I'm very frequently told that I need to realize that "some autistic people just can't communicate," but the thing is, I don't believe we we need to accept that at all. 1/ https://twitter.com/shannonrosa/status/1254052348889935873

In fact, I believe we're morally obligated not to accept that. 2/

Human researchers have developed systems to allow dogs to express themselves in human language to us, to allow horses to answer fairly sophisticated questions as long as they can be formulated as yes/no questions... 3/

We've decoded enough prairie dog language to know that they can communicate about abstract qualities like shape and color. We know that whales have different dialects depending on where in the world they've traveled. We can read bee dances. 4/

In the movie "Arrival" we conceived of how we might learn to communicate with alien visitors in a language that works profoundly differently from any known on earth through the application of math and linguistics. 5/

And we sent the Voyager's golden record out into the universe in the wild hope of making ourselves understood to another civilization that might not communicate anything like us at all. 6/

None of that was easy or magical; it took years of observation and research and good experimental design and people setting aside their assumptions about what kinds of thought non-human and non-verbal creatures could be capable of. 7/

We know that trees, even of different species, communicate to each other through chemical signals. 8/

So no, I can't just sit here and accept without serious question, "Some autistic people just can't communicate," given the diversity of non-speech communication that we know exists. 9/

When we're far more willing to believe in the communication of animals & aliens than we are in that of non-speaking & intellectually disabled autistic people and extend creativity and research to those ends...no, I do not accept "Some autistic people just can't communicate." 10/

That's a failure of imagination, ethics, and research priorities on our part. Not a fact. 11/

That's it! If you're claiming "some autistic people just can't communicate" but failing to consider, esp. in light of research indicating autistic people's neurologies may be utterly unique, even from each other's...12/

...that someone may be communicating in a way that's simply totally opaque to you, then you don't really know that at all. 13/