Autism is not a dish that is more or less spicy

“I don’t believe in profound or mild autism. I think autism is autism.” Kyriakos Gold, who gave the keynote at Think Autism Melbourne on 30 May 2026, said that near the end of it, and he said it because of what autistic people had been hearing in the weeks before the conference. Autistic people had been told that they lead unremarkable lives and that the spectrum should collapse because it was the wrong thing. He did not name who had said it. The claim, he said, had arrived in a political climate where autistic people had become the latest punching bag, and where it was easy for them to be disliked, pointed at or, to use a blunt autistic word, hated.

His argument against grading autism by severity started from what he can and cannot know. Everyone feels their own autism at one hundred per cent, he told the room. He has no idea how somebody else feels theirs, and he does not know how to feel less autistic or more autistic. His barriers feel to him like the highest mountain. His advantages are simply his everyday life, and he does not experience them as advantages at all. He was explicit that it was fine for others in the community to use different language. For his part, when people are labelled mildly or profoundly autistic, he said, “We’re not a dish that is more or less spicy. We’re humans.”