Let the Traces Speak: Against the Erasure of Autistic Presence

A call for scientific honesty in a time of political threat, and a refusal to be defined out of existence

In response to RFK Jr.’s pledge to find a “cause” of autism by September, this piece examines the existential threat behind the rhetoric—and insists that autistic presence, communication, and survival are evidence, not error.

Introduction

Submitted for your consideration: a dimly lit research facility, fluorescent lights flickering overhead, clipboards clutched in clinical hands. A team of scientists leans in, eyes trained not on a crime scene, but on children behind two-way mirrors, or on adults filling out forms written in a language that doesn’t belong to them. The goal: to study a peculiar population, long misunderstood—those who speak in fragments, who flap and hum, who carry order in their fingertips and rhythm in their routines. Their instruments are behavioural coding charts, parent checklists, and standardised assessments calibrated to detect deviation. But what they record are not lives lived, only behaviours observed. What they measure is not meaning, but compliance. What they report is not connection, but deficit.

If this feels familiar, it should. You are entering The Twilight Zone—that uncanny in-between where what is seen is not understood, and what is understood is not believed. Only here, the script is written in academic prose, the voiceover replaced with a peer-reviewed journal article. And unlike Rod Serling’s black-and-white episodes, the twist comes slowly. At first, you think the scientists are the protagonists. You think their questions are sincere. But then you notice: the language doesn’t fit the people it describes. The conclusions don’t emerge from the data—they precede it. The autistic person is present, but barely—flattened into traits, reduced to scores, framed as a burden. The people being studied are not simply invisible. They are overwritten.

I know this episode well. I’ve been watching it for years—but not just watching. I’ve lived in the intermission. For nearly two decades, I worked in forensic science, a field that demanded precision, clarity, and restraint. In that world, we were taught to document everything: tools used, limitations acknowledged, margins of error reported. We were trained to treat evidence with care, to distinguish between a trace—the authentic residue of something real—and an artifact, a distortion introduced by our own process. It was not enough to see something; we had to prove we hadn’t altered it by observing it.

Now, fully out as an autistic adult and a gestalt processor, I find myself in the uneasy space between the research and the reality. The scientist and the subject. The professional and the pathologised. And from this vantage point, I can’t help but ask: what happens when the traces we leave—our scripts, our sensory rituals, our echolalia—are mistaken for meaningless artifacts? What happens when the reality we live is rewritten by those who refuse to ask what it means to be seen on our own terms?

Forensics as Language: A Personal History

Between 2001 and 2020, I worked in the shadows of systems that valued proof more than people. I was a forensic scientist—specifically, digital and multimedia forensics. My work revolved around extracting and interpreting evidence from video and images: low-resolution CCTV, corrupted files, the fleeting trace of a face or gesture preserved in a few dozen pixels. It required method, caution, and a constant awareness that what appeared true might only be a product of the process used to reveal it. In 2008, I published Forensic Photoshop, a guide that distilled my workflows into a kind of procedural language. From 2007 to 2020, I maintained a blog that did the same, writing thousands of posts—each an attempt to explain, step by step, what I had done and why. They were not just technical tutorials. They were, in hindsight, the scripts I needed to exist.

As a gestalt language processor, I didn’t always have the internal scaffolding to narrate my thoughts in real time. But I could build the scaffold myself, post by post, procedure by procedure. I borrowed the structure of science—delimitations, reproducibility, internal validation—not because I was trying to be difficult, but because I couldn’t function in the ambient vagueness of “good enough.” The work demanded clarity, and so did I. And for a while, I believed that was the point. If I followed the rules, if I documented everything, if I acted in service of the evidence, then my presence would be understood—maybe even valued.

It wasn’t. My insistence on rigour was rarely seen as professionalism—it was labelled inflexibility, pedantry, obstruction. My refusal to skip steps, to look the other way when procedures were bent, or to soften the truth for convenience, marked me as difficult. I asked too many questions. I pointed to policy when practice strayed. I wrote detailed rebuttals when someone tried to rewrite the chain of custody after the fact. I was tolerated, then sidelined—except when it served the system’s interest to invoke my authority. Then, suddenly, I was the one who “wrote the book.” My presence was paraded as a credential, a shortcut to credibility. Not because they respected the work, but because they needed the optics. It was a textbook appeal to authority—wheeled out when a mistake had to be defended in court or a decision needed retroactive legitimacy. Only then was my autistic precision reframed, however temporarily, as expertise.

Looking back, I can see that what I built during those years wasn’t just a professional record—it was a lifeline. The work gave me form. It allowed me to externalise thought, to stabilise communication, to prove—not just to others, but to myself—that I was here, that I saw clearly, that my mind had structure even when my voice faltered. But even in a supposedly scientific field, I learned that structure was only acceptable when it served power. Outside of that, it was too much, too rigid, too strange. The very things that made me good at my job also ensured I’d never fully belong in the institution I served.

What Autism Research Lacks: Scientific Rigour and Epistemic Humility

When I read most autism research now, I feel the same sick weight I once felt in departmental meetings—watching a familiar script unfold, knowing exactly where it’s going, and knowing, too, that any protest will be framed as noncompliance. There’s a deep unease that settles in my chest as I move through these papers, not because I can’t follow the methodology, but because I can. I recognise the form. I recognise the absence of rigour dressed up in the language of it. And I recognise the way dissent is neutralised by process—how the appearance of science is used to shield its lack of substance.

In my former career, rigour wasn’t optional. Every piece of forensic work I submitted had to be grounded in clearly stated assumptions, documented tools, and repeatable processes. Delimitations weren’t a flourish—they were required. I had to name what was inside the scope of my analysis, and just as crucially, what was not. Anything less risked the integrity of the evidence and the credibility of the court. I lived by that. For years, I believed that systems—legal, scientific, academic—cared about that level of precision. I clung to the hope that if I was meticulous enough, I would be understood. That the evidence, clearly presented, would speak for itself.

It didn’t. And it doesn’t now. Autism research today doesn’t often carry those same commitments. Delimitations are either buried or missing. Internal validation—the careful examination of whether your method measures what you think it does—is rare, if it happens at all. Tools developed decades ago are wielded without question, as if their continued use proves their validity. Behavioural coding schemes reduce complex communication to checkmarks, their reliability taken on faith. There is a striking absence of epistemic humility. The researchers do not ask what it means to observe a subject whose language they do not speak. They do not account for the possibility that the lens itself is distorting the view.

And here I sit—in the gap between the field I left and the one that claims to study me. A liminal space, again. Not quite inside, not quite outside. I carry the rigour of my past with me, but I know now what I didn’t then: that rigour alone won’t save you when the system doesn’t want to see clearly. I spent years documenting everything, trusting that good science would matter. But I was writing in a system that only cared about the performance of objectivity when it served power. Now, I see the same patterns repeating in the research done on autistic people, rather than with us.

I don’t want to replicate that. I don’t want to spend my energy trying to force a field to care about the rules it claims to follow. I want something deeper. Something honest. Something that begins not with a presumption of deficit, but with the humility to ask: What don’t we know? What are we not seeing? And why? If there’s to be a science of autism, it must begin with the radical act of not writing the ending before the story is told. It must start in the liminal spaces—where most of us have always lived.

The Artifact Problem: Misreading Autistic Traces

In forensics, we were trained to distinguish between a trace and an artifact—not just semantically, but philosophically. A trace is the remnant of an event, the residue of something that truly happened. It bears the weight of presence. It is evidence, not in theory, but in form. An artifact, by contrast, is something introduced by the process—a distortion, an echo, a glitch. It is noise masquerading as signal, or worse, signal misread as noise. The work demanded we know the difference. Because if you mistake an artifact for a trace, you might misidentify someone. And if you dismiss a trace as an artifact, you might erase them entirely.

This is the lens I carry when I look at how autistic communication is framed. Echolalia. Scripting. Meltdowns. Hyper-focus. Repetitive movements. Sensory rituals. These are traces. They are authentic signals of how we process, survive, and express in a world not built for us. But the neuro-majority reads them as artifacts—malfunctions, pathologies, symptoms of some internal disorder. The trace is not given space to speak. It is encoded, flattened, reduced to a checkbox or a score on an observational sheet. No effort is made to ask what the behaviour means—only to label it, suppress it, or extinguish it.

And so the liminality deepens. We are here, leaving traces—yet treated as if we are not truly present. Our gestures, our repetitions, our borrowed language are seen not as expressions, but as flaws in the transmission. The system views us like a corrupted file: salvageable only if restored to something more recognisably human. But that judgement comes from a digital mindset—one that samples, quantises, compresses, and decides on our behalf what can be kept and what must be discarded.

When I worked in forensic imaging, I used to say that I preferred a low-grade VHS tape over the latest digital format. Not because the resolution was better—far from it—but because the greyscale was honest. A VHS recording gave me 64,000 levels of grey. It let me examine the shadows, the gradients, the spaces in between. Digital video, in its pursuit of clarity, too often clipped the greys. It decided what a pixel meant. A group of slightly different greys might be declared uniformly white, or equally black, or simply lost in compression. It made assumptions for the sake of efficiency—and in doing so, it erased the nuance.

That’s how autistic life is often processed by the neuro-majority. Clipped. Encoded. Oversimplified. Declared to be one thing when it was something else entirely. Our traces are not granted the dignity of ambiguity. They are not examined in the depth of their context, but flattened for consumption. And when we try to explain—when we speak in scripts, or gestures, or borrowed phrases—we are told we are malfunctioning. We are not. We are recording. We are responding. We are showing you the greyscale you keep trying to ignore.

What they call pathology is often just unreadable poetry. What they call disorder is sometimes a lifeline woven from borrowed language and instinctive truth. The tragedy is not that we communicate differently—it’s that our traces are so often misread as meaningless artifacts, and discarded before they are ever understood.

Writing a Reality That Isn’t Ours

Autism research, as it is most often practised, is not the pursuit of understanding—it is the construction of a reality. A kind of reality-writing machine, where the outcomes are scripted long before the first participant is recruited. In this world, autism must be deficit. Communication must be linear. Behaviour must be controllable. Divergence must be corrected. These are not conclusions drawn from the data—they are preconditions for participation in the research itself. The study is not a question; it is an answer in search of evidence.

This machine runs quietly but relentlessly. Its gears are diagnostic criteria, behavioural coding frameworks, standardised interventions. Each is framed as neutral—scientific, objective, clinical. But taken together, they form the architecture of a world that autistic people do not recognise as our own. A world where “noncompliance” is a measure of dysfunction, rather than an act of resistance. Where “lack of eye contact” is pathologised, while the inability to read our cues is considered irrelevant. Where communication is only valid if it conforms to a narrow, neurotypical ideal. Where silence is always absence, never intent.

In this constructed world, autistic people are not participants in knowledge production—we are its objects. We are observed, interpreted, and translated. Our words, when they exist, are filtered through a prism of suspicion. Our movements are reduced to symptoms. Our presence is flattened into categories, metrics, and acronyms. And when we protest—when we say, “this isn’t right,” or “you’ve misread me”—our protest is itself absorbed into the pathology. “Resistance to feedback,” they call it. “Impaired insight.” “Lack of self-awareness.” In the reality-writing machine, even our rejections become proof of the researcher’s correctness.

This is not science. It is mythmaking with footnotes. It is a closed loop of logic that validates itself by denying us the possibility of epistemic agency. We are not simply marginalised—we are overwritten. Our lives are redrafted in real time, shaped into something legible to the neuro-majority, even if it bears no resemblance to the truth of our experience. The world they describe is not ours. The language they use does not fit our mouths. And the conclusions they draw rarely begin with the question: what if we are already whole, but simply not yet understood?

A Forensic Mind in the Twilight Zone

This is no new phenomenon. What’s happening in autism research today—this rewriting of reality through the language of medicine and behavioural science—is not an aberration. It is a refinement. A more palatable version of an old game: the use of psychological tools to discipline, erase, and control. While the Cold War era often points the finger at the Soviet Union for its weaponisation of psychiatry, the truth is far murkier, and far closer to home. In the U.S. and across the Global North, psychiatry and psychology were reshaped—not for healing, but for order. Dissent became pathology. Queerness became disorder. Unreadability became deviance. And autism? It was absorbed into that machinery of suspicion without ever being named.

This is the twist in the episode. The scientists think they are studying us, unaware that the camera has turned. They assume we do not see them—do not know what they are doing. But we do. Some of us were trained in the very methods they now misuse. We recognise the signs. The absence of delimitations. The unexplained tools. The circular logic dressed as empirical discovery. We see when science is being replaced with belief, when evidence is contorted to fit preordained conclusions. We see the ghost of COINTELPRO in the casual linking of autistic traits with “threat assessment.” We see the fingerprints of Cold War ideology in every behavioural chart that punishes noncompliance as dysfunction. We see how “therapy” becomes discipline, how “intervention” becomes erasure.

And still, we are told it is for our good. That this research will help us. That these tools are neutral. But neutrality is a lie told by those who hold the pen. When the entire diagnostic framework assumes deficit, when the language of observation is built around impairment, when the outcome of the study is set before the first line of code is run—that is not science. That is narrative. That is social control wrapped in clinical terminology. That is power, masked as benevolence.

Standing in this space—as someone who has worked within the machinery of science, and now lives within the margins of its gaze—I carry a terrible clarity. I know what it means to construct truth. I know how easily data can be bent. I know what’s missing from the methodology sections, because I was once asked to leave it out. I know that silence, too, is a form of violence. And I know that naming the distortion—refusing to let the machine continue unchallenged—is itself a radical act.

They may not expect us to see them. They may still believe the mirror is one-way. But we are watching. We are listening. We are remembering. And some of us have learned to speak back.

Toward a More Honest Science

There is a renewed urgency now. In recent weeks, the rhetoric has shifted from dog-whistle to declaration. The new HHS regime, under the Trump administration’s reshuffling and RFK Jr.’s conspiratorial influence, has set a public deadline: they will “find the cause of autism” by September. Five months. That’s not science—it’s a verdict waiting for a justification. And it isn’t being improvised. It’s being executed with cold efficiency, using the apparatus already in place. This machine—built over decades through deficit-based frameworks, pathologising diagnostics, and the systematic exclusion of autistic voices—is now being run at full tilt. Not reformed. Not redirected. Accelerated.

It is chilling to watch. Because I know what it means when a state aligns itself with medicalised scapegoating. When a government declares that a marginalised population is a problem to be solved, and not people to be understood. The echoes are unmistakable. Mid-1930s Germany didn’t invent fascism—it inherited systems of classification, institutionalisation, and surveillance, and then turned them toward deadly ends. The NSDAP didn’t build the machine from scratch. They merely took control of an industrialised state already fluent in eugenics, and set it to work with a singular, horrifying purpose. That’s what we’re seeing now. Not a fringe ideology, but a state ideology, piloted by people who know exactly what levers they’re pulling.

So what would a more honest science look like, in the face of this?

It would begin by doing what forensic science taught me to do: state your boundaries. Validate your tools. Respect your evidence. In forensics, you must declare what you examined, what you excluded, and why. You must test the reliability of your methods, and if they fail, you don’t proceed. You do not twist the data to match your theory. You do not ignore contamination. You do not assume authority over the evidence—you follow it. You let it tell its own story.

Autism research has rarely done this. But it must, if we are to survive what’s coming. We need epistemologies that begin not with the assumption of disorder, but with the premise of difference. We need methodologies designed by autistic people—not simply as tokens in focus groups, but as architects of the entire research framework. We need studies that honour our traces, not erase them. That ask what a stim means, instead of how to stop it. That understand scripting as a form of expression, not a barrier to communication. That treat our lives not as puzzles to be solved, but as realities to be understood on their own terms.

This is not about scientific preference. It’s about survival. The tools of medicine, education, and behavioural science have long been used to marginalise us. Now, under this new regime, those same tools are being sharpened into weapons. The moment demands more than academic critique. It demands resistance. And resistance, for those of us trained in evidence, begins by refusing to let them falsify the record.

We are here. We are not artifacts. And we will not be defined out of existence.

Final thoughts …

In this moment—this sharpened, accelerating moment—the stakes are no longer abstract. This is not just about policy or pedagogy. It is existential. For autistic people, especially those of us who have been historically misread, mislabelled, or medically coerced, the promise that a “cause of autism” will soon be found is not a scientific curiosity. It is a threat. It is the state declaring that our existence is a question that must be answered, rather than a life that must be honoured.

But we are not unanswered questions. We are not gaps in the literature or errors in development. We are evidence. Our very being—our ways of speaking, of moving, of processing the world—are not signs of damage. They are traces of a different, beautiful mind. And like all traces, they require care in how they are handled. They must not be smudged, distorted, or interpreted away. They are not awaiting translation into neurotypical terms. They are the language.

I have spent a lifetime learning how to recognise traces—how to preserve them, how to let them speak for themselves. And now, as this new chapter unfolds, I know what must be done. We cannot wait for permission. We cannot afford to be polite in the face of erasure. We must document. We must testify. We must write and speak and move in ways that refuse to be made into artifacts.

Because we are here. We always have been. And what we leave behind—our scripts, our rituals, our gestures, our truths—is not evidence of a broken self. It is the imprint of survival in a world that did not want to know us. Until now.

Let it be known: we are the evidence. And we will not disappear.