 Good day fellow human and welcome back to my channel. My name is Thomas Herney and I make a lot of content around autism, mental health, self-improvement and much much more. Today we're going to be talking about the divide between autism parents and autistic adults. Something that I have noticed through my many years of being a content creator, being autism advocate on the internet, there is a very, very clear divide between the opinions, experiences, hopes and wants of autistic adults versus parents, which I think need to be talked about. We really do need to bridge this gap because the amount of advocacy that we can provide, the amount of changes that we can implement together is going to be so much more if we all combine our efforts towards a common goal. So why am I making this video? This is not for hate on either side, this is for unity. I do believe that if we have more people who are advocating for the same thing, pushing for the same thing, then we will get more done. But why me? Why should I be the person who talks about this? This is a very controversial, perhaps very nuanced, difficult issue to try and tackle. I've had a lot of experience when it comes to social inclusion. I have worked doing training pieces of training, working with governments, local authorities, working within communities to try and improve things for people with disabilities. And I have a pretty good idea of what our social care system looks like, what our education system looks like. I have a lot of experience, about years experience as a special needs teaching assistant, working one to one and also with classes in special needs schools. I also have over five years of online advocacy within the autistic communities online. My podcast I've interviewed parents and researchers and autistic adults. So I have a pretty good idea of the types of things that each of these groups are wanting and also why they may differ so much. Do I speak for all autistic adults or even those within the communities I reside in? No, of course not. I speak for myself as a person wanting to try and bring people together towards a common goal. What are these common goals, these things that I've outlined? Why do we need this unity? Obviously collaboration and advocacy for the lives of all autistic people is a really, really big thing. If we can collaborate and pull our efforts into advocating for certain things in society, I imagine that it's probably going to go a lot smoother. It's going to be a lot quicker. It's going to be higher quality. Things such as sensory accommodations in services, public and work spaces, massively important for both adults and children, protection from discrimination and bullying and a little bit more effort towards integrating autistic people into society. More support both post-18, post-25. You're hard pressed to find some post-18 support in your area even in the UK. Post-25 is pretty much zip, like nothing. We also need some more research into co-occurring conditions like mental health and other things which do impact the life quality of autistic people. Things like intellectual disability, really, really big one. We need high quality psychological support. A lot of the systems that we have in place for supporting autistic adults and children with mental illness is very, very ineffective. There's a lot of bad experiences that people have. The good therapy, the therapy that we want tends to be very private and give in the employment statistics of autistic adults and the expenses of perhaps supporting, educating, looking after autistic children. Money is going to be a little bit tight. We also need to have a look into some different, perhaps more safer, slash effective parenting and education methods. It's very clear at least from the autistic adult side of things that the systems that we have in place at the moment, the methodologies are not too good in their eyes and it's something that I do agree with to a certain extent. So let's talk about the points of tension between these two communities, if I can click on it. Functioning labels, a really big sort of hot kind of topic that people really don't want to talk about and I guess for a good reason. Functioning labels are basically someone's requirement for needs, their support needs, the type of presentations that they may have, the things that they need support with, whether it's something that's in childhood or in adulthood. All autistic people have some level of support needs or else they just don't get diagnosed. Because we diagnose problems, we don't diagnose identity. Sadly. Autism is split up into ASD1 adults, people like myself who would have been categorized as having Asperger's syndrome perhaps a few years ago. And then you also have ASD2 and 3 children who might be classified better by this idea of classical autism. These groups of individuals tend to have very, very high support needs, sometimes crossing into their adult life and tend to have significant intellectual disabilities, communicational difficulties, a lot of other very, very important support needs. A lot of autistic adults within the community really don't want to talk about functioning labels. It's seen as a taboo topic, as a too controversial of a topic to even mention sometimes. So we talk about it very, very broadly. We say autism. We don't say this is the experience of an ASD1 individual. We say this is an experience of an autistic individual. The thing is that pointing out a very clear difference between groups as something that is founded in reality is not this idea of ASB supremacy. It's not comparing groups in order to say that we're better, but just paying a little bit of respect to the fact that my experiences of life is probably going to be very different to someone who has classified as having very, very high support needs, who has to have round the clock care support and assistance and can't communicate. There is just going to be some functional differences in the way that both of us live our lives, which is not a bad thing to highlight. It's just a fact. The reason to why we don't talk about these functioning labels a lot and we talk about autism so broadly is meant to include people. It's not meant to exclude people. The funny thing is that a lot of autism parents actually find these broad strokes over autism, talking about it so broadly as an all-inclusive experience actually does exclude the experiences of children, ASD1, ASD2 and 3 individuals. They do need very, very high levels of support and experience sort of daily difficulties that we as perhaps autistic ASD1 adults may not be able to relate to which is a fair criticism. I feel like it can sometimes perhaps, especially when we're talking about sort of the positive sort of reframing autism as the positive or neutral rather than the negative thing, that that can fall pretty flat when it comes to talking to autism parents who mostly experience autism as their child having a significant disability or a learning disability. It's important to think about the reasons why we don't like to distinguish between ASD1, 2 and 3, these functioning labels. Mostly it's because it is incredibly socially inappropriate. If you call a person high-functioning, you're kind of undermining to some degree what their needs are. You don't know exactly what their needs are, you just see their presentation and you assume that they can live a full life and they don't need support in any facet of their life. Very incorrect way of going about things, something that I experience a lot, a lot of people are like, oh, you don't seem autistic. I'm like, ah, well, you don't see my executive functioning issues. On the other side, calling someone low-functioning, it's just kind of a flat out insult. So using it socially is definitely something that I discourage, although when we are talking about it in the broader scale when it comes to social care and health care, having these distinct categories of groups of people, depending on what their needs are, is obviously going to be very important when it comes to legislation and obviously helping that person, giving that person benefits and support in order for them to live a happy life. That is an important function of functioning labels. When it comes to talking about it socially, that's where the difficulties lie. And I feel personally like adults, autistic adults from the autistic community, do you need to pay a little bit more lip service to the fact that our experiences do not cover all of the autistic experience, that we do need to have some input from individuals, from parents of children when it comes to talking about autism so broadly. On the other side, I do find that quite a hefty amount of autism parents, at least online, they don't really understand or value just how similar we can be, just how similar I as an autistic individual can be to an ASD2 or free child. I have a lot of experiences in my life and the way that my brain works, which are very relatable to other groups of autistic people. A lot of the things that we advocate for as autistic people can be transferred as well to that group of children, that group of adults who do have significant learning disabilities. And the key thing here is that although you are a parent of an autistic child, we can get into all of this about the genetics factor when it comes to autism. It's likely that if you've got an autistic child, one of the parents is going to be autistic too. By all that, autistic adults have the capability of communicating, of verbalizing, of sharing their experiences, of pushing for changes, of saying yes and saying no to certain concepts. And I do feel like that needs to be respected a whole lot more within the autism parent circles. It's a very valuable insight into a brain that is different. And we do have the capability of communicating said differences in a relatable way. So I feel like there's a lot of ways in which the things that we talk about are kind of undermined from the parenting communities. But of course, there are tensions from both sides. I'm not saying one side is completely correct, one side isn't. But these are the things that kind of differentiate these two groups based on function labels. But let's have a look at something else, which is eugenics, fun time, fun stuff. This is going to be very poorly monetized video. What is eugenics? This is a very important issue to cover. I feel like it's very undermined. A lot of people don't really know what eugenics is either or where the origins come from eugenics at its core are is the beliefs or practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of humans remove disability basically in the context of autism, you would cure autism, you'd get rid of it. This methodology is something that was very, very apparent during World War Two. The whole cleansing. You might have heard about Hans Asperger who saved ASD1 individuals, people he turned to have value to society whilst allowing the group to get rid of the rest of them, which is not a good thing. It's a very dark piece of history that actually wasn't really too long ago. In our modern day, we do have organizations which are very dead set on producing a cure. There are some who have said that they no longer are trying to seek a cure. There are some that are openly happy about pursuing a cure and the important thing here is that a cure is likely going to be preventative. It's not going to be an option. It's not going to be a pill or a surgery that you can get as an autistic adult. Say like, oh, okay, I don't want to be autistic anymore. You take this pill, boom, neurotypical brain. It's likely going to be preventative of autistic children being born, which is definitely not a consensual treatment. You could argue that even if a cure was made that the action of autism advocates in the UK and the US would stop this type of thing being implemented. There is a possibility of that. There's a possibility that it would just continue to go on anyway. There is also a possibility that other countries who don't particularly have as much of a robust social justice movement to adopt it anyway within their own countries outside of the reach of autism advocates in the UK and the US and Australia. It's a bit of a difficult topic because eugenics can be somewhat good in some circumstances, meaning that, you know, perhaps if we can remove things like cystic fibrosis or epilepsy from the human gene pool, it's probably going to be a good thing for people being born. You know, they're not going to have these diseases, which is real great and good, and that's what we want. We want to cure it, we want to prevent it. But when it comes to something so nuanced, like a neurodevelopmental disorder where you have autistic people speaking about their experience advocating for their right to be autistic and accepted, and that it can be a positive or a neutral thing, as well as being negative, it becomes a little bit more murky because who really decides at what point something deserves to be cured, deserves to be removed from the gene pool? That is the problem. I and a lot of autistic advocates out there are very heavily against curing autism, very heavily against removing autism from the gene pool, even just speaking it in a very sort of capitalist way. There are a lot of benefits to autistic people being in society, different minds, different perceptions, we tend to be, when well supported, we tend to be 20% more productive than our near typical counterparts. There are a lot of good things about being autistic. And that's not even just considering like the amount of innovation that goes on out there. What about speaks? And you probably know who I'm talking about. This is a very big organization, which does a lot to inform the general public about autism, run campaigns, support families. There's a lot of drama that has gone on between the autistic adult community and this organization, mostly because of their original outcome for the company, which was developing a cure for autism, eugenics. This is something that they have since removed from the project mission statement. But I think it's important for parents, for the general public to understand that this is a very, very real threat to us, and something that we believe in. We don't want to be eradicated from the human race. It's not a pleasant thought. I love autistic people. I think they're great in a lot of ways. I love a lot of neurotypical people as well. But I don't think that we should be trying to remove us from the human race. As I said, as although it has been removed from the mission statement, it's very fresh in our minds. The whole war and stuff was a fair bit of time ago, but it wasn't really that long ago. There's still a lot of worries that we do have, particularly around genetics research that could lead to eugenics in the future. It's something that should really be respected as a group of adults who are advocating for their right to be a part of society and to be accepted. On the other side, Speaks does target a lot of autism parents and families of support, offers testimonials, a lot more experiences from autistic parents than you'll find in the community. A lot of people have high regard for this organization from the autism parents side of things, which does make it difficult as a little bit of a roadblock between these two communities. What about the spectrum 10k? This is something that I have covered on the podcast before. This is basically a genetic study that sought to gather the genetic data of autistic people across the UK, at least 10,000 of them. It was something that was very highly dismissed and fought against by the autistic communities and since was stopped. This was a study from Professor Simon Baron Cohen and his team over at Cambridge, basically seeking to understand the genetic profiles of autistic people. My personal feelings towards this project is that it could have been incredibly transformative for autistic people because it could highlight some genetic reasons to why we might experience other disorders and other conditions at a higher rate. Likewise, it could also prove that that's not necessarily a biological aspect of autism and encourage more policymakers to do a lot more social work to work on the social environment that autistic people have to deal with, which if you don't know tends to be very very negative disproportionately. However, the threat of genetic research for autistic people when it comes to eugenics is very very real and I feel like this has to be something that is at least collaborated with a lot with autistic run organizations or advocates and it needs to be done a lot slower. It feels like a lot of this stuff is being rushed in order to find this cure but it's not necessarily taking into account the voices of people who are actually autistic, which is a really really big problem. From the autism parent side of things there are some clear things that I believe these groups of people online, obviously not everybody, but this general group of people online needs to take note of is the actual desires of autistic people. So there is a clear contrast between the views of both of these communities on this issue. I feel like a lot of autistic parents out there do want a cure, they do want a cure not because they have some malicious intent but they really just want their child to flourish and they feel like autism has been disabling for their child and so getting rid of it seems like the best option. The issue is that that child as me as an autistic adult, I can't remove autism from my brain. That's not how it works. I am an autistic person, my brain has been developed in the classical way that autism is and that's a very important part of who I am. If I wasn't autistic I would not be myself and I think that's something to really drive home with this. You can't really separate autism out from the person, it's to do with your brain, it's neurodevelopmental and so removing autism from someone is just kind of a silly idea. It just really doesn't have any practical uses and if you were to remove the essence of what makes someone autistic they would not be the same person. I think from the autistic adult side of things and this is focusing on a particular sort of group of people who are very vocal and perhaps aggressive and bullying towards autistic parents they probably need to take a bit of a softer approach with this. It's not very well understood by a lot of autism parents or at least it is dismissed by a lot of people but it's important to try and educate people on why genetic research is not something that we want particularly at this moment and why we don't want to cure, why we don't want eugenics to occur. What about teaching methods? One of my stances on it. My stance is that teaching, education, parenting should be holistic and not challenging to non-harmful behaviors like stimic. This means taking little pieces of things that work from different teaching methods, methodologies and using what helps an autistic child and helps them live a happy life. Not trying to mold their outward behavior and presentations to appear more palatable to the general population but really things that are going to improve the quality of life for that autistic person. A lot of autistic adults will say that things like ABA is very dangerous and abusive but parents see it as transformative, safe and great when it's done right, when it's good ABA. ABA is seen as the gold standard from a lot of governments, people and organizations but I feel like a lot of autistic people are very very quick to label parents who use this teaching method as abusive. The fact is that this, a lot of the organizations which talk about this this practice and the fact that it is so embedded within our teaching and parenting spheres means that a lot of people are just going to be ignorant to this. A lot of people might even be desperate and uninformed. There is a lot of fear mongering that continues to happen today and has happened for quite a while, meaning that in a lot of cases these parents just really didn't know and shouting at them and bullying them and getting aggressive is only going to turn them further away from the view and the opinions that we hold. However this reaction of autistic people is very understandable. There are a lot of testimonials out there and I have a lot of insiders sort of perspective on how ABA can be very very negative for children, for autistic children. I also see the utility of some of the practices that are used in ABA. However I do not believe that this teaching method is completely flawless. I think that it can be particularly dangerous and something to consider considering the amount of negative responses that the adults have had when they have grown up under ABA therapy. Having as important that we do highlight their experiences and take it on board and try and change things. But what can we do about this particular aspect? Obviously we need a lot more awareness on the negative impacts, which has already been done hefty amount by the autistic community, perhaps we need a little bit more. We need to not label parents who have fallen into this kind of category of using ABA as evil, but looking to care for their child in the way that seems the best way for their child and for them. Ideally this method would be replaced with over practices, but perhaps there is somewhat of a middle ground that we can reach as I do understand that it's very popular and I imagine that the people who created it obviously want it to continue for as long as it can. It's something that does generate money, I understand it, it's something that has been researched, there's a lot of bad things about it and a lot of strange origins to the actual method, but I understand it's not necessarily something that's just going to disappear because autistic adults are talking about the negatives of it. Some options here would be partnering with autistic led organizations or incorporating autistic adults into their board to shape ABA into something better, something that removes the harmful elements that autistic people talk about. There also needs to be a lot more rigorous training highlighting abusive versus productive practices. By differentiating the productive from the abusive then perhaps we can become a lot more clear on in what ways implementing this practice can negatively impact an autistic child and some of the ways which might be actually productive and helpful for that autistic child in the long run in terms of the long term development, their health, everything like that. We also need some neurodiversity inclusivity training for staff, for parents and for practitioners. This shouldn't be something that's very, very core to a lot of the training that these organizations do. I mean what other better source of information, source of experiential knowledge can you get than autistic people who have gone through this, who do have opinions on it on the some of the ways that it can be improved, some of the things that they perhaps want to be removed from the overall practice. There are a lot of possible ways that we can bridge this gap and I do want to again highlight is not something that I'm for, I'm not pro this type of practice. However, I'm also not the type of person to jump down someone's throat and call them abusive just because that's what was presented to them by the medical system just because they don't have insight into the autistic community. I'm not going to label people as such. A lot of it is just due to widespread unconscious ignorance. They just don't know about it. They don't know about these testimonials and experiences, which is understandable. What about this idea of glamorizing versus demonizing? Neurodiversity versus demonizing autism. Certain organizations in the past had long histories of demonizing autism and fear mongering parents to gather support and funds. The disconnect that we have here that that is pretty consistent among a lot of areas when it comes to advocacy is that there is no person with autism. They are an autistic person. You can't accurately dissect out the autism part of someone's brain. It's neurodevelopmental, meaning that it is the way that our brain develops over time in the womb through our experiences. Another important point is that neurodiversity is not a counter movement to disability. Originally, from my own understanding, it was sort of like that that autism was an autism and things like ADHD were pushed to being viewed in a more positive or neutral light in comparison to the medical view of it being wholly negative and disabling. But in reality, a lot of people who talk about neurodiversity aren't making that assertion. They do say that they are disabled. So there's not really any distinguishing factors between neurodivergent, neurodiversity sort of affirming person, but you also say that you're disabled. They're not necessarily counters to each other. It's important when we're having this conversation to highlight that medical versus social model of disability. The medical model kind of assumes that someone is inherently disabled by being autistic, whereas the social model of disability tends to focus on the environment and its interaction with an autistic person as being the cause of disability. And we know from a lot of statistical research and testimonials that autistic people do experience a disproportionate amount of negative life experiences compared to our neurotypical counterparts. That is a really, really big factor when it comes to identifying whether autism is a good or bad thing. I would argue that there is a very, very heavy social aspect. And autism can be disabling sort of inherently in some ways. You know, you just think about sensory sensitivities as being quite a big one. Obviously, that's not caused, I guess it is caused by other people. Even that's just a little bit social, isn't it? But even if we were to say that there are some things that are inherently disabling about being autistic, a lot of the really disabling aspects for a lot of autistic people is the intellectual disability aspect of it. If someone has an intellectual disability, they're going to have much different outcomes to someone who doesn't. And the thing is that there are a lot of positives to being autistic, too, in a lot of different circumstances, not even just looking at it from the workplace view, which they have shown that we tend to be about 20% more productive when adjusted for reasonably within the workplace, than our neurotypical peers, which is massive. And there are a lot of great sort of creative, innovative, sort of divergent thinking, lateral thinking aspects of autism, which make being autistic sometimes pretty great. In an effort to round up this slide, we have one group of people, the autism parents, who do see significant disability in their children and see this idea of painting autism with a positive light as something just wrong, something that wrong from their experiences parenting their autistic child. On the other side, you have autistic adults who have had to deal with a lot of stigmatization, stereotyping from the mainstream communities for a long period of time. I think as adults, as autistic adults, we should have some level of say on our experiences of life. And if we want to reframe autism as a positive or neutral thing, for some people, I don't see any issue in that. This is this whole idea of positive versus negative. Are we glamorizing disability by talking about autism in this positive light? Or are we normalizing and empowering individuals? I'd agree with the latter, of course. Systems that we have in place are very much based on a deficit model, not a strength faith model. It's a very important aspect when we're speaking about autism, because a lot of the ways that we improve the lives of autistic people is by minimizing the negatives and not necessarily focusing on the things that we're good at, the things that we can offer. Employer engagement is perhaps the biggest hurdle faced by organizations and local authorities with getting autistic people into work. If you didn't know, we tend to have a very, very low employment rate, even if we're college graduates. A lot of organizations and businesses, they see employing autistic people as a charity effort, which is just really not the case. There are a lot of notable benefits, both from testimonials, both from looking at the professional landscape that we have online and also looking at the statistics as well. So we really do, to some degree, need to shift this idea of employing autistic people as a charity effort and seeing it more as an investment in the eyes of organizations. And it's important to distinguish that pointing out the positives as myself, you know, pointing out the positives that I experienced from being autistic does not undermine the negatives experienced by other people. It's more of an addition to the conversation to say that, okay, autism can be negative in these ways, but it can also be positive in some ways. It can also be neutral in other ways. And I think you'll find that even looking at the autistic adult communities, a lot of people do actually hold this kind of negative view of autism whilst holding these views of neurodiversity. I kind of sit somewhere in the middle, I'm very neutral on it. But anyway, what about this big fact that you, you as an autistic person, an ASD1 adult who used to be called aspergers cannot speak for our children. You should not have any input. You don't understand what it is like for my child. You don't understand what it is like to be autistic as an autistic person. Autism parents say that they are advocating for children. Autistic adults say that many of their experiences are very, very transferable to all autistic people and want to advocate for autistic children, autistic adults too, just in different ways, both highlighting different groups as having the right voice. Voices in our modern mainstream media tend to be heavily professionals and parents. There's not a lot of autistic people who have gone on and sort of engage with the mainstream media like this, but this is mostly. And I think that autism parents really do need to have more of an air of sensitivity and empathy too towards the experiences and voices of autistic adults. It's in my opinion that we should strive for more autistic voices being out there, just because of the dominance of professionals and parents. But equally, I don't think that parents should be labeled as ableist for explaining the difficulties that their child has, which do differ from perhaps the experiences that I have. Understanding that there is some heavy crossover between all autistic people, you know, some of the traits, some of the ways that we think, some of the ways that we perceive and view the world, they can be very, very similar. And these autistic voices can be very, very valuable even to parents and organizations, of course, do need more autistic voices on represent. So golden question. Do I hate autism parents? No. I assume that all parents unless proven otherwise are wanting the best for their child. No, my mom and dad are both orders and parents, and they are damn good ones. I am very lucky to have the parents that I do have. Very lucky to have a mom who works within special needs is who's amazing woman who does so much good positive work for both parents, autistic children and autistic adults. 100%. No, I understand it can be different. And in some ways more difficult to parents and autistic child in our neurotypical world, there were a lot of barriers, a lot of difficulties that come up throughout sort of regular daily living that I do see, you know, I've taken students out when we've been on group visits to different places outside of school. I understand that there are a lot of things that can make parents and autistic children different. And a lot of the cases because we don't necessarily have that framework to parent and educate those different people, we're kind of focusing on the masses. It's obviously going to be a lot more difficult. No, many orders and parents are actually undiagnosed, autistic themselves. It's kind of a bit of a non point, but I just really wanted to throw that out there because I feel like we very much in our minds sometimes separate the two, whereas the likelihood of one of the parents being autistic if you have an autistic child is pretty high. And I just really wanted to throw that out there because if you are watching this video as an awesome parent, you might want to think about that. You know, perhaps there are some elements to your life that you can share. I have talked to other autistic people who do have children, who do fit into both of those categories, who can probably empathise with both sides on a lot of these issues. However, despite all of these things, all of these reasons to why I do not hate autism parents, do I think that some can be ignorant and that some aren't seeking counsel enough from autistic adults? Of course, organisations, groups, people, they need a lot more of the actual autistic voices inside the work that they do inside the communities. It is a very important facet of autism advocacy, advocacy from autistic people. Very, very important component of it that really does need to be a part of these groups 100%. So how do we fix this? Here are some pointers from the slides that we have covered today. I believe ASD1 adults, these actually autistic people, the autistic community, need to acknowledge the differences that we have when compared to ASD2 and free individuals who have very, very high support needs. And we also need to be a bit more vocal about these differences, not shutting people down for talking about the differences, which are a reality, but highlighting them as a different way that someone may experience being autistic. Parents definitely do need to take a whole boatload more from autistic adults who were once children, who were at some point perhaps going through the same things that your child is going through. These are indeed autistic people with voices, and although that can differentiate them from, differentiate us from your children in some ways, we're still autistic people. And a lot of the things that we experience are very transferable to any person on the autism spectrum. We should seek to change practices, which are deemed to be harmful. I think it's a very silly thing to do to ignore the mountains of evidence and voices and testimonials from autistic adults who have gone through particular teaching protocols, education protocols. We really do need to highlight these voices a lot more and make some impactful changes to that or find an alternative that's better. We should all see the positives and negatives to being autistic, that goes for people within the autistic community, understanding that our lives, our support needs are very, very different to perhaps people who need full-time support and care. Autism parents also need to realise that yes, there are actually some aspects worse than that is positive and neutral as not just being wholly negative all the time, but perhaps different. We also need to understand the potential risks of genetic research and put measures in place to prevent eugenics. That needs to happen. If we are going to do this genetic research, that needs to happen. It's not okay to cure or to treat an entire group of people who have the voice to advocate for themselves. It's not appropriate, it's not okay, it really needs to be something that is taken to a very, very high-degrad regard, looked into a lot more and really solidified within our medical system that we are wanting to be autistic, that autism is not something that we want to eradicate from the human race. Important, important. So, some caveats to this video, some extra caveats who had one at the start, we got one at the end. I really do want to just highlight that I do not speak for everybody or any community, I just speak for myself, wanting some unity between two groups of people who I believe should be working together. I've seen a lot of tension between these two communities and it makes me really sad because both of these communities are seeking to make life better for autistic children, for autistic adults, but we just have a very, very different approach to doing so. I think it's important to remember that functioning labels are useful for talking about autism broadly, especially within healthcare and social systems, but it can be very, very inappropriate in a social context and when discriminatory. No, I don't know everything that goes on behind closed doors. I feel like I have quite a good amount of oversight over lots of different areas within the greater world of autism, but I am not omniscient. I do not have insights into every single part of this very, very controversial social issue. Do I see good and bad points from each side? Of course, totally. I believe that we should all band together, that we should all collaborate together for the fight to improve well-being and rights for autistic people. That is something that we all have in common. We all love an autistic person. We all care about an autistic person and if we can really collaborate, understand each other, bridge these gaps, perhaps push our efforts, pull our efforts together and push for some real changes in society, then man, like, they would be amazing and that's really, really what I want to end this video on. I realize that perhaps some of my takes might be a little bit more sort of biased towards the autistic adult side of things. That's because I am an autistic adult, but I have tried my very, very best to represent and understand and empathize with the experiences and views of the autism parent communities to any autistic adults who are watching this who don't agree with my use of functioning labels. My description of functioning labels, I feel like that's probably going to be quite a point of contention in the comments. Please feel free to comment down below, to have a discussion about things. I don't want the comments to be filled with hate from either side. That's definitely not what I'm intending on creating, causing. I really want this video, this channel to be a place where people can discuss these things and perhaps reach some level of common ground with each other. That is really ultimately what I want. But anyway, thank you very much for watching this week's video. I hope you have enjoyed it and if you want to support me with making more of these types of videos, any likes, comments, subscribers is always going to be really, really helpful for me as a self-recently self-employed person. And if you do want to support me a little bit more, you can become a member for as little as 99p, it's around about a dollar a month, you get access to a special little badge next to your name, some emojis, some perks. And in the future, I will be adding some more members only content. So if you do want to get in there nice and quick, encourage me to do more of these live streams and videos, then that would be greatly, greatly appreciated. All right, I have spoken too much. I hope you all have a very wonderful day and I will see you later in another video.