Non functional autism cases are rare. All the data RFK uses lumps in people you might not even think of as a little weird with non verbal people who need a full time caretaker.

Autism as it stands is very poorly defined and categorized. There are tons of symptoms and every autistic person has a unique severity for each symptom. Should someone perfectly capable of living a normal life be considered the same as someone non verbal and needs constant care? RFK thinks so. He said we'll never pay taxes or have relationships or acheive anything for society. Meanwhile I have a documented genius IQ, graduate degree, full time job, and a family. Birds of a feather flock together, and I don't know a single autistic person who takes RFKs stance on autism seriously.

From my perspective, the biggest issue in the conversation is that all of the professional material about autism is written by neurotypical people. For a disorder that often makes it difficult to determine your own internal emotional state, a bunch of people who have never felt what you feel guessing and then telling you that their guess is truth only makes it harder. The Internet is helping here with people connecting and talking about their experiences, but none of that is making it into professional diagnostic criteria or instruction for how to help people deal with their symptoms.

Most functional autistic people are very smart and capable of learning new things very quickly compared to neurotypical people. Hyper-focus is a symptom for autism just like adhd. We struggle to be taken seriously because of social skills lagging, people promote people who make them feel comfortable. This is a huge opportunity of untapped resources that is being wasted. So much talent wasted just among my social circle. I sort of lucked into a role that uses my differences wisely and allows me to contribute more than I could if I wasn't autistic. That is very rare. That is what we should really be talking about when we talk about autism.