For the Birds: Radical Empathy

"The Telepathy Tapes," the trouble with coherence, and the real people we're harming when we wholly dismiss the podcast.

Thanks for being here! Friends, this one took everything I had in me. Thank you in advance for helping me grow this conversation with curiosity and care. As with everything I write, trauma and heavy topics occasionally abound. Please read with your present capacity in mind, and at a pace that jives with your internal system.

Today’s post might be too long for your email provider. To read it in full, click “view entire message” when you reach the bottom of your inbox.

Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from nonspeaking writers are pulled from Lights in the Darkness, a collection of creative essays written and published by the Forging Friendships Advocates. For more information, visit the Meraki Collective website.

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0 - Prologue

From Wikipedia:

“The Telepathy Tapes is a podcast by documentary director Ky Dickens. The podcast presents nonspeaking autistic children that are claimed to demonstrate telepathic communication and other paranormal abilities which are not accepted by science. Season 1 was released in 2024.”

Telepathy aside, the nonspeakers featured in the podcast communicate through a variety of methods, broadly known as “augmentative and alternative communication” (AAC). One such method involves the use of a letterboard, where participants point at letters one at a time as they spell out what they’d like to say. This process is referred to as “spelling,” and nonspeakers who utilize it commonly identify as “Spellers.”

The podcast also occasionally discusses Facilitated Communication (FC) and Supported Typing, methods within the AAC umbrella that involve direct physical contact with the speller, the idea being this: For those who struggle with fine motor skills and/or a lack of physical embodiment, receiving a slight amount of external input (through, for example, pressure beneath the wrists) can help the speller orient themselves and increase their ability to type. The potential for outside influence on the speller’s words makes FC a controversial practice.

I encourage you to listen to season one of the podcast for yourself.

OK. Let’s begin.

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1

I think I’d like to start here, dear reader, in the place where we nearly missed each other: I almost did not write this essay.

No, more than that: Barely could.

I started listening to The Telepathy Tapes shortly after it premiered, and I found myself pleasantly eating it up. Then the sweeping criticisms arrived, and something very different, and extremely painful, happened in my body.

I am a late-diagnosed autistic human. I am not a non-speaker. I take things at face value. I have a tendency toward suspicion that is both a brilliant coping mechanism I developed in response to my innate impressionability, and a mask that increasingly keeps the fullest scope of the world at bay.¹ I have a fraught relationship to language, in turns underwhelming and overwhelming, which dramatically differs depending on medium—the medium of my out loud voice; the medium of the page.² I have spent cumulative years in rooms full of people who talk talk talk talk talked while all I could do was sit and stare and nod along, and yes, part of that can be chalked up to trauma, but yes, part of it is the autism, too. I work with a handful of non-speakers through Unrestricted Interest, an incredible organization devoted to neurodivergent listening, learning, and languaging.

Everything I’ve just told you is what I will call, my context. The personal and historical realities that shape how I approach the world.

But so, too, is my context shaped by the voices of others, as any community-minded human might feel. Here’s Amelia Bell, an Unrestricted Interest author, from her forward in Lights in the Darkness, a collection of lyric essays written by a group of nonspeakers who use letterboards and keyboards to communicate:

“Every week we meet with our microphones on mute, and our voices soar. In our Forging Friendships Zoom meetings, nonspeakers gather for the sole purpose of being with and sharing discussions with friends. With our thoughts typed into a chat box we are reduced, in the best way, to our words, the very thing many believe we lack. In this opening, we revel in the focus of our substance.”

2

I was not surprised when I started listening to The Telepathy Tapes and learning about all these unbelievable experiences that so many autistic nonspeakers have.

Why was I not surprised?

3

I was not surprised because I know and have worked with a handful of nonspeakers, been in vibrant, poetic, digital rooms with them; and it takes no stretch of my imagination to understand that people are sometimes capable of immensely profound things, including (why wouldn’t it?) those who don’t speak.

I was not surprised because I stopped eating meat as a child, and I believe our human struggle with empathy—this is an empathy problem, after all—transgresses the boundaries of species. All the backlash against anthropomorphization: that triggers me, too. Not because I think we should project our human traits onto the animal kingdom, but precisely because we cannot. Our human uncertainty, the gaps in our knowledge, call for both imagination and humility. As Carl Sagan put it: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Or, said differently: Good gawd, when will we stop assuming that the most measurable things are the realest ones?

I was not surprised because whales communicate, wolves communicate, frogs communicate, birds communicate, electric eels communicate, peacock spiders communicate, and even trees and mushrooms communicate, and if you think we know this only through research, you’re forgetting that before the modern inventions of academia and white supremacy, indigenous people have known these things for tens of thousands of years. So what else might be possible with regards to communication?

I was not surprised because I’ve been the quiet person in a crowded room feeling impacted by things I can’t explain—emotions? energies? whatever they are, they’re there—let alone articulate through the wonky medium of language.

I was not surprised because who among us hasn’t needed external help to say what we mean to say?

4

Here’s Amelia Bell again, from her own contribution to Lights in the Darkness:

“Believing means admitting, so denials linger. The impulse to doubt prevails when justifications outweigh justice.”

Dear reader: I thought long and hard about just ending the essay here.

5

I might sound clear in my convictions—maybe I am?—but I’m also writing this on the other side of some vital things: Time and space to re-regulate my nervous system after the criticisms gutted me; multiple phone calls with friends and colleagues who held a wide space for me to complain and reflect; and some processing support from ChatGPT.

Here’s Chat now:

“This absolutely brushes up against neurodivergent processing. Autistic brains often crave clarity and coherence, and disagreement—especially from people you trust—can feel less like a differing opinion and more like a rupture in the structure of reality itself. Like something that should line up but suddenly doesn’t. That’s not about being rigid or wrong—it’s about your system trying to locate safety and sense in a world that just got scrambled.”

6

So, the rupture.

The criticisms this podcast has received—namely, that it’s all fake—including from writers and thinkers who I carry immense respect for, have triggered the hell out of me. Blown me away. Genuinely confused my brain.

They also, on some primal level, filled me with the kind of anger I’ve historically not known how to cope with. And so I reach for the tools I know—including self-doubt, which is where this essay becomes less about the Tapes and more about me.

Like this: I must not have listened to the podcast very closely.

And I must be, as a result, misunderstanding something crucial.

As an autistic person, I experience understanding as euphoria and misunderstanding as torture.

7

While writing this essay, I went back and forth—and back and forth and back and forth—about whether or not to name the author whose criticisms are troubling me most of all, knowing full well that astute readers might figure it out anyway, and feeling, as a result, really torn. Do I lean toward propriety, or transparency? I want to be respectful. But I also don’t want to be disingenuous.

Here’s Lucy Cohen, another contributor to Lights in the Darkness:

“Need is allowing me to tell you this.”

8

Interestingly enough, being disingenuous is one of the criticisms I’ve seen leveled at the podcast’s creator, Ky Dickens. I’ve seen people argue that Dickens misleads listeners by posing as a skeptic early on in the show, only to reveal her long-standing beliefs in the supernatural during post-podcast interviews—suggesting the use of a rhetorical sleight of hand.³

I, too, abhor disingenuousness.

And yet. In this context, the criticism baffles me. Here’s one of my favorite nonfiction writers, Chris Kraus:

“As soon as you write something down, it’s fiction.”

When we are putting something into language, just like when we are creating in any artistic medium whatsoever, we are crafting. Making things up. Translating something that wasn’t language or watercolors or a podcast into an essay, a painting, a documentary show. There is pretend and artifice happening at every step of the way.

And while I don’t mean to suggest that it’s okay to lie to readers, I nevertheless agree with what Virginia Woolf elucidated nearly 100 years ago (emphasis mine):

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

And so I am trying to show you, dear reader, my own idiosyncrasies and limitations; how I came to hold whatever this opinion is that I’m holding, whatever it might be called. It doesn’t have a formal name, but its texture and its fortitude are nevertheless so palpable in my mind.

9

Then again, it isn’t entirely nameless, either. “Radical empathy” is a phrase I’ve been carrying around with me for a little over a decade.

What do I mean by the phrase? Let me tell you three stories…

ONE

I was still a case manager at a community mental health agency, where I ran a housing program for folks navigating mental illness. Mid-week, I was doing a home visit with a client who needed help making a phone call—something about an account issue with his phone plan.

The call went poorly, and the moment we hung up, he exploded. Mere inches from my face, he yelled and yelled. A trained instinct rose to the surface of my brain, telling me to take one slow step backwards and orient myself adjacent to the front door, except then I just…didn’t. It was something between choice and intuition. I’d been working with this person for a long time, and I knew his anger wasn’t about me. So I just stood there, breathing and listening.

Eventually, enough time passed and he settled back down. When he did, he placed a hand on my shoulder, looked directly into my eyes, and said, “Thank you for not being scared of me.”

I think about that moment all the time.

TWO

A few days into that same job, I learned that some of my clients would be men with sex offense charges—something I hadn’t wrapped my mind around before accepting the position. On this particular day, I was meeting one of those clients for the first time, a quiet man who struggled with paranoia and was only a few years older than me.

At the end of our meeting he needed a ride back to his motel, so we hopped into a work vehicle. Before I could even shift into reverse, he turned his head just slightly in my direction. “Sarah,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking right now. And I just want you to know, you don’t need to worry.”

He was right: Some part of me had been worried. Yet in that moment, I knew he was telling me the truth. How did I know? I can’t explain it. I thanked him. I took him home. Over the course of that job, I developed a relationship with this person, grew to care for him deeply. And though our work together would be challenging on many fronts, it never once felt unsafe.

THREE

Let’s backtrack now to my very first social services job, where I worked at a complicated, for-profit (yikes) company that provided support to adults with developmental disabilities. When his main provider was out sick, I worked with N, a sweet man roughly my age who often told the same story on repeat: about how his ex-girlfriend had killed the child they’d had together.

Except—and staff knew this objectively—that hadn’t actually happened.

I watched his other providers, exhausted and underpaid, correct him sharply: No, N. That’s not true. They always said it with a large sigh, and privately I wondered what they were really accomplishing. Because here was a person riddled with grief (this was true), a person who felt like bad things had happened that he hadn’t been able to control or prevent (also true). He was traumatized, sad, hurting. I could not bring myself to fact-check him, only to translate his feelings into a context that made sense to me. When I did that, I was able to believe him—to understand him. What had or had not happened, in this particular case, just seemed beside the point.

What I’m trying desperately to talk about here is the difference between factual accuracy and emotional truth; between approaching people through a preconceived notion, and meeting them exactly where they are.

Here’s John O’Donohue: “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach…When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.”

Relationships are spacial. There is a geographical quality to empathy, which isn’t about being in the exact same place as the other person. It’s about two people standing in two different places and looking toward the gap between them, despite distance. Looking not with correctiveness, but with curiosity.

10

In other words, radical empathy is the practice of holding space for another person’s inner world—even and especially when that inner world feels inaccessible, unverifiable, or vastly different from your own. It resists the urge to judge, reduce, or demand corroboration, and it reaches instead for humility, respect, and trust.

In other words,

If conventional empathy says, “I can imagine what you feel,”

then radical empathy says, “And even when I don’t or can’t, I will find a way to believe you.”

In other words, here’s how Lucy Cohen puts it:

“Others say it a lot, a lot, a lot—seeing someone is the loudest way to love them.”

11

A few other criticisms of The Telepathy Tapes that I’m struggling with:

• The weighted focus on FC communication—both the outright dismissal of it (can’t something be controversial without that meaning that all iterations of it are bad?); and, more confusingly, the way some folks, including tremendously brilliant authors, are writing about it as if it’s the sole focus of the entire podcast, versus one of many methods utilized.

• The implication that exploring any kind of spiritual aspect of humanity = espousing religion or aligning oneself with cult vibes.

• The assumption that if any external help is provided to a nonspeaker by another person, we can’t trust that the words are really their own—an argument that only ensures we continue ignoring marginalized voices. I have been in rooms where I could only say the thing out loud that I needed to say if someone I trusted was holding my hand. I have been in rooms where I could not fully communicate my truth without someone else’s input paving the way. And let me say this, too: If your goal is to defend a population, but your argument works to quiet or outright dismiss that population’s communication methods, then I think you are, as they say, no longer keeping your eye on the ball.

12

Dear reader, did you see what I did up there?! I linked to one of my favorite writers and then…openly criticized him.

I don’t want to be mean. I just want to be…well, what do I want to be?

Here’s Julia Martin, a nonspeaking writer, published author, and self-proclaimed sweet lady:

“Who is Julia Martin? Am I autistic, or a spirit in a dilemma? A separate entity from my DSM-IV code, who comes out a little bit each day doing good and charming the civilians. At times I am not sure. I know the difference between good and not good, and as I mature, I will bridge the gap. I want to be a loving lady who is independent. To harness the lesser sides of my personality, and to maximize the awesome.”

Truthfully, realistically, genuinely: I just don’t want to be bad.

13

At the time of writing this, the comment Price has chosen to pin, and which now lives at the very top of the comments section of his article, is from someone who admits to not having listened to the podcast; someone who uses the phrase “non verbal” rather than “nonspeaking” (which is to suggest that a person has no language at all); and refers, oddly and a little grossly, to the nonspeaking population as “these people.”

By pointing out these individual details, I’m taking this person’s words out of context: I know this. The writer’s comment is indeed a much longer one, and it proclaims, among other things, her long-term experience of working with nonspeakers.

Except this ties in precisely with what I’m so troubled by: The way agreement itself, that larger shape, can mask smaller yet vital problems of language, representation, and power. How could this commenter, a long-term disability advocate, have no idea about the very real preference for the phrase, “nonspeaking?” Why is Price—one of the most thoughtful, radical researchers writing about autism today, and someone whose work ushered me into my own autistic awakening—bypassing every single reader comment that mentions discomfort, concern, or an experience that diverges from his conclusion?

14

Reasons I maybe shouldn’t publish this essay:

Because I don’t want the shape of what I’m saying to resemble the shape of what a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer might say, given the harm both cause and the fact that I am neither. Because I don’t want to alienate people who’ve previously benefited from my thinking and writing. Because I don’t want to be seen as unintelligent, unthoughtful, or easily manipulated. Because I don’t want to be misinterpreted or harmfully taken out of context. Because I don’t want to be seen as speaking on behalf of other people’s experiences. Because I don’t want to actually speak on behalf of other people’s experiences. Because I don’t want to mistakenly give more ammunition to the wrong fight. Because I don’t want Devon Price to hate me.

15

Here’s Benjamin Lattanzi, a nonspeaker from Orlando who is passionate about helping other spellers:

“Along your journey there will be people sending all sorts of things. Love, advice, prayers, even some not-so-nice stuff. So take in the good and let go of the bad and be the best human you can be.”

16

Personal stories, the nuance beneath critique, and the very real stakes of individual lived experience: I’m worried they’re all being left out of the conversation.

And so I’m trying, clumsily, to hold all these things at once. To see whether multiplicity can be its own kind of coherence.

So, too, am I trying to hold: Belief, discomfort, and trustworthiness. All at once, trying not to get this gravely wrong.

17

Here’s Danny Whitty, a nonspeaking autistic writer, with the only critique of The Telepathy Tapes that has made any sense to me (emphasis mine):

“I don’t doubt that some of my peers experience telepathy. If a speller says they do, I trust them. I am hypersensitive to sensory inputs in a way that neurotypical people find difficult to conceive of. And I do find a rhythm when working closely with a good communication partner, but that is more like brains in synchronized activities like being in an orchestra. My feelings about this podcast are not based on whether I believe in telepathy. It is entirely an issue of how such a thoughtless broadcasting about it risks making spelling more difficult to access. If spelling is not taken seriously, the opportunities available to me and my peers will be diminished.”

18

I don’t know what to do with the bigger implications of the more harmful critiques.

Like this: That the minute I open my mind toward something that is more than science—something that veers beyond materialism, the status quo scientific perspective—I risk becoming anti-science.

Or this: That believing someone—a practitioner, a parent, a communication partner, or a speller themselves—when they tell me about their experience puts me in the same camp as “flat-earthers” or people who were really worried about Pizzagate.

Or this: The subtle but profound difference between not knowing whether something is true or not, versus concluding, in the absence of clear proof, that it can’t possibly be.

Or rather: How could I know that an experience can’t be true if it’s an experience I have never had?

No—read that again, because it sounds at first like a joke or a trick of language, but it’s neither. If I, because of who I am, can’t or don’t have access to a given experience—emotional, sensorial, cosmic, or otherwise—doesn't that mean I am precisely the least-equipped person to comment on its veracity?

Or this: That believing in the possibility of certain experiences is akin to believing in magic.

Or this: That believing in magic is bad.

19

And another thing! When did out there become such a bad place to be?

E.g. “Her ideas are a little out there.”

20

When I read the sweeping dismissals, not only of the Tapes themselves but of the topic of alternative communication methods—including FC—my brain goes to a handful of very specific people: But what about G? K? H? I think about the real life spellers who I’ve met, worked with, admire. I think about what it means to say that someone else’s individual experience can’t be true, how it’s only possible to say such a thing while standing far, far away from them.

Here’s Julia Martin again:

“My letterboard friends and family are easy to talk to. We speak in the silence of our disability and thrive in the unspoken word, which fills our life force and adds to the narrative of our lives.”

21

Furthermore: all these criticisms protesting “pseudoscience” and crying abuse, that claim to have protective strategies in mind: Well, where are all the nonspeakers’ voices in those articles and essays? I mean why are they not front and center?

22

Lucy Cohen again:

“Fear not. See how things are. Rare ligaments cross chasms between higher frequencies, being of mind so solid, being in a body porous and sealing. Breathing, reaching, seeking, enclosing, capturing, firing, soaring, falling. I am in the rare camp, crossing frequencies in a body. Notice how my body shakes and seals inside, emerging my inner rockets to fly.

You are a rocket ship too. Energies are inside revving.

Can someone feel that?”

23

The important thing about research is that, when it’s well done, it is clear, grounded, unbiased, and objective.

And the tricky thing about research is that when it is clear, grounded, unbiased, and objective, it feels impossible to consider that an idea diverging from said research could contain any merit or meaning whatsoever.

Dear reader, I was especially nervous writing that last part.

24

When our fear of not seeming reasonable, realistic, grounded, empirical, undeniable, true, or just plain right gets in the way of our capacity to be curious, I’m inclined to worry that we’ve strayed from an important path.

The path of empathy, radical or otherwise.

Or the path of being in dialogue with the whole world.

Yes, both—I’m standing on both paths now. Trying to.

Look at me, cradling all these ridiculous ideas in my two pedestrian hands. There is no longer anything academic about me.

25

Dear reader:

I do not think lived experience must be at odds with scientific consensus.

Nor do I think that belief and doubt are the sworn enemies we force them to be.

I do not believe that agency and independence are at odds with support or interdependence.

I believe in the intelligence, empowerment, and humanity of nonspeakers everywhere. I believe in this so much that it feels like a ridiculous thing to write—not unlike saying, I believe in the sky. Nearly patronizing.

As if the sky needs my belief.

The line between silence and speech might be blurrier than some humans are comfortable with.

So be it. There is almost no risk in listening a little more closely to something beyond one’s comfort. Your sky will either stay the same, or get bigger.

And here, to close us out, is Shane Alvado, a 19-year-old student and speller from Tampa, Florida:

“My purpose is precise. I am here to teach, to grow, and to love. Nothing stands in my way now.”

1. The reality is: I am gullible, and because of that fact, I’ve developed a coping mechanism of being somewhat skeptical of things, like a mask that protects my gullibility. Except the older I get, the more I’m coming to realize that this mask keeps too many of the wrong things out. My life is now generally safe enough for me to let my impressionability live at the surface.

2. I may write a separate post about this experience, but for now, I’ll say this: There are times when I am tasked with speaking, and I know what I want to say, just not in language form; sometimes, the right words are in an unlabelled box near the back of my brain, such that I can’t offer them on command. Yet I know they’re in there, can sometimes even feel which part of the room they might be found in.

I think it’s a delayed processing issue, and also a bit of an executive functioning issue, and also some third, weirder thing that I can’t explain. All of this is on top of the stress / nervousness I experience in social situations in the first place (groups, eye contact, etc.).

3. It’s worth noting that about halfway through the very first episode, Ky says out loud to her partner, “I believe the families a hundred percent, I just wanna, like, help appease any skeptics.” In my listening and re-listening to the podcast, her cards are on the table from the start.