Nothing About Us Without Us; Greta Thuneberg.

Recently, Fox News had to issue an apology after a guest called autistic climate activist Greta Thunberg "a mentally ill child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left." Conservative pundit Michael Knowles doubled down on his remark, saying "there is nothing shameful about living with mental disorders. What is shameful is exploiting a child with mental disorders to advance your political agenda." Once the network's apology was issued and Knowles was banned from appearing on the network again, the media moved on from the incident quickly, but for many of us on the spectrum, the dismissiveness of his remarks felt very familiar. 

To understand why, it's worth examining Knowles' remarks a bit more closely. Setting aside the more blatant ableism of referring to someone on the autism spectrum as "mentally ill" as a means of dismissing their concerns, there's a slightly more insidious element to the rest of the statement. His implication that Thunberg is not genuinely concerned about climate change, and that even if she is, her condition means that she couldn't possible have become an activist without the prodding of able adults with an agenda. That anyone who's been moved by her work is "exploiting a child with mental disorders," shame on them.

Knowles is not alone on the right in dismissing Thunberg on the basis of her autism. Former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka tweeted that her speech at the UN General Assembly on Monday reminded him of "a victim of a Maoist 're-education' camp," and that "the adults who brainwashed this autist [sic] child should be brought up on child abuse charges." The president himself joined in not long after, sarcastically tweeting that "she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future," implying that her rightful place is far, far away from giving a speech at the UN and snubbing him when she visits Washington. It's all too common for autistic people's concerns to be dismissed, regardless of where those concerns come from. That we couldn't possibly understand real, serious issues like that. You should stop perseverating about this because it's annoying us. Go play with your trains, the adults are talking now.

This dismissal hurts more because Thunberg has been vocal about being on the spectrum, and that her diagnosis is in no way incidental to her activism. Where ten years ago, her career as an activist likely wouldn't have gotten off the ground without a million articles about her "overcoming her disability" to lead worldwide movement, today it only ever comes up when someone decides to use it as a means of dismissing her. She's been vocal about describing her condition as a "superpower" that lets her see hypocrisy where that the neurotypical population chooses to ignore because it would be inconvenient to respond to it.

There is a phrase that pops up in disability advocacy circles a lot; "nothing about us without us." It refers to the idea that decisions about a group of people need to involve their input in order to be legitimate. Thunberg's improbable rise to be the face of a movement is that idea in action. The animating idea behind her work is that a radically changing climate will have its worst effects on young people that will inherit a changing Earth, but that the policymakers tasked with fixing it have refused to take their concerns seriously when making decisions. That in order to have real action to fix things, the people most effected by those decisions have to be involved in making them for those decisions to be legitimate. In a world that all too often dismisses autistic people as not capable of having their own opinions, their own lives, she is a living, breathing, speaking refutation of that.