2 years ago a major university asked me to come in to give a quick pitch on how I may be able to make their campus more neuroaffirming.
I said that I don’t do free meetings of this nature, but they assured me it was a pitch for 15-20 minutes to see if they’d be interested in a full meeting.
Like many autistic professionals in such situations, I reluctantly agreed.
The “15-20 minute chat” turned into an hour of asking and prodding me for information. It was implied that we would begin a professional relationship after some “checking with higher ups”.
After following up multiple times, with no reply, I was told that they were not interested in pursuing any of my ideas. It sucked, I was out 2 hours with travel without being paid, but thought that’s what it is and I moved on with life. Another “affirming” group taking advantage of autistic people’s labour and bodies.
Today I ran into a one of the people who sat in on said meeting. They attended a lecture I gave today for university administrators on building neuro-affirming university campuses (for which I was paid today). You can imagine my surprise when they told me with a big smile that they had implemented my ideas and built an entire team of “ND affirming” professionals. They used my ideas, my implementation plan, my program ideas, and then hired others to do it for them. Never bothered to pay me for that.
You can imagine my further surprise when this person said “oh that’s a great idea you just made in your talk. We should hire someone to do that!” and walked away, super proud of the “new idea” they came up with.
This person is, of course, NT.
Autistic people know the feeling of not being heard. Of people taking our art, our ideas, our lives, and making them their own, with no recognition. We know what it is to be paid nothing for our work, while NT people doing the same thing are paid in loads. And if you’re not a man or white, you know this on a number of levels.
So many of those claiming to care about affirming autistic lives are full of autisiphobis and ableism.
Our minds and bodies aren’t worthless. It’s our minds and bodies that make the world go around.
