Submitter: We had the following come in as an eBook request that I have turned down. On the outside this book looked promising, and then I got to the part about giving kids a compound that the Food and Drug Administration warns amounts to industrial bleach. Were open to different opinions, but this is a big old Nope!
The Autism Ambassadors Handbook
Kukoff
2013
Submitter: This terribly ableist book is in the library of the university I graduated from. When I discovered it as an autistic student, I was livid. The author, an 18-year-old boy who is being treated as an expert despite his lack of qualifications, describes autistic people in the most alienating way possible (he actually says we sound as if we just stepped off a spaceship). He doesn’t consider that if a child screams or covers her ears, maybe she is hurt or scared by a loud noise. To him, this behavior is just evidence that she is socially oblivious. The author clearly hasn’t talked to many autistic adults. If he had, he’d know that we do NOT want to be “indistinguishable from our peers”, that stimming has an important purpose, and that autistic people want real friends, not assigned “friends” for whom we are a special school project.
