#ActuallyAutistic
As neurotypical parents, we recognize that we can’t expect to understand the world Autistic people inhabit. We know that your voices have been (and continue to be) marginalized within the Jewish community and the world at large, and that depictions of you and your lives are often superficial and objectifying. We have learned so much from the #ActuallyAutistic community and have become better, more empathetic parents––and people!––as a result of our interactions. You educate us daily and we’re grateful for it.
Even though the Jewish Autism Network is a parent-driven organization, we strongly support self-advocacy for individuals with Autism whenever and however we can. We have individuals with Autism on our Board and actively solicit input from Autistic people in creating our content and programming.
A note on terminology: We know that different people prefer to use different language to describe themselves, whether it’s identity-first or person-first qualifiers, capitalizing Autism or keeping the a lower-case, and so on. We’ll always defer to your choice when we’re together, but we can’t standardize to everyone’s liking on our site, so we have intentionally used a variety of language here.