I make the right mistakes
And I say what I mean
Spare me from the mold
We are marginalized canaries in a social coalmine and Rawlsian barometers of society’s morality. It is deeply subversive to live proudly despite being living embodiments of our culture’s long standing ethical failings.
THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: ON HANS ASPERGER, THE NAZIS, AND AUTISM: A CONVERSATION ACROSS NEUROLOGIES
Our non-compliance is not intended to be rebellious. We simply do not comply with things that harm us. But since a great number of things that harm us are not harmful to most neurotypicals, we are viewed as untamed and in need of straightening up.
“When I was a little girl, I was autistic. And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s therapy.”
It is a human rights violation to continue to ignore and discount the voices of Autistic people about deeply traumatising and harmful “therapies” such as ABA.
CW: behaviorism, quiet hands, ABA, eugenics
Trainers are rejecting behaviorism because it harms animals emotionally and psychologically. What does that say about classrooms that embrace it?
Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of Equity
This “science-driven” mantra has been seen before through eugenics.
Therefore, eugenics is an erasure of identity through force, whereas radical behaviorism is an erasure of identity through “correction.” This all assumes a dominant culture that one strives to unquestionably maintain.
Ultimately behaviorism provides a simplistic lens that can’t see beyond itself.
Behaviorism is Dead. How Do We Tell The (Autism) Parents? » NeuroClastic
Why is the doctrine of behaviorism still being used, at all?
How can ABA be the gold-standard for autism when it ignores everything we know about autism?
The problems associated with ABA run very deep. It is a human rights violation to continue to ignore and discount the voices of Autistic people about deeply traumatising and harmful “therapies” such as ABA.
Jorn Bettin
The underpinnings of that ideology include: a focus only on observable behaviors that can be quantified, a reduction of wholes to parts, the assumption that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement, and the creation of methods for selectively reinforcing whichever behaviors are preferred by the person with the power. Behaviorists ignore, or actively dismiss, subjective experience – the perceptions, needs, values, and complex motives of the human beings who engage in behaviors.
The late Herb Lovett used to say that there are only two problems with “special education” in America: It’s not special and it sure as hell isn’t education. The field continues to be marinated in behaviorist assumptions and practices despite the fact that numerous resources for teachers, therapists, and parents offer alternatives to behavior control. These alternatives are based on a commitment to care and to understand. By “care,” I mean that our relationship with the child is what matters most. He or she is not a passive object to be manipulated but a subject, a center of experience, a person with agency, with needs and rights. And by “understand,” I mean that we have an obligation to look beneath the behavior, in part by imaginatively trying to adopt that person’s point of view, attempting to understand the whys rather than just tabulating the frequency of the whats. As Norm Kunc and Emma Van der Klift urged us in their Credo for Support: “Be still and listen. What you define as inappropriate may be my attempt to communicate with you in the only way I can….[or] the only way I can exert some control over my life….Do not work on me. Work with me.”
Autism and Behaviorism – Alfie Kohn
When I was a little girl, I was autistic. And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s therapy.
Quiet Hands | Just Stimming…
Abuse and silencing is a constant, pervasive theme in the lives of autistic people, and for many people it is best expressed by that old, familiar phrase from special education: quiet hands!
Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking (p. 8, 125). Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Loud hands means resisting. Loud Hands means speaking, however we do, anyway—and doing so in a way that can be very obviously Autistic. It means finding ways to talk and think about ourselves on our own terms.
There is room for all of us to play our part. And whatever we do, however we do it, we can do it with ‘loud hands’ and ‘loud voices,’ and loud whatever else we need, in whatever way that works for us individually or collectively. Let us be our real autistic selves, loud and proud, and show the world what we truly are.
Our non-compliance is not intended to be rebellious. We simply do not comply with things that harm us. But since a great number of things that harm us are not harmful to most neurotypicals, we are viewed as untamed and in need of straightening up.
THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: On Hans Asperger, the Nazis, and Autism: A Conversation Across Neurologies
One of my favorite anecdotes from Asperger’s thesis is when he asks an autistic boy in his clinic if he believes in God. “I don’t like to say I’m not religious,” the boy replies, “I just don’t have any proof of God.” That anecdote shows an appreciation of autistic non-compliance, which Asperger and his colleagues felt was as much a part of their patients’ autism as the challenges they faced. Asperger even anticipated in the 1970s that autistic adults who “valued their freedom” would object to behaviorist training, and that has turned out to be true.
Therefore, eugenics is an erasure of identity through force, whereas radical behaviorism is an erasure of identity through “correction.” This all assumes a dominant culture that one strives to unquestionably maintain.
Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of Equity
Simon says smile. Show us your teeth. You’re only as valuable as you are able.
Simon says smile.
Show us your teeth.
You’re only as valuable as you are able.
Simon says it's not time for a bathroom break.
You go when Simon says.
Simon says you're not listening.
People that don’t listen will never be successful.
Simon Says speak only when you are told to speak.
Simon says it’s still not time for a bathroom break and stop asking.
Simon Says that you if can't be silent
how will you hear what Simon is telling you to do.
Silence!
I said be silent.
Simon says be silent.
2016 NPS Finals – House Slam – Ashley Davis & Oompa “Simon Says” – YouTube
- CHAMPS and the Compliance Classroom – Stimpunks Foundation
- Eye Contact and Neurodiversity – Stimpunks Foundation
- Education Access: We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence – Stimpunks Foundation
- Behaviorism – Stimpunks Foundation
- Does Behaviorism Belong in the Classroom? – Stimpunks Foundation
- There Is Little Empirical Basis to Suggest That PBS Is Effective – Stimpunks Foundation
- A Fade to Extinction for Ethically Questionable Approaches That Disregard Neurodiversity – Stimpunks Foundation
- DIY at the Edges: Surviving the Bipartisanship of Behaviorism by Rolling Our Own – Stimpunks Foundation
That’s not earning your token.
- Why I Left ABA | Socially Anxious Advocate
- I Abused Children For A Living – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- I Abused Children And SO DO YOU: A Response To An ABA Apologist – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- Is ABA Really “Dog Training for Children”? A Professional Dog Trainer Weighs In. » NeuroClastic
- I’m an ABA therapist, I’ve noticed a lot of the… – neurowonderful
- I’m sorry, but that’s not earning your token
- ‘Cardgate’ Scandal Uncovers Widespread Disrespect of Autistic People | NOS Magazine
- The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists
- Applied Behaviour Analysis – Personal Reflections
- Read what one autistic adult had to say the day she realised that the therapy she went through as a child was actually ABA.
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy. The only government-funded therapy for autistic children is called Applied Behaviour Analysis, an approach developed in tandem with discredited anti-LGBTQ2S+ practises.
Both gay conversion therapy and ABA were built on behaviourism—the scientific belief that human behaviour is determined by conditioning from our immediate environments, and should be controlled through manipulating those environments. Behaviourist psychology has always seen queer and autistic identities as deviant, and so the pathologies around both were constructed at the same time, and from the same body of research. This is why many autistics today argue that ABA is actually its own form of conversion therapy.
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
“It’s all about policing unruly bodies,” says Negrazis. “Lovaas actively constructed gender and sexual divergence as disabled, which created an inherent disableism in the emergence of queer identities.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
Just like queer and trans people, autistics do not have a disease that needs to be treated. Instead, says Negrazis, “[autistics] need supports to help them identify how trauma has impacted them in their learning, relationships, ability to work and even their self-concept.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
“The psych industry has done so much harm to both [autistic and queer] people,” they say. “The very foundations of psychology and counselling need to be dismantled and rebuilt by queer and autistic people themselves.”
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy | Xtra Magazine
Oh behaviorism! Up yours!
Oh bondage, up yours
Oh bondage, no more
Oh bondage, up yours
Oh bondage, no more
CW: ABA, behaviorism, operant conditioning
Push the buttons just like we ask
This step first and that step last
Over and over and do it fast
I’m watching everyone, feeling like a simpleton
Why can’t I get it done? I just want to scream and run
I don’t think like you
But I’m the one that’s called abnormal
This construct
Was built by petty tyrants
Am I on the level yet? (Level yet)
How did I do on your little test?
Get my brain to reset (Reset)
‘Cause everything you say is static
Do I make a good pet? (Good pet)
Obey the commands or get the back of the hand
‘Cause the world wasn’t built for a brain like mine
Change my mind, change my mind, change my mind
We stand together
We think apart
We stand together
We think apart
Please complete this simple task
Take your place within the plan
We’ll help you fit as best we can
Over and over till you’re a new man
We’ll examine everything, measure your entire being
Normalize what you are feeling, put you on the proper setting
I don’t think like you
But I’m the specimen in question
This construct
Was built and can be dismantled
We stand together
We think apart
Neurodivergent by Rabbit Junk
This construct
Was built by petty tyrants
This was important because it meant that Darwinists and policy makers, deprived of widespread support for Galtonian eugenics, now saw a new method for normalising populations. But this time it sought to mimic evolutionary pressures in childhood development rather than through control of hereditary traits across generations. In this context, as Harvard historian Rebecca Lemov has detailed, large American philanthropic organisations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, which had previously funded Nazi eugenics, began lavishly funding new behaviouralist research. Most notably, this included the work of Elton Mayo, who sought to ‘adapt industrial workers to their tasks by deradicalizing them through psychological counselling’. This would formalise and update the kinds of scientific management that had been pioneered on slave plantations to manage the psyches of modern workers.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
…mass neurodivergent disablement and constant, widespread anxiety, panic, depression, and mental illness, combined with systemic discrimination of neurodivergent people, is a problem specific to the current historical era. Hegemonic neuronormative domination, in other words, is a key problem of our time.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
This construct
Was built and can be dismantled
Ordinary tried to fix me.
Talent by Swamburger and Scarlet Monk of Mugs and Pockets
I was a threat to a page in history.
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