By Eden S. May, 21, 2025.
On April 16th, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a press conference voicing concern on the rising rates of autism following a new report from the CDC.
Watch the full press conference below.
RFK is quoted as having said: “Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two years old, and 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, and we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it…”1
If you’ve heard this quote, hopefully too, you have seen the many articles fact checking RFK’s statements, correcting this skewed perspective of autistic life.
Of course, our lives are nothing like what RFK describes here: we DO pay taxes (except Elon, lol), play baseball, we write some of the best poems you will ever read, and we date and love and find pleasure in other people like you wouldn’t believe.
This is an example of a back-and-forth exchange familiar to the autist community: someone uplifts a stereotypical, medical-model-endorsed bit of rhetoric and the autist community and neurodiversity-model recognizing professionals respond with corrections and attempts to reframe these public discussions on autism.
People create a pejorative version of autistic identity, and we respond by attempting to ameliorate it. This is a difficult and ugly cycle which limits our ability to move beyond identity politics into conversations about creating supportive and interdependent systems that autists and many others can benefit from.
However, I see his last statement–that we are doing “this” to our children–as a form of truth.
Sarah Gibbons, a professor at Michigan State University observes that some Critical Autism Studies scholars don’t disagree with statements like the one RFK made that point out the environmental influence on autistic people.
She writes that: “an interesting aspect of [Dawn] Prince-Hughes’s text is her willingness to consider a link between autism and our changing natural environments in a way that avoids abstracting autism into a disease: she is able to consider how environments might influence autistic people while leaving out the assumption that autism is a problem…’modern life, with its unnatural living conditions, chemicals, broken-down social systems, and chronic stress, overstimulates and assaults the human animal, causing some to manifest the biological and psychological matrix we call autism” (Prince-Hughes 2004, 223).”2
We have indeed created man-made social, emotional, and physical environments that are fraught with demands that go beyond the capacity for what the average human is able to handle. We have also created ableist rhetoric and narratives about our bodies that make us think that we can and should strive to go beyond our own limits, and that achieving this–the external goals of labor, at the cost of our quality of life–is seen as something to have pride in.
There is much evidence that the majority of people living in the U.S.A. are overwhelmed and undernourished, such as these reports of the high prevalence of stress-related anxiety, depression, PTSD,3 burnout,4 and loneliness5 among U.S. citizens.
From this perspective, the rise in autism that RFK fears is not so much about autistic people as it is about the increasingly violent and demanding environment that we have created for ourselves.
I theorize that we autists just happen to be particularly sensitive (due to nervous system differences that affect how we interact with the world)6 to these types of violences and will always be some of the first groups impacted by physical, emotional, and social stressors.
I theorize that our reactions to these man-made violent environments make us more visible, in that, due to our attunement to sensations, we absorb and then mirror the violence, destruction, and suffering in our environments, which can greatly impact our lives, leading some of us to seek a diagnosis because we need support coping with the state of the world.
The issue then, is situated clearly in our environments, and their relationships with autistic bodies, but not within autistic bodies themselves.
I acknowledge and respect that other people may not frame their journey to a diagnosis (formal or self-diagnosis) this way, and that is fine. I do not seek to generalize the autistic experience, this theory comes out of my own experiences and from reading about the first-hand experiences of many others. However, I do feel like many autists would agree with me, and think that this could be a helpful way to frame the issues in public discourse that we deal with on a daily basis.
For example, the mainstream environmentalist movement is well-known for having co-opted the narrative that autism stems from environmental toxins; a narrative that supports mainstream environmentalists’ own goals for advocating for environmental protections and conservation. This is the theory that RFK is arguing from as we saw earlier.
In this way autism is proposed to be a mirror of the toxic environment. But in doing this they (environmentalists) have equated the eradication of toxins from the environment with the eugenical eradication of autism. This is different from missions to prevent other diseases, as Gibbon’s writes: “while many people who develop cancer later in life would not see the eradication of cancer, a life-threatening illness, as a eugenicc effort, many autistic people who do not believe their lives are at risk from their diagnosis view the movement to prevent autism as a form of eugenics that suggests their way of being in the world is not valuable.” (Gibbons).
As autists, we struggle against violent environments and subsequently, the people who see autisticness as an extension of a violent environment instead of traits associated with a healthy reaction to the broken states of our physical, emotional, and social worlds.
RFK’s comments contribute to the typical discourse that sees autists as problems to be solved by eugenics. We can’t keep responding to the kind of rhetoric RFK uses by ameliorating our autistic positionality–we need to start instead by imagining.
We must imagine how we could get out of the pejoration-amelioration loop. Imagining who we are beyond being the grounds for someone else’s arguments about the world.
Imagining new ways of being. Imagining new narratives to author. Imagining what we could learn about ourselves, and what we could learn about the world through our gaze. There is so much more to us autists as people than the mainstream would like to acknowledge.
Once we start to investigate the autistic experience, we find that we as autists are rich in embodied knowledge, and that our perspective is rich in its own gifts for navigating and resisting a white supremacist, capitalist, fascist, patriarchy, and for practicing self-knowledge, joy, and pleasure, which everyone and anyone can learn from–autistic or not.
- Right Side Broadcasting Network. 2025. “FULL SPEECH: RFK Jr. Holds Press Conference to Provide Updates on Autism Research – 4/16/25.” YouTube. Right Side Broadcasting Network. April 16, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-N9li4LdmY. ↩︎
- Gibbons, Sarah . 2017. “Neurological Diversity and Environmental (In)Justice: The Ecological Other in Popular and Journalist Representations of Autism.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities : Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray, Jay Sibara, and Stacy Alaimo, 545. Lincoln, Ne: University Of Nebraska Press. ↩︎
- American Psychological Association. 2023. “Stress in America 2023.” Apa.org. American Psychological Association. November 2023. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2023/collective-trauma-recovery. ↩︎
- Abramson, Ashley. 2022. “Burnout and Stress Are Everywhere.” American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association. January 1, 2022. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/01/special-burnout-stress. ↩︎
- American Psychiatric Association. 2024. “New APA Poll: One in Three Americans Feels Lonely Every Week.” http://Www.psychiatry.org. American Psychiatric Association. January 30, 2024. https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/news-releases/new-apa-poll-one-in-three-americans-feels-lonely-e. ↩︎
- See the home page of this website where I describe how I understand autism from my own experiences and through reading the testimonies of other autists from varying backgrounds. ↩︎
The Art of Autistic Joy 