Etana’s Substack

Let me state up front that I am very sorry that Jason Arday is dead. He was a human being, not to mention a husband and father of two. But I fundamentally feel as much sympathy for him as I would for anyone else caught in a mess of their own making with no way out. Which is to say I do not in fact believe that he was hounded to his death by racists (though they certainly factored in his downfall), or by a voracious British press (though they certainly reveled in uncovering each and every one of his lies), or by a neurotypical world that didn’t understand him.

I struggle in particular with the idea that this was a non issue, and that Arday was a private citizen. He had clearly become a public figure within the past three years at least, and he was feted on multiple morning shows and BBC radio programs. He was quite literally just about to publish a memoir when the story blew up. Even I knew a little about Jason Arday well before this incident, and despite being something of an anglophile from my days on fandom Tumblr, I am not inclined to follow news about UK university politics. Still, it must have been at least over a year or two ago that I stumbled upon this image:

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My immediate response was “bullshit”. I knew well enough by that point that stories like this about autistic people were nonsense- if not open fabrications then at least massive exaggerations. Autistic people who are actually non-speaking by age 11 do not graduate from college. They rarely ever learn to speak, let alone read. At best they’ll get acclimated to an AAC device to communicate their basic needs, and that will be the most of it.

I knew this because years of wasting time on the internet reading Tumblr posts from neurodiversity groups and then spending far too much time getting into endless arguments with Twitter activists about their support of Facilitated Communication and/or Rapid Prompting Method. I knew this from witnessing the rise and decline of obvious scammers like Mel Baggs, the Tumblr blogger who portrayed themselves as a nonverbal autistic despite ample evidence to the contrary coming out, and claimed among other things that their cat was their facilitator, moving their limbs to enable them to communicate. It’s incredibly common to see these kinds of claims coming from obviously high functioning people- assuming they are in fact autistic.

So long before everything else about this guy came out; the plagiarism, the marathons, the spurious claims of illness and harassment- I could have immediately clocked him for a liar. And Cambridge should have as well. But I get the sense that a lot of people still don’t quite understand the extent to which Jason Arday perpetuated a massive fraud. They think he was just caught plagiarizing a few lines in an essay, that the media simply delved through his CV and his stated accomplishments for shits and giggles, or simply to discredit a black man.

Overlooked is the fact that Arday was being investigated from the beginning and not by Cofnas. That he sicced the police on the initial academics attempting to investigate him. That he hired a notorious law firm to quash reports of his plagiarism- reports that had they come out earlier, would likely have spared Arday a great deal of media scrutiny and allowed him to slink away quietly. And his 2015 thesis was not some typical citation error but heavily plagiarized, as were many of his other works.

Most of the discourse around Arday has been entirely about racial politics, for very obvious reasons. But what’s been ignored, I think, is that Arday represents a much more serious indictment of the complete failure of institutions- both in advocacy and academia- to hold the line on the reality of what autism is. In the case of Arday this is exemplified by Simon Baron Cohen of all people, passionately defending Arday… but only mostly by accurately predicting that he was at risk of suicide. What Baron Cohen never comments on is the absolute medical miracle that Arday’s claim of sudden speech at eleven represents. Surely one of the foremost autism researchers would jump at the chance to study, interview, or at least analyze this particular anomaly? And surely he would have some defense for the many professional rebuttals claiming Arday’s story is impossible. But he’s been conspicuously silent in that area, sticking to platitudes about neurodiversity and mental health.

This is disappointing but not surprising. Back when the story of Woody Brown was doing the rounds, it was painfully obvious to anyone watching the supposedly inspiring tale of the nonverbal boy unlocked as a brilliant novelist by “rapid prompting method”, that he was being puppeted by his mother and subjected to a dangerous sleight of hand. But few major figures associated with the neurodiversity movement ever commented. Because whole cornerstones of the movement’s politics now rely on tacitly accepting forms of these facilitated communication rehashes (for more on the many variants see this website). They have to because otherwise neurodiversity would have to deal with the reality of parenting an intellectually disabled child and what it often entails. And since they don’t want to do that, they support deeply abusive and discredited practices or outright frauds.

I’d like to say this kind of obfuscation is a new development. That it’s the result of interlopers and desperate parents, a result of the insanity of social media, the lack of gatekeeping engendered by “Woke 1”. But it’s not- at least not completely. Jim Sinclair, usually touted as one of the core founders of neurodiversity made numerous implausible claims about his backstory, one of which was that he couldn’t speak until 12. And to my knowledge, no-one has ever really pushed back on this. I think neurodiversity made many valid points but it’s hard to ignore that the rot was there from the beginning.

And it’s just objectively harmful. It’s harmful to parents of truly nonverbal and severely intellectually disabled children who are spoonfed false hope instead of being encouraged to accept the reality of their child’s disability. It’s harmful to higher functioning autistics in the neurodiversity movement who are incentivized to obfuscate their backstories, play up their disabilities, and in some cases even deliberately regress to nonspeaking in order to create the idealized image of being both perfectly high functioning and extremely visibly disabled. It’s harmful to scientists, science communicators and disability journalists who are forced to tiptoe around obvious scams and not say anything for fear of arousing the wrath of advocates accusing them of lateral ableism.

So when people ask “who did he harm?”…. well, here’s my answer:

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