.  I grew up with a computer from the age of two – which, since my mom programmed supercomputers in college, seemed like no big deal to anyone – and pets and stayed mostly to myself with my books and papers.

Autism Speaks offends me, but it does also raise several interesting points, and it angers me sufficiently enough to care about them.  The organization itself hardly even pretends to represent any actual autistic people on its boards, and most of the money is diverted to various research projects which to any sane person, sound a lot like medical torture of children, like advocating the use of Magic Mineral Solution – a form of bleach – as enemas on children.

Autism Speaks has created propaganda videos which basically say that my autism is worse than cancer for my family.  How offensive would you find an organization that compared your neurological formation to a fatal and painful illness?  It further offends me that they focus their funding not on finding actual employment opportunities and fostering community programming to advocate for people who actually HAVE autism, but rather as a platform for their parents mainly to push for a need to cure us, because apparently we were “stolen” from them.

What the actual fuck.

The Pope has actually called for the international community to cease the persecution of autistics, and since like 80% of us are either unemployed or underemployed at any given time, I really can’t help but agree with him.  I’m not sure that I agree with him that my autism makes me a “martyr”, but I do certainly agree that I feel persecuted for having it, and that when I read articles by ignorant people who do not live in my head spreading disinformation about autism, it makes my blood boil.

Why don’t these busy bodies who care so much about the “autism epidemic” give a crap about the abuse that autistic children endure every day?  I read articles that talk about parents of “severely autistic” children who murder their kids out of a sense of hopelessness because they cannot protect them from pedophiles, but no one ever talks about it.  They only talk about how autism is evil and bad and caused by vaccines and omg.

They don’t talk about the fact that in the United States and Canada it is becoming a norm to put children in small prison like cells called “scream rooms”, or that they use physical violence and restraints on children in schools.  They don’t talk about the kids that come home with mysterious bruises and can’t or won’t tell their parents what happened.  They don’t talk about the fact that a nonverbal child cannot give consent or speak up for themselves in a court of law and that their legal status is essentially persona non grata.

But by all means, bitch away about vaccines.  Because muh science.