Going to start sharing responses to the RFK Jr speech from people outside of Tumblr because want people perspectives broader than what they are hearing here. Here is one from Joyner Emerick , an autistic parent to a nonspeaking autistic child and the first openly autistic & trans school board member in Minneapolis.
My child has complex neurodevelopmental disabilities and requires full-time, hands-on care. He is the joy of my life, and being his parent is a privilege that fills me with contentedness.
Given the opportunity, I would not change my child’s neurology, decrease the “severity” of his autism, or make him not autistic. His neurology, his disabilities, are defining factors of who he is as a person. To “cure” him would eradicate everything about him that I know and love and I would experience it as an unbearable loss.
Autism, even and including presentations of autism where needs for support, accommodations, and adaptations are least well-matched with how we function as a society, is not medically dangerous or inherently painful. Suffering is not inherent to autism, but suffering can be caused when we treat autistic people badly.
I am angry with, but more over, bewildered by parents of children like mine who are participating in the eugenic rhetoric that is once again surfacing to threaten our community. I want to interrogate those parents, hold them accountable, make them understand, ask them to explain how they can hate my child and their own so much. I am furious and sad.
However, I am reminding myself that leveraging the internalized ableism in parents to turn them against their own children is one of the most horrific and frequently used strategies in the ableism playbook. And while protecting disabled children must always be the top priority in situations where this horror manifests as risk to those children—which is often—this is also a violence perpetrated against those parents.
A society that will train you to hate your own child is truly a nightmare beyond comprehension. And yet it has been with us, showing itself in different ways, different intensities, using different mechanisms, for at least as long as modern society has existed. It has always been here, and an unimaginable number of disabled children have died—have been murdered —as a result, directly at the hands of their parents, or at the hands of the state with passive or explicit consent from their parents.
For a decade I have been doing bridge building work at every possible opportunity to build relationships with parents even when I fundamentally disagree with how they see or respond to their child’s autism. Yes, there are those—usually with platforms, sometimes monetizing the suffering they inflict on their children—who are beyond my reach. They are a loud minority. Many parents are confused, scared, exhausted, and looking for any narrative offered that may help them craft a life story for themselves and their child that brings more ease, more joy, more connection, and less fear and isolation.
Often those in the neurodiversity movement berate and criticize them, and those in the “profound autism is a burden and tragedy” camp provide empathy, connection, support.
Losing those parents to that camp is not a strategy that is good for autistic children with complex care needs, and it’s not good for our movement goals of access, acceptance and belonging for autistic people.
And, while this may not matter to everyone and that’s okay, it’s not good for the parents who are essentially sleeper agents for the state. Those parents did not opt in to performing acts of oppression against their children, they are being manipulated and conditioned by systems of oppression that essentially work like ABA. They are rewarded when they dehumanize their children, punished when they love and defend their children. They are being used, and it’s not okay.
It is not impossible to have an autistic child with significant needs for support and love them to pieces without caveats or pity. I do it. My wife does it. I personally know many people who do it. In general, we just call it “parenting”.
And because we know it is not impossible for us, we know it’s not impossible for ANYONE. I often think, what would the world be like if all parents of autistic kids were as in love with their children as I am, felt as fiercely defensive of preserving their kids’ authentic selves as I do, got to enjoy their children the way I am blessed to enjoy mine?
Families deserve that experience, the kids AND the parents. Many families are being told it is not possible for them, but that is a lie. Dispelling that lie is integral to my life’s work, past, present, and future.
