Over-valuing certain abilities means looking down on people who don’t share them. Aspie supremacy is the ideology that follows from taking this to an extreme: ‘aspies’ have extraordinary powers which not only make their existence worthwhile, but make them better than other people.
Autistic people are a vulnerable community, and as stakeholders in the Spectrum 10K debate, we deserve full and transparent engagement. We cannot allow the scientific process to continue in a direction that results in elimination of other autistic people, only for researchers to express regret when the inevitable outcomes occur.
For the most part, autistic people and our families do not want funds to be used on genetic research, and would prefer them to be used to focus on services and societal interventions that can impact the wellbeing, quality of life, and mental health of autistic people across the lifespan.
Recently my teen autistic son and I walked around a fancy shopping center, while his sibling was at a nearby appointment (public strolls are not always something he can do, but that day he was up for it). We ambled past the coin collector’s shop and the jodhpurs boutique, then popped into the housewares store—just
