Rights and Respect (Proud and Supported Series)

LGBTQ+ people deserve to be treated with respect, just like everyone else! If you are LGBTQ+, you deserve to be treated with respect by everyone in your life — including the people who support you. That’s why we made a new guide for LGBTQ+ autistic people called Rights and Respect! This guide will help you figure out what to do if you aren’t being respected. This guide will talk about things like:

  • What are my legal rights?
  • Why is fighting for rights important?
  • What does it look like when a support worker respects me?
  • What can I do if my support worker isn’t respecting me?

And more!

It can be hard when someone doesn’t respect you.  Now more than ever, we all need to keep fighting for our rights. We hope you’ll use this toolkit and share it widely so we can speak up and talk about discrimination when it happens. Let’s fight for our right to respect!

The toolkit is available in two versions:

Our Easy Read edition. The Easy Read version uses pictures along with large text, and has more white space. Click here to download the Easy Read version of “Rights and Respect.”

A Plain Language version without accompanying graphics. Click here to download the Plain Language version of “Rights and Respect.”

Easy Read Edition

The Easy Read Edition is split into parts. Each part has its own Words to Know section, and there is also a separate Words to Know part with all of the terms from every section.

Select the title of any of the parts below to download it:

  1. Part 1: To Start
  2. Part 2: What are my rights
  3. Part 3: We have to fight for our rights
  4. Part 4: What are my rights with a support worker
  5. Part 5: What can you do if a support worker doesn’t respect your rights
  6. Part 6: Self-Care
  7. Part 7: Words to Know

Click here to download the entire Easy Read version of “Rights and Respect.”

This resource was made possible due to generous funding from the New York State Developmental Disabilities Planning Council (NYS DDPC). It was developed in collaboration with the National Alliance of Direct Support Professionals (NADSP) and the Burton-Blatt Institute (BBI) at Syracuse University.