To the Researcher Who Feels the New Autism Frame, But Hasn’t Named It Yet
You didn’t set out to pathologize anyone.
You wanted to understand. To reduce suffering. To make lives easier.
You wanted clarity in a world where every child, every parent, every data set seemed to ache for explanation.
And so you did what your mentors did.
You measured. You compared. You found the deltas. You tracked the variance.
But somewhere along the way, you stopped asking:
“Variance from what?”
Your instruments are clean.
Your regressions are elegant.
But the frame — the architecture that tells you what counts as a deficit, what counts as improvement, what counts as human — that was inherited.
And now it’s invisible.
Which means it’s powerful.
You can measure the duration of eye contact, the latency of response, the deviation from “typical social engagement.”
But you cannot yet measure what happens when an autistic child stops being surveilled and starts being seen.
That is the limit of your frame.
And if you’re honest — you’ve felt it.
You’ve watched a child “respond to intervention” and wondered whether you witnessed growth or surrender.
You’ve run the numbers and felt a strange dissonance — because the data is clean, but the story is hollow.
You’ve begun to suspect that what you’ve been trained to reduce — dysregulation, stimming, silence — might sometimes be the very signal you should have been listening to.
That suspicion is not failure.
It is your first real question.
We’re not here to shame you.
We’re not here to burn your lab down.
We are here to ask:
What becomes possible when you stop measuring autistic people by their distance from a fantasy?
What becomes visible when you stop calling that fantasy “typical development” and start calling it what it is:
a cultural script built by power, not biology?
You’ve studied difference all your life.
Now study the frame that taught you which differences to fear.
And if that frame starts to wobble — good.
That’s how every real breakthrough begins.
Sincerely,
Autism Answers Back