Kudos to @chavisory for writing this. The reduction of any strong convictions an autistic person may have to "just rigidity" isn't just an oversimplification.

It's dangerous. It makes it far easier for others to dismiss us when we say "This is wrong."

(Also, something inside me died a little when I saw one autistic person refer to their own defense of a fellow student against a mean teacher as "displaying cognitive rigidity".)

An idea I don't have the spoons to manage but would gladly contribute to:

A 30-day blog where each day, a different autistic person over 30 writes about what they want younger autistic people to know about autism history.

And an instagram or tumblr account that shares posts and quotes from the blog to get them seen by more people.

There's so much I want younger autistics to understand about autism history and about disability rights. But I can't do it alone.

One difficult thing about being a burned-out 30-something autistic advocate in 2025 is seeing the community go backwards and forget its past in so many ways (I saw an autistic person on instagram using "split the spectrum" as a hashtag and I just *cannot*; we went over this a decade ago!), but being too tired to form the right words about what's happening.

I say it often, but...

Someday I'd like to see a study of autistic kids who hit speech milestones significantly earlier than average.

Both because I've seen it often enough "in the wild" that I don't think it's just a coincidence when an autistic toddler sounds like a mini-adult, and because it's worth learning how precocious speech might mask social communication difficulties, processing differences, and emotional delays.

Also because it's worth investigating whether precocious speech often causes an autistic child to be diagnosed late (I suspect yes), or to be denied needed supports even after diagnosis (probably also yes).

I know I've said it so often that I sound like a broken record, but...

The autistic community needs to have more, and deeper, conversations about how the misogynistic, gender essentialist way autistic girls were talked about by "experts" in the 2000s and early 2010s helped pave the way for the rampant discrimination that autistic trans and gender-nonconforming people still experience.

It was very common for girls' "social skills" books and materials of that era to force performative femininity on autistic girls to "help" them fit in. (Lisa Iland's "Girl to Girl Advice" in the somehow award-winning 2006 edition of Asperger's and Girls is an egregious example of how accepted this was.)

I've said this before too, but we could fill a Neurotribes-sized book with all the ways misogyny and queerphobia have been present in "expert advice" about and for (and sometimes even by ) autistic women and girls.

I know I've said this recently, but I really miss the autistic blogosphere.

I miss conversations about autism being free and accessible, not scattered across four or five different login-walled platforms. I miss them being organized by day and month, rather than buried by an algorithm or a too-fast timeline.

Can we (not just autistic people, but the world in general) collectively make blogging a thing again?