On May 21, state Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou announced she was abandoning her state Senate campaign for the Lower Manhattan seat and instead running for Congress in New York’s 10th District.

 No sooner had Niou announced her candidacy did Newsweek run a hastily researched story trumpeting the fact that, if elected, she would be the first openly autistic U.S. congressperson.

 As an autistic New Yorker myself, I wish I could be excited at that prospect.  However, I would rather there be no autistic representation in Congress than have Niou fill that role.

 Firstly, Niou actively supports the institutionalized abuse of the autistic community.  Last year, she co-sponsored/co-introduced and voted in favor of Assembly Bill 3523 (the Assembly version of Senate Bill 1662B).

 As I mentioned in my previous letter to your publication, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed that bill into law, allowing the same brand of conversion therapy practiced on autistic people (“applied behavior analysis”) to be practiced on anyone with any neurological or psychiatric condition.

 If Niou had any connection to the neurodiversity movement (or even did some cursory Googling), she would know how abusive this pseudoscience is and how the vast majority of autistic self-advocates strongly reject its use on anyone, particularly children and others who can’t legally give or withdraw consent.

 Supporting the inhumane treatment of autistic and other disabled individuals is, in and of itself, disqualifying.  Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to this story.

 While the Newsweek article falsely claimed Niou first publicly announced she was autistic in a 2020 Refinery29 interview, she actually appears to have first made such an announcement in a 2016 interview published by The Political Student.

 In the 2016 interview, Niou recounted making the decision to come out as autistic after meeting with a group of parents representing Autism Speaks while working for Assembly Member Ron Kim.

 For context, there are few organizations (if any) as widely reviled within the autistic community as Autism Speaks.  In a nutshell, the organization was founded in 2005 on the eugenic belief that autism was a disease in need of a cure (a belief they dubiously claim to have abandoned).

 They have spent the past 17 years infantilizing, stigmatizing and talking over autistic people and spreading an incalculable amount of disinformation and misinformation.  Further, very little of the money they raise tangibly benefits the autistic community.  (This only scratches the surface of how terrible Autism Speaks is.)

 For Niou to not only speak warmly about Autism Speaks, but to also credit them with such an integral part of her journey as an autistic public figure, is stomach-turning.  In Autism Speaks’ perfect world, she wouldn’t even exist.

 That’s not all, unfortunately.  Niou also referred to herself in that interview as “very high functioning.”  Again, if she had any connection to the neurodiversity movement, she would know that functioning language is inherently reductive and dehumanizing.

 Such language also badly misrepresents the concept of the autistic spectrum, which is not a left-to-right functioning scale, but rather a color wheel.  Where one falls on this metaphorical color wheel reflects one’s specific autistic traits.

 Considering Niou prefers to refer to herself using the euphemism “on the autism spectrum” (she appears to be strongly averse to using to using the word “autistic” in any context), one would imagine she would have some idea of what the spectrum is, but that doesn’t appear to be the case (or at least it wasn’t the case back in 2016).

 I just want to make it clear that I am not writing this to bully Niou or belittle the path she is currently on.  Many of us spend years or even decades mired in internalized ableism before we realize our self-worth (if we ever do).  I sincerely hope Niou will one day  pull herself out of that hole and learn, as she put it in a 2020 interview published by The Yappie, to stop “eating bitter.”

 However, in the here and now, I do not believe Niou is fit to represent the interests of the autistic community on the national level (or any level).  If she were to win a House seat, I am confident she would continue to defer to non-autistic voices, promote institutionalized abuse of the autistic community and normalize ableist language/labels.

 That would not be a step forward for the autistic community; it would be a large step back.

 Matthew Zeidman

New Hyde Park