Editor's note: Donna Venables will be better known to most of our readers as Donna Williams, the author of two autobiographies, Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere.]

Just a short letter to say that Paul and I stay in touch with what goes on in the area of FC. We feel the method will weather the storm and that the tide of change is inevitable.

Though we try to remain publicly impartial, it is sometimes hard. What matters to us is that people remain open-minded and test out new ideas even if they challenge their own assumptions of social, mental, emotional or perceptual reality. Some people do this more 'carefully' and 'politically' than others. Some do it too 'carefully' and 'politically' to contribute constructively to the exploration of certain new fields.

We do not think of you as a crank though even people working in FC can assume the reasons why it works or doesn't with autistic people and be as prone to being incorrect or correct as any other non-autistic person. Those who listen to the autists are, in our view, more likely to have a better grip on an autistic reality and, therefore, how things work or don't. Those who listen predominantly to parents' or professionals' non- autistic version of autistic reality are more likely, in our view to be as incorrect as a human assuming to know a dog's perceptual, social, mental and emotional reality. To study it from the outside is not to have communicated with it on its own terms from the inside. More and more people will listen more and more to autistic people themselves. Then, they may see that the difference between 'higher' and 'lower' functioning people may be SOMETIMES more a mirage, social construction, or compliant fulfillment of low expectations than a factual reality. Those who zealously refuse to acknowledge the possibility that the guarantees of their sweeping assumptions are flawless, will be most likely those who do not value, nor possibly conceive of the world of difference between 'appearing' and 'being.'

From Donna and Paul Venables.

(permission to reproduce this letter with writer's approval, in full only and without any editing of original as it here stands).