As an Autistic Father of Two Autistic Boys, I Am Mortified by RFK Jr's Take on Neurodivergence
Donald Trump lives by his mentor Roy Cohn’s sacred rules:
1. Attack attack attack
2. Admit nothing, deny everything
3. Always claim victory
The 45th and 47th president’s arrogance can’t help but infect members of an administration convinced that they can do no wrong, and Joe Biden is solely responsible for everything.
People who grew up rich and famous are particularly prone to toxic narcissism. That is quadruply true if they’re members of the Kennedy dynasty.
So I am not surprised that when RFK Jr’s ignorant comments about autism being a preventable tragedy that destroys families, children and lives, costs the neurotypical a fortune, but has a definite, non-genetic environmental cause and cure that he’ll discover within a year received widespread, if not universal criticism from the neurodivergent community, he doubled down.
Talking to hateful FOX News bozo Jesse Watters, the conspiracy theorist whined, “There was a wave of anger against me because I announced that we’re going to find the cause of autism. This is something that President Trump told me on day one: I want to know what’s causing it within a year.”
The crazed narcissist found the criticism “incomprehensible”, complaining, “I mean, why would people not want to know what the cause of autism is? We know it’s an epidemic.”
A human being with a soul and a sense of decency would listen to the community he thinks is afflicted by an almost inconceivably destructive epidemic that, in his mind, will cost the United States “one trillion dollars” by 2035.
RFK Jr. isn’t the listening type. He’s more interested in talking. More specifically, he’s interested in talking over people in the neurodivergent community when we try to tell him that his words and actions are causing incredible pain.
The enduring shame of the Kennedy family sees autism in apocalyptic terms, as an epidemic that, in his words, “dwarfs the COVID epidemic…because COVID killed old people.”
Robert F. Kennedy’s awful son isn’t interested in helping people living with the difficult reality of autism; instead, he’s intent on being the hero who will prove the entire medical establishment wrong by finding the mysterious environmental toxin responsible for the increase in autism diagnoses.
WE KNOW WHAT CAUSES AUTISM! It’s genetic and hereditary. You know how it is genetic? Because 75 percent of my immediate family is autistic. If it’s not genetic, then that is a CRAZY coincidence, the kind you find in most families with autistic children.
It’s possible that we were all exposed to the same mysterious environmental toxin decades apart or got the same vaccines, but the more obvious answer is that autism is genetic, and I passed my genes onto my autistic sons.
WE KNOW WHY AUTISTIC CASES HAVE INCREASED EXPONENTIALLY. It’s because there is far more awareness of autism now than there was in previous generations.
I know firsthand. I’ve been bipolar and had AuDHD all my life. I’ve been in therapy since I was a kid, and grew up in a therapeutic group home, but I had no idea that I was not neurotypical until deep into middle age.
When I was a kid, autism was the Rain Man disease, and I didn’t see any of myself in Raymond Babbitt. That’s not true now.
That’s because people weren’t widely tested when I was a child in the 1980s. My autism was seen as depression, introversion, anxiety, social awkwardness, and a response to trauma.
My wife, who works as a therapist with neurodivergent children and families, knew that I was autistic before I did. It took having two autistic sons, paying about a thousand dollars, and waiting about a year to get tested to confirm, conclusively, that I had AuDHD when I was 48 years old.
The answers are out there. Trump loves to brag about his common sense and how it guides his actions. I’ve just outlined the common-sense reasons for an increase in autism diagnoses.
RFK Jr. rejects these facts because they do not conform to his paranoid conception of the world as filled with sinister secrets where the truth is violently suppressed by a wicked establishment intent on retaining unholy power.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services thinks that he understands autism better than autistic people. He thinks he understands autism better than doctors who have devoted their lives to studying autism. He thinks he understands autism better than the autistic community.
He sees us as sheep too brainwashed by big pharma to appreciate his efforts to find the chemtrails causing autism. RFK Jr. thinks we’re ingrates who will feel differently once he finds the cure for autism and ends what he sees as a Bubonic plague-level epidemic.
We’re telling him how we feel as loudly and clearly as possible, and he’s putting his hands over his ears and screaming as loudly as he can that he’s not listening.
RFK Jr. talks about autism in apocalyptic terms. He has called it a “tragedy” and insisted, “Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children.”
Autism doesn’t destroy families. Ignorance about autism destroys families. Not listening to autistic people when they tell you who they are and what they need destroys families. Being treated like pariahs destroys families. Believing that avoiding gluten and processed food will cure autism destroys families by giving them false hope in an easily disproven lie.
Autism has not destroyed my family. Devoting our lives to caring for two wonderful autistic children has brought my wife and me closer.
I love my wife now more than I did when we got married, not just because she is an amazing mother, but because she is specifically a wonderful mother to autistic children, having devoted her life to helping the neurodivergent community.
She loves and accepts me with all of my imperfections. She knows that there are a lot of things that I cannot do, but also that autism can be a blessing.
My enduring contribution to pop culture, language, and society will be coining the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl. This archetype existed for decades before me, but it took the pattern recognition of an autistic man in 2007 for it to be given a name and definition. It’s not coincidental that both sides of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl equation—quirky, unconventional dream girls who exist in their own world and don’t care about convention, or expectations, and the depressed, introverted men who love them—are heavily codified as neurodivergent.
My autistic obsessiveness and pattern recognition have served me well as a pop culture writer. Without them, I would not have written an obsessive, 500-page guide to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s life’s work or The Fractured Mirror, my 524-page exploration of EVERY AMERICAN NARRATIVE MOVIE ABOUT FLMMAKING RELEASED DURING THE LAST CENTURY.
It disgusts me that RFK Jr. might look at my six-year-old, who comes close to fitting his criteria for severe or profound autism, and see a family-destroying tragedy and not a wonderful child who fills his family, both nuclear and extended, with joy.
My son had a significant speech delay and wasn’t toilet-trained until he was about five. My wife and I have devoted our lives to helping him through any means possible. That means spending a fortune on camps and therapy and taking part in as many events as possible, even if it makes things more difficult and complicated for us.
It takes a village to raise an autistic child, or two. My wife’s family has been an enormous help in the raising of our boys. They’re tremendously fortunate in that they have grandparents who couldn’t be more generous or compassionate.
Our youngest son’s speech therapist is a beloved part of our family. She realized early on that my son is what is known as a Gestalt Language Processor, which means he has a unique relationship with language and speech compared to other children. She understands that autistic children are different, and that understanding and embracing those differences is the key to effective treatment.
But we also benefit from the help the government used to offer. For example, my wife fought for years to have our youngest child included in the Katie Beckett waiver. It’s a Medicaid program that assists families like ours, which could be cut to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
Thanks to Trump and his army of enablers, the government has gotten out of the helping people business and into the hurting people business.
An administration that has declared war on diversity, equity, and inclusion cannot be trusted with the care of neurodivergent children.
We deviate from the norm. Rather than try to help us with a condition that is unfathomably complex in both good and bad ways, RFK Jr. is about to embark on a Quixotic campaign to find a cure that doesn’t exist and a mysterious cause THAT WE ALREADY KNOW but that he refuses to accept.
RFK Jr. talks about autistic children with pity, disgust, and condescension but no empathy or compassion, as a blight on society, a horrible problem that must be solved
In a bizarrely melodramatic move, RFK Jr described children with what he terms severe autism as “kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date.”
He seems to think that children like that are beyond help, but that he can ensure a glorious, autism-free future after he finds the cause and cure.
He seems to feel that if someone can’t pay taxes or hold a job, then they have no value to society or their families.
I’m here to say that’s bullshit. If my younger son doesn’t eventually get a job or pay taxes, he still has tremendous value to us and to society. His worth as a human being is not dependent on his behaving neurotypically or making money.
We’re not trying to get him to behave like everyone else; we’re trying to give him the best, happiest, most productive, and joyful autistic life possible.
RFK Jr. is going to use money that could help families like mine deal with the reality of autism to fund studies that will support his conception of autism as a preventable plague that must be obliterated for society’s sake before it unforgivably inconveniences the neurotypical further.
The shittiest Kennedy announced plans for an autism registry that chills me to the bone. Nothing good can come of that demented ghoul having access to me and my children’s medical records.
Autism is complex. It’s not innately good or bad. It’s complicated. It’s a mischievous gremlin that makes my life more difficult and a gift that has enabled me to do great things.
I don’t write many poems, but I have finished my ninth and tenth books. That’s not bad! My eleventh or twelfth will be about autism. I suspect that it will be my best and most important book.
Autism is a powerful bond that I share with boys who mean more to me than anything in the world, and a wife I love more than life itself, and every other autistic person and parent/relative of someone on the spectrum.
I will be the first to concede that life as an autistic parent of multiple autistic children is difficult. RFK Jr’s decidedly Trumpian combination of arrogance and ignorance is going to make it much harder.
This isn’t about politics. It’s about morality, or rather immorality, and the need for us to shout our truth so loud that the Trump administration can’t help but hear us.
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