And as I thought about it, I noticed something odd. It wasn’t the oft-quoted dialogue about mental retardation that bothered me; sure, it’s offensive, but part of the whole point of the movie is that the characters are painfully insensitive. (I mean, come on, Downey’s character performs in blackface. You can’t say the characters are pinnacles of understanding.) The portrayal of “Simple Jack” in the film-within-a-film is a bit more unsettling, yet even that wouldn’t offend me if it were framed in a suitably satirical context pointing out just how chock full of stereotypes it was.

No, what’s nagging at me goes further than mere dialogue and character portrayals; it’s a matter of unfortunate implications. Now, to be fair, it could very well be that this is dealt with in a more balanced manner in the movie as a whole, so I’m withholding any final judgment for the time being; even still, the choices of what scenes were chosen for the trailers alone demonstrate a… rather unsettling bias.

In this corner… we have Robert Downey’s character playing a black character, in blackface, totally to stereotypes. And in just the trailers, he’s called on how offensive this is, by actual black actors within the movie, who are none too pleased with said portrayal. This happens in at least two separate scenes, one shown in the general-audience trailer, one shown in the restricted trailer.

And in this corner… we have Ben Stiller’s character playing the intellectually impaired “Simple Jack.” But unlike Downey’s character, the only criticism he gets, other than a brief mention of bad box-office returns, is from Downey’s character for overplaying the character. Not because such an over-the-top performance could be offensive, but merely because it was something audiences couldn’t connect with.

And, at least as far as the trailer goes, that’s it.

There’s no further discussion of ableism, other than that short bit about how audiences won’t go for a character unless he’s Not Too Disabled. The characters’ own disability stereotypes aren’t touched on at all— which is a shame, because that’s something that could have led to some brilliantly satirical dialogue.

There’s no discussion of how certain terms are a shock to the disability community, in a huge contrast to that “you people” scene involving Downey’s character that’s even in the all-ages trailer.

There’s no discussion of the fact that an ill-acted, overly stereotyped portrayal of a character with a disability can be an embarrassment no matter how “mildly” disabled the character may be. (Unless, of course, that’s also a point of that one dialogue, in which case the filmmakers fail at writing satirical dialogue.)

In fact, even the criticism of non-disabled actors portraying characters with disabilities goes over like a lead balloon, assuming that was even part of the filmmakers’ intent. The point made in the trailer, at least, seems to merely be one of “…but not too disabled.”

And this is what I find most offensive here. It’s the fact that these points are explicitly touched on regarding race, yet issues of disability are shrugged off with a few lines here and there.

Now perhaps the movie’s writers thought that the mere excess of the dialogue, of the slogan and reviews for “Simple Jack,” and of the portrayal of the Jack character were ridiculous enough to drive these satirical points home without making them more explicit. The problem, of course, is that they’re not ridiculous enough. I’ve seen character portrayals as crude as Jack in various comedies that had no satirical intent whatsoever, and heard dialogue in university hangouts that sounded not unlike that one scene. Satire just doesn’t work when it’s too close to the truth.

Or to put it another way: Imagine that Downey’s character was the only “black” character shown in the trailer. Now imagine that, on top of that, the other characters, insensitive as they are, threw racial epithets left and right in referring to said character. Imagine that Downey acted the part in the most Stepin Fetchit-esque way possible. And imagine that the only issue that was explicitly brought up in the trailer, out of all this, was Downey’s character acting “too black.”

You’d bet the black community would be up in arms if the trailer was like that. And yet the disability community is said to be acting like the PC police when they criticize something with very similar implications.

Regardless of whatever the filmmakers’ intent might have been, just judging from the discussion around this trailer, it looks like we still have a long way to go in disability discourse before we approach anything resembling the state of racial discussion.

Zach Lassiter of AspieWeb has been in contact with Zazzle, and it’s been revealed that though there was an Autism Speaks complaint, it didn’t involve that particular shirt. In other words, this removal was just a Zazzle employee’s attempt to cover the company’s posterior, so to speak, despite what was claimed in earlier e-mails.

So— and this is probably one of the very few times I’ll ever say this— my apologies to Autism Speaks for claiming they did something that they didn’t.

(Now if only they would involve autistics in their organization and issue an apology for Alison Singer’s statements in Autism Every Day… those complaints, unfortunately, still stand.)

(Cross-posted, in slightly modified form, from DailyKos.)

You might recall that a while back, I posted an entry criticizing some of the tactics of the autism charity Autism Speaks, which I originally posted at DailyKos.

Well, let’s all be thankful that they haven’t (yet) forced DailyKos to take that post down— or, worse yet, sent a cease-and-desist notice to the hosting provider for my personal blog— because of alleged intellectual property infringement. As utterly absurd as that may sound, it is precisely what they’ve done to not one but two autistic bloggers an autistic parodist who have has dared to criticize that organization.

Back in January of this year, an autistic teenager by the pseudonym of ‘abscout’ created a web site parodying Autism Speaks’ site, as shown from an alternate perspective: what if there were an organization dedicated to eradicating all traces of neurotypicality, i.e., lack of autism? It was no more infringing than pretty much any parody in, say, Mad magazine— and, of course, parody has long been legally protected as a fair use of copyrights and trademarks.

That didn’t, of course, stop Autism Speaks from sending the site’s author a cease-and-desist notice— an incident which was even covered in the popular press magazine New Scientist.

One would think the backlash from this incident would have been enough of an embarrassment that Autism Speaks’ lawyers might be a bit more cautious… but no, it seems they’re back to their old tricks.

Just this month, another autistic blogger created a T-shirt through Zazzle, a custom shirt printing service, with the text: “Autism Speaks can go away. I have Autism. I can speak for myself.” No use of any sort of trademarked logos or designs, only the use of a company name in plain text; no libelous attacks, just a statement distancing the wearer of the shirt from a particular organization. Surely that’s got to be fair use, since there’s not exactly any other way to clearly refer to that organization, right?

Not according to Autism Speaks, of course.

This time, the organization’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist notice to Zazzle, forcing them to pull the shirt in question from their online catalog. The shirt’s designer found out about this upon receiving a notification from Zazzle; after further inquiry, it was revealed that this takedown wasn’t just a proactive move by Zazzle, as some had assumed, but was indeed the result of a complaint by Autism Speaks.

In my opinion, this puts Autism Speaks in a bad light: an organization that not only seems unwilling to listen to criticism (as I already covered in my previous post), but actively tries to quash that same criticism through spurious intellectual property complaints. And there’s hardly any doubt that, at the very least, the most recent complaint is spurious: there are already plenty of precedents demonstrating that the use of trademarked names in a critical context is legal. Indeed, some of these past criticisms have even led companies to change the very practices that prompted their critics to complain.

If only Autism Speaks could do the same… but no. One quickly gets the impression that Autism Speaks would rather hush criticism than concede that autistics might actually have a valid point.

So for those of you who are new here… welcome! It’d probably be best to start off with my introductory post and trawl through the (admittedly sparse) archives from there, but I won’t hold it against you if you don’t.

I guess this means I’ll have to start blogging a bit more frequently here. Not that I shouldn’t have been doing that anyway, of course, but this will definitely give me a bit more motivation to do so.

And this Georgian isn’t going.

I’ve already written in the past about Autism Speaks, the organization sponsoring this walk, in a good bit of depth, but I’ll just reiterate things in a shorter fashion to drive the point home:

I refuse to support an organization whose idea of treatment isn’t to try to find a way for autistics to function in a hostile world, but rather to “ultimately eradicate autism for the sake of future generations”, in the words of its founder.

I refuse to support an organization which talks all the time about the peril of autistic children, while seeming to forget about us autistic adults, or at most, giving us only a passing mention.

I refuse to support an organization which falsely appears to speak for autistics, when not a single person on the autistic spectrum can be found amongst its board of directors or anywhere else in its leadership.

I refuse to support an organization with a vice president who openly admits to having wanted to drive off a bridge with her autistic daughter in frustration, in front of that very daughter, while cameras are running to record the moment for posterity in a fund-raising documentary.

And in this repudiation, I’m not claiming autistics don’t need support, services, or any other help. Even though I’m on the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum, I’ve had many moments where I could easily have used a helping hand…or several. I, too, go into meltdowns when I’m feeling stressed or overloaded; I, too, would very much benefit from accommodations that allowed me to actually meet halfway, rather than exerting even more effort than most people dream of just to maintain an appearance of normality.

But this help should be provided with respect. Respect for who we are, for the fact that autism is a pervasive developmental disorder and not just something that can be taken out of us like a tumor. Respect for the fact that our brains work differently, and that methods of teaching which may work perfectly well for a typical child (or adult!) may not work at all for us. Respect for the fact that we may still be aware of what’s going on around us, what’s being said about us, even when it doesn’t look like we understand a word.

Strangely enough, organizations for other neurological disorders—disorders with even more of a popular stigma than autism—get it. See, for instance, Joel Smith’s comparison of Autism Speaks’ rhetoric with that of the National Down Syndrome Society for just one example.

But unfortunately, even with plenty of protest by autistics all around the country, the world, and the Internet, Autism Speaks just doesn’t seem to grasp this idea.

And that is why I cannot honestly support them.

…Yeah, I’m way too easily amused.

(Hey, this is sort of related to autism, in that we autistics often have an eye for patterns… )

Seriously, this has practically left me speechless at the moment. I’ll definitely be posting more on this later.

But for right now, I just want to touch on some of the aspects of this subpoena that I found most ridiculous:

• A lawyer can’t bother to check the spelling of “LexisNexis”, the famous legal search engine. No, really, it’s spelled “Lexus Nexus” in item 8.
• Item 9 requests records of communication with—I am seriously not making this up—”any religious groups (Muslim or otherwise)”. And yes, that parenthetical note is really there in the original.
• Item 5 contains a half-a-page-long laundry list of every blog in Seidel’s blogroll, with whom she’s expected to have kept a record of every single bit of communication. Oh, and did I mention the little remnant of HTML code in the paragraph, another sign that nobody likely bothered to proofread the thing?
• “2. All documents pertaining to the setup, financing, running, research, maintaining the website http://www.neurodiversity.com/.” Isn’t that just a bit overreaching? Particularly that “research” bit?
• Seidel is not even a party to this lawsuit, not even named in any of the material involved in the suit; merely a random blogger who happened to write about some of the individuals involved. Yet she’s expected to collect this ridiculous amount of information and even show up in court, with barely any reason to have even expected a subpoena in the first place.
• And last, but not least, none of this information seems to have any bearing whatsoever on whether the defendant’s product in fact caused the developmental disabilities on which the complaint hinges.

I seriously hope this subpoena gets quashed.

Because it’s quite scary.

So I, too, stand in allegiance with Kathleen Seidel, even though I’m not even one of the individuals who was named in the subpoena. To not do so would be to put all my fellow autistics in danger, as such a subpoena could strike any of us who dare to speak out in the name of good science and in the name of autism advocacy.

Or, to paraphrase the words of a certain other protest against outrageous legal tactics that’s been in the news lately… we are Kathleen, and we are legion.

And to be fair, there were some bits of coverage that had me screaming at the TV. Like a certain evening talk show which covered the issue of vaccines and autism in what sounded to me more like a shouting match than a rational debate. And for that matter, I’m glad I don’t get the Sundance channel either, because they showed the extended version of a certain autism ‘awareness’ film that I’ve already criticized here in the past.

But yet, despite this, today was surprisingly not a total loss when it came to coverage of autism in the media.

One thing that particularly bothers me about media coverage of autism is that it generally focuses on the most severe cases, and on top of that, generally focuses on children while completely ignoring the experiences of adults with autism. While I don’t deny that there does need to be coverage of autism in children and of the more severe end of the spectrum, the point is, that’s not the full extent of autism. To truly have autism awareness, we must touch on the whole range of autistic experience—and for that matter, we must have at least some awareness of the experiences of autistics themselves, not just the vicarious experience of parents.

Those of us who are on the ‘higher-functioning’ end of the spectrum, in fact, almost have it worse in some respects. Because many of us can maintain an appearance of typicality most of the time, it’s assumed that this façade is a natural one, rather than one which must at times be consciously applied. And even when all effort is being used to keep up this façade, it doesn’t always work quite as planned, and certain gaffes may make it quite apparent that something’s not quite normal. I liken it to running Windows in a virtual machine on my PowerPC Mac; it does run, but it’s much slower than running it on a native processor, it takes up a lot of memory and processing power, and it doesn’t even emulate the entire range of code supported by a native Pentium processor. It’s usable, and it looks OK on the surface, but using it for any extended amount of time makes it pretty clear that this is no Pentium inside this little box.

The Washington Post made a good start by printing the article Autistic and Overlooked, which asked the question of why the media seems to ignore the fact that autistic kids grow up into equally autistic adults. Even then, I felt it didn’t go far enough—among other things, repeating the same old rhetoric of autism being a “devastating disorder”—but at the least, it was a very good start in at least pointing out the lack of attention toward autistic adults.

And then, I discovered, on the web site of the magazine Computerworld, an article also posted today with the title Asperger’s and IT: Dark secret or open secret? This article not only talks about the existence of autistic adults, but specifically discusses those issues that are troublesome for those of us on the higher-functioning end of the spectrum, particularly in the workforce.

This is the sort of autism awareness that doesn’t get enough coverage in the media; this is precisely the sort of thing I’d like to see more of.

And last, but definitely not least, one of us adult autistics deserves special mention for making some significant efforts toward promoting awareness of autistics on this first ever Autism Awareness Day.

Ari Ne’eman of the Autism Self-Advocacy Network (one of the autism organizations for which I’d like to see more media coverage, incidentally) spoke at the inaugural meeting of Florida’s Autism Task Force regarding the needs of autistics; the transcript of this speech can be found here. And as if that’s not enough, Ne’eman was also appointed by Jon Corzine, governor of his home state of New Jersey, to the New Jersey Adults with Autism Task Force.

So yes, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the efforts made in the name of autism awareness today; things did not turn out nearly as discouraging as I’d expected given previous coverage that I’d seen. Here’s to even further progress on the next Autism Awareness Day!

More to come later today, once I’ve gotten a bit more of a chance to digest all of today’s media coverage…

But that’s going to be changing this month.

Why? It’s not because I’m less stressed; far from it, in fact. It’s that time of the semester where everything starts building up all at once.

Rather, it’s because the month of April has been designated as Autism Awareness Month. And the whole reason I started this blog in the first place was to make people more aware of not just my experiences, but even my mere existence, as an autistic adult.

And that’s important. We autistic adults do exist— and for all this talk of awareness, there seems to be comparatively little awareness of this fact, and even less of an attempt at bringing awareness to it. When it is brought up by certain prominent autism organizations which make frequent appearances in media coverage of autism, autistic adults usually get a very minor mention, if any at all, in comparison to the very frequent focus on children with autism. Not that children aren’t worth our attention, but children do grow up, after all, and they don’t magically become un-autistic.

So yeah. It may be April Fool’s Day today, but I’m starting this month off here quite seriously— and I’m going to be putting my autistic perseveration skills to good use the rest of this month as well.