autism at the trait level to develop effective interventions for helping people meet their goals. For example, treating self-injury, cognitive delay, speech delay, etc. rather than “autism” as a whole. This addresses disability directly without pathologizing autistic identity.

even those who have low support needs still have some support needs and are therefore still disabled by autism to some extent. Some don’t like to think of themselves as disabled, but that doesn’t mean support is not needed.

Instead of creating this dichotomy, we should instead strive to understand

Interesting question, Silvaro! I’m actually going to push back a bit here - I don’t think we should create a dichotomy between people to whom neurodiversity applies and those who are “truly disabled” by it. Neurodiversity should apply to even those who are profoundly disabled by their autism. Also,

They do not destroy families. They are not a “horror show” or an “epidemic”. Autistic children *are* beautiful, healthy, and vibrant, just as they are.

5. His rhetoric surrounding autism rewinds #advocacy efforts by at least 40 years, to a time when the appropriate response to an autism diagnosis was for a parent to grieve their “lost” child. Autistic children are not lost versions of a “beautiful, healthy, vibrant child”.

4. The increase in diagnostic rates is largely due to a better understanding of autism, as well as the removal of speech delay and intellectual disability as diagnostic criteria over multiple iterations of the #DSM.

3. Research into the #genetics underlying autism has not fallen short at all. In fact, this research has helped to illuminate the vast complexity of autism genetics.

2. #Vaccines do not cause autism, they do not contain #mercury, and there is no evidence that “spacing them out” is safer. There is evidence that it is more dangerous to do so because children go unprotected.

1. There is no causal link established between #Tylenol and #autism. Discouraging #pregnant women from taking it and from giving it to babies will result in untreated fevers, which (unlike Tylenol) can cause issues with neurodevelopment.

I recently read a paper claiming to address activists’ concerns about ABA, which concluded that the concerns were invalid. A quick Google search of the authors revealed they were all ABA therapists. No COI was declared.

I definitely think so!

This is why we need custom #algorithms that account for #biologicalInteractions in an interpretable way.