The principal health advisor to the president of the United States trash talks Autism. You bet I have things to say.

16th April 2025. The US Health and Human Services Secretary - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stands to a microphone to describe who autistic children grow up to be:

“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." 

He also refers to autism as a disease. Not much of a research guy, this guy.

The concept of affirming the natural diversity of human brains and nervous systems are far beyond his cognitive reach. Much more of a deficit guy, this guy.

There are so many layers to his lack of awareness, his assumptions and his incorrect conclusions – layers I can pull apart because of my autistic layered thinking.

On poetry.

I’m an autistic adult, and I’m writing – whaaaaat?!

I find myself wondering about the kind of dispassionate, dry, lifeless and supremely limited poetry RFK Jr would produce. As dismally disappointing as the rest of him, to be sure.

I write poetry – but he could never understand it.

The complexity, development and nuance

lost

on a mind so simple

so furrowed and suited -

so closed

and so small.

Like an awe inducing sunset spilling a kaleidoscope of coloured beauty

being witnessed by a tangled kite with no wind.

On sport.

I play sport, and it fills me with a sense of rapture I’m certain this guy will never know.

Three players may be closer to the ball but I’m the one that gets it. Exactly because of my pattern recognition ‘reading the play’. Exactly because of my intense hyperfocus on the ball. That is to say, I bloody love playing sport because of my autism.

On dating.

I can date. There are a few reasons why I consciously choose mostly not to.

Embracing my unmasked autistic identity allows me to drop the facade of having any interest in performing status quo for the sake of status quo. Which, of course, impacts relationships and dating. For me now, someone has to add value to be allowed in, and to stay.

I have a lifelong special interest in the study of human connection, psychology and pattern recognition. This means I no longer doubt what I can see early as an insufficient match.

I also find deep delight in the richness of my own company. In the internal world that I possess which grows from the foundations of my autistic special interests. The beauty of connecting dots and sliding seemingly unrelated pieces together to see the world more clearly. There is an immense amount of joy to be found in my inner world. Many autistic people feel this way.

And isn’t all that threatening to so called men like this guy. That there’s an entire cohort of women and people that will no longer sacrifice themselves to free labour and masking and playing a kind of mother-like subservient role to below average, offer nothing beautiful, so called men like him.

Also: coping with this world in my autistic body and mind takes a huge chunk of my capacity. That’s not a problem with autism. That’s a problem with ableist systems and structures.

On paying taxes.

It’s true. As an autistic woman and mother, I’ll never pay a lot of tax.

But hey, neither will billionaires.

If paying tax equals worth, why not tax those fellas at the top? You know… the ones who’ve hoarded enough dollars on this planet to find frivolous joy in a space trip that lasts around the same unit of time as Taylor Swifts All Too Well (10 Minute Version).

Is our most true and beautiful world measured by each individual worker bees ability to pay tax?

What more interesting metrics could we use to measure the meaning of peoples lives?

How could we honour the rich diversity that exists when we explore what every soul in a human suitcase has to offer?

This is what I think about.

Who’s generating hope, who’s connecting community, who’s fostering safe attachments for the littles. Who’s caring for animals, for oceans, who’s rippling kindness, who’s exploring deep wells of knowledge, who’s advocating, who’s standing up even when their voice shakes.

Who’s finding solutions and who’s here to sit with us when solutions can’t be found.

Who’s creating art. Who’s making us laugh. Who’s making us to feel at home. Who’s feeding all the different parts of us. Who’s working tirelessly to stop wars, to end cruelty and suffering. Who’s regulating the individual and collective nervous system. Who’s creating good mischief. Who’s generating money and then funnelling it with intention.

And doesn’t all that matter more than paying tax?

I won’t be a huge tax payer in my lifetime but the world will benefit from my place within it. I will grow and tend to a veggie garden, and do my best to create new stories to support our health stories. I will be an incredible listener. I will be honest and I will use my voice to say uncomfortable things. I will raise my kids and all the kids around me to have the emotional intelligence, fortitude and compassion to question people who fall upwards into power like this.

And for me, that has come to be enough.

I’ve had to meet and surrender to the grief of not performing capitalist perfection. I’ve had to examine the internal stranglehold success and worth held within me. The ones embedded into the earliest fibers of our being. I’ve had to let them fall away on a million different days in a million different ways.

It’s been quite a painful process, there’s a lot to grieve. And: I have arrived to a place of witnessing my own enoughness.

With a lot of examination, cycles of burnout and compassionate attendance I now see the hamster wheel for what it is. For what it did to me. For what it does to others. And I open to the courage and power it takes to be stand in enoughness for what I offer.

On employment.

Ableism skewers all kinds of folks around employment.

Quick note. This is a systems issue, not an autism issue.

The thing underneath all that he said: On determining the worthiness of a human.

You can’t put all autistic people in one box. And I don’t want my reflections as a late diagnosed, privileged, white, able-bodied, cis woman to stand for anything more than my own autistic experience.

The most important thing I want to say is. All human beings are worthy. As they are.

Those who do not have the ability to write poetry or hit a baseball are worthy. Those who cannot be independent in the ways society drools over wanting individual worker bees to be are worthy. Those who will never pay a cent of tax are worthy. Just as worthy as the person with the microphone, in fact.

Every human deserves care and support and joy and their basic needs be met. To be seen through an affirming lens for all the beautiful things they offer those around them.

This might seem like a flowery positivity washing platitude. It’s not. I say this in recognition of the damaging beliefs and practices around eugenics and the terrifying history of disabled people being targeted.

RFK Jr.

Your status quo markers of sports and dating and taxes and poetry cannot find us.

We’re living an entirely different experience to the one you are, and thank goodness. Yours looks particularly bleak and depressing and sad.

RFK Jr.

Autistic people owe you nothing and equally, we want absolutely nothing from you.

You are not a safe person, an educated person or even a joyful person.

Nothing within you is anything we aspire to.

And yep – you’ve spotted it - that’s some autistic honestly for you right there.

If autistic people had our way, there would never be compassionless, weak, undereducated and ill-informed suits in positions of power talking into a microphone about things they seem almost proud to know nothing about.

RFK Jr. stands amongst a nauseating posse of the same-suit wearing, higher than god, smug authoritarians pretending to be both leaders and men. People of the same uninspired dreary caliber claiming their microphones and from a place of ego declaring things like they ‘don’t know what intersex means’ whilst make laws that effect intersex people.

The world could only dream of having more autistic people in places of power right now. For the passion and life and knowledge depth and humanity and sense of inclusion we would bring with us.

RFK Jr. only being able to see autistic people as failures and loss causes… His defeatist, narrow minded view could never contain the beauty, reflexivity, depth, burning passion, joy, adaptability and pain of the autistic experience.

It is, of course, all more of a reflection of himself than of the autistic community.

Importantly, his failings are not because he is neurotypical. We create bridges to allow curious, compassionate, aware neurotypical individuals into our lived experience every day.

It’s not his neurotype that disallows the truth of the growth and joy and potential here.

It’s because he’s an asshole.

RFK Jr. is the very problem he seeks to unearth.

He speaks about autism destroying families… But you know what destroys families? Polio. And all the other important pieces of science he chooses to dig in against and block his ears about. Like a toddler that never grew up.

His own voice is the dangerous thing.

Leave autistic people alone.

And while you’re at it, in the name of intersectionality, leave migrants, racial minorities, women, gender diverse and intersex and every other marginalised people alone too.

It’s a beautiful sunny day outside and I’ve spent it writing this. I do it to show my passionate support for the whole of the brilliant autistic community, for the willing neurotypical folks who want to understand, and to show my younger self the beauty of all that I am and all I am willing stand up for. I do it for all of the divine and important autistic kids navigating the hellscape of life in a neurotypical world.

Ableism never sleeps, so it’s advocacy on a sunny day until this madness corrects itself.

Our lives are hard enough trying to deal with supermarkets, socks, florescent lighting and surviving a capitalist culture that asks us to swallow our burnout and genuine human needs for a dollar.

We don’t need RFK Jr. with a microphone too.

And directly to RFK Jr. - just one last thing from your speech list remains unaddressed.

Despite us not asking for your assistance with toileting, I can confirm,

you’re giving us all

the absolute shits.

Written by Amy O’Brien (she/her)