2000s

An organization known as Autism Resource Konnection (ARK) held a rally to raise awareness of the supposed epidemic of autism known as “Hear Their Silence”. The rally was held in Washington D.C. People involved with Autistics.org held a protest to this known as the “Hear Our Voices Rally”. Several people, including autistic people and non-autistic parents, sent a series of letters to ARK to counter the rhetoric they were using. The event still went as planned. 

A life simulator game known as Second Life was a place several disability sub-communities gathered in the early 2000s. This included Autistic Liberation Front from Autistics.org. It was a way of utilizing virtual spaces for activism. The format of Second Life worked particularly well for a lot of autistic users. 

You can find images from ALF's second life community here. 

Edan devised this fictional lost society that all autistic people were supposedly genetically descended from known as Apergia. The Aspergia website was up for about two years before going down. This was a controversial idea in autistic spaces. People took the ideas of Aspergia with them and developed them further, while some of the users started their own autism forums. 

Allistic is a way of describing people who are not autistic, but may be neurodivergent. It can also be another way of saying neurotypical. Andrew Main (Zefram) first used allism in an article he created that parodies that way autism is described in scientific literature.  Ettina Shee of Abnormal Diversity was the main person behind spreading the concept.

GRASP, short for Global and Regional Asperger's Syndrome Partnership, was founded in 2003 by Michael John Carley. It was the first known autistic-led non-profit related to autism. They hold peer-led support groups. There was lots of controversy surrounding them and their CEO with the Articles of Understanding collaboration they made with Autism Speaks. GRASP is still in operation, though Carley left in the early 2010s.

Yahoo Groups was a vital platform for organizing in the early days of the Neurodiversity Movement. A few of the key Yahoo Groups newsgroups that were part of this were AutAdvo and AutisticSpectrumTreehouse, both maintained by Frank Klein. AutisticSpectrumTreehouse was started in 2001. Frank ran a website of the same name.

Oddizms was a website that featured various writings about autism on Geocities. It linked to other peoples' blogs as well. 

A Canada-based autistic researcher known as Michelle Dawson wrote an essay known as “The Misbehavior of Behaviorists”.   Soon after, several proponents of ABA wrote a series of articles published in an autism journal known as the Schaefer Report that challenged Dawson and were skeptical of whether Michelle was truly autistic enough to actually know what the needs of autistic people were. Several autistic people involved in online activist spaces came to Dawson’s defense. This helped galvanize opposition to ABA within the Neurodiversity Movement, which was already present. Dawson later acted as an intervener in a Supreme Court of Canada case known as Auton v. British Columbia. The court decided that the provision of ABA services was not going to be guaranteed at the federal level.

Oddizms and users from the website Oops, Wrong Planet Syndrome started a website filled with the pictures and profiles of several autistic adults. This was meant to show that autistic adults existed.  

Amy and Gwen Nelson started a website called Aspies for Freedom. Aspies For Freedom was a forum by and for autistic people that opposed attempts at curing for autism and advocates for autism acceptance. They were the first ones to come up with Autistic Pride Day, which has been observed on June 18th every year since 2005. This is the earliest instance of the rainbow infinity symbol used in the context of autism that has been found so far. They have an instant messaging channel known as ChatAutism, which is still active to this day. 

 Alex Plank and Dan Grover started a website called WrongPlanet. This included discussion forums where many autistic people gathered. It had a larger reach than most autistic-led autism forums at the time, though has not exclusively been used for movement-building purposes.  

Autistichat was a chat channel/room for autistic people as well as related disabilities as well as family members of autistic people. Its servers were up from 2005-2012. The contents of the channel itself have not yet been found, and it is not known who was behind Autistichat, but the link provided shows what remains of it can be found through Web archive.

Suzanne and Bob Wright, who were wealthy philanthropists with ties to NBC and had an autistic grandson, started a non-profit known as Autism Speaks. They wanted to raise awareness about autism in hopes of finding a cure. From the beginning, this organization was controversial among the Neurodiversity Movement. Their mission and values were in stark contrast to that of the Neurodiversity Movement.  Much protest ensued in the years following. Despite rebranding efforts and a change in leadership, opposition to Autism Speaks still remains strong within the Neurodiversity Movement. 

An autistic led organization called Global and Regional Aspergers Syndrome Partnership (GRASP) decided to partner with Autism Speaks to create a dialogue. This upset many autistic people who were active online. Their executive director, Michael John Carley, published a series of articles with Autism Speaks then-Vice President Alison Singer in an attempt to come to an understanding of what is meant by a “cure” for autism. 

The Autism Acceptance Project (TAAP) was started by Estée Klar in 2006. It featured blog posts, videos, art, and various resources that were meant to conquer the fear-mongering that autism awareness campaigns emphasized. They were affiliated with Autism National Committee and Autistic Self Advocacy Network.  The project has now moved to what is known as Dis Assembly. 

Autism Hub was a collection of blogs started in late 2005 by Kevin Leitch of Left Brain Right Brain, who is a parent. It featured many autistic blogs as well as blogs by parents of autistic people who were down with the cause of neurodiversity. In 2007, Kevin handed the hub off to Dave Seidel. Autism Hub was home to blogs that discussed a wide variety of things related to autism, the most prominent topic at the time being discourse about vaccines. Many of these blogs tackled vaccine misinformation, including the myth the vaccines caused autism.

During the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s, one way in which autistic people connected with each other and expressed their thoughts on the autism discourse was through blogging. This collectively came to be known as the “Autism Blogosphere”. There was a specific community within this blogosphere called Autism Hub. A lot of these blogs tackle the misconceptions about autistic people as they relate to the anti-vaxxer movement and various quack doctors. Members of Autism Hub consisted of both autistic people and parent allies, and they could be found with the Autism Hub tag that can be seen below.

Autism Hub was established by Kevin Leitch, who later stepped down and gave the responsibility to Dave Seidel. Several instances of conflict ensued, leading to the disbandment of Autism Hub. You can read more about the specific conflicts here

A collage was put together by members of the Autism Hub known as the Wall Against Hate that was a protest to Bernie’s Wall against autism, which was started by Defeat Autism Now (DAN), which is now known as the Autism Research Institute. 

Shorthand for Academic Autism Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education,  AASPIRE was started in 2006 by Dora Raymaker and Christina Nicolaidis. They use a model of research called Community-Based Participatory Research. This is a model where the researcher and the community members are equal partners throughout the research process. They focus on research topics that are rarely seen in autism research, such as research on what autistic burnout looks like, improving healthcare for autistic adults, and reproductive health. 

An autistic girl in Illinois named Katie McCarron was murdered by her mother. She was only three years old. Her mother, Karen, suffocated her with a plastic bag for refusing to take a nap. She did it to “end [Katie]’s pain”. Autistic people on the internet created graphics in memory of Katie. Karen was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to 36 years in prison.

George W. Bush signed the Combating Autism Act, which gave the Federal Government money to fund autism research. This created the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, IACC, who would decide what areas of research the federal money would go towards. 

The Autism Acceptance Project (TAAP) was started by Estée Klar in 2006. It featured blog posts, videos, art, and various resources that were meant to conquer the fear-mongering that autism awareness campaigns emphasized. They were affiliated with Autism National Committee and Autistic Self Advocacy Network.  The project has now moved to what is known as Dis Assembly

Initially known as Autistic Social Action Committee, Autistic Self-Advocacy Network was started by Ari Ne’eman and Scott Roberson. ASAN’s mission was to increase visibility of autism in the Disability Rights Movement and to counter the harmful narratives about autism that were at large. They adopted “Nothing About Us Without Us” as their slogan from the Disability Rights Movement, which was also used in South African Apartheid protests and Hungarian labor organizing before then. They started out as an all-volunteer organization.

Autism Rights Group Highland (ARGH) is an autistic self-advocacy organization in Scotland that started in 2007. It started out as an autistic adult consultation group. 

 The New York University Child Study Center put out a series of ads portraying mental disabilities, all of which fall under the neurodiversity umbrella, as thieves that take children hostage. They were framed as ransom notes. This included autism, and autistic self-advocates decided to counter this with a protest. Ari Ne’eman emailed several listservs connected to the NYU Child Study Center, as well as their Board of Directors, and got many other people to do the same. They got people from ADAPT and other disability organizations to assist them. They initially responded by doubling down on their campaign, though self-advocates pushed harder after that. Then on December 19th, 2007, the ads were officially pulled.

 The Real Voices of Autism was a social network by and for the autistic community. Its servers went live in 2008. The only content that have been uncovered as of now is the front page. Some prominent advocates in the Neurodiversity Movement were frequent users on there, including Phil Schwarz, Laura Tisoncik, and Samantha Crane. It included several sub-channels for specific groups, like Femautism for female autistics, and a channel for planning Autreats. 

Autism Speaks produced the PSA “I Am Autism”. It shows video footage of autistic people, mostly just standing around, with a deep voice narrating it. It says things like “I am autism. I know where you live, and guess what? I live there too. I work faster than pediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined.  I will bankrupt you for my own personal gain. I will make sure your marriage fails.” It then transitions to family members of autistic people gathering around, saying they will do everything in their power to end autism. The script was written by Billy Mann, a long time board member of Autism Speaks and music producer, and the film was directed by Alfonso Cuaron. This PSA was quickly deleted from Autism Speaks’s YouTube channel. It sparked a number of online and in-person protests against Autism Speaks from neurodiversity advocates.