Azeen Ghorayshi

And they emphasized that many of these traits, instead of being seen as pathologies, they could be seen as just differences.

You know, sometimes they even referred to them as superpower, that they could be things that made a person, an autistic person, see the world in a different way that was actually really valuable to society.

Mark Zuckerberg's sister is quoted as saying that, you know, to succeed in the technology industry, you need a little bit of the RIS and a little bit of the TIS.

RIS being charisma and TIS being autism.

downstream from the efforts of those early activists was just a broader awareness and embrace of autism in society.

You have that at the level of Elon Musk going on Saturday Night Live and saying at the time that he had an Asperger's diagnosis.

There's sort of a cultural embrace of autism that, you know, extends to media and TV.

We have, you know, the Big Bang Theory.

Love on the Spectrum.

Me too.

We have a character with autism on Sesame Street.

So it's really this movement away from stigmatizing autism and being in some cases proud of autism as a label.

Yeah, I think this is all really a victory for the neurodiversity movement.

And the stigma begins to fade so much that for a lot of families, it actually becomes desirable in some ways to have a diagnosis for your kid if they have some of these struggles.

It actually becomes a way for them to be validated and again, be able to access resources that might be able to help them.

But all of these changes, the increase in diagnoses and the really increased awareness, all of this ends up leading to a lot of unintended consequences for the autism community itself.

So while broadening the tent did expand access to help for a huge number of people, it also brought in many different kinds of people with disabilities.

many different kinds of needs.

And that has raised these tensions over which of those needs get prioritized in a world where there's a really limited pile of resources to help.

And there's two really big areas where we see this.