I remember, when I was 22, my father said to me, "You don't want to have kids. Why?" He then told me that I lacked any human warmth.

Before I knew I'm autistic, I thought to myself, "If I have kids, the thought of having to drop them off on their first day of school really scares me." And the last thing I wanted was for a kid I had to come home in tears because of something that had happened at school that day. I remember having a meltdown at school, in Year Eight, and in retrospect, I wish I could have said to the Deputy Principal, "If you had listened to what my mother asked at the end of last year, we wouldn't be standing here now." My mother asked that I not be put in the same class as a known bully, but it still happened, and she didn't follow it up, so in that sense, it was her fault. On the day of the meltdown, the acting deputy principal tried to tell me that I wasn't completely innocent, to which I wanted to reply, "I didn't go looking for the bully, nor did I call out to him. I was sitting quietly eating my lunch, and he came along and wouldn't leave me alone." I remember, a few months later, he kept following me all lunchtime, and he's a reason I find running footsteps triggering. I had managed to escape from him, and I had sat down to eat my lunch somewhere else, and I heard running footsteps, and they were from him!

I believe that we don't suffer regarding autism, we suffer as a result of other people's attitudes towards autism and from predatory bullies.

This particular bully, also, seemed to treat women as if they were little more than sex objects.

I wouldn't be able to cope with the sensory overload of having kids, and the possibility that I would have a neurotypical kid would make parenthood even more difficult for me. Okay, if I had a partner who was autistic like me, and we had a kid who was autistic like us, we would have a nice little unit, as it would probably be that my partner would be in her room doing her special interest, the kid would be in their room doing their special interest, and I would be in mine doing my special interest and the place would be quiet. Whereas if I had a son who wanted to go to the football, people would probably not think I was much of a father if he said, "My uncle takes me to the football; my father isn't interested." Okay, if a same-sex female couple had a child and their uncle took them to the football, or their biological father had a role in their life and he took them, people would probably say, "Okay, that's nice." I mean, I can sense that my own father was disappointed as he took me to the park to kick a football when I was about one, but I was fascinated by the seagulls. My parents took a photo of me on a beach wearing a yellow jumper being fascinated around a flock of seagulls when I was two.