Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"And this is where we come to our current Secretary of Health, Robert Kennedy Jr. He points at the increase in children diagnosed with autism as a crisis in need of a solution. He blames vaccines for our “disability,” flying fearlessly away from the current scientific consensus. This is incredibly damaging to us, as individuals and as a community, regardless of age or severity.</p><p>The vast majority of us -- assuming that we don’t also have other, more disabling conditions -- do not want to be seen as suffering from a mistake. We are who we are not because of vaccines or bad mothering. Our existence is a feature, not a bug. Genetics is the primary cause of autism, if you want to understand why it happened to this or that individual. More generally, autism is one of the ways to be human. The idea that autism can be cured or overcome is as insulting as the idea that gay people can be cured or that to be successful women should act more like men. We don’t want to be cured; we want to be accepted and allowed to be who we are. RFK Jr. stands for the opposite of that. Whether he understands it or not, he is guilty of inciting hatred and self-hatred against our community.</p><p>We defy simple categorization. The vast majority of us aren’t intellectually deficient. We have all the emotions and empathize with others. We see allistic social rules and cues, body language and facial expressions, and those linguistic tics and mannerisms that enforce social pecking orders. But other things speak to us more loudly. We’re intensely curious, so we ask indelicate questions. We want to get to the heart of the matter, so we don’t pad our words with softeners. We want the world to make sense, and often go out of our way to make it so, even when those around us don’t notice, care, or do anything about it."</p><p><a href="https://www.theamericansaga.com/p/guest-post-one-autistic-man-explains" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theamericansaga.com/p/guest-po</span><span class="invisible">st-one-autistic-man-explains</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Autism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Autism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Psychology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Psychology</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Neurology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Neurology</span></a></p>