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Autism grievance parents keep topping themselves in cynical awfulness, including cozying up to fellow autism disinformation-spewer RFK Jr. So we’ve updated our explainer on how these parents harm autistics, meaning their own kids as well as ours. Thread. thinkingautismguide.com/2022/11/grie... 1/

If you’re the parent of an autistic child or adult, and you are also horrified by MAGA-style disinformation, please know you should be just as skeptical about getting autism information from people I’m going to call “grievance parents.” 2/

Autism grievance parents brand themselves as autism experts, yet promote reactionary ideas about autism and resentment towards autistic advocates—while encouraging followers to become too upset about having autistic children to question autism misinformation. 3/

Knowing how to identify and avoid grievance parents matters, because their efforts limit autistic people’s already challenging lives, instead of enriching or improving them. 4/

Who are these grievance parents? They are generally—like me—parents of autistic children with significant disabilities. Except instead of targeting “the libs,” grievance parents and the forums they run target autistic, disability, and #neurodiversity activists. 5/

It is painful to watch parents who should be my and my autistic son’s allies instead publicly declare war against the autistic adults their children will grow up to be (or in some cases already are) and dismiss the valuable advice autistic advocates provide. www.emerald.com/insight/cont... 6/

It is also painful to see how autism grievance parents deflect queries about their harmful behaviors, by enlisting and spotlighting outlier non-representative autistic adults who agree with their takes. 7/

It’s understandable when parents new to autism to look to other parents for help. But it’s also crucial for those parents to understand that autistic adults are not the enemy. 8/

Like the leaders of any other community your child belongs to but you do not, autistic and disability advocates have beneficial insights and learned wisdom that non-autistic parents simply cannot provide (and that, as a bonus, research supports). journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 9/

My mostly non-speaking autistic son has become several magnitudes happier, and my own parenting experience has become significantly less fraught, thanks to autistic guidance. www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/20... 10/

My autistic son’s disabilities require full-time support, which means he and I live the very lives autism grievance parents tend to portray as horror shows. Please know that I would never deny how challenging things can be for families like ours. 11/

Accessing the supports my autistic son needs can be brutally difficult, especially as he and his peers transition into adulthood. But unlike autism grievance parents, I believe my son deserves respect and understanding—not grievance parents’ relentless exploitation of their children as burdens. 12/

You can clock such parents when they reject insights & advocacy from autistic communities—insisting autistic adults “despise parents of autistic kids,” while invoking Trumpian egocentrism, claiming it’s them who “have been at the forefront of […] improving the lives of those disabled by autism.” 13/

Autism grievance parents also often claim that they need to “be their children’s voices.” These stances are troublingly out of sync with rights- and services-focused developmental disability organizations, as well as a worrying denial of their children’s communication capabilities. 14/

As autistic advocate Julia Bascom @juststimming.bsky.social reminds us, “There are no voiceless people. There are plenty of people who are spoken over, ignored, or not given an accessible way to communicate.” autisticadvocacy.org/2021/01/tran... 15/

Note that autism grievance parents are often pro-vax but some—for instance the NCSA’s Jill Escher—happily take smiling photos with dangerous anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Grievance parents can be more concerned with furthering their anti-autism agenda than protecting public health, it seems. 16/

Autism grievance parents head autism organizations often wrongly perceived by autism advocacy outsiders as useful, including Escher’s National Council on Severe Autism (NCSA), Alison Singer’s Autism Science Foundation (ASF), and The Profound Autism Alliance. 17/

Autism grievance parents are MAGA-like in aggressive hypocrisy & spin. Typically wealthy, connected parents who sit on multiple boards & head foundations, they claim to be bullied by #neurodiversity & autism advocates (i.e., by systematically marginalized & largely impoverished disabled people). 19/

Autism grievance parents are thumb-on-the-scale influencers in autism policy and research—yet take advantage of entrenched negative attitudes about disability and their status as parents of high-support autistic children to appear like typical Davids, and avoid being outed as elite Goliaths. 20/

Consider how grievance parents hijacked a Lancet commission on strategies for improving autistic lives to promote a “profound autism” label. “Profound autism” then became the focus of the commission’s media coverage, even though many spoke out about the functional inappropriateness of the term. 21/