$7 million says this is support. It isn’t
A new “autism support clinic” just opened in Norman, Oklahoma. It cost $7 million. The news anchors call it a game changer. The staff call it a place of hope.
But scroll past the headline and the mission statement and you’ll find what it actually is:
Applied Behavior Analysis.
ABA is not new. It’s not care. It’s not “support” in any sense that respects autistic life. It’s a program built to correct us — and a pipeline designed to fund that correction.
“Every day in this building, children will learn how to communicate, how to take care of themselves and how to live with independence and dignity.”
Let’s break that down.
ABA doesn’t teach communication. It teaches compliance labeled as communication. It doesn’t teach self-care. It teaches task performance judged by someone else’s standard. It doesn’t teach dignity. It teaches that you earn safety by appearing neurotypical.
That’s not support. That’s supremacy — just quieter with laminated token boards.
And yet, the ribbon gets cut. The cameras roll. The funding flows. Because the pathology model is lucrative — especially when it cloaks itself in “care.”
So let’s ask what doesn’t get funded when $7 million goes to this:
Peer-led support spaces for autistic youth?
Housing built around sensory safety not institutional control?
Communication access that centers our ways of expressing?
Training for teachers and families that starts with acceptance not extinction?
This clinic isn’t filling a gap. It’s reinforcing a narrative: that autistic children are broken until they’re trained. That our bodies are problems to be solved. That “independence” means not making anyone uncomfortable.
And that’s a story that builds careers — not community.
We deserve better than this.
If support means anything at all, it has to start by trusting who we are — not funding programs to make us disappear.