> This is why autistic adults in recent years have become more vocal insisting "nothing about us without us", i.e. if the researchers want to study autism, the

> This is why autistic adults in recent years have become more vocal insisting "nothing about us without us", i.e. if the researchers want to study autism, the research team should at least include autistic researchers. There are many people out there who probably could get an ASD diagnosis if they wanted to, but (at least for now) they’ve decided they don’t want to go down that path. There are other people who have actually been formally given that diagnosis at some point, but have decided to reject it. Do they potentially count as “autistic researchers”? Personally, I am rather convinced by the criticisms of the scientific validity of the concept of ASD made by authors such as Lynn Waterhouse, Laurent Mottron and Sami Timimi. I think the demeaning of research by “all-allistic” researchers is harmful because people who build an identity for themselves on a label are likely to be unsympathetic towards scientific criticisms of it; and it ignores the fact that “autistic”-vs-not is a continuum divided by a socially constructed boundary. And I say all this as someone who has a significant degree of autistic traits.