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you don’t have to publish this but for the record there’s been rumours about Atypical having ties to Autism Speaks since the beginning but the official Atypical Twitter directly responded to someone in 2017 saying that they did not consult with Autism Speaks for the show. the tweet is still viewable, and was recently retweeted by someone i follow which is why i was reminded of it. so there’s that to also add to the mix i guess.

Well, I’d hoped that by the time I got to this batch of asks I’d have cycled back around to giffing more Atypical but I’m not even close. I’ll just answer them anyway. 😮

Okay, despite how quickly I published the first ask about them, I didn’t really see any urgency in posting this because while it does clarify this one thing, that they’re not funded by nor did they consult with Autism Speaks as of 2017, they’re still heartily endorsed by them and there’s still criticism of their rep.

But it is worth at least correcting that point:

https://twitter.com/Atypical/status/890002457790566401

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I wasn’t sure whether to bring this up but you can ignore this or post if you also think people should know this. Unfortunately I saw a queer autistic person posting that Atypical is funded by Autism Speaks, which is a ‘charity’ that speaks FOR autistic people, but they are NOT autistic people so are considered a hate group by actually autistic people. They weren’t a fan of Atypical but also it was suggested watching it not on Netflix to not support AS? Maybe ppl watch the sl on vids anyway Idk.

Heh, over the last couple of days I’d spent more time answering asks than I’d intended, usually I try to balance my “productive” Tumblr time between gifs and asks, so I ended up finishing some some almost completed gifsets and posting them. I was going to try to focus more on giffing today after answering some brief asks but then this arrived and I definitely didn’t want to leave it lying there.

First, thanks for telling me! I always like to be more informed than less.

Second, we both know that my opinion isn’t worth much here, this isn’t my issue to speak on, so my role is more to simply raise awareness, pass on info. In trying to balance that and the fact that this is my blog and thus I get at least that much say, I just wanna say a few things:

In wanting to pass on info here, I wanted to find a source to link for the claim “Atypical is funded by Autism Speaks”. That I couldn’t doesn’t mean that it’s not true, I’m just saying that I personally couldn’t find anything and I’d urge people to look into it themselves. I found this tumblr post which also could not find anything BUT, my point is not to say, “Hey, this person from the relevant group is giving us permission!”, I’m just saying it does seem to be difficult to find info connecting them. Autism Speaks has positive reviews and articles on the show on their website and spokespeople have commented favorably on it in news articles but it’s hard to find anything beyond that.

Now, again, people can make whatever choice they want on this, I’m just talking about my own approach on this, but as a person who gets fairly little rep, much of it bad, as a Muslim, as a lesbian, as a desi, as all three of those at once, my stance is not to judge people for continuing to watch something that hurt me. There’ve been a lot of shows that’ve done us wrong over the years, many that I’ve quit, many that I’ve been furious at and wish they HAD gotten cancelled but as much as I might judge people’s tastes for still watching them, I’m not judging them.

I also tend to think better of shows that try and listen and improve. Seeing these criticisms now, when I just finished watching Sam as the sweet boy from s3 who goes through a lot of pretty universal issues and succeeds, maybe the show did take in what people were saying and apply it?

All of this which means basically nothing, lol, as I said up front. It’s not up to me to absolve or give permission on this. One could say my reasoning works out pretty conveniently where I still get to watch and and enjoy what I wanted, the f/f. So, I’m publishing the ask, posting my thoughts, and uh, everyone is free to do what they want with that.