Thomas Ledbetter

@capledbetter.bsky.social

144 Followers 113 Following

Autistic activist, advocate, researcher, critical optimist, and hopefully a friend. Views are my own. #ActuallyAutistic #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs https://thomasgledbetter.com/

You know what I can't shake the feeling about? That even under our administration before today in the US, disability rights and advocacy wasn't a primary issue. Disabled people are struggling with awful healthcare systems, constant stigma, and non-disabled people deciding what it means for them to exist or not. And that was under a Democratic leadership that ostensibly cared about the rights of other intersecting minority groups - which means that after today, and for the next four years (and maybe beyond), disability rights, neurodiversity, and advocacy will be bottom-of-the-list issues for our governmental climate.
"At ASF, we fund a broad spectrum of autism research topics—from genetic discovery, to early warning signs, biomarkers of diagnosis, interventions, gender and racial disparities, and ways to improve service delivery" Autism Science Foundation (https://autismsciencefoundation.org/what-we-fund/)
Due to the wide range of characteristics and needs of autistic people, some researchers have proposed a new category called profound autism, Mandell said. This diagnosis would be given to autistic people who will require the constant presence of an adult to help them throughout their lifetime. These people usually have an intellectual or language disability, or both. Mandell said that perhaps Kennedy was in fact referring to people with profound autism. But even if so, “his statement that there’s no one his age who has profound autism or you haven’t met them — you may not have met them, but that’s very different from them not existing. And what he has said is patently false.”
“No there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines cause autism,” Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist and autism researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told us in an email. “This proposition has been repeatedly rejected including withdrawal of the first article that proposed it (and subsequent loss of medical status of its author) and every study since then,” she said, referring to the retracted Lancet paper.
In a June 5 SiriusXM town hall, Kennedy, who is 69 years old, told radio and TV host Michael Smerconish: “I have never in my life seen a man my age with full-blown autism, not once. Where are these men? One out of every 22 men who are walking around the mall with helmets on, who are non-toilet-trained, nonverbal, stimming, toe-walking, hand-flapping. I’ve never seen it.” He said on a June 15 episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast: “I bet that you’ve never met anybody with full-blown autism your age. You know, head banging, football or helmet on, non-toilet-trained, nonverbal. I mean, I’ve never met anybody like that my age.”
Alt text: an image of the United States Electoral College map all in one color with the words "Autism Moms" between Democrats and Republicans, a bar in the same color with the number 538 in the middle, and pictures of Alison Singer, Jill Escher, and Jenny McCarthy above the map