A few weeks ago, during a phone call between the autistic drag artist Zuri and a senior drag artist, the conversation shifted sharply.
What could have been a genuine exchange turned into a monologue in which Zuri was berated. Every attempt by Zuri to talk about their actual lived experience of autism in the situation being discussed was cut off. Their words did not matter. The other person wasn’t listening. Instead, they were performing certainty.
The call left Zuri shaken and traumatized. It was a familiar script: an autistic person is told, explicitly or implicitly, that their reality is wrong, their reactions are wrong, and the fix is simple: be less autistic.
In human rights law, we work from an effects-based perspective. We don’t have to do the impossible task of getting inside someone’s mind to figure out what they “meant” to say or what their intentions were. We look at what their words and actions actually do. And the effects here — silencing, shaming, and reinforcing exclusion — are damaging.
The Spectrum Isn’t a Volume Control
The popular image of autism as a spectrum encourages the idea that some people are “mildly autistic” and others “highly autistic,” as if there were a single volume knob you could turn up or down.
This is inaccurate. Autism is not a linear scale. It is a set of differences across multiple areas: sensory processing, communication, movement, emotional regulation, attention, and more. Two autistic people can have entirely different profiles of strengths and challenges, and those can vary with context.
Some recent remarkable research published in Nature Genetics (Litman et al., 2025) reinforces this point. Studying a large autism cohort, the authors identified four distinct phenotypic classes, each representing a different pattern of traits rather than a point on a single scale:
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Social/behavioural: high scores in social communication challenges and restricted/repetitive behaviours, along with disruptive behaviour, attention deficit, and anxiety, but without significant developmental delays.
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Mixed ASD with DD: strong enrichment of developmental delays (DD) alongside social challenges, repetitive behaviours, and self-injury, but with lower rates of ADHD, anxiety, and depression.
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Moderate challenges: consistently fewer difficulties than the other groups across all measured domains, though still differing significantly from non-autistic profiles.
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Broadly affected: high scores across most domains, with elevated rates of co-occurring conditions and developmental delays.
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These clusters are driven by different genetic programs, showing that there is no single biological pathway for autism. This research shows it is not “more” or “less” autism, but instead it is different autism.
When we cling to labels like high-functioning / low-functioning, we collapse this complexity into a single dimension and erase the realities of autistic people’s lives.
Masking and Its Costs
Many autistic people mask. They suppress natural behaviours, copy neurotypical social cues, and rehearse conversations. Masking is learned early, often as a survival strategy in environments that punish visible difference.
Pearson and Rose (2021) describe masking as both conscious and unconscious. It is a set of strategies to suppress natural autistic responses and replace them with alternatives in order to be accepted or to avoid negative treatment. They place masking firmly in the context of stigma: a predictable response to a deficit narrative about autism.
Seen in this light, masking is not a quirk of personality or a harmless bit of social polish. Masking is a learned survival skill in a world that often refuses to make space for autistic ways of being. And it comes at a cost: delayed or missed diagnosis, deteriorating mental health, burnout, even suicide attempts.
Masking can make someone appear “less autistic” to others, leading to the dangerous assumption that they could “try harder” and pass as “normal” more often. What goes unseen is the constant energy drain and the erosion of authentic self-expression, creating a burden carried for the comfort of others.
The “Try Harder” Expectation
When someone says “you just need to try harder,” they rarely see how much effort is already being expended. Autistic people work continuously to interpret unclear social signals, manage sensory input, and recover from meltdowns or shutdowns.
A meltdown, which is a state of extreme emotional and behavioural dysregulation, is not a failure of willpower. It is a physiological event, often ballistic in trajectory, and it can take hours to recover from. Afterward, there may be shame, embarrassment, and the emotional labour of explaining autism yet again.
Expecting an autistic person to “work harder” in these circumstances is to misunderstand both the nature of autism and the toll of constant adaptation.
Shifting the Responsibility
The challenge here is not to make autistic people less autistic. The challenge is to make the world less disabling. That means creating environments where masking is not required for participation, where sensory differences are accommodated, and where communication is clear and respectful.
It means valuing ethical clarity and difference of thought rather than seeing them as obstacles. Hartman & Hartman (2024) note that autistic people in workplaces are less prone to moral disengagement, meaning they are more likely to speak up when something is wrong. In environments that value conformity over truth, that integrity is too often misread as being “difficult.”
The demand to “be less autistic” is a demand to carry the entire burden of adaptation. Ethically, that burden must be shared in a community.
Final Thought
From a human rights perspective, we don’t need to prove that someone intended to exclude or silence an autistic person. We only need to see the exclusion and silencing happening and recognize the harm those effects cause.
If we are serious about inclusion, we have to stop treating autism as a volume to be turned down. We must start treating it as a difference to be understood, respected, and accommodated.
Because here’s the truth: in that phone conversation, Zuri didn’t need to be “less autistic.” They needed the space to speak and to be heard. They needed someone willing to set aside their assumptions and listen to what living with autism is really like.
Until that happens, the harm will keep happening. And autistic people will keep paying the cost for other people’s comfort.
References
- Litman, A., Sauerwald, N., Snyder, L.G., Foss-Feig, J., Park, C.Y., Hao, Y., Dinstein, I., Theesfeld, C.L., & Troyanskaya, O.G. (2025). Decomposition of phenotypic heterogeneity in autism reveals underlying genetic programs. Nature Genetics, 57, 1611–1619. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-025-02224-z
- Hartman, L., & Hartman, B. (2024). An ethical advantage of autistic employees in the workplace. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1364691. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1364691
- Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0043