Listen.

Listen.

EVERYBODY knows (or should) that you DO. NOT. STOP. in Vidor, Texas. 

It’s best to just run out of gas elsewhere. Whatever you do, black folks, DO NOT STOP IN VIDOR, TEXAS. 

There’s a good chance you’ll get lynched or just come up missing - and I’m not joking.

also do NOT stop in Harrison, Arkansas!!!! (relatively close to OK and MI) a nazi town with a BIG KKK organization.

Reblog To Save Life

@noodle-shenaniganery I promise I’m working on your ask about what “soul” is, I have just been way too sick to answer the way I want so will finish answering eventually

people seem forget nonverbal semiverbal speech unreliable speech loss all can be caused by things not autism outside of autism. kuru i me is not nonverbal semiverbal self, but body have somewhat frequent speech loss, and many alters (like self) speak weird funny or not speak at all. is mostly part of us our schizophrenia and brain damage and ID. we autism autistic too, but autism tend cause more words speak hyperverbal lot lot lots words spill out ramble off, rather than hard to speak hard make sentence hard words or no at all.

this post, want say hello and i see you to others with schizospec or brain damage or ID who not speak or struggle speak some way because of it. you welcome here, is your community too. ^_^

please please please don’t forget to include intellectual disability, psychosis / schizospec disorders, level 2-3 autistics, folks w dissociative disorders, and others with “severe mental illness” from ur conversations about mad liberation.

these are some of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised mad people, and we need to give them a voice.

these are the places where liberation is needed the most

Giving nonspeaking kids and kids with difficulty using oral speech access to AAC as soon as possible needs to be normalized.

Of course you want your child to communicate, that's fine, that's GOOD. But oral speech isn't the only way to do that, and refusing to give your child a way to communicate because it isnt the form of communication you favor isn't okay.

Its OKAY if your kid never learns (or relearns) to use oral speech. ITS OKAY.

"But I put them in speech therapy to learn to talk! I don't want them to use that tablet all their life. They need to learn to talk using their mouthparts." Why??

First of all, AAC is proven to actually help people develop language skills and oftentimes oral speech. So any concern about AAC hindering development of oral speech is uncalled for and irrational. But along with that, ORAL SPEECH ISNT THE ONLY GOOD FORM OF COMMUNICATION!! AAC is good. Sign is good. Etc.

Saying otherwise and/or preferring your child to use oral speech IS ableist, and yes, it IS harmful to everyone.

I had to unfollow a blog today because they said autism “wasn’t a disability” and referred to the considering of autism as a disability as a negative, damaging thing.

I am on board with autism being regarded as just a different neurotype–to me it isn’t a disease, an illness or even a disorder. It’s just a word that describes how my brain works and certain similarities I may have with other people who also possess that neurotype.

But, in a world created by, created for and dominated by allistics and the needs of allistics, with allistic expectations for my behaviour and social interactions, and allistic-favoured composition of the settings that surround me, autism is to me a disability. Autism combined with social anxiety means I mumble, which has made a few social situations difficult and stressful. The sensory processing disorder that comes with autism means I can’t bear it when people wear perfume. The prosopagnosia that comes with autism means I can’t remember faces and can’t match names to faces. The sensory processing disorder that comes with autism means I can’t process sound in a loud environment, meaning that I can’t follow conversations. The difficulty I have with spoken communication when stressed or tired, solely a factor of autism, has resulted in my being abused. I had to quit a retail job in part because of customers being unhappy with my facial expressions, expressions that don’t fit allistic norms. And so on, so on, so on. There are many things I cannot do, or cannot do easily, or can only do in certain circumstances or with certain supports, or cannot do in the ways expected of me, because of autism–and yet society unfairly and unquestioningly expects everything I listed above to not be any kind of difficulty. Society seldom even comprehends the difficulty in all of the above, never mind providing suitable and accessible supports in order that I can more easily interact with the world or be understood by it.

All of this is exactly the same as my experiences for my other main disability–chronic pain. Something else that also means there are many things I cannot do, or cannot do easily, or can only do in certain circumstances or with certain supports, or cannot do in the ways expected of me, despite society expecting me to navigate all its demands while unaffected by pain. Something else that is seldom comprehended by society, and something else that doesn’t result in my receiving suitable and accessible supports so I can more easily interact with the world.

The social disability model gives me a pretty clear map for regarding autism as a disability, because it is not accommodated by society in any significant way, and that lack of accommodation is what so often makes a wide variety of disabilities disabling. If my pain were fully accepted and accommodated by society, if I had free access to a variety of technological aids and human supports, it wouldn’t disable me anywhere near as much as it does–it might not even disable me at all. But I don’t have those things, and so it does. Autism isn’t any different.

If we lived in a world where providing for the needs that accompany my neurotype were as commonly accepted as the provision of clothing against freezing or burning (and clothing is an accessibility aid, for it lets us do many things we cannot do without it), then no, I wouldn’t consider it a disability.

I don’t live in that world.

Maybe you don’t consider autism having any relationship to disability, and that’s fine. But please, please don’t erase those of us who do consider autism a disability. Please don’t treat our considering autism a disability as a bad thing that should be corrected or stopped. I don’t regard autism as a disability from a place of negativity. I don’t want to be allistic; if I had the opportunity to become allistic, I wouldn’t take it. Autism shapes how I create and how I think; it is far too entangled in my creativity and identity for me to choose not to have the struggles that come with it. Yet I have needs that still go misunderstood and unaccommodated by wider society, and that is too close to my experiences with chronic pain for it not to be, to me, disability. That’s all it is.

The framework of disability is how I make sense of who I am as an autistic in a world that is set on trying to erase my struggles and provide me the least amount of recognition and support possible. It isn’t a negative thing any more than calling my chronic pain a disability is a negative thing. Disability is, in fact, an empowering term that gives me understanding, connection and community. Rejecting it won’t support me–it only does me damage.

If you want to separate yourself from that, by all means do so–for you.

Please don’t deny me that framework and identity, as someone who considers myself disabled in part because I am autistic.