Allyship is a verb. Not a badge.
Allyship is something you do. It is not something you are.
Autistic Pride Day 2026, the current campaign
Autism is trending. Now do something about it.
The six lines of Autistic Pride Day 2026
- Autism is trending. We've always been here.
- Autism is trending. Our lives haven't changed.
- Autism is trending. We built what was missing.
- Autism is trending. The systems haven't noticed.
- Autism is trending. We're not a moment.
- Autism is trending. Now do something about it.
The 2026 campaign.
The six actions
June 18
Our impact
Stories from 2026.
On being newly identified as Autistic.
You have not become Autistic. You have always been Autistic. What has changed is that you now have a word for it, and a community, and a way of reading your own life.
The numbers are not the story.
Autism prevalence is often quoted as one in a hundred, one in seventy, one in forty four, depending on who you ask and where they are counting. The numbers vary. They are not the story.
Medicine has not been kind.
If you are Autistic and you have had a bad experience in a medical setting, you are not unusual. You are in the majority.
Autism in later life.
The late diagnosis cohort is moving into its fifties, sixties, seventies, and the public conversation about autism has not caught up.
Autism Went Mainstream. The Systems Did Not.
We’ve run Think Autism four times now and I still can’t predict how the day will go.
Autism and school. The first system to fail us.
Most Autistic adults carry some version of school trauma. The setting failed us early, and it failed us consistently, and many of us did not recover the relationship with learning that we might otherwise have had.
Autistic Pride Day is no longer one day.
Originally created on 18 June 2005 by autistic led advocacy group Aspies for Freedom, Autistic Pride Day was built as a day for autistic people to define themselves on their own terms.
Parenting an Autistic child. First, believe them.
Most advice about parenting an Autistic child is written for the parent’s anxiety, not the child’s life. The advice tends to be procedural. What to do when they melt down. How to get them to eat.
Autistic parents.
There are a lot of books written about parenting an Autistic child. There are very few books written about being a parent who is Autistic. The two are different topics.
Autistic children do not lack social skills. They have different ones.
When an Autistic child plays alone, someone usually writes it down as a concern. The same child, absorbed and happy, alone by choice, looking for something specific in a toy no one else noticed. That is not a deficit.
Non speaking is not non thinking.
Some of us do not speak. Some of us spoke once and do not anymore. Some of us speak on good days and not on bad ones. Some of us speak in some contexts and not in others.
Autism and sleep. Why the night is loud.
A large proportion of Autistic people do not sleep well. The figure is sometimes quoted at sixty to eighty percent.
