Leave Grandin alone.

Look, we get it. You don’t like that she works with the meat industry (even though the work she does makes that industry just a little less awful). You don’t like that they had a neurotypical actor playing her (which is a damn valid complaint- I wish we had more autistic actresses). You really don’t like that they exaggerated how she talks (she does sort of talk like that, from what I’ve seen of her, and they got her visual thinking down perfectly, by her own admission). So, you know, you’ve got some legitimate complaints.

That said, this is Temple Grandin. The autistic community doesn’t have a lot of heroes. Amanda Baggs and the rest of the ND crowd are awesome, but the media doesn’t ever report on them. Grandin’s one of the only people we have who talks about autism and autism pride in public, and gets people to actually listen. I don’t think you understand how important that is, or how much it hurts us, as a community, when you tear her down and call her a murderer. We have less than 3% employment among adult autistics. We have quack doctors forcing harmful treatments on us. We have abusive therapies and institutionalization. We have a cure movement breathing down our necks not only trying to stop us from existing, but actively suing and censoring people who criticize them. We have a media that supports that curebie mentality. When we get someone who the media will listen to, who supports our right to exist, who champions our inclusion in the workforce, who provides a role model for autistic kids who’ve been told they can’t be anything, and you come along and knock her down because she does all these awesome things, these things that have a very real and important impact on our lives, by working with Cargill, that doesn’t help. Animal rights has enough advocates. We have one who the media listens to. One. It’d be really, really cool if you didn’t take that away from us.

I DO remember a segment on “321″ in which children studied cow eyeballs…that did bother me.