The Auld Skald's Fudgel

The Hard Hello – “Come to Mama”

Oh, hello there, Secretary Kennedy.

You don’t know me. But that’s never stopped men like you from speaking over women like me.

I’m an autistic woman, in Australia, thankfully. I’m 53 years old, diagnosed at 51. But let’s be clear: I’ve been autistic my whole goddamned life. The diagnosis didn’t create me. It just confirmed what I already knew.

I’ve lived. I’ve loved. I’ve grieved. I’ve held dying hands and still cooked dinner. I’ve spent years in senior roles—occupational health and safety, environmental management, quality systems. All in service of one thing: the prevention of harm.

Not sure you’re familiar with that concept.

And let me be very clear, Secretary Kennedy—you weren’t talking about people like me.

I’ve got words, thanks to autistic hyperlexia. I’ve got a blog, thanks to autistic hypergraphia. I’ve got fire in my belly, thanks to an autistic sense of justice. I research and learn relentlessly, thanks to an autistic need for cognition.

I’ve got everything you fear in a neat little paragraph—and I use it all.

But you? You weren’t targeting me. You were targeting my passengers, my autistic kin—Ava, Milo, Rafi, Imani, and Tilly.
All autistic children and teens with high support needs. The ones who don’t have the language, the access, or the platform to fight back. The ones you framed as burden, as lost cause, as less-than.

Ava, whose smile lights up rooms.
Milo, whose music can still a storm.
Rafi, who carries trauma no ten-year-old should know.
Imani, who writes with assistive tech because her thoughts are too alive for silence.
Tilly, who brings joy to little kids with nothing but her presence and spark.

You weren’t speaking truth. You were erasing theirs. So I’ve got a recommendation for you, Secretary Kennedy.

Detox. But not the kind you peddle in press conferences.

I’m talking about a stay in a proper sanatorium. One of Asclepius’ model—you know, the kind where healing wasn’t forced, but invited. A place where dreams mattered, where silence wasn’t feared. A place where healing meant restoration of the self—not conformity to a standard.

Because let me be clear: I wouldn’t wish the modern medical model on anyone. Not even you.

But maybe, if you spent some time being quiet—truly quiet— you might hear something besides the sound of your own fear.

Until then, you don’t speak for me. And you sure as hell don’t speak for us.

This is not a come to Jesus. This is come to Mama.

---

We Are Not Broken.

We see your eugenics.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood behind a podium this week and told the world that autistic people are incapable. In his words, we will never pay taxes, never hold jobs, never date, never use a toilet without assistance. He called autism an epidemic. He framed autistic lives as tragedy.

This is not a misunderstanding. It is not a slip of the tongue. It is a deliberate construction; a worldview that reduces human beings to a list of what they cannot do, and then calls that list science. This is not policy. This is dehumanisation with a necktie.

We are not broken. We are not less. We are not your cautionary tale.

Autism is not a defect to be pitied—it is a divergence to be understood. It is not a disease. It is not a tragedy. It is a valid way of being in the world, with its own logic, its own rhythm, its own internal brilliance. We are not failed versions of some imaginary norm. We are not broken horses. We are zebras—different by design.

You call us incapable because you refuse to see us fully. You imagine only the children, and only through your lens of fear. You do not see the adults we have become—the workers, the artists, the caregivers, the scientists, the parents, the thinkers. We speak, or we do not. We stim, or we mask. We love. We create. We survive systems that were never built with us in mind. That is not incapacity. That is resilience.

Your words do not describe our lives. They erase them.

We are not waiting for a cure. We are waiting to be heard. We are waiting for our humanity to be recognised without condition. We are waiting for people in power to stop using our existence as a talking point and start listening to our voices.

And now, let’s speak plainly—because under your rhetoric lies something far older, and far more dangerous. This is not concern. This is eugenics.

You dress it up with environmental language, with graphs and talking points, but we see the shape of it. It is the same shape it always has been.

You speak of prevention—not of suffering, but of us. You describe a world improved by our absence. You imply that a society without autistic people would be a cleaner, better world. That is not reform. That is extermination by slow policy. That is eradication through shame, and erasure through fear. Because you fear that we will not contribute fully to our capitalist society.

Do not pretend this is compassion. It is control. It is the logic of white coats and sterilised rooms, of institutions and forced compliance. We know that history. Some of us were nearly swallowed by it.

You fear what you cannot measure. You condemn what you cannot cure. And in doing so, you expose not our limitations, but yours.

Let us be clear: we do not need your pity. We do not need your fear masquerading as care. We need space. We need support. We need to define our lives on our own terms. And we are already doing it, with or without your approval.

You say we are incapable. We say: you are irrelevant.

You say we are limited. We say: your imagination is.

We are autistic. We are divergent. We are here.

And we are done with you talking down our HSN kin.