Arguments and ad hominems: A night at the Higashi School and “disappeared” footage from a podcast
Barry Prizant was a no-show at a forum that I mentioned in my last post: a forum at the Boston Higashi School on a variety of Facilitated Communication (FC) known as Spelling to Communicate (S2C). A vociferous group of Higashi parents wanted the school to adopt S2C, and so Howard Shane, Bill Ahearn, and myself were invited to address S2C’s lack of validity. Even in Prizant’s absence, we received a fair bit of pushback.
The strongest pushback I received occurred after the moderator asked me to respond to an objection that many parents had raised about the school’s decision to limit the panel to FC critics. I replied that the number of public forums dominated by FC proponents, based on what I’d seen online, far outnumbers the number of public forums dominated by FC critics. That remark drew loud gasps of disbelief and exasperation. I stand by it.
Additional gasps of disbelief and exasperation followed my remark that eye contact is a prerequisite for language learning. Those gasps recalled to my mind one of the Neurodiversity Movement’s truisms: It’s unreasonable and harmful to suggest that autistic people should make eye contact. I could, I realized too late, have been more precise. To figure out what a speaker is referring to (and thereby learn the meaning of a new word), one has to glance at their eyes long enough to see where they’re looking. We know that sustained eye contact can be highly aversive to people with autism, particularly when the other person is looking right back. But there’s no evidence that glances at eyes that are looking elsewhere—glances that last just long enough to determine where the eyes are looking—are so aversive that they shouldn’t be encouraged as ways to access language.
One front-row parent raised the interesting question of how blind children manage to acquire language—as they surely do—without eye contact. Had there been more time, I’d have done more than acknowledge this as a tricky question whose answer isn’t fully understood. Fostering language in blind children seems to require more deliberate work on the part of caregivers, e.g., bringing objects over and touching them together while describing them. Perhaps more of this could be done in language interventions for low-eye-contact, minimally-speaking autistics. But the child would still need to attend to speech sounds (a behavior that is diminished in minimally-speaking autism) and infer the communicative intent of the other person (a skill that is significantly impaired in autism, particularly in minimally-speaking autism).
From one of the other front-row parents—one of two S2C parent practitioners whose skepticism was most visibly and acoustically evident throughout the night’s discussion—I heard two novel claims. The first had to do with a statement I’d attributed to the facilitator in the Lower Merion Court Case: namely, that training programs tell facilitators it’s unethical to do facilitator-blinded authorship (or “message-passing”) tests. At first the parent claimed that the facilitator hadn’t actually said this. I replied that I’d been there, that I’d later acquired the transcripts, and that’s what he’d said under oath. She then assured me that she’d also read the transcripts and was familiar with what the facilitator had said. He’d misspoken, she then suggested. The actual rule that S2C practitioners must follow, purportedly, is this one:
Message-passing tests are allowed only if the “speller” (the person being subjected to S2C) consents to them.
Of course, in the S2C “Spellerverse,” the only way to express or withhold consent is through S2C-generated output. All other potentially communicative behaviors are purportedly “unreliable.” This, purportedly, is the result of a condition known as “whole body apraxia,” which FC proponents claim, without evidence, is the basis for minimally-speaking autism. If the only way to express or withhold consent is through S2C-generated output, then, according to all the available evidence (which now includes public displays of what some people call “telepathy,” but what scientists call “complete facilitator control over letter selection”), it’s the facilitator, not the facilitated person, who controls whether consent is given. And so it isn’t given—ever.
The second novel claim of this parent-practitioner was that there are now “thousands” of non-verbal individuals who have graduated to full independence. When I asked whether full independence includes the ability to type responses to questions when all the facilitators are out of the room, she said something like “Yes. I’ve seen it many times. I’ve seen it at IEP meetings.” When I replied that I’d never seen any videos of such communication (completely independent and spontaneous), she explained that these independent communicators don’t want to appear in public videos. Not one of all these thousands, apparently, wants to show the world what he or she can do.
The parent-practitioner also asked me why I wanted to prevent these individuals from “learning how to spell.” Her echoes of “modern spelling methods” reminded me of just how far removed these people are from conventional reality—including its conventional concepts and terminology. As I wrote earlier, for those who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, teaching spelling doesn’t mean things like using morphology and etymology to help students learn to spell words like “two,” “sign,” and “pleasant.” But I declined to reconcile my universe with hers and simply told the audience that there are evidence-based ways to teach spelling and that these don’t involve held-up letterboards.
One other notable comment came from an occupational therapist. Though she said she was on the fence, she, too, appeared to have drunk the Kool-Aid—at least on whole body apraxia. She suggested that one reason she was undecided was the dearth of recent studies on FC. I told her there were lots of recent studies on motor difficulties in autism and that not one of them has found evidence for whole-body apraxia. I don’t think she found that convincing.
The discussion was largely civil and no one called us “nay-sayers” or “haters” to our actual faces. The other of the two front-row S2C practitioners, however, used those terms to characterize FC skeptics in general. He did this so reflexively that it seemed an ingrained habit that he simply couldn’t suppress.
Things got more ad hominem a week or so later on a podcast in which both myself and Howard Shane were named: the Presume Competence podcast hosted by S2C and telepathy-believer Betsy Hicks-Russ. Betsy’s guest was Rutgers Psychology Professor and FC-supporter Elizabeth Torres. I’d been tracking the show because Betsy had invited speech-language pathologist Alyssa Croll to come on after Alyssa had posted a few skeptical comments. Alyssa then reached out to us here at FacilitatedCommunication.org and asked if one of us might be interested in joining her, and I said I’d be happy to. Initially, Betsy expressed great enthusiasm:
We are all very excited for this! Could you give me some dates that it might be possible? My guess is we might have to look towards the end of February to find a date that everyone’s available. Even March, but just having something on the calendar will be fantastic.
In my reply, my chief goal was to convey a wish for enough time for Alyssa and me to get across all of our points. I wrote:
Thanks for having us on your podcast, Betsy. There's so much to cover--It should be an interesting and wide-ranging conversation. Hoping we have enough time for it all!
Betsy promptly replied:
I appreciate both of you. And I definitely want to change my original wording as being a “discussion” not a “debate”. I’m hoping that softens the energy around it for everyone involved.
Sweet. Then began a sequence of delayed responses and postponements.
As much as I would love to record in February, we’re looking at late March as the earliest. [She gave some details about various complications]. Be assured, we are VERY excited to record with you, but need a bit more time as there are so many moving parts. Now that I have both of your emails, I’ll reach out once I know more.
Then, after another nudge from Alyssa:
Our next recording got delayed AGAIN and won’t be now until April 21st. [She mentioned a few other complications]. So the podcast has to take a back seat for a bit. I won’t forget you. I’ll get back to you when I can.
A few weeks later, a colleague sent me a link to the April episode, the one with Elizabeth Torres and the ad hominems. In the excerpts that follow, I use a combination of the electronic transcript on YouTube and my own transcription, adding punctuation here and there for clarity.
Curiously, even though at least three of the four regulars on the Presume Competence series—Katie Asher, Becca Cramer, and Betsy herself—believe that the competencies of autistic non-speakers include telepathy, not one mention of telepathy made it onto this episode. The closest anyone came was Katie Asher. Discussing why message-passing tests fail, Asher stated that, because of all the anxiety and “noise in the nervous system,” the facilitated individuals “default to whatever it is that the communication partner is sensing.” It was unclear whether Torres picked up on what Asher was driving at.
But Torres was perfectly happy to tell the four regulars what they wanted to hear about IQ tests and message-passing tests. This prospect, I’m guessing, is why they invited her on in the first place. Here’s what she had to say about IQ tests:
Every performance requires motor control no matter how simple is like say that you're going to point to a circle in blue versus a square in green you still have to control your arm to get it there and your hand and your finger to get it there just not they take it for granted but this is something that takes on the order of at least four years to mature and develop in a way that is controlled. And so it makes no sense to me to rely on something that is so cognitively demanding. The, the whole issue with motor control and the uncertainty of the nervous system and, and the autistic system is that it creates an enormous cognitive load. So your, your mind your, your, your mental processes your mind is preoccupied with accomplishing something that for us goes underneath awareness...
None of these tests consider the fact that your mind as an autistic person with all this uncertainty in your body and random noise in your motor systems and in your autonomic systems and everything that we have very precisely quantified this I'm not just saying this I've done an EEG so your mind is the enormous cognitive load that you have to just do that just do that your entire mind is occupied on just doing that which is something that we do completely largely beneath awareness.
Side note: Torres’ research doesn’t find that individuals with autism are unable to point to blue circles: “In accordance with the idea of successful coping, we saw that individuals with ASD often had a high accuracy in the match-to-sample decision, in spite of their corrupted proprioception.” (Torres et al., 2013).
When Torres told the four regulars what they wanted to hear about message-passing tests, it was only after they made it clear to her what message-passing tests are and what they wanted her to say about them. When Katie Asher asked her to “explain why that is an inappropriate test to validate their communication,” Torres first queried:
So I’m not acquainted or exactly familiar with all of the aspects of this test. I've heard of it, but this is not what I do. What is it? This message-passing thing?
Becca Cramer provided a general description, and then Asher provided the priming:
The problem is of course that the in this kind type of testing environment the nervous system gets activated the anxiety gets activated And this contributes to them not spelling or basically so much noise as you were discussing on the nervous system that they kind of default to whatever the communication partner is sensing [see above] and that flaws the results of the test. And this is the test that is used to attack non-speakers in court cases all over. This is the one that is used to basically say that their communication isn't valid. So it actually is important to understand this from a neurological as well as a ner, um, a nervous system perspective.
Thus primed, Torres, after a long and winding discussion about outcomes and experimental design, finally gave them want they wanted:
So there is there a lot of things in there like one of them is it is possible that let's take let's take the scenario where where, where the, the partnering the partner is indeed prompting the person and the person is understanding that prompting and is understanding that prompting to the to the level that it repeats what the partner is saying exactly and consistently. That would be amazing like to begin with. So that's one scenario. Then there is another scenario where it's a flip of a coin, you know, just totally random. So sometimes it gets it, sometimes it doesn't. And then there is the other scenario where it never gets it wrong. So it it always what is supposed to be and it's like that would claim that it's independent, right? So at the very least you ought to do these three scenarios and quantify the probability of which one of them the child belongs in and the partner belongs in. You cannot uni-modely do one of these because that's that's flaw. That's like it's that's a completely flaw study. So that let's start there at the high level of design. But now let's go into the physical level. Right? It's random what you're gonna point to because your system is in distress number one and before being in distress it lacks motor control. So it is altogether a cruel test that is designed to fail that person So it should be it should not be allowed and then anything that is sort of along those lines should be banned.
Much of the podcast, thus, rehashed the usual pro-FC talking points. Besides the claims that non-speaking autistics lack volitional control over their bodies and the resulting inappropriateness of pretty much any kind of testing, there were the usual rants against ABA.
But some of this was new—at least to me. Becca Cramer suggested that the single most-cited study by SLPs who criticize FC is this one, which I’m guessing most SLPs haven’t heard of. And Sarah Inonado bestowed one more role onto facilitators. Besides myelinating motor pathways to redirect language from fine motor to gross motor, “training the motor,” and providing emotional and attentional support, facilitators apparently also teach their clients how to think:
Yes, you can prompt someone to learn how to communicate. Yes, you can fade those prompts so it becomes independent. But you still have to build the skills of reasoning and making choices and independent thinking.
Also new to me were several of Torres’ criticisms of ABA and other autism-related fields. She faulted ABA for being a “cult” and for its purported association with “conversion therapy”:
So in the Lovaas example you know, they started out um it, it was called conversion therapy for a feminine boys. That was the first it was it was targeting that you know that emerging what they thought was feminine boys and so they would punishment and it was conversion therapy that was the origins of this and then they shifted to this whole autism uh diagnosis world the emerging autism.
Torres also alleged deficiencies in ABA’s training: deficiencies that she doesn’t seem to realize also apply to facilitator training programs, S2C included:
There's not one single class on neurodevelopment or like the nervous system on neuro anatomy and neurophysiology. Not a single class, you believe this? You're-you're treating a neurodevelopmental condition and there is not a single class in your curricular activities that teach you the fundamentals of the nervous system as it develops or the sensations and the perceptions that the system builds and how it all works that that's not there.
Finally, she faulted behaviorism, along with linguistics, speech-language pathology, and psychology, because “they don't have the training to do the motor part.” Invoking her own mathematical training, she accused her fellow psychologists of assuming that curves are linear and that distributions are normal. Were behaviorism subjected to quantitative scrutiny:
There would not be any behaviorism because this army of technical people with mathematical skills and computational skills will go and say “What? That's a joke.”
As for “the fields that do um cognitive science, cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, the psychological and psychiatric field, fields”:
They don't have the technical training of the motor part which is very, very complex to model human movements and the control and motor control is extremely complex mathematically. It requires many, many years of training and that's why they don't have it because they, they just don't have it.
Meanwhile, given how motor planning is “something that you know would be addressed by an occupational therapist”:
I was shocked, shocked as soon as we started pushing this in an occupational direction that the occupational therapist started giving the exact same spelling isn't an evidence-based um treatment or communication or it's not evidence-based and so I was shocked that that influence was almost immediate as soon as we had started to shift the focus to direct it to occupational therapy.
Indeed, Torres sounded quite frustrated that no one wants to collaborate with her or fund her research. She recounted how she created a simplified, digitized version of an autism screening tool known as the ADOS, which primarily measures social interaction. Her version appears to focus, instead, on motor issues:
You can detect the, the girls the female phenotype. You can detect it automatically from the, from the motor code.
Despite the virtues of Torres’ quick, cheap motor assessment tool, the developers of the ADOS have clung to their lengthy, expensive social assessment tool and continue to withhold their testing booklets from parents:
What has been happening over the years is really mean-spirited and evil. It's just, it's just bad. It's a morally, morally wrong in so many dimensions.
As the podcast progressed, a reason began to emerge for why Dr. Elizabeth Torres would do something that her peer, Dr. Vikram Jaswal (the other pro-FC psychology professor), has thus far opted against. That is, to appear on an autism series that’s largely about paranormal abilities. Referencing the approximately 30% of autistic individuals who are minimally speaking, Torres implores:
But I mean you got 30% of the spectrum and, yes, the ABA lobby is very powerful and is very marketing and all that lying and gaslighting and so on but you guys are 30%. You got to come together, be united, and break out of the autism spectrum all together and create your own diagnosis. And there are multiple ways, but one way I would pursue is going through the Movement Disorder Society. The Movement Disorder Society does have motor disorders for children, but they're less common because it's mostly adults and you know Parkinson's and other disorders. But you could create a chapter there as an organization, create a chapter in the movement disorder society. They're very friendly people. They have a journal where we could we could publish research.
...
We can raise funding for at the state level and my state is completely a pro-ABA and the ABA lobby dominates the whole thing and the same with like Massachusetts and other states.
Let’s turn now to Torres’ ad hominems against those people who have so undermined her ability to get research funding that she’s now making pleas to paranormalists. These underminers, evidently, include yours truly.
Torres and I have a little history. She and I first tussled in the comment section of a blog post I wrote two years ago. She wrote:
I have been alerted by Researchgate about a citation to our work by a paper on S2C and its related arguments. We do not work on S2C or any methods per se.
Can you please explain to me how exactly you are using my work to support your opinions?
Torres E. B., Brincker M., Isenhower R. W., Yanovich P., Stigler K. A., Nurnberger J. I., Mextasas D. N., Jose J. V. (2013). Autism: The micromovement perspective. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 7, Article 32. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2013.00032
It is the first time that I hear about this. I am puzzled by how our work was cited and the context in which it has been placed/boxed.
Our work is agnostic to any of the currently ongoing arguments in autism. In fact, our findings are applicable to any neuromotor control disorder. They happen to be present and yet neglected in autism.
Please, kindly refrain from using our work to support any views or claims, yours or anybody else's, unless you unfold correctly what it is that we have discovered, namely empirical evidence for an ontogenetically orderly maturation law of the human nervous systems, a law that is violated in the nervous systems that go on to receive this label of autism, but that it can be easily recovered when the affected system is regulated through proper neurophysiological support.
[The comment continues for another 500 words that aren’t worth repeating here.]
I replied as follows:
If you review this post carefully, you’ll see that your article was cited not by me, but by Jaswal, Lampi, & Stockwell (2024). If you’re concerned about how Jaswal et al. are using your article to support their views or claims, I suggest that you query them directly.
That was my last direct interaction with Torres, though I continued to exercise my right to discuss her work (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Torres’ ad hominems, which appear in the second half of the podcast, suggest that she may have paid these posts of mine some attention:
There are a handful of these people that are self-called scientists or and there are always the same names... I mean I always see the same names in the media and they all debate and stuff like that. And it was interesting because there was this person... Beals or...
[Someone whose voice sounds to me like Katie Asher’s pipes in with “Katharine Beals. We know her well.”]
That one. And she always presents herself as a professor of U Penn. A professor of linguistics, or language literacy. And I was curious. One day I went on Google and said who is this person. So she was at some point an adjunct person which means that you teach some class at U Penn and it’s a historian or something. It’s not really a linguist or anybody. I asked my colleagues because I have people in the in the field of linguistics, like serious people. But I said do you know this—“No”—and then in this, in this, uh, this blog [presumably she means the “about” page] it is now affiliated to U Penn. No longer a professor. So very interesting because I kind of posted this in my FB and I said “Be careful when these people are presenting themselves as academics because they’re not.”
She then extended her confused and faulty revelations to the rest of the “handful of these people”:
And the sad thing is that they gaslight the districts and they get anywhere from—I don’t know—seven thousand and eleven thousand per deposition against the non-speakers trying to, or the parents or someone trying to, introduce these methods. And so they’re making a living because you know just take ten of these depositions right? And so they’re making a living off of this whole story and then because they make so much noise and unfortunately some of the big organizations like the Simons Foundation or Autism Speaks or these powerful organizations in autism promote them, give them a big megaphone, they’re empowered and so the other people are afraid of them, and so they’re afraid of what they’re going to say, and so this. It’s ridiculous. These people are not even academics. Like where is this all coming from? Why are [here she grabs her head]--this is crazy!
It’s telling how obsessed pseudoscientists are, as compared with actual scientists, with academic credentials. The pro-FC Barry Prizant has been similarly emphatic (and similarly confused) about my purported deficiencies in this area, while the pro-telepathy sector constantly touts Diane Hennacy Powell’s neuroscience training and Harvard degree, along with Becca Cramer’s B.S. in nuclear engineering. To actual scientists, of course, it’s about the evidence and argumentation the person offers rather than what some people call their “standing.”
“Where is all this coming from?” Asher pipes in again:
Well, it’s coming from the ABA lobby, which stands to lose, as you mentioned earlier, 6.72 billion annually.
I find it amusing when people lump me in with the ABA lobby (Barry Prizant has done so as well). Of course, I’m not an ABA professional. Nor did I choose ABA therapy for my autistic son. I do, however, wish that some of the training that I myself underwent in various skill areas (from proving the Rank Nullity Theorem to executing a jump-turn inside swing kick) had been more ABA-informed. ABA writ large—beyond autism-specific ABA—is arguably the best framework for teaching anyone anything.
Next come Torres’s ad hominems against another person unaffiliated with ABA: Dr. Howard Shane.
You know, it really kills me all the, all the extent that they go to, to create this very cruel thing [It’s unclear what “thing” she’s referring to here; I’m guessing message-passing tests, which Howard Shane has designed and which Torres had just discussed]. But it doesn't surprise me because those people, the Shane—I call him Dr. Shame actually because he should be ashamed of what he’s done—and all these other losers—there’s no other words for it—making tens of thousands of dollars at the expense of your kids, right?
Shortly after listening to all this I did two things. First, to secure a record of the most unprofessional insults I've ever heard used by an academic against her peers, I did what I do with all incriminating YouTube videos that might possibly disappear. I recorded it.
Second, I emailed Betsy Hicks-Russ.:
Hi Betsy,
I think at this point the honorable thing to do is to follow through and have me on your show. And Dr. Shane as well, if he's interested, given what Dr. Torres said about him. I think you know that in your heart. May you have the courage to have us on--and to let us speak at length, unedited, about what concerns us.
Best,
Katharine
I included a link to my faculty page at Penn in my signature, where one can learn that I’m a linguist, not a historian.
To date, Betsy hasn’t emailed back. But shortly after I sent this message and made a private recording of the podcast, it was marked “private” and could no longer be accessed. Curiously, it has since reappeared, but with all mention of me and Howard Shane and the rest of the “losers” completely excised.
Just as videos can be edited to remove the most damning facilitator cues, they can also be edited to remove the most damning remarks that their participants make—damning, that is, in terms of what those remarks reveal about integrity, credibility, and ulterior motives.
References:
Torres, E. B., Brincker, M., Isenhower, R. W., Yanovich, P., Stigler, K. A., Nurnberger, J. I., Metaxas, D. N., & José, J. V. (2013). Autism: the micro-movement perspective. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 7, 32. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2013.00032
