Published 10:16:52
Dear Autistic people and individuals suffering from neurotypicalism,
Last week the Advisory Council on Autism unanimously approved a letter to the governor, a very important letter detailing concrete steps within his power he could do to protect Autistic people and the funding of medicaid many of us depend on from a fascist government and a Secretary of Health and Human Services who wishes to create a federal autism registry and send autistic people to re-education camps. Our letter advised reasonable and realistic actions, already taken successfully in other states. But the next day I was told that Commissioner Marks at the Department of Behavioral Health can just unilaterally reject our letters, and did so.
I therefore hereby resign from the so-called Kentucky Advisory Council on Autism--which is not only severely lacking in autism, filled by no more than six Autistics at any time, a small minority of the total seats, but in fact not an advisory council at all, since we cannot with unanimous approval send even one letter to the governor who appointed us to advise him. Why can some bureaucrat who is neither on the council nor was present at the meeting overrule our unanimous vote? Why can the council not even communicate with this mysterious person directly, instead having to go through the opaque smokescreen of the so-called Office of Autism?
I wish this were a single event, and not a miserable two years of unending pushback from all those who name themselves “allies”--who were afraid to even call themselves accomplices and then proved this well in your refusal to break a single arbitrary rule in our defense. Why, after two years of our autistic minority faction existing on this council, do we remain so few, while positions have opened again and again and either been filled by the enemies of autistics or left vacant endlessly at the inscrutable whims of the office of boards and commissions? Why do our continual protests of the abusive conversion therapy you so affectionately refer to as “early intervention” fall on deaf ears? (and this is merely an expression, if only you allistics had a tiny fraction of the resolve and solidarity of the Deaf community!)
If we cannot even do the one single thing you are willing to believe we have the power to do, send a letter to the governor, what purpose is there for us to continue to waste our time and energy here? There is none. We will be leaving now, sending the letter we unanimously approved ourselves to the governor and to the press and being very autistically loud to ensure all know what a waste of time it is to be on the Advisory Council on Autism.
Perhaps I am too low-functioning to comprehend the genius of this neurotypical design, with its obtuse layers of bureaucracy seemingly existing specifically to provide a pretense for allistics to say “there is nothing we can do” and go home and feel good about themselves for making the most minimal effort. This council’s absolute refusal to take any action, to break any of its arbitrary rules at all for the defense of Autistic people, is unfortunately symptomatic of the entirety of this doomed nation we were so unlucky to be born in. When the law decrees that all autistics must die, how you will wish for a safe house to hide your children in, but you will find around you only glass houses with open doors under star-spangled flags, and regretful words that “there is nothing we can do.”
And by the time this fascist regime will fall, as all regimes do, I will gratefully either be dead for not keeping my hands quiet at the death camp, with a bullet through my pink and yellow star, or by the grace of the goddess I will have escaped this cursed land, and in either case never have to hear most of your duplicitous voices again. I hope you remember these words on the day the camps are liberated and you all decide you were always against this.
~Winter