Autcom Webinar - February 2026

The Right to Grow Up:  Mental Age Theory

Date Presented:  February 28, 2026

Webinar Recording

Details 

AutCom Vice President Ivanova Smith presents about their lived experiences and the importance of the Right to Grow Up, along with the harms of using mental age theory. AutCom Board member Maxfield Sparrow moderates a panel of autistic adults who share their lived experiences:  Dan Bergmann, Ali Burris, and Yasmin Arshad.  A question-and-answer session with the audience follows. 

Ivanova Smith is a disability advocate and Community Collaboration Program Manager in Washington State and is happily married with two children. 

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Yasmin Arshad was born in Florence, Italy, and came to the US at age 7 and is bilingual. She is an artist at Gateway Arts in Brookline, MA, and has exhibited at the Fuller Art Museum, Brockton, MA., the Outsider Art Fair in NYC, in London and in Tokyo. She is also a poet and enjoys traveling, walking, horseback riding, snow shoeing, and going to the symphony.  Yasmin types to communicate and reports being able to read since the age of four, although no one knew it at the time.  

Dan Bergmann is 30 years old. He has been living with minimally-speaking autism all his life, and was often treated as a much younger child before he learned to communicate abstract thoughts by spelling them out when he was 12.  Dan graduated from the Harvard Extension school in 2021, the first nonspeaker to earn a Harvard degree. He “spoke” via text-to-speech computer at his commencement. He writes essays, plays and screenplays. He is the author and leading actor in “Pointing Fingers“ the first fiction feature-length film by and about people with non-speaking autism who communicate by typing. The movie is in post-production and will be finished this spring.

Ali Burris is a Black, AuDHD self-advocate and the president of the Autism Society of Washington. She also works as a session facilitator at the Autism Mentorship Program, an organization that provides Autistic youth with Autistic adult mentors. She is passionate about supporting Autistic autonomy and building a positive Autistic culture.