...so, surely by now we can agree this joke has gone too far. An Elderly President, a Kennedy heir, and a daytime TV doctor lined up like prophets of doom, declaring they have “found the cause” of autism. Panadol, vaccines, mothers who did not do it right. Cue the applause. If this were a train carriage, he would be the man everyone avoided, muttering about miracle cures while chewing on conspiracy fumes.

And yet there they are with cameras rolling, as if this performance deserves airtime. It is not only embarrassing, it is dangerous. Because people believe them. Parents believe them. Communities shape their fears around these soundbites.

The numbers game makes it sound convincing. Once one in 30,000, now one in 36. Proof, apparently, that something sinister is at work. Except the only thing that changed was our ability to see. The criteria widened, awareness grew, the tools sharpened. People who were invisible before are finally counted. What they call an epidemic is recognition, not disease.

History tells a different story. Ancient Greek texts describe children who lived in silence, unmoved by social rhythms. Medieval chronicles record innocents who could not conform to village life. Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Rousseau wrote about childhood as something imperfect that needed shaping into form (Locke, 1693/2002; Rousseau, 1762/2009). They did not have the word autism, but they noticed people who did not fit the mould.

When I studied Sociology we called them moral entrepreneurs. The people who define what is normal, label the rest deviant, and then sell the cure (Becker, 1963; Sercombe, 2010). That is exactly what is happening now. Autism becomes their stage set. We become their proof.

I know what it feels like to be proof. For most of my life I wore a mask. Not something you take off at night, but a constant performance. Mimicking, scripting, translating myself into whatever the situation required. Every smile calculated. Every word rehearsed. It worked, but it nearly hollowed me out.

When the diagnosis came, it was not a curse. It was translation. Suddenly the exhaustion, the intensity of focus, the permanent sense of being out of step had a name. Autism. I was not defective. I was understood. That shift matters. Without language, decades believing you are broken. With it, the possibility of breathing again.

So when I hear public figures declare people like me a contagion, it is more than insulting. It corrodes. It tells adults diagnosed late, children struggling at school, and parents searching for clarity that autism is a problem waiting to be erased.

I see the fallout every week in my work with young people. On basketball courts, in classrooms, out in the community. They shine when allowed to be themselves. They shrink when forced to mask. Parents whisper that their child is broken, because they have heard the same sermon from pulpits and podiums. As Foucault (1977) pointed out, power creates categories and then polices them. Autism becomes a problem not because of what it is, but because of how it is framed.

There are other stories too. A teenager called defiant discovering that what adults named defiance was self-advocacy. A child written off as a burden realising that their way of seeing the world is a strength. These moments prove autism does not need a cure. What needs curing is society’s obsession with sameness.

The tragedy has never been autism. The tragedy has been erasure. Generations hidden in institutions, silenced in families, pushed to the margins of public life. Care often meant containment. Love was conditional. Policy wore the mask of compassion. Always the same result: autistic people removed to make others comfortable. As I’ve written elsewhere, difference too easily gets framed as risk, as if deviation itself is the problem rather than the structures around it (Humphreys, 2021, 2022).

And still the microphones hum. Their words carry further than facts. Parents, exhausted and frightened, listen. Politicians score points. Meanwhile autistic people hear something else. We hear that our lives are negotiable. That our difference is pathology.

Here is the truth. Autism is not a plague. It is not caused by Panadol, vaccines, or parenting styles. It is part of human variation. It has always been part of human variation.

You can trace us in scripture, in folklore, in monasteries and universities. You can find us in families, workplaces, classrooms. Not as errors, not as epidemics, but as people.

Trump and his cronies are wrong. Their circus is tired, their numbers hollow, their cures empty. Autism does not need eradication. It needs respect.

References

Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1975)

Humphreys, R. (2021). Risk and restraint: How we frame young people [Unpublished student essay]. Tabor College.

Humphreys, R. (2022). MAGA, money, and the myth of choice [Unpublished student essay]. Tabor College.

Locke, J. (2002). Some thoughts concerning education (R. W. Cox, Ed.). Routledge. (Original work published 1693)

Rousseau, J. J. (2009). Émile, or On education (A. Bloom, Trans.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1762)

Sercombe, H. (2010). Youth work ethics. SAGE Publications.