...So, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood up and said he was going to end the autism epidemic, I didn’t get angry right away. I just rolled my eyes. Because I’ve heard it before. That kind of talk always wears concern like a mask, but it stinks of fear. You know the type, it sounds like care, but it’s not for us. It’s about fixing what makes people uncomfortable.

He said autistic people wouldn’t pay taxes, wouldn’t hold a job, wouldn’t play baseball, write poetry, go on dates, or even use the toilet on their own. And I sat with that for a moment, trying to figure out who he was even talking about…because that’s not autism…that’s poverty. That’s neglect. That’s what happens when you’re born into a system that never had a place for you to begin with.

The truth is, we do all those things. We work. We fall in love. We write. We pay our bloody taxes. One of us even played professional baseball. The list of things we do isn’t short, it’s just not your list. We don’t need fixing. We need a system that stops confusing difference with failure.

What Kennedy is doing here is problematising. It’s what people have always done when they don’t understand something, they turn it into a problem. They make it sound like a crisis. And then they offer themselves as the solution. It’s a setup. Autism isn’t an epidemic. It’s not a tragedy. You don’t cure people like us. It’s not something you catch like a virus. It’s a way of being. And it’s not going away.

He’s not even talking to us. He’s talking about us, around us, over us. Using our existence to tell some bigger story about decline and purity and what went wrong with the world. It’s moral panic dressed up as science.

But there’s something else going on here, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

RFK Jr. has a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia. It affects how he speaks. His voice doesn’t come out smoothly. It strains. Catches. Makes people look sideways. And I wonder if that’s the real root of all this. Because he knows what it’s like to sound different. To feel judged. To be a bit out of sync with the room.

Sound familiar?

But instead of finding empathy in that, standing with people who live that kind of difference every day, he’s built a campaign around erasing it. Around “curing” it. Around pretending that if we just get less shots, the right diet, the right rule, no more fluoride, the difference would disappear.

And that’s projection. That’s what it looks like when someone can’t sit with their own discomfort, so they put it onto other people and call it righteousness.

Because the way he’s behaving, the rigidity, the need for certainty, the obsession with control and purity and order, that is familiar. I’ve seen it in myself. I’ve seen it in the kids I work with. Geez, it’s practically autistic in its own way. But instead of recognising it, owning it, Kennedy turns it outward. He makes difference the enemy. The other. 

That’s the tragedy here. He could have stood with us. He could have said, “I know what it’s like to be different, to be misunderstood, to have to work harder to be heard.” But he didn’t. He picked a fight with the people who are already working the hardest just to be accepted.

So no, RFK, we don’t need your cure. We don’t need your pity or your war stories or your vision of a world scrubbed clean of people like us. We need inclusion. We need support. We need equity.

And to the autistic kids who saw those headlines, who heard someone important say they were a problem to be solved, I see you. You’re not broken. You don’t need to be normalised.

You just need a WORLD that sees you.