Autism is a disability, HOWEVER I am autistic and if anybody DARED offer me a cure for my autism, I would tell them to take a long walk off a short plank and if anybody cured me of my autism, I would buy a length of hose and connect one end of it to the exhaust pipe of my car and you can imagine the rest. Why? Because I would NOT be the same person if I wasn't autistic.

A bully at school said to me, "Imagine if you had a bump on the head and you changed." No, thank you! The little bastard later deliberately aimed a softball at my head!

I like the person I am. And there's something else that people need to consider. If an autistic person doesn't communicate verbally, unless you ask them what they want and they can communicate it, you are ASSUMING you know what they want, or imposing your will upon them.

I liken it to this. I knew a man who was extremely racist, and after his mother died, his sister, who was not racist, told him that their great-grandfather was Chinese. He lived for another 28 years, and he would have probably been content to not know that his great-grandfather was Chinese, and he didn't soften his attitude. Knowing this man well enough, if you had asked him where his ancestors were from, he would have either answered that he didn't know and wasn't interested or denied his Chinese ancestry. Having said that, though, you couldn't have looked at him and said, "You've got Chinese ancestry, haven't you?"