This is discounting and echo backs the “You’re HFA therefore you don’t count” argument that parents use. I am sure your son already has a voice, not the one that you expect from him. But it’s there. I notice the voices of both severe and passing children in the classrooms I work in. They speak in dynamic and not always appropriate ways but I know they are communicating (even if I results with head phones being yanked out of my ears by one student who does it and flaps his hands.)

You’re right Mel and I are not like your son. I am 25 year old adult and transgender male and Mel is a married woman. I am not a child anymore (as much as the rest of the Autism Community begs to differ) I am still autistic, and my strife and frustrations still echo your kids. I have been held down by my SO while having self injurious meltdowns, I head bang, tear paper up, chew on everything I can grab. Yet what Mel or what I say apparently is discounted because I am not a child and I can hold a part time job and keep a lover. It’s ridiculous, it echoes the same sort of “Not trans enough” rhetoric because I am not on hormones yet.

I don’t understand this idea that parents can compare their child to an adult and it’s valid.

What I wanted to point out is regarding your picture. That the shoe is on the other foot with regards to my most affected son. Whatever you say about autism may have little to do with him. He is just finding his voice. It is the same as me talking about how autism affects you without consulting you. We all need to proceed without presuming we ‘know.’ I have no misconceptions that he will be ‘normal.’ But I have every hope that his voice will be loud. And true.

I love how you expressed “My body is narrating…”

Off to tell him to embrace his body being lively! Thank you.

I just wanted to comment on Sarah’s critique of “Look Me in the Eye”. I also disliked the book and didn’t even finish it. It felt like a boys’ book. Like when rock guitarists or drummers go on and on and on for a solo. The book gave me that same feeling.

Your blog is like a gold mine to me. No a treasure chest or the tickle trunk. Canadians will know what I mean by the tickle trunk – from an old children’s show called Mr. Dress-up.

Enough blabbing. Thanks to both of you.

I don’t know what the processes were that brought the powers that be to excercise an academic hammer of the magnitude you have described in this excercise, they would seem to be outside my own experience at my current uni, where in the aftermath of my disciplinary experience never mind what offence I had caused the University had also failed to ensure that the incident did not happen because I had been given inadequate support at that time and a stalemate or gentleman’s agreement ensued.

I have given a number of lectures now on autistic rights and the social model of disability, to various groups, sometimes it has been well received, sometimes less so, and that has as much to do with the different characteristics of the respective audiences than anything else I can think of. It is always my autism talking, I am my autism, it is me, it is MY autism not yours or anybody else’s, I’m not a stereotype or straw man I am my own particular expression of what I am, and that is the way it should be. To borrow a concept from last years Autscape Theme. I own my autism and it’s meaning, not those who would construct it to be something else and it speaks all over the place, both bidden and unbidden. It always has something to say that should be listened to.

We simply should not be taking this bullshit from anywhere that privileges an NT cognition as being magically more authentic or correct than our own. An academia that does that, has by so doing relinquished all objectivity and credibility.

It’s a long time since Francesca Happe, did an academic character assassination on Temple Grandin’s and Donna Williams writing, she would not do that now. She has heard my autism answer that. It’s progress of a kind.