I wish I could stop talking about Sia, but I have a few points to make about her recent “apology” in the Sydney Morning Herald.

One thing she said was, “[autistic] people functioning at Music’s level can’t get on Twitter and tell me I did a good job.”

That’s a lot to unpack.

It also mirrors a statement made by an interviewer at Variety Magazine, who was talking to Sia about her film.

Referring to Music (the autistic character), the interviewer said:

“Here’s this person who can’t speak... she might as well be an inanimate object, like a wig.”

What these two statements tell me is that neither Sia nor the woman interviewing her view autistic people as human beings with agency and opinions of our own.

More specifically, they don’t view nonspeaking autistic people as human beings with agency and opinions.

I am not nonspeaking, though I do lose my ability to speak and have to use AAC when I’m in a meltdown.

But I’ve been an aide to a lot of autistic people who have limited speech, and I can say with absolute certainty that none of them are inanimate objects.

No, not every nonspeaking autistic person can use Twitter.

But there’s a significant population of nonspeakers who DO use social media as a primary method of communication, because (surprise) it doesn’t require speaking!

The internet is home to a lot of autistic people.

Sia’s statement shows that she doesn’t really understand autism.

By writing off everyone criticizing her as too “high functioning” for their opinions to matter, she erases the concerns of ALL autistic people.

It’s convenient for her to act like nonspeaking typists don’t exist.

What is very unsettling to me about both Sia’s statement and that of the interviewer, is that they both feel comfortable blatantly disregarding the humanity of autistic people who can’t speak.

It’s 2020. And nonspeaking autistics are being referred to as “inanimate objects.”

This is an issue that affects all autistic people. When nonspeakers have their humanity stripped away, it strips us of humanity too.

Sia and others have tried and failed to separate “autism activists” from “nonspeakers.” But that’s not how it works. Many people are both.

And it’s ridiculous for Sia to insinuate that primarily speaking autistics don’t have any authority on the subject, either.

Just because we can usually speak, doesn’t mean we always can. And many of us use AAC like Music’s when we lose that ability. I’m one of those people.

I understand what it’s like to stim obviously, have violent meltdowns, not be able to speak, bite myself, etc.

But because I can use Twitter, that means I can’t criticize a film where a non-autistic person plays a caricature of someone like me?

No. That mindset is wrong.