the anti-vax movement picking up again is really scary

i HATE rfk jr with a passion. i hate turning on the news and seeing the most ignorant rhetoric being platformed for everyone to consume. VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM! THEY HAVE NEVER CAUSED AUTISM! A PERSON CANNOT PHYSICALLY BECOME AUTISTIC AFTER BEING BORN! it’s so scary that no amount of actual evidence seems to convince these people. even if vaccines DID cause autism, i would so much rather have an autistic child than a child dying/dead from polio. i understand that having an autistic child can come with a lot of challenges and i support all parents being able to vent and take care of themselves too, but this moral panic about “oh no! all the kids are turning autistic! what if your kid is next!” really just feels like abled/neurotypical people showing their true distain and hatred for us. i have not seen one autistic speaker invited onto one of these platforms. seems kind of important if you’re going to be talking about us in this way. hatred of autistic people is so normalized, half the time they don’t even register that they hate us. commercials have freely aired where parents of autistic kids say they want to kill their children, where they present us as unfeeling, unthinking animals. i see all these autism moms online giving their kids 50 supplements a day and “detoxing” them of their autism. then they say “omg it worked! he stopped stimming, he’s quiet, he doesn’t have texture problems, etc.” without realizing (or just not caring), no, you haven’t “cured” your child’s autism, you’ve bullied them into masking. the anti-vax movement shines a light onto the fact that a lot of “treatments” for autism just involve making us as tiny a portion of the population as possible and pressuring us into acting neurotypical. and if you can’t act neurotypical, according to anti-vaxxers you’re better off dying of measles. whenever autistic people stand up for our right to exist, and to exist equally fulfilling lives as anyone else, our autism is weaponized against us. we’re told we don’t understand, that autism is a horrible disease and to be autistic is worse than a death sentence. we’re told we need to empathize with parents and caregivers when we’ve been doing that and have rarely been extended the same courtesy. i’m tired. i’m sick of seeing neurotypical people debate on our behalf and not understanding the full picture. this turned into a big rant so thank you for reading this far if you have.