Thanks to wonderful Autistic conversations I think I am beginning to understand why I feel so much at home in the ocean. To date I had not connected it to healing from Autistic trauma, but now I see the connection with increasing clarity.
In 2022 the Autistic Collaboration community is in the process of co-creating and operationalising peer support services for Autistic Trauma based on the lived experiences of Autistic people all over the world. We invite our Autistic peers (you) to contribute lived experience.
This event is part of the Global Disability Summit and also part of the global Ban of Conversion Therapies project, towards comprehensive bans of all forms of conversion therapies (Applied Behaviour Analysis, or ABA, Positive Behaviour Support, or PBS, and various other rebrandings).
The cultural bias that is baked into the pathologising framing of the diagnostic process compounds the trauma and perpetuates internalised ableism. We urgently need to educate healthcare professionals and the wider public about the neurodiversity paradigm, the neurodiversity movement, and Autistic culture.
You are invited to listen to our series of international panel discussions towards comprehensive bans of all forms of conversion therapies. We are building on the results achieved to date, focusing on the human rights violations in countries that have ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
If I would have had access to some magical time machine for procuring books when I was a teenager, it would have spared me many surprises, and I might have been able to avoid a few detours on my journey through life to date.
Following the trail of where Hans Asperger picked up the term autism I ended up reading a fascinating 1919 German book by Eugen Bleuler titled ‘Autistic and undisciplined thinking in medicine, and how to overcome it’. The content is not at all what you would think. The sands of pathologisation have shifted significantly.
From an autistic perspective cognitive dissonance manifests not in terms of contradictory beliefs, but in terms of complete alienation from the mainstream culture in industrialised societies. Most of the so-called foundations of our civilisation amount to a delusional level of wishful thinking. Our society is locked into paradigmatic inertia by fear and busyness.
From today we will will start counting the days until all forms of conversion therapies are banned in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our hope is that this page will only need to be appended a few times with further activities to remind the government of its commitment to banning conversion practices and of its commitment to human rights, including all the rights articulated in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which our government has ratified in 2008.
In a submission to the Justice Select Committee, members from New Zealand autistic community groups say while they fully supported a ban on conversion practices targeting sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, protections should be extended to include all New Zealanders subject to these practices, especially neuro-diverse communities among whom conversion therapies also cause considerable harm.
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