[This is from our email newsletter. If you’re not receiving our newsletter and would like to, please sign-up here]

Dear Friend,

I can’t believe that another year has come and gone and we’re less than two weeks away from 2023! AWN has had an incredible year, and as the executive director I am proud of what our team has accomplished in 2022. We’ve continued to grow our voice on the national stage and expanded the ways we serve our community — while at the same time inviting others to join us in moving the neurodiversity movement towards justice-centered work. 

It has especially been a packed year with groundbreaking representation for and by the autistic community in federal policy work. In April I represented AWN at the White House for an Autism Acceptance Month Policy Session. In June our Policy Director Lydia XZ Brown represented us at the White House Reproductive Rights Roundtable. And earlier this month, our Equity, Justice & Representation consultant Morénike Giwa Onaiwu represented us at Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Summit hosted by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in collaboration with the White House Domestic Policy Council. 

AWN was also there this summer to contribute our voice in moving reproductive justice advocacy forward after the devastating loss of abortion rights protected by Roe v Wade. Together with the National Women’s Law Center and Autistic People of Color Fund, we co-authored “Everyone Deserves to Make Their Own Choices: A plain language statement about abortion rights and reproductive freedom.” We also published an in-depth conversation between Latina reproductive justice Advocate Angelica Vega and Latine trans advocate Kayley Margarite Whalen of AWN on our blog about the possible short-term and long-term repercussions the overturning of Roe v Wade will have on the Latine community. 

AWN has long believed that everything we do needs to be informed by restorative and transformative justice, and we invite others in our movement to adopt these principles as well. To this end, AWN devoted a significant amount of time this year working with Mia Mingus to publish a guide outlining what restorative and transformative justice looks like in practice, which we released as part of our newly relaunched website. These principles mean we believe that we as an organization and as a movement are imperfect, yet we should always be striving towards greater accountability, including acknowledging and working towards healing when harm occurs. We believe in work that truly transforms our society and culture, which must include dismantling systems of domination and oppression including capitalism and white supremacy. Justice looks different to every person and every day, and ultimately we believe we must constantly evolve and shift how we work to best achieve liberation. You can learn more on our Guiding Principles page. 

To list everything we’ve done this year would be impossible in one email, but I will add that I’m especially proud of AWN’s input and contribution in expanding Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which protects health care discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. This will be crucial in ensuring federal protections for gender-affirming health care, which has come under increasing attack by state lawmakers who are politicizing and vilifying the very existence of trans and nonbinary people to push a violent fascist agenda. AWN is here to keep building our movement so we can push back against oppression and keep each other safe.

There is much ahead in 2023. We’ll continue with our popular Liberating Webinars series, which will now be offered with Spanish translation as part of our growing commitment to language justice. And as we shared in our last two emails, we’re currently developing a resource guide to help families support and embrace autistic trans youth. Going forward our resources will be in Plain Language and Spanish, and we’re working to revise and translate past resources as well.

Thank you so much for believing in AWN’s work. We are about to take a break for the holidays starting this weekend, and you won’t hear from us again until January 9. But before I say goodbye, I do want to urge you to consider donating to AWN so we can continue our work supporting our community, and pushing our movement forward towards justice and liberation.

Would you please donate $5, $25, or $50 today to keep AWN’s work going strong in 2023?

Donate Today

In Community,

Sharon daVanport, Executive Director

Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network

P.S. Every donation helps keep our work going, and we’d deeply appreciate if you donated today:

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