Every claim you have made about the pro-neurodiversity perspective substantiates my assertion. You keep digging yourself in deeper and deeper.

Harold said:
“I also disagree fundamentally with the view that high functioning autistic persons who become engineers, researchers, artists, professors of various topics, internet essay writers etc are entitled to claim to speak on behalf of autistic persons such as my son who have much more limited skills and life prospects. The actual life realities, skills and life prospects are fundamentally different.”

So let me get this straight — you think that *non-autistic* persons who become engineers, researchers, artists, etc. etc. are *more* entitled to claim to speak on behalf of autistic persons? How are *their* realities any closer?

The things that verbal and non-verbal autistic people *do* share (and verbal vs. non-verbal is the primary distinction you’ve been coming back to) are significant — the sensory, praxic, and affective components of autism, and the cognitive and communicative sequelae of the sensory and praxic components. It stands to reason that those who have those components of autism and can talk or write about them, have a great deal they can say on behalf of those who have those same components but lack the ability to talk or write about them.

What makes it so hard for you to see that, and take advantage of the perspective and insight you can get from those who *are* talking and writing?

Why do you think they would lead you astray, when I and others so clearly have found otherwise?

Finding and listening to people all across the spectrum — from people who can talk circles around me to people whose only means of communication is a keyboard, and even then only intermittently and with great effort — has made all the difference in the world to Jeremy, in the way his (non-autistic) mom and I have parented him.

Moreover, if you think that the purported divide between “high functioning” and “low functioning” autistic people is a permanent fundamental difference, you’re wrong. And you better *hope* you’re wrong, because if you’re right, that means that *no* interventions, *no* therapies, *no* educational supports at all will ever improve the outcome of the “low functioning” people to the point where any of it would have been worthwhile.

The reality is that there are interventions, therapies, educational approaches, supports, and accommodations that, although still far from ideal, have improved substantially over time and are continuing to do so — and that more and more so-called “low functioning” autistic kids are growing into far more enabled adulthoods.

And when they do, surprise surprise — they overwhelmingly agree with *our* perspective.

How are you going to explain to your son, when he is capable of reading what you write, the extent to which you have at times declared his future a foregone conclusion? You *do* hope that he will gain that capability as he develops, don’t you?

When Jeremy was your son’s age, we had no *clue* what his future was going to be. But we — and *he* — worked at acquiring skills and learning from the world around him, and at 16 the lower bound of the developmental trajectory ahead of him is considerably higher than it was when he was little.

I think much the same is true for Kristina’s son Charlie, following several years hence. The slow, incremental gains accumulate.

We still don’t know what Jeremy’s life will be like when he’s 30, but we’re not ruling things out as foregone conclusions. I’d bet Kristina would say the same thing about the prospect of Charlie at 20.

So yes, Harold, verbal autistic people *do* provide me meaningful input as Jeremy’s parent. And they would you, as Conor’s, if you were willing to lay down your misconceptions.

I hope Conor’s future is as bright as Jeremy’s, and Charlie’s, and Alex Bain’s, and all the many autistic young people growing from significant handicap into more enabled and autonomous adulthoods.

Mark Osteen, the organizer of the 2005 Autism and Representation conference at Case Western Reserve University, at which I first met Kristina and Jim, has a very severely handicapped adult autistic son. He’s written a memoir, and read from it at the conference: absolutely searing in what it describes. He and his son and his family have had a very, very hard time of it. Yet he said to me, of the work that verbal autistic self-advocates and their allies are doing, that we are helping to create a rising tide that lifts all boats.

If he, at the stage his son and his family are at, years entrenched, can say this, how much more should it be true of parents like you, of much younger kids, with much greater prospects of developing to the point where all the verbal autistics’ concern about housing and employment and higher education and civil rights and mutual support are going to matter *very* much?

I hope that several years hence, Conor’s expanding developmental trajectory, if not anything I or any of us say here and now, will lead you inevitably towards our perspective.

From excellent speech notes by Robert Martin, who has lived the consequences of the assumption that certain kinds of people just naturally belong in institutions:

“I have learnt that discrimination and segregation becomes an accepted part of the community. Our parents begin to accept that it is right. Even those of us with the disability begin to accept that it is right. Everyone is in their rightful place and the community begins to congratulate itself on how it cares for the less fortunate. “Don’t they have a wonderful place to live, don’t they have wonderful staff and don’t we spend a lot of our money caring for the unfortunates” they say.”

Mr Martin also points out,

“For me empowerment and participation is just as essential for those of my friends that do not walk
and talk. Just because you cannot talk it does not mean that you do not have a voice.”

Harold, does NB have a clients’ self-advocacy program for developmentally disabled adults in residential facilities?