I'm starting to see an odd and rather worrying undercurrent of contrarianism in the autistic community that largely amounts to 'Hey, autism speaks isn't so bad!' They've made efforts to improve and they're just trying to help low functioning autistic kids! Who are we to tell them to stop when we don't know what it's like to be low functioning or have to raise a kid like that?' I even saw a post claiming that to be against them is like being against people who are looking for a cure for cancer. Ugh, why do so many people love to compare being autistic to having cancer, including other autistic people?
It's been cropping up way more lately as April gets closer and more posts about acceptance over awareness pops up. I don't know if this is just a weird backlash that's happening due to the need for some people to be contrarian about everything and they feel the need to do so now that hating Autism Speaks is more mainstream than not nowadays, or perhaps some sort of astroturfing is going on to try and make it seem like they're more accepted by the autistic community. I wouldn't put it past them to pull such a thing. Either way, it's a bit distressing to see it becoming more common to defend them when we know how shitty they are. If they want their image to improve then its up to them to prove it to us, nothing more, nothing less.
Honestly, given an argument I had with a couple of Americans a few days ago (one of whom claimed to have an autistic sibling, the other an unspecified disability), and how dismissive one of them was when I attempted to point out the differences between the US and UK in terms of infrastructure and resources for autistic people - and even then, it's not exactly 'great' over here - I think what may be emerging is an attempt to argue that the state of mental healthcare - and particularly autistic care - is, effectively speaking, 'good enough'. That sure, it might suck, but what more can people expect, etc?
On a semi-related note, and due to the same argument, I'm beginning to worry that some may be drawing a wrong conclusion from the whole 'don't blame your disability if you're an asshole' rhetoric that's gotten popular the last few years. Because while it is technically true, I'm finding that some are missing the nuance in how a disability may still affect that, and otherwise how it can provide explanation and context for - though not absolving a person of - misbehaviour or failed comprehension. There is a weird onus being placed entirely on a potentially disabled person to control and regulate themselves, rather than for people around them to make reasonable accommodation or adjustment to expectation in light of that. It reeks of some 'quiet dignity' bullshit where the solution to having a disability is to act and present as if you don't at all. That may be in light of a cultural context where these things are much more readily blamed for wrongdoing in their entirety - ironically and often - so as to make the neurotypical folk feel better, believing themselves physically incapable of true evil, but it's still not a functionally helpful or healthy outlook longterm, I think.
Otherwise, HamsterDude I suspect it's because your evident choices of interest and expression, in the eyes of others, appear overly juvenile and thus, 'worthy' of mockery. Since you mention it being an autism discord particularly, I suspect there's a tinge of gatekeeping and/or elitism going on, because of how this overt interest in such a 'childish' thing as hamsters, to the point of developing a game about them, aligns with stereotypes about autistic people - particularly 'low functioning' autistic people - as being mentally akin to a child. If you do rejoin, or have already rejoined, the server, I would at least be wary. Don't want you going back into that if the mods are going to do nothing about actually keeping people from harassing you for something as harmless as liking hamsters.