http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0804/02/acd.02.html
About halfway down the page, there’s a transcript of the news story which details the part about the conference. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, the basic gist is that Amanda was giving a speech about self-advocacy and all the diagnoses she’s been given “orally and on paper”. Parents with legit autistic kids began asking (presumably) legit questions about independent living. Tired of being treated “like the exception to the rule” (read: “People weren’t fawning over me and telling me how brave I was and kissing my morbidly obese, rash-laden ass like I expected.”), she wheeled herself to the ladies room to have a temper tantrum.
I think it was after the CNN report when former associates of Amanda took the internet to denounce her claims that she started to lose a little credibility. I think the real blow came in those Wrong Planet threads in 2011 when people actually called her out directly and began to pick apart her narrative. That probably spooked her and she stopped posting shortly thereafter. Her Ballastexistenz blog remained fairly active after that for about a year until she suddenly had her “health crisis” and nearly “died” as a result of the medical community’s “ableism”.
Has anyone else noticed that since she returned to the internet with her beloved feeding tube in 2013, her posts seem to revolve less around autism and more around various medical and physical problems? I wonder if she realized after the Wrong Planet incident that the autism gravy train was losing momentum. Not to mention the fact that by 2011, autism was becoming much more widely known and the research into it was far more advanced than in the early 2000s when she began her charade. This meant that she couldn’t always rely on people’s ignorance of the condition in order to snow them. So she needed to step up her game and find new and better ways to get sympathy and attention.
Enter the sudden gastroparesis and subsequent feeding tube. Then she didn’t feel special enough, so she changed her name to Amelia Evelyn Voicy Baggs Bader Ginsburg Wayne Gacy or some shit. Although she never really made a big deal about her sexual orientation or gender in the past, she wanted to be in on the latest pronoun trend and became sie and hir. I could go on and on, but I think you get the gist. Even her current Twitter posts are mostly about her waiting at a doctor’s office rather than ableism and Black Lives Matter (am I the only one who gets suspicious of white people who constantly post BLM memes all over their social media more than actual blacks post such things? But I digress.).
TL/DR: If Amanda’s narrative had never been called out on Wrong Planet and/or people’s overall awareness of autism was still where it was 20 years ago, would she have ever made the sudden switch to physical disabilities rather than developmental?