Category Archives: Autism

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:

1. • 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.

   • 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.

   • Moderate challenges: consistently fewer difficulties than the other groups across all measured domains, though still differing significantly from non-autistic profiles.

   • Broadly affected: high scores across most domains, with elevated rates of co-occurring conditions and developmental delays.

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.

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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

Imagine you believe something to be true and make a decision based on that belief, a decision that has an enormous negative impact on someone else.

Now imagine you later discover the truth is something quite different from what you believed. How would you correct your mistake?

Sometimes we can feel certain of our decisions because we feel certain of the “facts” we used to make them. That certainty can come from trusting the person who is the source of the “facts” or because the “facts” align with our existing beliefs and biases. In neither case have we actually verified the “facts.”

This flawed reasoning is an example of what I call a calculus of ignorance.

A calculus of ignorance is a method of reasoning or decision-making that operates on false, incomplete, or unverified information. Even if the logical steps are internally consistent, the conclusions can be deeply flawed because the framework relies on premises shaped by misinformation, bias, or misplaced trust. The danger lies in the certainty such a system can inspire, masking the fragility of its foundations and amplifying the harm of the decisions it produces.

As a mathematician, I am a creature of logic, and as such, I am acutely aware of the importance of verifying the truth of anything I use as a basis for my decisions.

In the real world, the desire to verify truth underpins the legal and ethical principle of natural justice, which requires decisions affecting someone’s rights or legitimate interests to be made fairly.

Natural justice is framed around two important rules:

1. The right to be heard: Before a decision is made that could negatively affect you, you must be told the case against you and be given a fair opportunity to respond, to address the evidence, make arguments, and bring forward your own information.

2. The right to an unbiased decision-maker: No one should decide a matter if they have a personal interest in the outcome, have prejudged the issue, or could reasonably be perceived as lacking impartiality. This standard includes not only actual bias but also the reasonable apprehension of bias.

A calculus of ignorance is antithetical to natural justice. Natural justice requires open, impartial processes in which allegations are disclosed, evidence is tested, and those affected are given a meaningful opportunity to respond.

In the case I described in my previous post, an autistic drag artist I called Zuri was excluded by one of Vancouver’s oldest charitable societies (‘the Society’) through a closed and opaque process. The Society refused to disclose the alleged concerns, withheld the identities of many of the individuals the decision-makers claimed to have “consulted,” and declined to engage with Zuri in any way. The result was a decision untethered from tested fact and based in a calculus of ignorance built entirely on unverified and undisclosed premises, yet carried out with complete certainty and producing a profound, damaging outcome.

For autistic people, the dangers of such an unfair process are amplified. Autistic individuals are often judged not on the substance of their concerns, but on their affect, which is the visible ways they express emotion, on their autistic perceptions and ways of understanding the world, and on their autonomic storms (commonly called “meltdowns”), which are involuntary responses to intense stress. These responses, rooted in neurology rather than intent, are frequently misinterpreted as evidence of unreliability, unreasonableness, or bad character. This is particularly true for autistic people who are high-masking, so exhausting themselves by trying to hide the true nature of their autism. When such misinterpretations form the unexamined “facts” in a calculus of ignorance, they serve to dismiss the autistic person’s truth and to undermine their credibility without ever addressing the real issues at hand.

Layered into this is a persistent form of ableism: the accusation that autistic people are “using their autism as an excuse.” Such claims distort reality. When autistic people speak about their autism in these contexts, they are not evading responsibility. They are attempting to foster understanding by explaining how they perceive, process, and respond to the world, and how these differences can affect interactions. Framing these efforts as “excuses” dismisses the legitimacy of their experiences, erases the impact of disability, and shuts down the very dialogue needed to build mutual respect and equitable participation.

Beyond the Society’s formal decision, there has been a sustained whisper campaign, including the spreading of so-called “facts” that are untrue, believed to be carried out by individuals closely associated with the Society, some of whom operate their own drag-related businesses. This conduct amplifies the harm far beyond the initial exclusion. It undermines Zuri’s professional reputation, creates a chilling effect on future performance opportunities, and entrenches false and prejudicial narratives within the broader drag community, including in venues that regularly host drag shows in Vancouver. Those engaging in this behaviour may feel justified, but that justification rests on a calculus of ignorance and therefore lacks any sound foundation.

The BC Human Rights Code is directly engaged. Unfounded and ableist narratives have taken root, entrenching discriminatory stereotypes, undermining the credibility of autistic self-advocacy, and causing tangible harm to dignity, self-respect, and professional opportunity.

At its core, this is not only about one exclusion or one individual from Vancouver’s drag community. It is about the dangers of allowing decisions to be made using a calculus of ignorance, where secrecy replaces transparency, assumption replaces fact, and bias replaces fairness. Natural justice exists to prevent precisely these kinds of harms, and the BC Human Rights Code reinforces that protection when discrimination is at play. When we fail to confront unfounded narratives and ableist stereotypes, we do more than harm one person: we damage the integrity of our communities. The work of building fair, inclusive spaces requires that we replace ignorance with truth, suspicion with dialogue, and prejudice with respect.