Laura McKenna:

Has the Neurodiversity Movement Forgotten The Most Disabled and Their Parents?

When Ian was three, the local school district sent him to a neurologist to see why he couldn’t talk. After a few background questions for me about my pregnancy and his birth, she turned to Ian, and said, “okay, let’s see what’s going on here.” She pulled out a wooden puzzle with a dozen barnyard animals and dumped them on ground. I smiled and said, “wait until you see this.” 

Ian glanced down at the puzzle pieces of the cow and the dog, picked up one by the little peg, and slapped into the wooden puzzle board without hesitating or jiggling the piece to fit it into place. Slap. And it was in. And then he did it again and again. Fast and perfect, without looking at us once to register our reaction and without any comments at all. I handed him a candy reward.

“Wow,” said the neurologist. At the end of the appointment, she said that he couldn’t talk because he was smart. (Yes, doctors really did say that twenty years ago.) As we later learned, Ian is smart, and he’s also autistic. But autism looks differently in every person, and few have Ian’s combination of strengths and weaknesses. 

In a viral article for The Free Press — Bari Weiss’s substack — Jill Escher writes that the neurodiversity movement, which celebrates autism and normalizes it, has done real damage to her family. Escher say that those autism advocates do not speak for her or her two profoundly autistic adult-children, completed derailed the effort to find causes of autism, and distracted from the real desperate need to create programs for adults with autism. 

The neurodiversity movement, which gathered steam in 2010, maintains that autism is not a disability, but a feature of normal human variation, and in some cases, an evolutionary advantage. I once joked described that this movement should be renamed, Woke Autism, but they’ve been very successful in reshaping the terms of the debate and even transformed advocacy at the mega-foundation, Autism Speaks.