Assertive Autism Advocacy

The Triple-A Manifesto

Mission Statement

Improve the quality of life for autistic people everywhere.

Problem Statement

Autistic people suffer anxiety, depression, and PTSD at extremely high rates. This fact is no longer acceptable to us. There are numerous reasons for this trend: lack of support; lack of understanding, being targeted for bullying, harassment, and abuse; systematic abandonment, alienation, and isolation; pathologizing of healthy needs and behaviors; and more.

Methods & Strategies

1. Education & Advocacy: General awareness and education

2. Challenge Harmful Norms: Demonize bullying people for being 'weird' or 'nerds' or whatever

3. Advancing Social Narratives: Destroy stigmas around autism

4. Call Out Cognitive Dissonance and Double Standards: Genius narratives while actively harming neurodiverse individuals

5. Use Privilege for Positive Change: Self explanatory

6. Depathologize Unharmful Autistic Behaviors: Flapping, stimming, eye contact

7. Normalize Autistic Needs:  Social, emotional, physical, sensory, and intellectual needs

8. Deconstruct Harmful Stereotypes: Autistic people are all quiet, etc

9. Valorize Autistic Qualities: Thoughtfulness, divergent thinking, sensitivity, vulnerability

Roadmap

This document is a simple yet robust roadmap, a comprehensive set of strategies that serves to simplify and organize a decentralized, grassroots movement. It is a set of principles that anyone can abide by to advance the agenda outlined in the Mission Statement. You can participate in a million different ways, whether you employ these strategies at work, at home, in fiction, in videos, in podcasts, in policy. Wherever. 

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