If you take away nothing else from this essay I’d like you to take this: one of the core mottos of our community comes from South African disability rights activism: “Nothing About Us Without Us.” If you can keep those five words in your mind when writing about Autistic people your journalism is going to get a lot better.

If you take two things (and let’s be real, I want you to take more than two things but I’m a pragmatist) it’s that you shouldn’t be writing about Autism if you don’t understand the Double Empathy problem, covered below.