TW: suicide. My childcare worker just burst into my home office, bawling. Her best friend just ended his life. He was autistic and 22. This is not an abnormal day for me, and that is a five alarm emergency the world doesn’t care about because autism is an industry to colonize.

Y’all don’t want to listen to us, so you keep your conversion therapy & your puzzle pieces & focus more on stimming & potty training than understanding us. Y’all are contributing to a human rights crisis because you care more about neurotypical comfort than autistic lives.

Like so many people, I imagine his bereaved loved ones are going to be visiting our site to understand him now that it’s too late. Why should I care about this more than you do? Why is there so much effort being invested to get you to even honor the most basic, simple requests?

Use identity-first language. That is the most basic step one. Listen to autistic people. Nope, you won’t. You care more about being polite and bending to the mainstream. You straddle every fence so as to not rock boats. And my people are dying left and right.

And I’m angry. I’m angry all the time because you all invalidate everything— even basic neuroscience— to cling to the status quo. I loved everything about this guy and told my childcare that he was the most heroic person she knew. He was doing everything right, and you aren’t.

And that’s why he’s dead. Because being autistic means 7 billion people can be wrong if it benefits them personally, and they’ll all ignore you for asking them to see how their actions cause life to be too hard for people like me. Today is just another day in autistic advocacy.

Now my childcare worker will carry the weight that I carry when working with my autistic child. She will see the patterns caused by your behaviors and know the future that comes with your unbending dedication to the status quo and being polite over being a responsible human.