The misconception that autism fundamentally disrupts the ability to connect meaningfully with others was once so widespread that the first autistic people to publicly share their experiences being autistic introduced themselves as “recovered” from autism (e.g., Grandin, 1990; Kanner, 1943; Pripas-Kapit, 2020).
After weathering misconceptions about autism for decades, Jim Sinclair, Donna Williams, and Xenia Grant met for the first time in an “autistic space,” free of nonautistic people and their expectations about how people should interact. Together Jim, Donna, and Xenia cofounded the first autistic-led advocacy organization, Autism Network International (ANI) in 1992 (Sinclair, 2010). Within a few years, the ideas sparked by this initially “autistic only” alliance would inspire a dialogue between autistic people and people with and without other conditions that would lay the foundation for a new type of civil rights movement, the neurodiversity movement. The neurodiversity movement challenges deficit-oriented conceptualizations of autism, reframing autism as a valuable minority identity that needs no cure (Kapp, 2020; Kapp, Gillespie-Lynch, Sherman, & Hutman, 2013).