Yet another battle in the war against autistics

We can all laugh at Trump and Robert Kennedy’s completely ridiculous ideas about autism and that it is linked to paracetamol taken during pregnancy. These are ideas that are completely baseless and have absolutely no scientific foundation of any kind whatsoever. It is however yet another attack on autistic people in what has at times felt like a relentless war that has in truth been going on since the 1940s, a time when eugenics was spreading throughout Europe and other parts of the world. Eugenics, first developed in the early 20th century by scientists such as Sir Francis Galton, is about control, controlling reproduction and improving humans by the elimination of unwanted traits and characteristics. The awful lies and mistruths that RFK and Trump are spreading will have terrible ramifications for autistic people. How far will they go to rid the world of people like me and my son?

I know of a book about autism that was published in the US a number of years ago, written about two autistic boys. The book tells the story of a family and basically tells a story about how life was made hell because of autism, until the two boys were ‘healed’. (yes! healed, “sigh”). The woman who wrote the book was inspired by the teachings of an evangelical preacher and like so many saw autism as an enemy, a disorder that needs to be cured, a curse and almost like demonic possession of these two children. Their stimming was seen as unnatural, their meltdowns seen as disturbed and naughty behaviour, their deep interests seen as repetitive obsessions and non speaking judged as non thinking. Rather than create an environment suitable for these two autistic boys and understand their world, they sought to fix them, cure them of this terrible thing called autism. Rather than seek to understand their distress that led to extreme dysregulation, meltdowns and shutdowns, they sought to convert them and probably used ABA to do that.

Let me be very clear here, autism does not need to be cured, fixed or’healed’. Autism is a naturally occurring human difference, a neurotype, nothing more and nothing less.  Because neuro-normativity is woven into the pages of the DSM V it means that autistic people are compared with neurotypical people and assessed as abnormal, impaired and deficient. The way we are and our differences seen as disordered because they are different. There is however no such thing as a normal brain, rather the neurodiversity paradigm teaches us that there is a beautiful variety  in human brains. There is nothing weird, odd, wrong, disordered or broken about being autistic. It is not a condition or a disorder but a brain difference. There are many brains that are neurodivergent and not neurotypical, including people who are ADHD, dyslexic, dysphraxic, have OCD, Tourettes Syndrome, BiPolar and I could go on. People can also have aquired neurodivergence (acquired brain injury, addiction, dementia, etc) and even temporary neurodivergence (Pans/Pandas etc)

Autistic people are heavily stigmatised due to years of misinformation that have led to harmful myths. Ideas have come and gone but these myths have left a mark that we are still impacted by. Ideas such as that autism is caused by ‘refrigerator parenting’ (Kanner in 1949) and that mothers of autistic children were cold, lacked empathy and described as ‘refrigerator mothers’ (Bettelheim in 1970s). And then one of the most damaging has been that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine (Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced Dr who was struck off for spreading false information and lies about autism in 1998). Autism is not caused by parenting, it is caused by sex - it is highly inheritable and therefore if you are autistic then one or both of your parents probably are autustic too. Autism is also not caused by any exposure to chemicals.

The harm so many autistic people have been exposed to also includes the impact of ABA (applied behavioural analysis), created by the same man who devised gay conversion therapy. ABA essentially seeks to convert autistic children to be neurotypical using what are often traumatising techniques.  It’s a way to improve the autistic child’s ‘behaviour’ and eliminate unwanted characteristics. ABA is in a long list of things that seek to ‘cure’ autism, including praying for healing, casting out autism demons and using bleach enemas, are completely and utterly  dehumanising. And that’s what lies behind eugenics - removing humanity from a certain sector of society. 

Trump’s announcement is also another attack on women’s rights to pain relief; women and people with ovaries, especially when autistic, already struggle with issues such as interpretting expressing their pain and feeling believed, often due to having been gaslit by medical professionals. Women are more likely to be expected to endure pain and told ‘it’s not that bad’ by men usually. And Black women and people with ovaries are also assumed to be more resilient to pain due to systemic racism that still impacts what medical professionals often believe about racialised people.

Autistic people are here, have always been here- right from the dawn of humankind and we will always be here - beautifully and magnificently different.