10/23/2025
A very moving letter that has been printed in The New York Times from a young autistic adult who objects to the use of the term ‘profoundly autistic.’
If the text in the image is too small, it reads:
I am one of these so-called profoundly autistic people this article describes. I cannot utter meaningful speech, and as a result, I was branded for years as someone with an intellectual disability and an I.Q. of 40.
All this time, however, I understood everything that was going on around me. I just could not show it to others because of my deranged relationship with my own body.
I am concerned about the creation of a separate category, called profound autism, for those of us with the most severe disabilities.
There are real differences between the sort of autism that I have and so-called Asperger's syndrome. But it does not help us at all to impose a hierarchy of lower and higher functioning.
We need to figure out how to tap into the skills and insights of those of us who cannot talk, who make up anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent of the autistic community, depending on the estimate.
For me, the way out of this dilemma was learning to communicate by typing. I suddenly went from being seen as intellectually impaired to taking college classes. I was never low-functioning, and neither are my autistic brothers and sisters without the ability to speak.
I was just misjudged and ignored, and I fear that my fate will be the fate of many others termed low functioning in this new schema.
Jason Jacoby Lee
New York
