Autistic Hedgehog

Unfortunately, there may not really be a good way to deal with these individuals. Whatever the reasons they got into that mindset, they need a certain level of insight and introspection to get out of it, and you can’t necessarily give that to a person.

The best you can do is try to explain why these ideas are problematic. Functioning labels have extremely limited meanings. They’re used by allistic people in an attempt to describe and sort us, and thus lack nuance and connection to our reality. As well, “functioning” is defined by what allistic people think is right, so if someone can communicate just fine, but cannot do so by actually speaking aloud, they’re automatically dubbed “low-functioning”. This is regardless of how they feel in their day to day life and how they actually function in society.

As well, there are huge assumptions about what “low-functioning” individuals can and cannot feel, based solely on the fact that the don’t meet an arbitrary definition of “normal” in how they express themselves. Society (and groups like Autism Speaks) works overtime to reaffirm these ideas, to brand them on the minds even of autistic people. Thus comes the assumption that “low-functioning” individuals wouldn’t be able to decide for themselves if they wanted a cure anyway, and that’s unfair. No matter how “high-functioning” anyone might be, they wouldn’t want anyone making those kinds of assumptions about them, and they have no right to do it to others.

Moreover, what would a “cure” even entail? Autism is pretty firmly entangled with our brainmeats. I doubt it would be possible to cure someone who is already autistic, which means things like in-utero detection and extensive gene therapy. Since it would be impossible to determine “functioning” level ahead of time (especially considering the meaninglessness of functioning levels in general) the only possible end result would be that autistic people wouldn’t be allowed to be born. Not even the so-called high-functioning ones. When “high-functioning” autistics support a cure, they think they’re safe because they’re agreeing with allistics, but in the end it’s allistics who have the real power right now. When we agree with them that a cure is necessary for “low-functioning” individuals, all we really do is let them take more power from us. 

The idea of autistic anti-vaxxers is a bit mind-blowing. But in the end, for the most part, there’s no reasoning with anti-vaxxers. They’re anti-science, counter-factual conspiracy theorists. No matter how many times you put the facts right under their nose, they won’t believe them, because those facts don’t support their bias. The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin is actually pretty useful for understanding how their attitudes have come about (but a warning, Mnookin has his own misconceptions about autism and some of the language he uses is upsetting).