We are living at a very exciting time — a time of great hope for autistic people and their families. Society is on the brink of a major transformation in its understanding of autism and other developmental disabilities, and everyone on the leading edge of this transformation — whether they’re a teacher, a policymaker, a disability-rights advocate, the parent of a child on the autism spectrum, an autistic person themselves, or several of these things at once — is playing a crucial role at this long-awaited turning point in history.
We’re evolving as a society from viewing people with autism merely as checklists of deficits and dysfunctions — seeing them solely through the lens of pathology, only in the light of the things they can’t do or struggle to do — to viewing autism as another way of being human, with its own distinctive strengths and positive attributes as well as profound challenges.