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The Right to the Ordinary: Money, Choice, and Dignity for Autistic Adults
Andrew recently spent a night in New York City. It was a staycation — a Broadway show, dinner in Manhattan, an overnight stay at a Times Square hotel, and shopping for souvenirs. Andrew is a young autistic man supported by AABR, and during this particular trip, something new was in his...
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Medicaid Fraud Is Real. So Is the Harm to Families Who Depend on It
Reports of Medicaid fraud are deeply troubling, and those responsible should be prosecuted. But fraud has become the justification for policies that make it harder for families to access the medical care and supports they depend on. Our government has the tools to investigate fraud without placing...
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Autistic Personal Philosophy: Regarding Equity and Equality
Both of these terms are of critical importance to the establishment and enforcement of those rules, regulations, and laws of ours with social justice implications, though one of them often wins out when the other should. The consequences, particularly for members of marginalized segments of the...
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We Shall Overcome: Why I Am Certain Nonspeakers Will Win Our Rights to Communicate
I was born perfectly healthy and passed all my developmental milestones, including saying words like "ball" and "dog." Then suddenly, at 15 months, I lost all my spoken words and started to bang my head on the floor. My parents brought me to Yale Medical School, and their only recommendation was to...
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Giving Voice to Non-Speakers: Language, Respect, and the Power of Naming
For the longest time, I used the term non-speaking synonymously with non-verbal, having been taught ‘non-verbal’ in graduate school. Since that time, new terms and definitions have emerged with the advent of a variety of disability rights movements. Person-First Language Person-first...
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Re-Envisioning Our Unnecessarily Disabled Futures
Most disabled adults are forced to live segregated, impoverished lives absent of the security, life expectancy, community, and agency that all human beings deserve. For those of us from historically marginalized communities, including non-speakers, the isolation can be even more profound. The life...
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Advancing the Rights-Based Inclusion of People Who Need and Use AAC: A Guide to Allyship
People often ask CommunicationFIRST for our recommendations for interacting with people who need and use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools and supports,1 including nonspeaking autistic people, autistic people who are sometimes able to speak, and people with other...
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My Autistic Brother Nearly Died Waiting. Now They Want to Cut What Saved Him.
He stood over me and his companion Steve on the steps leading into the Senate building and prayed "God, give me the words today." It was March 24, 2026, and my 30-year-old autistic brother Stephen was invited to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressional staffers and share his experience living with a...
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Resilience, Resistance, and Making a Difference While Cultivating Autistic Joy and Living in Community
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone. Children are terrified of going to school. Families are being separated forcibly and deported. Peaceful protestors, including Renée Good and Alex Pretti, have been killed in the streets of Minneapolis. Warehouses are being converted into jails....
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Autistic Lived Experience: My Government Is Waging War on Me and on My Community
Not that there has ever been a good time to be autistic, considering how society has pathologized us for decades now because of our differences, though to be autistic and living today in the USA has been particularly punishing in light of the current administration's toxic rhetoric about us and...
