Parents hitting their children was not part of traditional African culture. It came with colonisation. allafrica.com/stories/201910…

AM I DISABLED? 🧵 1/

Many autistic people tell us that they are not disabled. Some parents of autistic children say their children are not disabled. 2/

Most of them say this because they don't understand what disability really means. They think that saying you are disabled is the same as calling yourself inferior. This is a wrong idea about disability. 3/

Disabled doesn't mean the same as 'unable'. Disabled doesn't mean you can't do anything at all. It also doesn't mean you're worse than everyone else at everything. You may even be better than most people at some things, and still be disabled. 4/

We work with the human rights approach to disability. This is the approach used in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities (#CRPD or #UNCRPD). 5/

Are one or more of these statements true for you? 1. People discriminate against me because my body/mind works differently from most people's bodies and/or minds. 6/

2. Because of the way my body/mind works, some things that are easy for most people are extremely difficult or even impossible for me. 7/

3. Because my body/mind works differently to most, I need special equipment, or changes to the environment, or I need people to change how they interact with me if I want to do the same things most people can do without these changes. 8/

4. Some systems are not designed to include people whose bodies/minds work like mine, yet these systems work fine for everyone else. 9/

If at least one of these statements is true for you, then you are disabled, and the UN Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities (#CRPD or #UNCRPD) was designed to promote your rights. 10/

Autistic people are bullied a freeking whole lot for our existence and for our autistic traits and it's no secret that we have bone the brunt of physical and emotional abuse as well as struggling with our mental health for years because of that

Femi Taiwo is an autistic Web programmer of Nigerian origin, living in South Africa. Here he talks about collaborating with neurodivergent people such as himself in the workplace. youtu.be/BwXNadquIBE?si…

The phrase "off his meds" is considered ableist language. It is a microaggression that perpetuates stigma surrounding mental illness and medication, implying that someone's behavior is negative or "crazy" because they are not medicated or are somehow unstable. 1/

The language is rooted in the ableist assumption that people with disabilities or mental illnesses are "less than" or "need fixing". It uses mental health terms as insults or punchlines. 5/

Distilling multidimensional ideas and thoughts using sentences is such a mess.

Jangle leg They were always there. Mostly kept indoors and mostly not properly diagnosed. For instance, someone with Schizophrenia, black folks would say unamaDimoni or amaFufunyana or amDlozi. Someone with Bipolar, till today we just say “uyamazi uZiban-bani, unenkani neengcwangu”…

Looks like this person wants to go to war against Black nonspeaking autistic advocates, to tell them that they don't know what they're talking about...

i feel like "gentle parenting" is just normal parenting and we call it gentle because treating children like sht is so normalized in society.

Wherever we do autism advocacy in Africa, we must also do advocacy for the rights of LGBTQ+ people, because of the intersection between the two. Often autistic people in Africa face a ban on who they are are.