If you have some time, please, please, please watch this video. Please don't come in here and post a hot take if you're not even going to take the time to even try to understand where autistic people are coming from when it comes to issues like this.
I gotta admit, this video pretty much had me in tears through the whole thing. So much of what she talks about and her experiences is something that I can relate to on a personal level, and I'm sure the same can be said for a lot of other autistic people.
It hurts when regular people will sooner turn to dangerous eugenics rhetoric long before they will ever consider being accepting or accommodating for autistic people. They would sooner consider treating you like something to be eradicated, sooner desire that nobody like you ever exists again long before they would ever consider trying to make life marginally more comfortable for us autistic people to exist in or accept us as we are. They will use 'low functioning' autistic people as a means to talk over us and silence ALL autistic people, ignore that even 'high functioning' autistic people often struggle immensely with various symptoms themselves. At the same time, they dehumanize 'low functioning' autistic people, implying their lives have no value, that they are nothing more than a burden, while ignoring that there are many of them who do communicate their lives both on the internet and off in their own way, and they will happy communicate that their lives have value too in spite of their struggles. It is ugly that society would rather consider us undesirable and a problem to be cured rather than find ways to better support us and the parents who raise us. So much of the animosity particularly toward 'low functioning' autistic people could be alleviated if parents and the autistic person in question were given the support they need to thrive rather than being left dangling in the wind to handle it alone.
What autistic people need is for people to be less judgmental and less gun-ho to shun anyone who seem a little 'off'. We need acceptance, understanding, and kindness. Think a little more before you decide to mock or judge someone for acting differently from the norm, because you don't know their situation. We need less dehumanization and disgust. What we don't need is the constant rhetoric that we're unwanted and a burden to society. That it would be better if we were cured or kept from existing all together. It hurts a lot when people don't even try to pretend like they would rather have you changed or that they would rather have it that you were never born in the first place.
At the end of the day, what so many can't seem to understand is that our autism is heavily ingrained in shaping who we are and our personalities. That if you could simply 'cure' it, we would effectively be altered to such an extent that we would be replaced with someone entirely different. Trying to change who we are would mean destroying us and replacing us with a 'correct' human. And since its looking more and more likely that autism is indeed something that can never be cured, but instead something that can only be managed with proper care and support, the tide is turning to where its being considered better if we were simply kept from existing all together. My condition does not make me suffer, it is a society rejecting autistic people and leaving us to struggle alone and without support that is causing us to suffer.
At the end of the day, we need people to stop speaking over us and our experiences. It's this constant discounting of our lived experiences, often by using other autistic people who can't necessarily speak for themselves, as a means to silence us. It's helping to cause this frightening shift where it's slowly being decided that it might be better for us to not exist at all. So many of us are left isolated and unable to find help or the support we need, and rather than work to improve that, people would prefer to just double down on dangerous rhetoric. Our disorder doesn't mean that we don't deserve to exist or that we would be better off never being born. We are different, not broken, and our lives have just as much value as anyone. If you are not autistic, think before you talk about these matters and how hurtful and potentially dangerous propagating these ideas are for us.
