When Proximity Becomes a Weapon: Why We’re Done Explaining Gestalt Processing to People Who Don’t Listen

"We Are Not Autistic, But…” — How Yet Another Article Repeats Hutchins et al. and Calls It Progress

A sharp, unapologetic takedown of the ASHA Journal’s latest GLP ‘critique’—exposing analytic supremacy, colonial language politics, and capitalist capture—and a declaration that autistic meaning belongs to us alone. Our future, our way.

Introduction — That Familiar Lurch in the Stomach

Lorang, E., Mathée-Scott, J., Johnson, J., & Venker, C. E. (2025). A response to Blanc and colleagues’ viewpoint on gestalt language processing and the Natural Language Acquisition protocol: Concerns and common ground. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_PERSP-25-00055

I opened the paper and felt it before I read a single line—the old, familiar lurch in the stomach, that tightening in the chest that signals danger long before language catches up. It’s a sensation every autistic adult knows, especially those of us who grew up as gestalt language processors (GLP) ourselves: the moment you realise you are about to be interpreted, not understood. Dissected, not held. Categorised, not met.

Before the text even settled on my screen, my body had already recognised the pattern. Here it was again—another non-autistic “response” to GLP and NLA, neatly wrapped in the language of profession caution, already vibrating with the prelude to the same old critique. That sideways boredom, that low, steady hum of rage, rose up like muscle memory. I didn’t need the details. I knew the choreography. I’ve lived in this interpretive trap my whole life.

Because this dance is always the same. They announce themselves as ‘reasonable.’ They gesture towards care. They adopt the tone of the responsible adult in the room. And then the scalpel appears. Not out of malice, but out of certainty—certainty that our interiority is theirs to map, ours to surrender.

So let me say it plainly, right here in the opening, before we wander too far into their frame.

This isn’t new.
This isn’t neutral.
This is reminiscent of Hutchins and Venker / Lorang, with some familiar and misplaced generalisations that discount lived experience yet again.

Only this time, we’re not going to pretend it’s an honest misunderstanding.

What Lorang et al. Claims to Be Doing

The authors frame their new piece as a gentle intervention, a clarifying gesture meant to steady the discourse around GLP and NLA (which they, interestingly, consider one-in-the-same, even though NLA describes gestalt language development, not gestalt language processing, which is much broader). On the surface, it all looks somewhat reasonable: a call for discussion, for caution, for appropriate claims. They present themselves as the voices of reason, slowing down the trajectory of what they imply has become a runaway narrative. And, of course, they lean heavily on their professional experience—years of researching and working with autistic children offered up as proof that they speak from grounded practice and study rather than simply theory and ideology.

They signal their role as guardians of rigour, invoking the familiar triad of evidence, best practice, and clinical responsibility. Nothing dramatic. Nothing overtly hostile. Just some professionals from the US stepping in to ensure the field does not lose its footing. As a PhD, a researcher, an IRB Chair, an educator, and AuDHD GLP, It’s the same tone I’ve heard in meetings, in IEPs, in consults, in research proposals: the calm assurances of people who believe they’re keeping everyone safe.

The presentation is cursory but immaculate. A peer-reviewed platform. Softer language about “supporting autistic children.” Polite nods to nuance. A small frown of concern at the idea of “over-claiming,” as though they alone can strike the perfect balance between enthusiasm and caution. Every sentence is crafted to telegraph responsible critique.

And yet, behind the costume, the pattern reveals itself.

On paper, it reads like a conscientious contribution. In practice, it is the oldest move in the book—a repetition of the same power structure, a few different details, and dressed up as objectivity.

Hutchins in 4K — Same Frame, Sharper Harm

Reading this new paper, I could feel Hutchins and Venker & Lorang humming beneath every line, like an old operating system running under a fresh interface. The authors may never mention Hutchins or her team by name, though they cite their work heavily. Nevertheless, the lineage is unmistakable. Hutchins built the template: analytic processing as the gold standard, echolalia cast as a primitive shadow of “real” language, gestalts never mentioned at all. And, always, the gentle dismissal of autistic-led alternative frameworks effectively deleted from the conversation. Echolalia matters, sure, but it is not language development material.

The new article doesn’t innovate on the earlier work; it simply extends it. The same assumptions glide beneath the surface—or erupt in vehemence. Autistic experience is never quite considered at all. Our words aren’t even specimens in their world. Interpretation, to them, belongs to the professional by default, and any suggestion that autistic people might hold epistemic authority is quietly nudged aside as sentiment or speculation.

GLP, in their hands, shrinks into something smaller than even their predecessors allowed—an abstract problem to be managed rather than a reality lived by millions of us. It becomes a theoretical inconvenience, a supposed mistake, instead of a coherent linguistic ecology. The child’s expression is reduced to a vague gesture toward communication and then dismissed—not recognised as a code, not honoured as meaning, and certainly not understood as part of language development.

The whole piece reads like a plug-in update to an expanded Hutchins worldview—same architecture, same assumptions, the same insistence that they understand language better than the people who actually live inside these patterns. The interface is smoother now only because it’s been condensed; the tone appears more polite only because Blanc’s ‘grey citations’ have been folded in. The references may look contemporary, but the OS hasn’t changed. It’s simply been rendered in sharper focus, 4K resolution, with all the old hierarchies intact.

Omission #1 — Our Gestalts Are Not Your Dissection Specimens

What struck me most, reading their careful prose, was the silence. Not the polite academic kind, but the deeper, older silence that falls whenever autistic meaning is present yet ignored. Nowhere—nowhere—do they ask the most obvious question: what do these gestalts, this echolalia, mean to the people who use them? There is no curiosity about the emotional weight a script carries, no interest in the sensory or atmospheric imprint that lets a gestalt resonate so deeply it becomes part of our internal vocabulary. They do not ask how a gestalt settles into the body, or why it becomes the doorway to a state we cannot otherwise name.

For them, a gestalt barely exists—at best a puzzle, an error in need of disassembly. For us, it is a world. They spend precious space insisting that all children, autistic or not, process language word-by-word, but for gestalt processors each utterance arrives as part of a larger whole. A gestalt is always more than the sum of its parts.

Our gestalts are containers of memory and sensation. They are the way a moment of safety is preserved, the way desire is recognised, the way trauma becomes speakable without being directly exposed. They are the warmth of a room, the ache of longing, the rhythm of a childhood street, the echo of a film line that became a lifeline. Often, they are the only reliable bridge between an unspeakable interior and a world that demands vocabulary we do not have. A gestalt arrives whole because the feeling arrived whole.

Yet the authors do more than mishandle these expressions—they erase their significance altogether. They announce their acceptance of echolalia as communication, but offer no account of how one might actually understand it; the question of meaning is left untouched. They no longer reference Prizant’s landmark observation that “echolalia can be best understood as a manifestation of gestalt language,” nor do they explain why they have abandoned their own earlier language of “gestalt language development” in favour of the colder, more clinical “gestalt language processing.” So what, then, do they imagine these expressions to be? Their silence tells us. In their framework, a gestalt is not a lived form of meaning but a specimen—something to be broken down, reorganised, reassembled into shapes that fit their analytic comfort. There is nothing neutral about carving another person’s meaning into pieces because the intact form unnerves you. The insistence on dissection reveals more about their need for mastery than our need for clarity.

This is where the colonial mandate of normality rings loudest. The coloniser recognises only what can be translated into their own categories, counted within their preferred metrics. Meaning that cannot be measured inside their structure is dismissed as curious at best and ‘suboptimal’ at worst—a judgement voiced openly at the 2024 ASHA convention. Everything outside their frame becomes superstition, poetry, confusion, immaturity. Under the Power Threat Meaning Framework, the central questions—what happened to you, how did it affect you, what sense did you make of it—are not simply unanswered here; they are treated as irrelevant. The child’s meaning is not the point. The professional’s comfort is.

And this is the violence. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just the steady erasure of our epistemology through the repeated assumption that our expressions are raw data awaiting replacement by language they can measure. That our language is, at best, an early draft rather than a final form. That our relationship to our own words is always secondary to their interpretive tools.

So let me say the thing they cannot imagine needing to hear: our gestalts are real language—as they are—and part of our natural language development. They are not puzzles you’re entitled to assess, decode, or deem acceptable. They belong to us. We decide how to hold them, whether to keep them intact, to mitigate them, to analyse them into words, to reconstruct them, or to return to them again and again. Our gestalts are a language we’re entitled to keep.

Omission #2 — A Research Population with No Voice

The authors make a point of telling us they work with autistic children. It’s presented as evidence of proximity, of care, of grounded practice. A sort of appeal to authority, their own. A reassurance that they are not theorising from afar but speaking from within the daily life of autistic communication. This is meant to lend weight to their critique, to position them as the responsible adults in the room—people who know our community because they serve it.

But then the emptiness settles in. For all their proximity, there is not a single vignette. Not one moment from practice. No small story of a child whose gestalt cracked open a new understanding. No pattern they observed over years of relationship. No acknowledgement that a child ever surprised them, corrected them, taught them something they could not have known alone. An autistic caseload, yet not a single insight offered back into the world.

Their clients appear only as credential—never as colleagues in meaning-making, never as teachers, never as the ones who reshape practice from the inside.

This is extraction without relationship, the old colonial pattern of using the lives of marginalised people as raw material whilst denying those same people a voice in the narrative. Autistic children exist here as justification for professional authority, not as humans with epistemic inheritance. Their words do not appear. Their meanings do not register. Their presence is used to defend the clinician’s position, not to complicate it.

It is Hutchins all over again—this time from a group of SLPs whose clinical ties remain invisible. Lived autistic experience is flattened into data points narrated by outsiders. The children are mentioned, but none of their meaning survives the translation. The adult authors remain centred; the children become scenery.

I cannot help but notice the contrast. Since I began my own work—books, articles, reflections—the stories of my students have been woven through every chapter. Not as decoration, not as a sentimental flourish, but as the ground on which my thinking stands. Their words shift my frameworks. Their gestures dismantle assumptions. Their interpretations correct mine. They teach me, daily, what language can be.

So when I see professionals claim caseloads as credentials yet offer not a single moment of learning from those children, I have to name the ethical breach clearly: if you hold a whole roster of autistic students and cannot name one thing they taught you that changed the way you practise, you are not doing relational work. You are doing colonial research with better branding.

“We Are Not Autistic, But…” — The “I Have a Black Friend” Defence

They end, of course, with the familiar closing move: we are not autistic, but we work with autistic children. It is delivered softly, almost tenderly, as if proximity alone could absolve them of the power they wield. As if being near us grants them a kind of moral exemption.

But the structure is transparent. It is the exact same logic as the old racial defence: I’m not racist — I have Black friends. The gesture is identical. Proximity is offered as proof of innocence. Relationship is invoked as a shield against critique. The marginalised person—or in this case, the autistic child—is reduced to a token, a small piece of social armour meant to deflect the charge of harm.

This is proximity innocence.
This is benevolent authority.
And it is a posture widely condemned in race, gender, and colonial studies because it masks power whilst pretending to disarm it.

The logic is painfully simple:
If I am close to them, I cannot be hurting them.
If I care for them, I cannot be implicated in the system that harms them, that harms them by ignoring them.
If I work with them, I must understand them better than they understand themselves.

But proximity without accountability does not reduce harm. It concentrates it. The ones closest to us—the ones who interpret us, speak for us, ignore the essence our language, and structure our world—have the greatest capacity to wound, even unintentionally. And with that proximity comes a greater obligation to listen, to reflect, to be corrected.

Instead, they use their closeness as insulation. They invoke autistic children not to amplify their meaning, but to protect their own position. Not to honour their voices, but to silence ours.

This is the move that gives the whole article away.
Because anyone who ends a critique with “we are not autistic, but…” has already declared where they believe authority resides.
And it is not with us.

The Analytic Supremacy Problem — Why They Can’t See Us

What sits beneath their argument isn’t personal bias or misunderstanding; it is analytic supremacy—the quiet doctrine that insists language must be constructed from ever-smaller pieces to be understood, managed, or made legitimate. It is the belief that phonemes, morphemes, and discrete skills form the true bedrock of linguistic communication, and that anything arriving whole, atmospheric, relational, or memory-soaked must be treated as an alternative mode—respectable, perhaps, but fundamentally unlike “real” language. A primitive draft, waiting to be refined.

This worldview saturates their writing. Gestalts are framed as communicative but not truly linguistic—tolerated because we are autistic, yet still positioned as early, immature steps toward the “real” goal of linear, decontextualised language. They speak as though the highest expression of communication is a tidy row of isolated units, easily coded, easily measured, easily charted. Anything that cannot be quantified by their tools becomes an outlier to be acknowledged but not granted depth. Anything that resists their predetermined metrics becomes an inconvenience. Anything that refuses their hierarchy of skills becomes a problem to solve, not a reality to understand.

And so, when gestalt processing upends their entire schema—not by theory, but by existing in the world—they fall back on the only logic their training allows. If it isn’t analytic, it isn’t valid. If it isn’t incrementally processed, it isn’t language processing. If it isn’t neatly analysable, it isn’t really language.

This is why they cannot see us.

Because their tools were built for a different species of communication altogether. Because their definitions of “rigour” and “evidence” were inherited from behaviourist traditions that prioritised compliance with norms over embedded meaning. Because ASHA has spent a century binding itself to deficit-driven models. Because the RCSLT still drapes everything in the narrow cloth of standard English, as though communication must be filtered through the King’s grammar to be legitimate.

And because systems like the “Science of Reading” machine have convinced an entire generation of practitioners that the smallest parts are the truest parts—and that anything whole is naïve, unscientific, or suspicious.

But our ways of knowing do not bend to their microscopes.

We learn whole-to-part.
We move through meaning first, not form first.
We navigate language as atmosphere, memory, pattern, and relational signal.

Complexity lives in the connections, not the fragments.
And not everything that matters is available to their instruments.

Their paradigm was never built for us—and that is not our flaw. It is theirs.

… For me, an AuDHD gestalt processor with Level 2 language support needs, language was never home terrain. It arrived from outside, a foreign current pressed against a system that already knew how to move. Scripts were borrowed, lines echoed, phrases carried whole. They were not building blocks but costumes—worn, repeated, turned over until they fit just enough to pass. If Sapir and Whorf imagine thought as contained within the lattice of grammar, then here the lattice never fit. Thought spilled wider, stranger, recursive…

(See “A Short Digression—The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and GLPs” in this article.)

The Institutional Pattern — ASHA, RCSLT, and the King’s English

To understand this paper, you have to understand the soil it grew from. ASHA and the RCSLT did not emerge as neutral guardians of communication; they were born in the same historical moment that medicalised disability, pathologised difference, and elevated behaviourism as the scientific gold standard. These bodies grew alongside the rise of standardised testing, standardised English, and standardised notions of “functioning.” Their authority was built not on diversity of human communication, but on the tight containment of it.

In these institutions, language becomes an object to be measured, not a living ecology. English becomes not simply a language but the benchmark of legitimacy—the default tongue of professionalism, intelligence, and “clarity.” Anything that deviates from the King’s English is treated as deficit, delay, obstacle. The entire system is architected around the idea that communication must pass through a narrow monolingual gate to be valued.

This is colonial language politics dressed in clinical terminology.
Languages other than English are permitted to exist only as “barriers,” something to be overcome rather than honoured. Multilingualism is seen as interference, not inheritance. A rich communicative world is reduced to a diagnostic complication.

And so whole groups vanish from view.

Multilingual GLPs—whose patterns stretch across languages and cultures—are rendered invisible because their meaning does not map neatly onto English phonology. AAC users, whose communication requires attunement rather than decoding, are pushed to the margins because their modes disrupt the linear progression the institutions insist upon. FC users are dismissed entirely, casualties of a moral panic that refused to consider that agency could take unfamiliar forms. Non-speaking autistics are treated as diagnostic mysteries because their expressions do not sit comfortably inside the standardised rubrics that define “acceptable” communication.

The system was not built to see them.
The system was not built to see us.

And this is the crucial point: the article is not an anomaly. It is not an unfortunate misstep. It is the expected output of institutions long committed to analytic, monolingual, white norms. When you create a profession that valorises fragmentation, standardisation, and English supremacy, you cannot be surprised when it produces scholarship that pathologises communication forms that refuse to be broken apart.

A paper like this is not an aberration.
It is an inevitability.
A perfectly predictable expression of the structures that platform it.

Enough. We’re Done Trying to Fix Your House.

There was a time when many of us tried to work within these systems. We offered consultation in good faith. We sat on lived-experience panels, believing our presence might shift something. We accepted invitations to speak, to clarify, to humanise. We gave careful feedback on drafts that treated our inner worlds as curiosities. We endured endless rounds of “stakeholder engagement,” each one framed as progress, each one promising a seat at the table that was never truly ours.

What did all of that yield?
A few softened phrases.
A handful of grudging citations to autistic scholars.
Some reworded guidelines that changed tone but not substance.
Minor edits around the edges of models still built on behaviourism, standardisation, and analytic supremacy.

Not once did power shift.
Not once did epistemology change.
Not once did a major body say: maybe we need to rebuild the frame entirely.

This latest article is simply the point at which the façade cracks. Another repetition of the same dismissal, the same centring of non-autistic professionals, the same refusal to imagine that autistic communication might hold its own integrity. It is the signal that reform is not coming. That these institutions cannot be decolonised from within because they are not merely practitioners of a flawed paradigm—they are the paradigm.

So this is the turning point.

We are done trying to fix your house.
We are done patching cracks in foundations that were never meant to hold us.
We are done offering our time, our insight, our lived truth as free labour for structures that continue to extract from us while refusing to learn.

And let me be explicit: we are not here to be your specimens, your consultants, or your reputational shield. We are here to build something you cannot yet imagine—and we don’t need your permission.

Sketching the Elsewhere — A GLP-Centred, Multimodal Communication Field

The way forward isn’t a plea for recognition; it’s the quiet, steady work of building an entirely different field—one that doesn’t emerge from the ruins of speech-language pathology, but grows alongside it, rooted in very different soil. A field shaped not by pathology, standardisation, or analytic supremacy, but by the richness of multimodal communication and the lived expertise of gestalt processors ourselves. Not a profession obsessed with fragments, but a discipline fluent in wholes.

Imagine a field that doesn’t call itself speech-language pathology at all. Something broader, deeper, and truer: perhaps multimodal communication and literacy. A discipline that understands language as gesture, rhythm, breath, AAC, scripting, pattern, syntax, sensory memory, silence, and story. A field that treats echolalia as poetry and AAC as architecture. A field that refuses the colonial hierarchy in which spoken English sits at the top like a king, and every other form of expression is treated as as a curiosity at best, and an obstacle at the worst.

The foundation would be radically different.
Autistic and GLP adults would not be tokens or “stakeholders” trotted out for optics. We would be founders—co-authors of the ethics, the pedagogy, the research, the training. First-person meaning would be the gold standard of evidence. Gestalts would be recognised as intact units of truth, not inconvenient communication to work around, or even raw material awaiting clinical refinement. And if a gestalt is ever unpacked, it will be because we chose to do so, not because someone demanded linearity.

The field would be multilingual from its inception. Not multilingual in the colonial sense—where English is the centre and other languages orbit as “complications”—but multilingual as ecology: languages interacting, shaping one another, holding different emotional timbres and sensory contours. Communication across languages, modalities, and identities would not be a barrier; it would be the starting point. A multilingual GLP child would not be treated as an exception. They would be the template.

And literacy would be restored to what it has always been for us: a relationship with text and world, not an endless performance of decoding. No more pretending that reading is merely a sequence of phonemic extractions. Literacy, in this new field, becomes a sensory practice, a meaning-making ritual, a way of weaving oneself into narrative and community.

Who, then, belongs in this new landscape?

• Autistic GLP practitioners who carry our internal architectures in their bones.

• Educators who understand whole-to-part learning as an ancient human pattern, not a deviation.

• AAC, Spelling, and FC specialists who know how to attune rather than control.

• Interpreters fluent in multilingual, multimodal environments.

• Disability justice organisers who can hold historical power structures to account.

• And, yes, allied SLPs—if they are willing to step into the role of true language therapists, to decentre their training, unlearn the supremacy of the analytic gaze, and follow rather than lead.

And it cannot remain theoretical. This must be a field with infrastructure, with weight, with teeth.

Imagine training programmes that begin with autistic epistemology, sensory attunement, and gestalt processing realities—not with pathology. Ethical guidelines that are community-governed, not institutionally imposed. Research standards that treat autistic people as co-researchers, not subjects. Parent and educator education built from our truths, not filtered through deficit-led frameworks.

A credentialing pathway could emerge as part of this—rigorous, justice-centred, rooted in neurodivergent leadership. A professional certification that teaches not how to correct us, but how to understand the architectures of meaning we inhabit. Something parallel to newer justice-oriented initiatives: not gatekeeping, but grounding; not authority over, but expertise with; not compliance, but liberation.

Imagine a field where the first question is always:
What does this mean to you?
And where the answer is treated as knowledge, not noise.

This is not fantasy. This is design.
This is how new disciplines begin—not by asking permission from the old guard, but by gathering our people and building what we needed all along.

A Brief Digression — The Money Question

Let’s be honest about what’s actually at stake here. Their articles are not written out of innocent concern, nor out of measured scientific caution. They are written because a truth like gestalt processing threatens an economy. A real one. A lucrative one. And those who benefit from that economy will always move to enclose what they cannot understand, to capture what they cannot control, to dismiss what would force them to loosen their grip on power.

Gestalt processing destabilises the entire revenue structure of analytic research, university teaching, and intervention. It renders obsolete a century of training pipelines, billing codes, assessment tools, and the professional authority that rests upon them. If autistic communication is recognised as legitimate in its own form—if gestalt language is seen as coherent, meaningful, self-organising—then vast territories of clinical labour become unnecessary. And capital does not tolerate redundancy.

So they write. They publish. They double down.
Not because the evidence favours them, but because the market does.

The timing is not accidental. These “cautionary” and “critical” pieces intensified precisely when Private Finance discovered language therapy as an investment opportunity—when venture capital began circling speech therapy clinics, when insurance-backed programmes scaled up, when therapeutic services became another asset class in the neoliberal portfolio. Once the industry became a marketplace, autistic children became commodities. And commodities must be disciplined into forms that can be standardised, packaged, and billed.

GLP breaks their business model.
AAC breaks their business model.
Multilingualism breaks their business model.
Any form of communication that cannot be easily captured, quantified, and converted into line items threatens the architecture of profit.

So these papers serve a purpose: they reassert the myth that only analytic, clinician-driven intervention is legitimate. They paint our ways of communicating as risky, unserious, or unscientific—not because they truly believe this, but because acknowledging us would undermine their hoard. They need to write against us to justify their monopolies. They need to undermine our epistemology to defend their financial territory. They are capitalists protecting their income stream, cloaked in the soft language of professional concern.

But the solution is not to fight them on their chosen battlefield.
Capital always wins when the frame remains capital’s.
The only real path is to queer the system entirely—to refuse the terms, the hierarchies, the ownership model itself.

Return care to the commons.
Return communication to community.
Return language and communication development to relational, collective spaces rather than clinical economies.

We do not need to outspend them or outargue them. We need to build systems where their wealth becomes irrelevant, where their claims to authority dissolve because the authority was never theirs to begin with. Our liberation doesn’t come from wresting tools from their hands. It comes from creating worlds where their tools are no longer needed.

Closing — Our Gestalts, Our Meaning, Our Way

I return, at the end, to the feeling that opened all of this—the quiet lurch in the stomach, the tightening in the chest, the old bodily knowledge that tells me long before intellect arrives: they are about to take something that is ours and treat it as theirs. That small, sharp ache of recognition. Not fear, exactly. More the weary recognition of a pattern too many of us know by heart.

But that sensation, which once signalled danger, now signals something else entirely. Resolve. A line drawn not in defiance but in clarity.

Because our gestalts are ours.
They are not specimens to be handled by strangers with steady hands and analytic tools.
Our patterns, our ways of communicating and sensing and stitching meaning together, are not up for dissection unless we invite it.
Our languages—spoken, AAC, scripted, gestural, atmospheric—are not data points to be collected. They are home. They are memory. They are inheritance.

We no longer need to argue for their legitimacy.
Legitimacy was never something they had the right to grant.

So let me close with the truth that has been rising through every paragraph of this piece: you have had a century to tell your stories about us. We are taking the next century for ourselves. We are done fighting for a seat in your institutions. We are building our own rooms, our own tables, our own languages—and we will decide who gets an invitation.

Our meaning has always been ours.
Now the future will be too.