Boycott To Siri With Love

academicgangster:

gyrosteelballs:

If you are planning on reading or gifting “To Siri With Love” by Judith Newman, please be aware that the autistic community has called for a boycott.
The book is a grotesque invasion of the 13-year old son’s privacy including her cruel observations that imagining him having sex is accompanied by the Benny Hill soundtrack in her head. She plans to acquire power of attorney to have him forcibly sterilized when he is 18 without his consent.

Books having a long shelf life, this tell-all laughing at his struggles with social communication, motor apraxia, etc. may make her a lot of money and has gotten her on the NYT book list, however that book is going to follow him for the rest of his life. It is child abuse in printed format. 

Okay, so I read the first twenty pages of the book, and HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS IT’S BAD.

• The author begins by saying she hates ‘patronizing’ phrases, but then:
• She says she’ll use ‘he’ as the default pronoun because she hates the singular ‘they’ – I quote, “Language needs to evolve, but not into something ugly and imprecise.” She then goes on to bash the word ‘cisgender’ as supposedly pretentious.
• She casually mentions looking at her kids’ Google search history as a matter of course.
• While discussing the rise in autism diagnosis rates, she says, word for word: “Or whether it’s because slightly odd people who used to be single are having more of a chance to breed”
• She consistently uses person-first language, despite having poked fun at it earlier.
• She consistently focuses on her (very privileged, narrow, making no attempt to widen it) worldview rather than her child’s.

And that’s just within the first twenty pages.

Here is a post by an actually autistic lady detailing the horrible, callous, dehumanizing way this author speaks of autistic people, the way said author has behaved on Twitter towards autistic people, and yes the author’s unashamed declaration that she intends to forcibly sterilize her autistic son who was, let me remind you, thirteen years old at the time she wrote the book (and is still a minor).

In conclusion, fuck this woman. Absolutely boycott this book. As an autistic person, I know our voices are incredibly diverse, but I think I speak for all of us in saying this: I do not want to be condescended to by people who pretend they’re on my side.