In thanks for the legacy of Mel Baggs

April 14, 2020

In thanks for the legacy of Mel Baggs

As much of the autism and disability rights communities have heard by now, writer and activist Mel Baggs passed away suddenly over the weekend, after years of complicated health issues as well as medical neglect and denial of sufficient home and community-based services.

While Mel was multiply disabled and often emphasized that sie felt more solidarity with the developmentally disabled community more broadly than sie did as simply autistic, sie also wrote the very first thing I remember, specifically about autism, that made me see myself. I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom in my last apartment in Athens, GA and feeling my world kind of turn inside out as I read words that could’ve just been written about me. I was 21. So while it’s not as if I’d known hir all my life, Mel was inherently part of the world as I knew it, in which I knew myself in important ways.

Mel was, in ways, much more intensively disabled and had much higher support needs than mine. Sie could not speak, most of the time. Sie didn’t live independently. Sie had been institutionalized. Sie wrote about times when people looked at hir and assumed that sie could not think, or had the mind of an infant.

And sie wrote in a way that made me see myself in the world more vividly than almost anyone else would for a very long time.

So when people say things like “We aren’t talking about autistic people like you” when they talk about the autistic people they are sure need to be cured, prevented, controlled, institutionalized, or who they assume “just can’t communicate,” think, understand, or learn, Mel is one of the foremost reasons why I know they are wrong. That they are talking about autistic people like me, and that neurodiversity, presumption of competence, disability rights, and human rights, are for all of us. Every single one.

Mel was like me. And I am like Mel. Not in every way, but in important ways.

I didn’t know Mel personally but had the honor once of editing hir work. My mother said “So you felt like you knew her,” but really, it’s more like my entire generation of autistic people felt like we knew ourselves because of hir.

If you’ve never seen Mel’s video “In My Language,” it was truly a groundbreaking piece of media not just about autism, but about the sheer diversity of human thought and language and possibility of communion with the world.

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