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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...
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Autism Rights, Wrongs, and Acceptance: A Two-Way Street
Though I was diagnosed autistic as an infant, I was unaware I was different until second grade, when I was shuffled between special and regular education classes, when I decided, mostly on my own, that I would transition to mainstream school. While I was a great student throughout my scholastic...
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Scientific Setbacks: Medical Stigma and Political Interference Threaten Autism Healthcare
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said many autistic children were “fully functional” and “regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll...
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Medicaid Cuts Will Put People Like Me at Risk
My name is Jimmy Tucker. I have a learning disability, and I am on the autism spectrum. In school and in adult life, I never felt like I fit in. I’ve always felt different, and that made things harder for me. But Medicaid-funded programs have helped me find my way. These are the supports I rely...
