I didn’t want to cook for myself tonight, but I read somewhere that the place I started ordering from is a sponsor of Autism Speaks.
Before placing the order, I tried to go on the AS website to check it out but I kept getting distracted by the stream of donation alerts that popped up at the bottom of the page.
It took me an additional five or so minutes to review their partnerships because it was so overstimulating.
email them about it, they might not know. keep it anonymous I’d say
Hi! I got here from the “everything” tab, while I don’t have autism myself I want to support those with autism as best as I can. I have often seen that Autism Speaks is problematic, but I don’t fully understand why, can someone please explain it to me?
Just a few points, you’ll find much more just putting “autism speaks controversy” into the search engine of your choice.
They view autism as a disease that needs to be cured.
They made videos saying autism will destroy your marriage, your family and your life.
They advocate to develop prenatal testing for autism with the goal of having women abort their supposedly autistic babies.
Thank you!
They treat autism as a disease to be cured, which is a disgusting way to think about it. Their founder also claimed that it’s “possible” that autism is caused by vaccines, which is scientifically disproven. There are also no autistic members of their board, which means no actual representation for the people they claim to want to help.
Thank you!
There are a lot of reasons, but I think this article does a good job of listing the main criticisms: https://www.themarysue.com/the-autism-speaks-controversy-explained/
But in a nutshell:
- They frame autism as a disease that needs curing
- None of their board members are autistic
- They spread fear and misinformation about autism
- As a charity, embarrassingly little of their money goes to actually doing anything for autistic people
Thank you!
Well, donation/purchase popups are already a very big red flag in itself. Scam sites use them to drive FOMO. I have never heard of Autism Speaks so I don’t know about this particular case.
Is it intentional, that the person’s face slightly resembles a down syndrome face? This is how they view us, no matter the evidence against it.
Can you give a link?Don’t mind, I found it out (it’s the AS website itself).You mean this: https://www.autismspeaks.org/. I meant the evidence of us usually not being intellectually disabled.
Exactly, I wanted to see the Down-ish looking person is displayed but was too lazy to first look at the most obvious place, or recognise my ambiguity. Sorry to disturb.
And yes there are eugenicist agitators posing as experts. Makes it sort of mandatory to work against.As you started with this topic, how did those people even become the most popular autism related (to avoid the term advocacy, as they are not advocating for us, but against us) organisation?
I’m not OP, and I learned about AS only through this community but didn’t investigate further (different continent). So I can only speculate: there’s a lot of revenue to be made from therapy and pharma if you find a new niche. A fundamentally wrong popular bias, reinforced by pouring massive money into advertising helps that a lot.
To me it also smacks a lot like a part of that post-humanism psy-op. Some (influential) people really want to have “Brave New World” become reality (or “Gattaca”?) – the “perfect” human machine; engineered and gated; divergence is a flaw. The rest goes happily with the narrative. There was someone posting their dismay about an interview with a person they previously liked, maybe already a year ago. The person in the interview was speaking of how autism should get removed from the gene pool …
As for the Wikipedia I read, people in BNW are selective breading for intelligence, which is at least somewhat proven, so it’s still better, than AS, who just seek to discriminate against autistics, which shouldn’t even be considered as a bad trait. So it’s worse, than the movies. PS: Thanks for the bonus movie recommendations.
In case you ever have to go back to Autism Speaks’ website, or a similar one;
Try running NoScript browser plugin, or something similar. It shut down the distracting notifications for me.
Don’t know which browser you use but I’ve found that if you put a little effort into it and use one that supports some good plugins you can cut out a lot of the most annoying things on the internet.
