I’ll be honest (and this is me being on the outside even of my own group yet again): I feel like pieces like this one seem to work really hard to pretend being autistic merely can be difficult but never truly challenging for both the autistics themselves and for the people around them.
But what really bothers me is that innocent people are being endangered and abused based on what amounts to little more than overly simplistic and alarmist fiction. The autism that terrifies these parents and guardians is as divorced from the realities of autistic life as their methods are from actual science.
It’s not a “fiction”, for example, that circumstances exist in which the inclination toward self-injurious behavior on the part of an autistic person is high. Not acknowledging those sorts of realities even while rightfully judging panic and pseudoscience doesn’t help the dynamic in which some segments of the “autism parent” community think that neurodiversity advocates are living in a fantasy world.
That doesn’t mean the junk science of anti-vax zealotry or “bleach therapy” isn’t dangerous, insulting, or even immoral. It doesn’t mean we have to be accepting of arguments for a “cure”.
It just means that when autistic people who can communicate well to a public audience and who can go about their lives more or less independently don’t even acknowledge how scared or confused a parent might be at the prospect of having an autistic child fitting, say, a severely self-injurious stereotype, it seems nearly as blinkered a take as what they’re critiquing.
Prospective “autism parents” should vaccinate their children, and shouldn’t pour bleach into their children’s orifices, and if they do these things anyway they should in no uncertain terms be judged, publicly.
But it’s weird that communicative autistics seem so uneasy about acknowledging how challenging raising some autistic children might be, given how nerve-wracking raising any child can be.
Respecting fears, so often born of an initial ignorance, is not the same as accepting harm. It’s not giving aid and comfort to some sort of quiet eugenic pogrom to tell nervous parents that we seethem while also helping them see that being autistic doesn’t have to be a nightmare.