12/29/16

Everything Wrong With Vaxxed (Autism Sins)

Andy Wakefield is at it again! Stop to get your popcorn ready and answer all your texts, 'cause this video will make sure you really know EVERYTHING wrong with this movie.



The same guy who committed fraud in 1998, by saying that the MMR vaccine causes autism, in an attempt to sell his individual measles vaccine for profit, has now made a movie to say that the MMR vaccine causes autism, in an attempt to sell his individual measles vaccine for profit, while accusing everybody else of doing the things he's doing. Actual diseases and anti-autism eugenics are back in full swing in this silly conspiracy movie!

Autism Sins is a snarky, sometimes satirical series, where I review media portrayals of autism in a rip off- er, I mean, an homage to the format of CinemaSins.

For T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other junk that leaves me a neat little artist margin, visit my RedBubble store.

To see more of my videos, visit my YouTube channel.

For the original Sinners, visit youtube.com/user/CinemaSins or cinemasins.com

9/15/16

Autism Sins: Adam from House





Everything Wrong With House M.D. season 3, episode 4 "Lines in the Sand" and its portrayal of Autistic patient Adam Kelvey.




This is the first installment of Autism Sins, where I snarkily review media portrayals of autism in a rip off- er, I mean, an homage to the format of CinemaSins.




To see more of my videos, visit my YouTube channel.

4/22/16

Acceptance Must Not Become a Buzzword

The discourse surrounding autism is full of meaningless buzzwords: Awareness, cure, treatment, high-functioning, optimal outcome, and many more; even the factual-sounding phrase "evidence-based" cannot be taken as an indication that there really is evidence. Many of these words did mean something once upon a time, but since then have been distorted by widespread overuse and misuse.

Language has power, and replacing meaningless buzzwords with things that are meaningful is an important part of pro-Autistic activism: Rather than appealing to a vaguely defined "functioning" level, we describe what people's specific support needs are. Rather than trying to nonsensically "treat" or "cure" something that isn't a disease, we attempt to change the social and civil environments to ones that are more accommodating.

You might expect that a campaign to promote "awareness" of autism would be educating people about what autism is, highlighting some Autistic role models, and explaining how to best support the Autistic people in your life. In practice, "autism awareness" campaigns don't seem to promote any message other than autism is a thing that exists. If that's all we're meant to be aware of, then frankly, I think we're at peak awareness. When I hear people talk about "raising" awareness further, I imagine some Amish family in the mountains, living off a tofu farm, that hasn't heard the word autism yet.

Awareness, at least autism awareness, is a meaningless buzzword. You can verify this by asking people at "autism awareness" events, "what does awareness mean?" and getting the word awareness thrown back at you in most of the answers. It's a signifier with nothing signified. Therefore, the only meaning it holds is by association with the people currently using it, and for the most part, those associations aren't pretty. When the main beneficiaries of "autism awareness" are also the people encouraging us to buy blue light bulbs and commit child abuse, "awareness" becomes a top priority to replace.

The Autistic community's answer? Acceptance. That word is loaded with meaning, and every year we make concerted efforts to pack it with more: Acceptance is an action. Acceptance is more than just passive tolerance of Autistic people's existence. Acceptance is implementing accommodations before they're needed. Acceptance is presuming competence. Acceptance is solidarity. Autism acceptance is a fundamental shift in mindset that embraces the neurodiversity paradigm and the social model of disability.

Thanks to the aggressive promotion of acceptance within the Autistic community, we're starting to see the idea of replacing awareness with acceptance take hold in things created by non-Autistic organizers. Some people chase the imaginary neutral position by including both words, while others see what the world is trending towards, and hop on board with acceptance.

However, bringing a word out of the fringe and into the mainstream has an unfortunate side effect: The fringe no longer has control over the word's meaning. The word is subject to the large-scale social mechanisms behind language development. The word's meaning is now derived from consensus rather than logic or purpose.

Just as awareness can shift from education and understanding to "beware the autism boogeyman", the meaning of acceptance can shift to harmful ideas like "accept the tragedy of autistic life" or "accept the real child hidden behind the autism." If that happens, then acceptance is no different from awareness. It's stolen from the activist toolbox and becomes one of the master's tools. Our years of work become a failed experiment and we're forced to start over.

Already there are organizations co-opting the acceptance label to dupe their Autistic audiences into not making a fuss, when the content is still the same message that we protest. There are well-intentioned "acceptance" events where the people who show up use the word acceptance because it's there, but are really still stuck in the awareness mindset, undermining the events.

It is not enough to correct these occurrences for misusing a word, for they may be ignorant of the intended meaning of one label, but their overall messages are quite intentional, as they have always been. It is necessary for us to condemn phony acceptance as fraud, and as hatred.

We must not let acceptance become a buzzword. If it does, then we have made no progress towards actually autistic people being actually accepted.

4/11/16

Not All Labels Are Created Equal

I wrote this article as part of the A-Z neurodiversity series created by Un-boxed Brain for Autism Acceptance Month. It is listed in that series as "L is for Labels"

The following article contains 238 labels.


The moment you tell me that you "don't like labels" is the moment I know you're being dishonest. If you speak any oral, written, or signed language, you use labels constantly: Child, adult, doctor, musician, gamer, optimist, pet owner, car enthusiast – These are all labels.

If you honestly tried to remove every label from your own speaking patterns, you would immediately run into the problem of infinite regression, as most label words can only be defined with other label words. Rather than "pet owner" you would try to say a person who lives with an animal in the same house, but then realize that person, animal, and house are all labels, and arguably so is the phrase "lives with" as a synonym of roommate.

We use labels for their utility, and out of practical necessity. Without labels, the only nouns in any language would be this, that, and pronouns. We would have zero ability to discuss concepts. You don't say "I don't like labels" when somebody calls you by your name, or occupation, or hobbies. The real meat of the conversation is those labels that are less mundane - more radical - not yet accepted as mainstream.

By "I don't like labels" you really mean "I don't like the label you just used." After fixing the language, the complaint is more relatable. We all have words we don't like; racist or ableist slurs for example. We might not all be on the same page about the details, but I think we can agree that some labels are neutral, like names or ages, some are bad, like slurs, and some are good. Let's start with the bad:

Ableist slurs hinder our ability to communicate.


Dumb, stupid, moronic, idiotic, and- if those first 4 words didn't shock you then this shouldn't either- retarded, are used as slurs against disabled people to insult us directly, and that's obviously harmful. They are also used against non-disabled people, to insult them by comparison to disabled people, which is of course offensive to all disabled people. Yet neither of those applications are what make these words less-than-useless as labels.

Ableist slurs based on "intelligence" end your thought process. If you don't like something, just call it "stupid" and swish your hands together like you're shaking off crumbs. Why don't you like that "stupid" thing? Well, because it’s stupid! The same can be done with "sanity" slurs and with the word lame.

In this scenario, we're not even talking about a person. We're talking about an object (or an emergent property of an object, like a story or a computer program) that has no brain and is thus incapable of having any brain-related characteristic. The word "stupid" thus has nothing to do with a brain; it's just an empty metaphor where you can file away everything in the broad category of "I don't like it." Since intelligence is a vaguely defined social construct invented to justify ableism, this is all equally true when we ARE talking about a person.

The basic utility of a label is to shorten a longer phrase: Rather than carrying around "small battery-powered computers that transmit digitized sound waves across great distances and reinterpret them on the other side", we carry cellphones. Human communication would be incredibly slow and cumbersome without labels to signify larger phrases. The problem with a label like "stupid" is that it fails to represent any phrase other than "I don't like it." Lazy critics may think they are signifying something important by referencing intelligence, when really it signifies nothing. If you get too used to calling things stupid, you learn to rely on it, but take the word away, and you are forced to describe the details of your actual complaints. If you don't care about removing ableist slurs from your vocabulary because they're ableist, remove them because you will become a better communicator without them.

Functioning labels divide our community.


High-functioning, low-functioning, mild, severe, and the nonsensical non-clarification of "Asperger's, not autism" are similar to "intelligence" slurs in the sense that they don't really signify anything. There is no set of characteristics that constitutes any measurable "functioning" or "severity" level.

Language has a tremendous influence on how we think, but that influence does not necessarily require using the language to communicate clearly. In some cases ambiguity may even be where the real power lies. Even if a label has no meaning behind it, the fact that people think it has meaning gives it power.

Functioning labels create categories out of thin air, simply by naming them, without even defining them. The connotations of "high" and "low" create a hierarchy: One label paints a target for prejudice, the other grants a shot at being accepted into the real privilege of the neurotypical label, at the cost of not having any support in doing so.

Meaningless buzzwords unite us toward inaction.


Labels without meaning aren't a new concept. If you're familiar with advertising, then you've surely encountered words like deluxe, gourmet, premium, and world-class. In the realm of advertising, these labels are known as buzzwords. If you've had the unfortunate experience of "autism awareness" groups, then of course you know that "awareness" is a buzzword too.

Awareness would ideally mean what it sounds like, a knowledge and understanding of the subject. In practice "awareness" campaigns, especially the ones about autism, have perverted the label such that it now signifies nothing more than seeing the word more frequently.

The label of "awareness" is a blank slate. It can encompass a variety of endeavors, from messages resembling those of neurodiversity to abusive practices derived from misinformation. Anyone can latch on with their own idea of what they feel "awareness" should mean. The label doesn't inherently mean anything, and yet we see communities come together on the basis of the label, just because a label exists. "Awareness" has the power to unite people, in the joint mission of doing nothing in particular, but doing it together.

Privileged people reject their own labels.


Neurotypical people (along with several other categories including white, straight, and cis) often reject the label of neurotypical. As is true for my pronouncements about slurs and functioning labels, when someone tells you not to use the word neurotypical, that's because they don't want you recognizing neurotypical as a concept.

When asked for an alternative, neurotypicals may offer the word "normal" or something similar, but that perfectly illustrates the problem with not having a label for neurotypical. Normalcy is a tool of oppression. Calling one set of people "normal" presents that set as the only good and healthy way to be, which in turn instantly paints everyone else as weird, alien, bad, and unhealthy.

The other alternative is to avoid labels altogether. Why do we need those words at all? Can't we all be human beings? Why can't we just call everybody people?

We can't just call everybody people.


If you constantly avoid labels, instead referring to everyone as people, then any time you give in and take the easy route, you'll be contrasting a label against "person" thus implying that whoever you're talking about isn't a person.

You can't just do away with human traits by not talking about them. Because there is no universal set of human experiences, desires, or needs, the differences between us matter. In a world where most people speak with their mouths and assume everyone else does too, I need the autism label to explain why typing is better. In a world of sensory assault, where "I don't want to" is not a sufficient excuse, I need the autism label to justify my self-protection.

It would be great if labels like autism weren't necessary. It would be great if ableism didn't exist, but that's one hell of a hypothetical. Ableism is an extreme and far-reaching problem that can't be solved without labeling the specific disabilities of the people being harmed.

Identity labels create communities.


Those who think it wrong to label ourselves autistic are operating under false notion that there is something wrong with being autistic. The autism label may be used to create stigma against us, but it also gives us something to reclaim. Before the label, we only had terms like weird, or abnormal, or worse. With the label we have something to point to for positive identity and pride.

Before the autism label existed, autistic people were disconnected, isolated individuals. We needed the label before we could begin to congregate on the basis of being literally like-minded. We need the label in order to search for resources from people with the same experiences. The autism label enables Autistic community. Uniting ourselves categorically unites us as people.

Bringing autistic people together also led to the creation of other terms, like stimming and special interests, which capture the beauty of autism and Autistic culture. These terms were created out of necessity and out of appreciation for our shared community.

...and it's all thanks to a label.