Time to stop and listen, your legacy depends on it.

The autism communities owe much grattitude to Professor Tony Attwood. He has provided much insight, wisdom, acceptance and destigmatising of autistic people. His book The Complete Guide to Aspergers Syndrome graces the shelves of many a bookshelf amongst families with autistic members.

Tony is rightly credited with seeing autistic strengths and making moves to depathologise autism. One could say he was, at least in part, early to the neurodiversity movement, in a sense.

Personally I have heard him speak on a number of occasions, I have enjoyed his lighthearted and friendly approach to communicating about autism. I recall with delight the first time I came across Tony, he was giving a talk to at The National Press club in Canberra, he spoke of things that were very relatable to myself, perhaps it was in fact this first experience of Tony that were really the seeds of discovering my own neurodivergence.

As time has gone on, as I listened to Tony again and again, things seemed to not sit quite so right. I felt as if something was a bit a miss. At first I put it down just to me being over sensitive or something, but it became apparent that it was in fact not just me, a growing number of autistic people were feeling the same way.

That was that Tony was getting laughs from his audiences by regailing them with jokes and anecdotes about things we do and say that are for some reason seen to be funny at our expense by the non autistic audience. The thing is of course, that his audiences were never really all non autistic at all. We autistics have always been a part of those audiences and Tony was aware of this.

The line that Tony crossed for me was a combintion of hearing him speak as part of an audience at an Aspergers Victoria event where a large proportion of the attendees were adult autistic humans. Tony regailed us with joke after joke after joke at our expense. It was at this event that I really started to feel something was not quite right.

Over time I realised I wasn’t alone, and in fact Tony had been approached at an event and called out for this behaviour. Tony responded by claiming we autistics just misread the situation and lacked the social and communicational understandings to grasp it, this person attempted to dialogue further about this and received responses that showed Tony was unwilling to listen to the voices of those he purported to be helping.

The program that aired on Austrlia’s ABC last night was somewhat entertaining, it delivered pathos of a family living through difficult times. It showed some honesty from Tony acknowledging how he missed the autism in his own child.

Again, to be clear Tony has given much to the autism community, a gift of incalculable proportions. However, if Tony continues on his current trajectory he will diminish that gift and risks becoming a pariah.

Tony’s use of language was terrible, consistently referring to functioning labels, outmoded diagnostic labels and consistent use of person first language. This was stark and cut across the fact that, at the same time he was trying to present a depathologised picture of autism. All whilst using the pathologised language.

Tony also failed to present an accurate picture of what neurotypcial actually means and equated it with non-autistic. This kind of language erases the many variations of neurodivergence that abound in our world.

At one point, he spoke of the autism spectrum as if it was a linear line, a line at which he placed a particular type at one end, intimating a superiority at that end. The spectrum is not a line at all, I am not sure the best way to characterise it but It certainly isn’t a line, and an autistic person occupies different points on that spectrum at different times, sometimes from moment to moment, but certainly from day to day and week to week and so on.

Tony, I for one have benefited greatly from the knowledge and wisdom you have given to the autism world, but, please, Tony, for your sake, for my sake, for your son Will’s sake, please it’s time to listen to us. You are not our translator, you may think you speak our language but you actually don’t. Yes you know a lot about our language, but you don’t speak it, and you can’t really translate it. Your response to us when we have critiqued your use of jokes about us is a prime example.

Tony, please, stop, take a step back, listen to us, learn from us, stop speaking for us and just listen for a while. Once you’ve done that, I ask, Tony, that you shift your focus to speaking in a way that amplifies our voices, I believe Tony, if you are prepared to do this you will add to your legacy and stop detracting from it.

Oh and yes, please, Tony, stop saying ridiculous things, like, what if Aspergers is the next step in evolution, things like that are just ridiculous.

But yes, please, Tony, listen to us.

The Australian Story episode can be found here