I remember being in a discussion, on Facebook, where a person who has a few mutual friends with me, in my native Australia, said that he was "an eighth Aboriginal" and another person told him that he was being racist and either he was Aboriginal or he wasn't. I defended him and he thanked me and said that at least I understood how the world worked.

There have been right-wing commentators in my native Australia, who have been found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act with comments about Aboriginal people and I refer to a story that I saw whereby a clean and tidy looking Aboriginal man walked into a hair salon and wanted to make an appointment to get his hair cut and the receptionist told him that they didn't cut men's hair anymore. He was okay about it, but when he walked past a few hours later, he saw a man sitting in a chair and he went in and asked the staff about it, and the salon owner said, "Oh, I'm sorry, but my receptionist thought it might have been confronting for the customers to see you in the chair."

I can understand why Aboriginal people find classifications such as "an eighth" offensive, because, while, when my father was growing up amongst Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, nobody really cared if a person had an Aboriginal parent and a European or Chinese parent, but with the Stolen Generation, it was used as a means to identify who to remove from their families and who could pass as European.

I see the same thing when it comes to autistic people and giving functioning labels. In the case of the man who said he was an eighth Aboriginal, I say, what he was basically saying is, "Yes, one of my great-grandparents was Aboriginal." An equally shameful period in Australian history was where the government denied Aboriginal peoples autonomy and agency and had a policy whereby they tried to encourage people who had an Aboriginal parent or grandparent to marry a European not for love, but to reduce the Aboriginality of future generations.

One only needs to look at Nazi Germany to see that even a person with one Jewish grandparent was considered Jewish by Hitler.

I believe that ABA and functioning labels are akin to the Stolen Generation in Australia.

When one examines history of autistics, almost every invention has been made by an autistic person. Marie Curie was believed to be autistic. Alexander Graham Bell is another example. As is Henry Ford. If Henry Ford hadn't thought the way he did, the motor car may have been a toy for the eccentric businessman and not been available to the general public.

I also say that a functioning label does not consider the whole person. So, a person labelled "High Functioning" might be able to work a 9-5 job BUT their typical day might go something like this, "7am: wake up, sniff shirt, if it doesn't smell of sweat, put it on, and trousers, 7:15am: breakfast of corn flakes and yoghurt and a cup of coffee, 7:45am: having washed up, and brushed teeth, heads out of home, 8:45am: arrives at work, 10:45am: morning tea of coffee or tea and snack. 12:30pm: lunch, which could be something from home or fast food, 3pm: afternoon tea, 5pm: finish for the day, 6pm: arrive home with pizza or fast food, as too tired to prepare a meal, 7pm: shower, 8:30pm: crawls into bed exhausted. By weekend, too tired to do anything. And that's the cost of living a neurotypical life when you're not neurotypical.