Here’s the TASH letter: The Continued Debate about Facilitated Communication: A Response from TASH’s Executive Director and President of the TASH Board.
The first problem is not the letter itself, but the original issue of the RSPD. It called for researchers to submit articles in favor of, or opposed to, FC. It is inaccessible. There are not many of us in academia. Our stories and experiences might be dismissed as “just anecdotes” but this how we experience our progress, the changes FC brings to our lives, the day-to-day message-passing that we don’t need to record, report or have validated by every single Very Important People, usually privileged, non-disabled people, who call themselves “experts”.
I could not read the journal. For many reasons, I am not a TASH member, and I believe the journal is only available to members. I rely and trust the reports I’ve got about the articles though. I will make a guess (in my experience with these types of articles, I am likely correct) that the skeptics wrote the articles based in data from other skeptics, and none of them has probably never met the subjects of the research.
And there are plain lies based on bias (facilitator ALWAYS leads FC user – ALL facilitators, ALL THE TIME). TASH should have condemned the RSPD right there. Yes, there are unethical facilitators, as facilitators are human. But unless TASH believes everyone who is not a facilitator has never, ever cheated, lied or deceived in any way, the bias is not only from the researchers. It is also from TASH.