This April, Don’t Support Autism Speaks

Lee Beaudrot
Staff Writer
Lee Beaudrot is a second-year student at Florida State University and a staff writer for the FSView.

April is Autism Awareness month, and this year there has been an increased amount of cultural discussion regarding autism and how people living with it should be treated. The recent movie “Music”, a passion project of the pop singer Sia and critical disaster, has brought more attention to the subject by being an extraordinarily bad portrayal of autistic people. The movie’s main consultant for the portrayal of autistic characters was an organization called Autism Speaks.

You may have heard of them before. Autism Speaks is the leading organization in advocacy for autistic people, running the Light It Up Blue initiative during April and responsible for popularizing the puzzle piece as a symbol for autism. However, their track record as an organization is not viewed favorably by the autistic community.

Over the years, Autism Speaks has employed rhetoric that diminishes the humanity of autistic people and treats them like tragedies that befall parents rather than actual human beings. There’s a particularly notorious fundraising video titled “I Am Autism” that has the personified voice of autism claiming that it is here to “rob you of your children and your dreams”. They have repeatedly been criticized for calling autism an “epidemic” and supporting efforts to find a cure even though autism is a neurological disorder similar to ADHD rather than a disease with a cure. Sixty different mental health advocacy organizations have denounced the organization’s work.

The issue comes down to how we view autistic people, either as burdens or as people with differences in how they process the world. Autistic people are working on shifting their public perception away from just being adolescent white boys who are either savants or dangerous, and towards the lived reality of autistic people across spectrums of gender, age and race. Autistic people don’t disappear once they reach adulthood. They continue to rely on the resources available to them which all but dry up once they’re older, the direct result of Autism Speaks’s focus on the parents of autistic kids rather than autistic individuals of all ages. There’s been a growing movement amongst the autistic community to rebrand April as Autism Acceptance month, rather than focusing on awareness.

Because Autism Speaks focuses on awareness rather than acceptance and puts most of its research funding towards biological indicators rather than quality of life studies, the conversation has been about how to prevent autism rather than how to make life easier and more accessible for autistic people. Many autistic individuals deal with sensory processing issues which make certain common facets of everyday life like fluorescent lighting or loud noises difficult to deal with.

There’s also the fact that it’s not socially acceptable to stim in public, stimming being repeated motions or sounds made as a way to give yourself positive stimulation which often manifests as flapping hands or repeating words or rocking back and forth. Disabled people in general do not have marriage equality due to the fact that they lose their government benefits if they marry someone. Changing the focus to make spaces less overwhelming and normalizing stimming, as well as ensuring that disabled people aren’t deprived of their benefits just for getting married, would be positive steps that make life easier for autistic people. But instead, we focus on Autism Speaks and how difficult it must be for parents to deal with an autistic child and how the world would be better if autism just didn’t exist.

The rebranding to Autism Acceptance month has been spearheaded by organizations like the Autism Self-Advocacy Network, which is dedicated to foregrounding the voices of autistic people in the conversation about autism. Supporting them and their initiative Red Instead is infinitely more beneficial than donating to Autism Speaks because you are supporting autistic people rather than research that aims to silence and ultimately get rid of them.