Autistic people are not diseased. Stop trying to cure us.

We will never be normal. Eat all the Tylenol you want.

Authoritarians love to champion conformity, when they’re not directing their goons to deal decisively with anyone who points out that dear leader is obsessed with sharks, cannot produce a coherent sentence, and is holding the whole world hostage to his every emotional spasm. So it came as no surprise when Donald Trump announced that he had found a cure for autism. Even so, I was curious.

As an autistic person, I was rather hoping whatever medieval quackery he came out with would require us to do something fun, like carry a hedgehog at all times, or take heroic quantities of cocaine, both of which would make the world more interesting for those of us who struggle with social cues. Of course, given the administration’s long war of attrition with the woke notion of objective fact, they could also have announced that the cure was the laying on of hands by an incel influencer - which would solve his problem, but not mine.

Either way, nobody was expecting Robert Kennedy Junior to actually come out with anything sane. The US Health Secretary has been huffing the chemtrails of anti-vaxx conspiracy theory for years, which does not qualify him to make public health decisions, in the same way that being a nervous flyer does not qualify you to run Air Traffic Control.

This is a man whose grip on reality has softened since a worm quite literally ate part of his brain. You’ve got to wonder if the worm isn’t still up there running the show on behalf of wormkind, given his obsessive opposition to vaccines that actually do prevent actual diseases like - let’s see - measles, mumps, meningitis, hepatitis, polio, typhoid, tuberculosis, rabies, yellow fever, smallpox, and, yes, COVID 19. There is still no evidence that vaccines cause autism. If there were, as an autistic person, I’d happily take one for the team.

Either way, it’s chilling how many parents would prefer to see their kid die of a Medieval plague than grow up autistic.

It was something of a letdown when the White House declared that the cause of autism is women who take painkillers in pregnancy. This is unoriginal as well as untrue. For hundreds of years, women have been shamed for not, in Trump’s words, ‘toughing it out’ and accepting that suffering is their lot because of the Sin Of Eve, which, if I recall correctly, was asking too many questions.

The grim, sexist history of scapegoating mothers for somehow making their children autistic started in the 1930s, when researchers noticed that the mothers of these strange little boys they were studying were rather rude, and concluded that they must have broken their sons by not loving them enough.* The ‘refrigerator mother’ theory hung around causing heartbreak until at least the 1990s, because why put time and effort into helping disabled people lead happier lives when you can just blame women. We now know that the reason these women came across as rude was probably because they were autistic themselves. Neurodivergence is, in fact, extremely heritable. We were born this way, not that that’s likely to protect us from punishment in a culture swinging hard against any sort of diversity at all.

Speaking science to superstition is often the same as speaking truth to power. Yes, it’s important to debunk the bullshit. Yes, it is important to point out that Trump is an unstable, unwell man who does not get to decide from being told by world experts in infectious diseases that he might not be the greatest in the world at healthcare policy. The White House is overrun by ignorant clowns who appear to experience peer-reviewed science a personal insult.

But, speaking of personal insults - while what remains of the free press is patiently pointing out that no, Paracetamol does not cause autism, I find it more alarming that a dictator just got up on stage and effectively promised to rid the world of people like me.

In the 1930s, eugenicists studied autistic people in order to find ways of eliminating us from the gene pool. The Nazi solution to the persistent problem of people who struggle with sensory issues and find the world loud and overwhelming was, well, exactly what you probably imagine it was. But the mania for stamping out autism has never gone out of vogue. The conversation is still about whether it is possible to cure autism. Nobody has yet asked autistic people if we want to be cured.

[The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers - but, as usual, when I hit ten new paid subscriptions, I’ll unlock it for everyone. Thank you!]

Imagine if the president stood up tomorrow and announced that homosexuality happens because pregnant women eat pickled onions - but don’t worry, we’re working on a cure! - and the immediate discussion was all about the pickled onions rather than the morality of eradicating an entire minority group.

There’s a difference between the oppression of queer people and of autistic people, but there’s not every difference. Homosexuality was also treated, well within living memory, as a malady requiring medical treatment. The frontline therapy that’s still used to bully autistic children into behaving like normal little boys and girls was invented by the same doctor - Ole Ivor Lovaas - who pioneered gay conversion therapy. For decades, desperate parents have subjected their kids to traumatizing and life-threatening treatment, from bleach enemas to chelation because they were told they were doing the right thing for their kids. That being a loving parent meant doing whatever you could to ‘cure’ your child, rather than just letting them be autistic.

Trump is not the first American president to promise to cure autism, but he’s the first to claim to have actually done it - and it’s no accident that today’s backlash against autism acceptance is coming from the hard right. The hard right are as happy to exploit struggling parents and witless conspiracy theorists as they are to capitalise on public panic about the rise in autism diagnoses, which depending on who you ask, is treated as a woke social contagion, a horrifying epidemic, or both.

But we know why autism diagnoses are rising, and it’s nothing to do with painkillers, or vaccines, or heavy metal poisoning. Diagnoses are rising for three reasons: firstly because there’s more awareness and understanding of the condition. Secondly, the medical establishment has been playing catchup after belatedly realizing that yes, women and girls can be autistic, too. And lastly, in 2013 the official definition was expanded to include people would previously have been diagnosed with, for example, Aspergers. Recent research has shown that the number of people with autistic traits has remained fairly consistent - it’s just the number of diagnoses that has risen. People like us have always existed.

Autism is not a disease. It is not a failure in human functioning. It is a cognitive difference that is also a disability, although how disabling it is depends as much on your circumstances as it does on your symptom, in the same way that a left-handed person would find themselves disabled in a world of scissors. Autism, s activist Jim Sinclair wrote in their 1993 essay ‘Don’t Mourn For Us,’ isn’t something a person has, or a “shell” that a person is trapped inside….autism is a way of being. It is not possible to separate the person from the autism. -

Therefore, when parents say,”I wish my child did not have autism,”what they’re really saying is,”I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.”Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.”

The major issues that autistic people face, in childhood and in adulthood, are stigma, violence and exclusion. The reason neurodivergent people have a lower life expectancy than neurotypicals is that we are people are more likely to be bullied, abused, excluded and subjected to physical and sexual violence. We are more likely to die early from substance abuse, self-neglect and suicide. We are less likely to be locked up for life, tortured with electric shocks or forcibly sterilised than we were a generation ago, but we still face shocking levels of prejudice in education, housing and employment. We are still denied deprioritised for lifesaving medical care. In the UK, autistic women are nine times as likely to take their own lives. In the United States, young black autistic men are eight times as likely as their neurotypical peers to be murdered by police. These things are not inherent to autism. They are things that are done to us.

But somehow, still, the problem is with us. Somehow it’s autism that needs to be cured, not ableism.

Almost all of the funding in autism research is funneled towards finding a cure, rather trying to actually help autistic people and their families live better lives. So far, the only reliable solution is to be born or become so extraordinarily wealthy that everyone tolerates your eccentricities- although Elon Musk, the world’s most powerful autist, has demonstrated that no amount of fame and money is enough to stop people picking on you for being an odd duck. I’ve often found that a little tragic. The rest of the nacreous, self-dealing personality types currently running the US government into the ground are considered normative, so, of course, nobody is trying to cure them.

But I’m glad there isn’t a cure for autism. There have been times in my life when I’d have been tempted to take it. Times when I’ve been so worn down by misunderstanding that I’d have given anything to be ‘normal’. To have a more loveable stranger move in behind my eyes. Just to see what it was like.

But what will help autistic people and their loved ones isn’t a bogus cure. It’s tolerance, understanding and care. Unfortunately, these are now unforgivably woke ideas, now that we’re down the trouserleg of time where you can get deported from several nations for daring to suggest that people try putting up with each other for a change.

Non-conformity is the opposite of fascism, and the backlash against autistic identity is already building beyond the ranks of the far right - a swelling social animus against the sheer number of autistic people now daring to describe our lives without apology. Conformity is back in fashion, as is the populist promise to make the world safe again by enforcing social norms with violence. For those of us who have spent our lives trying and constitutionally failing to fit in, this is frightening news.

*yes, the researchers also studied little girls. What happened to them is a darker story for another day.