We Don’t Need to Be Cured — We Need to Be Heard

 

The Trump administration recently made headlines by claiming they’ll “cure” autism, without offering any medical, scientific, or ethical grounding for such a statement.
But the biggest issue isn’t the lack of evidence. It’s the framing.

Because when someone promises to “cure” autism, what they’re really saying is that autistic people are a problem to be solved. That we’re broken. That the world would somehow be better if we were different.

And that kind of thinking isn’t new. This administration, like many before it, has a habit of talking about marginalized groups, whether neurodivergent, racialized, disabled, or LGBTQ+, as issues to fix rather than people to understand. It’s dehumanizing language disguised as concern.

For autistic people, that “fixing” rhetoric hits especially hard. Most of the time, the people promising a cure can’t even define what they mean by “autistic.” They don’t acknowledge the vast, nuanced spectrum of experiences, from those who need round-the-clock support to those who have learned to mask their differences just to survive in a world designed for neurotypicals.

Yes, being autistic can come with challenges in social interaction, sensory processing, emotional regulation, and communication. But those difficulties often say more about how inflexible and overwhelming the world is than about any inherent flaw in us.

We don’t want a cure.
We want to be understood.
We want to be listened to.
We want support when we ask for it, and accommodations that make it possible for everyone, neurodivergent and neurotypical alike, to thrive together.

The obsession with “curing” autism erases something vital: the strengths, insights, and beauty that come with being wired differently. Autistic people bring creativity, imagination, pattern-recognition, problem-solving, and an almost fierce resilience born from navigating a world that often misunderstands us.

We don’t need fixing.
We need respect.
We need empathy.
And we need a world that finally stops treating us as projects to repair, and starts seeing us as people worth knowing.