Cross posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org.
A couple of weeks ago, Autism Science Foundation founder Alison Singer posted on Twitter a video of an exchange she had with Cure Autism Now founder Jonathan Shestack. The clip opens with a question from Singer:
You’ve been away from the autism advocacy world for some years, but what’s your feeling about how the definition of autism spectrum disorder has changed?
Singer was alluding to the expansion of the autism spectrum to include what was once called Asperger’s Syndrome. This expansion assigns people with a range of speaking and writing abilities—some fully fluent, others completely minimally verbal—to the same diagnostic category. Back in 1995, when Shestack and his wife, Portia Iversen, founded Cure Autism Now (now Autism Speaks), autism and Asperger’s were distinct diagnoses.
Shestack, answering Singer’s question, implicitly raises another:
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