The Child No One Wanted in Class
A recent New York Times article (October 1, 2025) suggesting autism needs to be broken into two categories cited “a survey of 800 families, conducted this year by the National Council on Severe Autism, [which] found that 80 percent had been told their children were too disruptive even for classrooms and services tailored to students with autism and other disabilities.”
While no one would accuse me of having “severe autism,” I, too, was an unwanted, disruptive presence in my classrooms. My kindergarten teacher loved me, even though I bit her when she tried to pull me out from under the table where I was hiding. My first grade teacher hated me and requested I be removed from her classroom and put in special education. She called me the R-word.
When I think back on elementary school, it’s hard to remember what happened, where. I changed schools so many times I’d been in at least six different schools by fourth grade. Sometimes there were other reasons for shuffling me around, but I was removed from many classrooms because teachers couldn’t handle me. No one knew what to do with me.
I’d slither on the floor like a lizard. I’d meow like a cat. I’d take any opportunity to hide under a table where it was darker, quieter, less overwhelming. My emotions erupted straight through my skin with no regulator, no buffer. My outbursts and disruptions became louder and more appalling the older I got. By middle school, I’d gotten myself expelled from the entire county school system. There was no place back then for someone who was both academically gifted and behaviorally disabled.
They have a word for it now: twice exceptional.
I hope they have more than a word.
I hope kids like me actually have a place now.
A Spectrum With No Middle
I grew up to find “my people”… sort of. Maybe.
There’s a current cultural argument: autism should be split into “profound” and “non-profound” autism. Researchers have joined the debate, studying where to draw the line and how to justify it. Quoted in the Times article, Ari Ne’eman, long-time Autistic self-advocate, compared the attempt at separating autism into two camps to trying to “cleave a meatloaf at the joints.”
I don’t belong on either side. Will that cleaver chop me in two?
My life keeps proving what the research hints at: the middle of the spectrum is where services, language, and understanding fall apart.
Services for “profound autism” will not help me. I speak, I write, I drive. I don’t require 24/7 supervision. I remember the days when those services were the only thing there was. I was drowning in my own life and no one would help me because my IQ is higher than 70. These are services only available to people who can’t ask for them.
But support and services for “non-profound autism” leave me behind, too. I have a hair-trigger nervous system. I become “profoundly” dysregulated and cannot “behave appropriately” in systems where no one is trained on the nuclear level meltdowns that overtake my bodymind in times of intense stress. My sensory sensitivities are calibrated so finely that I can barely stand to be around people (despite being an extrovert who loves human connection.)
I belong to the messy middle. We fall through the cracks.
The Lived Middle
When I read about the proposed split, profound vs. non-profound, I can see what each side is trying to describe, but (like many Autists…most Autists?) I live in the space between them. I don’t need someone to monitor my every move for my safety. But I do need someone who understands that my nervous system runs like a live wire, and that a “simple” social misunderstanding or a flickering fluorescent light can send me spiraling into hours of recovery.
I can cook, drive, write, edit, and facilitate groups. I can also lose the ability to speak for days. I can manage complex projects for work, then fall apart because someone touched me in the grocery store. When I melt down, my brain doesn’t politely announce, “please excuse the emotional disturbance.” It shuts down my access to my prefrontal cortex (while leaving my brain’s language center dismayingly untouched!) and throws me into a physical storm that feels like experiencing every threatening emotion in one giant tsunami.
I am neither the non-speaking child in a residential facility nor the worker who has kept the same job for twelve years (though not, I should note, without suffering or struggle). I am the missing middle case: the one who gets lost when systems are built for either the child who can’t communicate or the adult who can network.
If autism is divided, where will people like me go? “Profound” autism categories will not include me because I can speak. “Non-profound” services will exclude me because I cannot perform neurotypicality sufficiently to keep a job more than a few months. When I am regulated, I can explain my meltdown with elegant clarity; when I am in it, all I can do is scream obscenities. This same body holds both truths.
The danger of the cleaver isn’t just that it divides. It crushes the connective tissue. We mid-gradient people prove that autism isn’t a tidy collection of buckets but a terrain of overlapping ranges. We are the fault lines that make the whole visible.
The Scientific Lens, the Polygenic Divides
A 2025 study in Nature Medicine put forth the thesis that autism looks different depending on when someone is diagnosed. Researchers tracked thousands of children and found two main developmental arcs: one that emerges early, and one that surfaces later. The early group, usually diagnosed around preschool age, showed strong signs of dysregulation and social difference from the start. The later group, those not diagnosed until adolescence or adulthood, looked more “typical” in early childhood, then began to struggle as social life grew more complex.
Genetically, those two arcs map onto different constellations of traits. The early group is tied to genes that influence social communication and sensory processing. The later group is tied to genes overlapping with ADHD, PTSD, and depression. According to the data, the two profiles are distinct enough that they could almost be seen as different “autisms.” Yet even the researchers left an undefined window between ages six and nine, a no man’s land where neither trajectory cleanly applies.
I land in that overlap zone. I have an early-identified nervous system carrying the later-diagnosed cluster of comorbidities. My life is where the two curves meet and tangle. I was initially diagnosed at seven (squarely between “early” and “late,” in the study’s framework) yet I live with both the extreme emotional dysregulation the study defined as a hallmark of early diagnosis and the ADHD, PTSD, and chronic struggle with anxiety and depression that the study found more common among later-diagnosed people. I’ve always been the statistical noise that refuses to average out.
The scientists used the word polygenic to describe how hundreds of genes combine to shape each person’s developmental path. I think of it as poly-everything: polytraumatic, polysensory, polymodal. I’m a multivariate outlier. My neurology carries multiple histories at once: genetic, experiential, cultural. I am early-emergent in my meltdown profile, late-emergent in my self-awareness, and forever trying to reconcile a body that feels ancient with a mind that keeps discovering itself anew.
When researchers talk about these two genetic “factors,” they still speak as though everyone fits neatly into one or the other. But so many of us are hybrid systems: early storms that never quieted, layered with late revelations. The data call me interstitial. I call it being alive at the seam where categories unravel.
Science likes to sort, but the closer researchers look, the more the borders blur. Each new study meant to clarify autism’s architecture ends up revealing new subtypes, new overlaps, new contradictions. Attempts to cage the spectrum only unravel into a cluster of intersecting constellations. Advocates of the “profound autism” label say there is not one autism. In truth, there are not two autisms, either. There are many autisms, coexisting and often colliding in combinations inside a single person. The data are only beginning to catch up to what many of us have lived all along: there is no single arc, no single story, no single way to be Autistic. It’s Ari’s meatloaf with traits thoroughly mixed throughout, not lined up as discrete slices.
An Ethical Gap: Diagnosis Without Disclosure
I was diagnosed at seven but first told at thirty-four. For twenty-seven years, I lived with the label but not the knowledge. The word autism lived in files, not in my awareness. Others had access to information that could have helped me make sense of my life, but no one handed me the map.
When researchers talk about age of diagnosis, they assume the person diagnosed actually knows. But there’s another trajectory that rarely enters the data: early-diagnosed on paper, late-diagnosed in life. On a chart, I’d be plotted among the “early” cases; in lived time, I belong with the “late.” With my mixed collection of traits, I belong nowhere.
That’s one ethical vacuum in the whole conversation about splitting autism into “profound” and “non-profound.” What good are new categories if the people inside them still aren’t told who they are? The system can label a child, publish the data, even claim early intervention success — but if that same child grows up without language for their own difference, what intervention was that, really?
Diagnosis ≠ disclosure ≠ support.
Knowing about me is not the same as letting me know myself.
The Human Cost of Polarization
Both sides of the split debate are reacting to genuine pain. The parents of children with high support needs see the more verbal Autists growing in numbers, eclipsing children like theirs, putting forth an ideology that they fear will leave their children behind. They’re fighting neglect in a world that offers little safety net, little respite, and too few clinicians willing to take on complex cases.
Neurodiversity activists, on the other hand, are fighting erasure. For years they were told they weren’t “really” Autistic, that they were just eccentric or socially awkward. Meanwhile, glossy “Autism Awareness” campaigns featuring celebrities peddle a narrative of tragedy, comparing autism to diabetes and cancer.
But between those two righteous causes lies a widening gulf that swallows anyone whose life defies both archetypes. When advocacy polarizes around who suffers “enough” to be considered truly Autistic, people like me flounder with few places to turn for useful help.
I was the child too disruptive for classrooms and too verbal for compassion. I lost school placements not because I couldn’t learn, but because no one knew how to teach someone like me. I carried untreated trauma for decades because professionals saw only defiance, not distress. Even now, the daily work of emotional regulation: holding myself together through noise, touch, light, and human unpredictability? It’s invisible labor few realize I’m slogging through every day. I don’t fit either narrative. I suspect most Autists don’t. Who is researching that?
For the “profound” camp, I’m too capable. For many in the “neurodiversity” camp, I’m too volatile. But my existence proves both realities true at once: the need for safety and care, and the right to self-definition. The binary breaks apart where I live.
My Life as a Bridge
When I call myself a bridge, I mean the structure, the connective tissue that holds two sides in relation. The middle is not an absence but an architecture. People like me show where the spectrum’s supposed endpoints bend toward each other.
My neurology is hybrid, not broken. It offers a way to see autism as an ecosystem rather than a spectrum line. Forests don’t divide cleanly into “trees” and “not trees.” They contain gradations of shade and soil, roots interlaced underground. Autism is like that: an ecology of traits and bodies that shape one another. To understand the whole, you have to study the overlap zones, the places where categories blur and organisms coexist.
If research and policy treated those overlaps as instructive instead of inconvenient, support could become scalable and individualized rather than categorical. A system built for complexity would ask different questions: not “Which kind are you?” but “What do you need, and what helps you thrive?”
This is an ethics of care that designs for the edges and intersections, not the average case. The bridge perspective doesn’t erase difference; it honors it by keeping the structure intact for everyone who lives between.
Reclaiming the Middle Ground
I think of that child on the classroom floor, hiding under a table because it was the only place that felt safe. The lights were too bright, the noise too sharp, the air thick with other people’s expectations. No one knew what to do with that child. The teachers wanted them gone. The files called them disruptive. But they were trying, in the only language they had, to build a bridge between their bodymind and the world.
What if the field saw that child not as an outlier, but as the center? What if the messy middle was understood as the heart of autism rather than relegated to its margins? Every diagnosis, every theory, every classroom could start from that question: what happens when we design for the ones who don’t fit cleanly anywhere?
What if we center them in the story of their own life?
The future of autism can’t belong to the extremes alone. It belongs to us all: to those clearly defined and to those who live in the thresholds, translating between worlds, proving that connection itself is a form of intelligence. The spectrum’s strength has always been its range, and its hope lies in those who refuse to disappear into binaries.
That child is still here, learning to stand in the open. The world is finally beginning to meet them halfway.
It’s almost enough.
Works Cited
Ghorayshi, A. (2025, October 1). Should the autism spectrum be split apart? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/health/autism-spectrum-neurodiversity-kennedy.html
Zhang, X., Grove, J., Gu, Y., Buus, C. K., Nielsen, L. K., et al. (2025). Polygenic and developmental profiles of autism differ by age at diagnosis. Nature Medicine, 31(2), 225–238. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09542-6
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