Autistics' Slice of Life: Autism Acceptance Month on TPGA

Because we consider April Autism Acceptance Month, Thinking Person's Guide to Autism will feature "Slice of Life" conversations with Autistics of all ages -- kids through adults -- for each of the month's remaining 29 days. We will profile a different autistic person every day, answering the same set of questions -- in a similar spirit to (although for copyright purposes otherwise unlike) the Proust questionnaire capping each issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

Why? We'd like to help our non-autistic readers get to know autistics as people who have interesting, complicated lives, and who are as diverse and varied as any other random population united by a label. We are the people in each others' neighborhoods, and the more we know about each other, the more visible we and our children are, the more common Autism Acceptance will be. That is our hope.

We'd also like to encourage you to investigate what other folks are doing for Autism Acceptance Day, and Autism Acceptance month, in the spirit of Paul Durbin Westby's declaration:

It's Time to Take Back April! Autism Acceptance Day and Month: ACCEPTANCE, not tolerance, not "yes, but..." (in the sense of "We can only accept you just so far...") but complete acceptance. Pro-neurodiversity, pro-supports and services, against "cures." 2012 is the second year of Autism Acceptance Day/Month.

Please look through Paula's Autism Acceptance blog to hear more about what other folk are doing during April, and come on back to read about the amazing folks we'll be profiling here!