December 23, 2013, 1:49 p.m.
Ido Kedar belongs to a rare confederacy.
Diagnosed with autism when he was a child, Kedar — now 17 and a junior at Canoga Park High School — refuses to be defined by his disorder and joins a number of other autistic activists who are out to redefine popular assumptions about intelligence and disability.
“Who are we?” Kedar recently wrote on his blog, “Ido in Autismland.” “Silent fighters, that’s who.… It is time to be advocating for ourselves. Why forever must the theories of scholars be listened to over the people with autism themselves?”
Mostly unable to speak, they communicate with iPads and letter boards. They blog, write books, make films. Mental deficiency and autism, they say, are not synonymous.
Some researchers and critics, however, are not so certain. In 2010, the journal Psychological Medicine published a study that concluded that of 156 autistic children, 55% had an intellectual disability.
Kedar, the subject of a profile in the Sunday Times, hopes more parents with autistic children will question these conclusions. For years, aides and teachers didn’t give Kedar credit for his work, and that frustration prompted him to write his blog and turn his blog into a book of the same name.
In January, Kedar, who lives in West Hills, spoke — or rather, his iPad spoke — to almost 250 parents looking to help adult children who are on the spectrum. In August, he was acknowledged by the Helen Diller Family Foundation for his work in the autistic community, and in October, he shared his ideas on doctoring to a class of UCLA medical students.
The ranks of other activists are growing and include:
  • Carly Fleischmann has become a celebrity through her YouTube video “Carly’s Café,” which offers a first-person perspective of autism. “Everyone has an inner voice,” she writes at the end of the short