I knew a man (unfortunately) who was too racist and too arrogant to understand or accept that without two Eurasian women (his mother and grandmother) and a Chinese man (his great-grandfather) he wouldn't have existed as he was. You couldn't look at him and say, "Oh, yes, I can see that you are part-Chinese," (his hair was soft not coarse) and was grey and had probably been dark brown when he was younger, his eyes were a hazel grey (when he squinted his eyes looked slightly Asian) and his skin was a tan colour (a mixture of natural skin tone, smoking cigarettes heavily, which gave him a yellow tinge, and an outdoor occupation driving trucks). Okay, he didn't know his great-grandfather was Chinese until after his mother died (I suspect, as his sister, who wasn't racist, told his sister and said, "Don't tell him. And I'll know if you do.") and he couldn't choose his forebears, but he chose to be racist. I will say, though, that his grandmother was not conceived as the result of a rape, and nor was she conceived due to a one-night stand. His great-grandfather MARRIED an Irishwoman and they had children.

Would he have been a better person if he wasn't racist? Yes.

Would you be a better person if you weren't autistic? My answer to that question is "No." And I say the same for myself. Why? Well, I might not be a fast runner or a good sportsperson, but I make up for it in other ways. If you weren't autistic, you wouldn't be you. If I wasn't autistic, I wouldn't be able to recall some of the things that I can. If I wasn't autistic, I wouldn't have the deep empathy that I do. And I wouldn't have the friends that I do, either. Why?

Well, the friends that I have know me as a left-wing, social justice warrior. If I talked like a trump supporter, people would probably say, "Who the hell are you and what the hell has happened to you?"

I don't believe the unfounded rot that rheumatoid arthritis is the result of being suppressed; it's caused by genes.

An autistic person is who they are because of their make-up. We all have our struggles, but you rock just the way you are.