Hey! Instead of supporting these rlly bad ppl who can bring harm to autistic people (will link proof below)!
How about you buy autistic friendly clothes n stuff that can do u no harm from an actual autistic persons store @elsinore-snores !
Hey signal boost!!!!
hey it’d mean a lot to me if yall’d reblog this since as an autistic person this is really fucking disgusting
we are not fuckin dogs to be microchipped wtf???? this only allows autistic people to be abused even easier than before
im sure non-autistic people can rb this for their autistic followers??
Okay… so I went and did some fact-checking.
First – Typing in “Independence Day Clothing Autistic” in Google I found this page where Autism Speaks Vice President of Family Services Lisa Goring (ugh) talks about funding for tracking devices for wandering autistic children/wards. However, admittedly the information is all over the place. The page name in the tab is “Independence Day Clothing | Reversible Preppy Apparel | optional GPS”(<– the part I’m focusing on here), but the link says “free-tracker-subscriptions”, but then the page itself is just the Q&A for Lisa Goring.
The FAQ page on the site doesn’t mention GPS – it just talks about standard shipping and handling, payment methods, returns, etc. This is where you are taken when you click on “How to get GPS” in the footer links on the site.
I found a Huffington Post article from 2015 however that explains more about what we’re fearing here. I encourage to give it a read just so you have more information.
The ‘Approach’ page says that their clothing is ‘compatible’ with personal trackers. What that means, I dunno. It doesn’t say if they’re merely pockets that you can slip a device inside of, or if they have devices that they sew in and you have to activate.
I haven’t found an easy link where the site would talk about the sort of devices that they would offer to potential buyers – no prices, or anything. In my opinion, the site is all about being designed to be ‘aware’ and ‘friendly’, but it’s terrible with giving much-needed information.
Coming away from it, just on the principle that they freely support Autism Speaks leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And some of the language on the site, like ‘Who needs to know you don’t have a zipper down there?’ as if you’ll be judged for not having a god-damned zipper, really irks me and rubs me the wrong way. To me, it’s obvious that they’re trying obscenely hard to be relevant and trendy, especially by mentioning outright that they’re a “women-and-minority run company” as if that automatically should put them in everyone’s good books.
They do not mention the ‘Spectrum’ anywhere, so I don’t get the impression that they are aware that there are differences from one autistic person to another.
OP has since removed the original post. The Huffington Post article is from 2015, so I’m going to assume that’s when the post came out.
By the way, OP’s ‘Store Link” is not to “Independence Day Clothing” as I had initially thought (poor reading on my part perhaps), but to a cute little Etsy store run by Francis from @elsinore-snores, who is on the spectrum and crafts various stim-friendly accessories, noise-muffling beanies and headbands, and sensory safe garments. I’m not sure exactly how active they are on the Etsy account, but if you’d like I’d encourage you to go check it out and support someone who really wants to help others like them. Keep in mind though that they are in Germany, according to their Etsy – I’m unsure if there will be any shipping restrictions because of that. I don’t know them personally either, so keep that in mind as well.
Ugh… I apologize for the wall of text on this one. There was a lot to talk about.
The Perfect Scientist 