chavisory:

myceliorum:

chavisory:

Part of what always gets to me about the “but some autistic people can’t communicate” crowd is what seems to be an implicit assumption that I don’t understand the depth of some people’s communication difficulties because I don’t really know anybody with those kinds of communication challenges, or else I wouldn’t believe what I do?

And I do, you guys.  I know them in person, for real.

And I believe in their rights to have their communication in whatever form it does occur taken seriously.

This is not a belief that’s antithetical to people with profound communication disabilities existing.

I just wanted to reply to this to clarify something: I hope you didn’t get that from anything I said to you. Because I didn’t mean any of that to apply to you, just to be perfectly clear.

Because when I replied to you before with all that the extreme amount of information about the topic, I was not at all meaning to contradict anything you said. I was only trying to add to it that there is unfortunately a group of people who really do think that said people don’t exist. And who are also unfortunately easily confused with you or with me or with a lot of other people. Because they say things that sound a little similar to things we say, but they mean something entirely different. And I think the distinction is lost on a lot of the “there are some people who can’t communicate” people.

So I wasn’t in any way trying to say you didn’t know people, didn’t know of people, anything like that. I was only trying to tell other people who might be reading, that there is this unfortunate group of autistic people who honestly believe that communication issues are extremely simple if they exist at all. And who do actually berate strangers for things they couldn’t possibly know about a stranger.

And unfortunately I think some of the confusion of them with us is honest enough. And that if they’ve encountered people like that, they could just read that into what we are saying. But I also think some of it may be dishonest some of the time. Like I think sometimes what they’re doing, is they’re deliberately blurring the lines so that they don’t have to think about what we actually have to say.

When it’s honest, I think it’s that thing where where people just don’t read that carefully. And if they see two things that look vaguely similar, and they have certain biases already, they’ll see what they expect to see. But when it’s dishonest, it’s more than that.

Also if the formatting on this post is completely borked it’s because my Tumblr client seems to be completely borked so if these paragraphs are out of order it’s because I literally can’t figure out where they are because they’re on top of each other.

Oh no, not at all….this was an afterthought not only towards the specific anon who inspired my rant of a couple days ago, but to a pattern from, especially (for some reason), siblings of non-speaking/non-verbal autistic people who I see yelling at people.  Not at you.

Like, there is often this undercurrent of what seems like an assumption in the anger of people who feel the need to let me know that their autistic family member really can’t communicate at all that I just don’t know people with real and significant communication disabilities.

And I have absolutely seen autistic people claiming that autism itself is never disabling, that autism alone cannot cause lack of speech, or that autism can’t cause certain speech and language issues that they’ve seen parents describe that I know it can because I’ve seen other autistic people (including you) report them or because I experience them.

So to some extent I understand that anon’s frustration, because I do know the rhetoric she’s talking about it and I resent it, too.  I have a pretty sharply limited daily capacity for speech.  I know people in real life for whom no conventional form of AAC seems to work particularly well.  (One uses RPM, and has had a lot of success with it, and it’s STILL a hugely effortful, draining, time-consuming process that she can’t do very much of all at once.)

I see it being the case both that:

a.)  There are too many people who assume that someone who doesn’t speak doesn’t have the capacity to communicate and there are too many people who may be able to use AAC or learn to type but have never even been given the opportunity, let alone taught.  And

b.)  There are people whose communication disabilities are such that we don’t have any readily available, easy solutions yet.

With both of those things leading me to the conclusion that it’s too dangerous to declare virtually anyone simply incapable of communication, because we both don’t provide tools to enough people who probably could use them, and don’t understand enough about autism or about truly complicated and intense communication disabilities.