Of all the potential harms from Trump's announcement, let's not lose sight of the primary one - to autistic people. [View all]

Autism is part of the normal range of human variation and experience. Some people are very tall, some people are born to be very fat, some people have blue eyes, some people have hyper-sensitive hearing and touch, some people notice the forest first and some people notice the trees, some people have a strong social drive and some people don't.

Autism is genetic and has always been with us. Autistic people's contributions to human progress have been phenomenal - the first astronomers, botanists and food scientists, surgeons, architects, artists, poets, priests who introduced calendars and other cultural rituals, engineers, computer scientists, all benefited from individuals with strong attention to detail, pattern recognition, prodigious memories, and the ability to think differently.

By focusing on the cure to or prevention of autism we are telling the 1 in 40 humans born autistic that the way they were born is wrong, a disease, something to be done away with, a freak accident.

And that sets back our understanding of autism and the rights of autistic people more than 40 years.

I'm proud to be autistic. I don't need to be cured. I'm autistic because my father was and many of my other extended relatives, not because my mother took Tylenol a few times. Being autistic is an inextricable part of who I am and is a large part of what has enabled my success in life. If there was a pill I could take tomorrow that would make me not autistic you couldn't pay me to take it.

We should be celebrating the extraordinary gifts that come with autism and recognising that many of the challenges come not because there is something wrong with the autistic person but because our society has not been set up to address that level of human variation well. We need understanding and accommodation, not a "cure" or "prevention".