The Telepathy Tapes Is Such A Sizzling Mess — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
For months, people have asked my opinion on the popular Telepathy Tapes podcast, and its premise of non-speaking autistics not only reading minds but bringing the world messages of love and peace. (You’ve probably been asked about it, too, if you have even a tangential autism connection.) And I’m here to tell you: The Telepathy Tapes is a hot, complicated mess—but not for the reasons you may think.
If you’re unfamiliar with the show, its host Ky Dickens describes it as “a groundbreaking podcast exploring the voices of nonspeakers and the science of consciousness, connection, and communication.” The “nonspeakers” part is important, because Dickens aims to show the world that non-speaking autistics are not only underestimated (this is true), but telepathic (this is questionable at best). If you need another reason to be skeptical, The Telepathy Tapes is endorsed by conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, who claims in his own podcast that autism “may be a blessing that we just don’t understand yet,” and wants us to consider “the possibility of a spiritual meeting place for autistic children guarded by angels.”
Treating the autistic people in the Telepathy Tapes as special spiritual messengers is absurd. If you have ever encountered later-emerged AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) users, they tend to be traumatized about how they were treated before they had useful communication, and most felt (and still feel) incredibly isolated. Autistic AAC users may overflow with empathy and understanding, but they do not exist to bring other people healing radiance, no more than any human does.
The Telepathy Tapes’s patronizing woo is not about understanding or accepting autistic people. But it is why the podcast is a success, because its narrative gives non-autistic people a fairy tale about magically connecting with autistic people, instead of doing the hard work of truly exploring autistic people’s often very challenging realities, enabling communication access, and understanding the ways non-autistic people and society could improve their lives. We must also reject its message that if AAC users can read minds and communicate telepathically, maybe they don’t need access to the robust language-based communication that is a human right.
As AAC user Danny With Words explains,
“There is already widespread skepticism about my method of communication. This podcast adds fuel to the skeptics’ fire. What is the plan for how the claims of our telepathy will actually make our lives better? Sure, people might marvel and see more potential in our minds, but they might just think our whole community is delusional or some sort of circus attraction. This is like savants being treated as a spectacle to be amazed by, not as complete humans with dignity and rights.”
We cannot use the questionable agenda of The Telepathy Tapes to question whether or not the autistic people are “really communicating,” despite outlets like Vice and The Cut and even The Guardian using outdated communication positions and non-autistic advocates to dismiss its autistic subjects’ autonomy. Successful AAC users who currently use, or started out using, supported communication exist. I have met many. They are not unicorns. They do not have supernatural talents.
If non-speaking autistic people aren’t telepathic, then what is behind the “mind reading” feats in The Telepathy Tapes? As one autistic commenter explains on BlueSky: “I’m very good at reading nonverbal cues. I’m not telepathic.” This is the most plausible scenario. Autistic people can be wildly sensitive to and adept at pattern matching, not to mention their tendency towards phenomenal hearing, excellent observation, elephantine memory, and keen emotional perception—whether the person is able to speak, or not. Since many non-autistic people do not question stereotypes about autistic people as remote, unfeeling, and refusing to make eye contact, they assume that autistic people are disengaged and unobservant. And they think it’s a miracle when autistic people notice, absorb, anticipate, and recall what the people around them do and say.
In the podcast, Dickens calls these abilities “telepathy.” She is not the first person to suggest that AAC users (namely people who use supported communication methods) are telepathic, by the way; people have been making such claims since the 1990s.
Autistic non-speakers deserve better than The Telepathy Tapes’s wishful fantasizing. It is, frankly, offensive that the podcast portrays all non- or partially speaking autistics as capable of telepathy; a stance worryingly similar to the claims of former anti-vaccine Speller parents who insist that all autistic kids with communication disabilities are “locked inside.” One prominent such parent is J.B. Handley, who founded the crank mercury-causes-autism organization Generation Rescue—now defunct but once figureheaded by Jenny McCarthy—and who wrote the hateful book How to End the Autism Epidemic. Handley now has a book called Underestimated: An Autism Miracle, about his Speller son. Yet he was relentlessly, publicly furious about having an autistic child, until his child was able to connect in a way that Handley himself valued.
It is undeniable that many current AAC users were formerly in inappropriate special educational settings (sedentary and unenriching placements that are inappropriate for any student, not for just non-speakers who use AAC). But we also have to acknowledge that some autistic people, as Julia Bascom points out,” really do have intellectual disabilities and really do need exceptional support,” and that this wouldn’t change even they had access to appropriate communication. Yet The Telepathy Tapes ignores autistics who aren’t communicating in ways that captivate a non-autistic audience.
People shouldn’t have to perform to matter, or to get the supports they deserve for communication and well-being. If only the Telepathy Tapes audience could be just as curious and accepting about people like my own adult autistic son, who has little interest in the AAC methods he’s tried over the years, but still deserves to live his best life and have people consider him worthy. He also deserves more research and efforts into ways to help him communicate better. Per AAC user Typer Tremblings,
“Our speller and typer utopia, will not be a utopia if they stay in the cage while we come out because we are so so different from them. I hope that they can fit in our dreams, even if the world could never call them genius or secret brilliant or intact mind. Even if they can’t spell their way out of the cage they shouldn’t be in the cage. The cage should not exist. We are all real and we all communicate and think and should be free.”
We need to do better by autistic people who need AAC. We also have to have some empathy for the AAC users and families who appear in The Telepathy Tapes. Most of them have little-to-no support, and lack connections to other autistic people or non-speakers. It is not surprising that they may be willing to go along with a questionable agenda, if it gives them connections that have been desperately missing from their lives.
Finally, don’t be fooled by The Telepathy Tapes using advocacy buzzwords like acceptance, neurodiversity, and ableism. When used for such a questionable agenda, these terms are hollow.
If you are sincerely interested in understanding the needs and experiences of being autistic and non-speaking, avoid The Telepathy Tapes. Instead, follow organizations like Communication First that advocate for people who “cannot rely on speech alone to be heard and understood.” Read books like the novel Happiness Falls, about falling for fake AAC but then finding real AAC, with its audiobook featuring narration by real-life AAC user Thomas Pruyn. Watch movies like Wretches and Jabberers, The Reason I Jump, or This Is Not About Me, which document the lives of autistic non-speakers on their own terms. Autistic people deserve reality-rooted resources for improving their lives, not The Telepathy Tapes’s false smoke and feel-good mirrors.
© Lorc – Creative Commons
