What is your opinion of 'Autism Speaks'?

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What is your attitude toward "Autism Speaks", and why?

Am not particularly well informed about them myself.

But I see a lot of hostility to them here.

I voted other. I do not particularly like the organisation but definitely not sheer hatred and wanting them to crash and burn like a lot of people on this site. More of a slight disliking.

Autism Speaks doesn't speak for me.

(If you want to know more about this, here's a link: https://thecaffeinatedautistic.wordpres ... -be-too-2/. Or just search "why is autism speaks bad")

Autism Speaks just doesn't seem to get it. A decent autism organisation doesn't pay its top brass eye-wateringly high salaries out of the donations box, or have zero representation from autistic people on its executive, or spread the idea that autism is a terrible disease that must be eradicated, or block the advertising of T-shirts that say the organisation doesn't speak for them. As far as I can see, Autism Speaks does all those things.

In my opinion, a decent autism organisation accepts that autistic people are here to stay, and respects the notion that for many of us autism is much more a difference than a disease. It tries to educate society into accepting us for who we are and into making appropriate adjustments to give us the same chances of living comfortable, fulfilling lives as neurotypicals. It spends a large proportion of its donation money on the autistic people themselves. Its policies are informed and largely controlled by autistic people. It sticks to the truth in its publicity material. As far as I can see, Autism Speaks is seriously lacking in all these respects.

Therefore I'm against them.

It's a nasty group, really. They're hated because of how they operate, what they've done, and how these things... aside from being damaging... go against what they claim to be all about. In some cases, they go REALLY HARD against what they claim to be about.

They're supposed to be about helping autistics, for instance... but only 4% of their budget goes towards actually helping those that need help. The rest goes towards things like cure research (for something that may, in fact, be incurable by it's very nature), advertising and stuff, and paying crazy amounts to their own members. And then there's the videos...

But rather than repeat it all here, there's this topic already: viewtopic.php?t=291604 where a number of people (myself included) posted recently about them and why we hate them (for example, someone in there posted some info on their spending habits or whatever you might call it, and there's stuff about their videos, and so on). That topic derails a bit after a time, but still, it explains enough about them to get the point across.

I've voted Anti-Autism Speaks. Any organization that wants to wipe out any population that they don't understand, is not worthy of my support.

This is why you shoudn't support Autism Speaks





P.S. Don't forget to cuss them out in the Youtube comments.

That ad is terrible!

So...

Only one supporter out of the 30 respondants?