Thunderbolts and Mortals

Academia rarely agrees on anything. That’s not a criticism, it’s just how the field works: peer review exists precisely because experts are expected to fight over the details. But every so often that ordinary, healthy disagreement can cause a stir that reaches far beyond the hallowed halls of brainbox-land, and right now it’s landed on the question of who gets to be autistic.

Some of the most senior figures in autism research do not agree on where autism’s boundaries sit, who counts, how many categories there should be, whether the numbers climbing means anything at all.

It’s exposed how unsettled the ground under our neurodivergent feet actually is, and who’s expected to just wait quietly while the titans work it out.

Like the Gods on Olympus, taking sides, refusing to give an inch, hurling their arguments across the heavens, while down on the plain, the mortals are doing the actual bleeding. Nobody asks the soldier on the ground what he thinks of Zeus and Hera’s latest row. He just lives, or dies, with the fallout.

Swap the thunderbolts for journal editorials and Radio 4 interviews, and you’ve got a fair description of where autism diagnosis sits right now.

There’s real damage being done here, to real people, by these people arguing over our heads.

In August, Dame Uta Frith, whose research in the 1960s and 70s laid the groundwork for how autism is understood, published an editorial arguing the spectrum has “widened to the point of collapse.” Her proposed fix: split autism into at least two categories, early-diagnosed and more severe on one side, later-diagnosed and often female on the other, and stop calling the second group autistic at all.

Here’s what makes this more than one researcher’s opinion. Frith personally trained three of the field’s most influential figures, and none of them agree with her, or with each other.

Simon Baron-Cohen, her doctoral student, wants better subgroups but rejects the idea that too many people are being diagnosed. Francesca Happé, also her doctoral student, sat on the DSM-5 committee that folded Asperger’s into the single autism spectrum category in the first place, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to justify keeping the subtypes separate. Tony Attwood, her third doctoral student, spent decades arguing the opposite, that something important was lost when Asperger’s disappeared as its own diagnosis.

One supervisor. Three students. Three incompatible positions. If the people who trained together, under the same person, in the same institution, can’t agree on where the line goes, that should tell you something about how solid the line actually is.

There’s a coda to Attwood’s story worth sitting with. He’s spent fifty years running one of the world’s best-known diagnostic clinics for autism and Asperger’s. It took him thirty years to notice his own son was autistic, only recognising it while rewatching old home videos, by which point his son had been through addiction and jail. In March 2026, after half a century in the field, Attwood shared that he’d recognised his own autism too. If the person who wrote the clinical textbooks can miss it in his own child for thirty years and in himself for fifty, the idea that tighter, more behavioural diagnostic criteria would reliably catch the right people and only the right people stops looking like precision. It starts looking like a promise nobody in the room can actually keep.

Step outside Frith’s academic family entirely and you get a different flavour of the same argument. Temple Grandin has spent years pointing out that one label covering someone who cannot dress themselves and someone with “mild autism who works in Silicon Valley” makes it harder to get support to whoever needs it most. She’s not questioning anyone’s diagnosis. She’s questioning whether a single word can do the job of routing resources for a condition that spans that much ground. It’s a fair, practical point, and, as a family, we’d agree with it.

And then there’s the researcher who broke ranks entirely. Sue Fletcher-Watson was never Frith’s student, just someone Frith supported early in her career and once endorsed in print. She published a direct public rebuttal to Frith’s argument, disputing the “collapse” framing and specifically defending the scientific validity of masking, the very thing Frith’s proposed test is designed to catch people out on. Where Baron-Cohen, Happé, and Attwood are all arguing about where to draw the line, Fletcher-Watson is arguing that Frith’s method for drawing it, distrusting people’s own account of their experience in favour of what a clinician can observe in a room, is the wrong tool entirely. And that, I whole-heartedly agree with.

But, here’s the thing… None of that is really the problem. Reasonable people can disagree about subgroups and resource allocation forever, and the field will hopefully be better for it. Where it goes wrong is Frith’s specific method: deciding that someone’s ability to hold a conversation, read a room, or get a joke disqualifies their own account of what it costs them to do it. That’s not refining a category. That’s deciding some people’s evidence doesn’t count.

So, if the titans can’t agree, what are the rest of us meant to do with that? Especially the people actually living it and not studying it.

Here’s what’s worth holding onto: classification arguments and lived experience aren’t answering the same question. Frith, Baron-Cohen, Happé, Attwood, Grandin, and Fletcher-Watson are all arguing about where to draw a line, what counts, how many categories, how the label should route support. That’s a technical argument, and it needs technical expertise to resolve.

None of it touches whether your exhaustion is real. Whether your child’s meltdown after school was real. Whether the years you spent thinking you were just stupid, or lazy, or too much, were real. Those things already happened. No editorial in a psychology journal retroactively un-happens a childhood.

And the reason this doesn’t feel like a harmless academic disagreement is that diagnosis is currently the only key that opens the door to any support at all. So, when someone with Frith’s standing says the category may have become meaningless, it doesn’t land as a technical correction. It lands as a threat to the thing standing between your child and any help whatsoever.

There is something patronising about conducting this argument in the register of journals and radio interviews while more people than ever are reaching out for support that simply doesn’t exist. And this isn’t just an unedifying spectacle. It does real damage to real people, right now, while it’s happening.

Every time a headline reads “the spectrum has become meaningless,” somewhere a parent who’s been fighting for eighteen months to get their child assessed reads that as permission to be turned away. Somewhere, a school that was already reluctant to act on a diagnosis finds one more reason to say it isn’t necessary. Somewhere, an adult who finally had a name for a lifetime of feeling wrong quietly decides not to bother pursuing it, because apparently people like them are the reason the whole thing’s become a joke.

Nobody arguing about where to draw the line is the one sitting up at night with a child in meltdown. But the fallout from their argument lands on that family anyway.

The question was never whether this is real.

The question is who is being protected by this argument happening the way it’s happening, in journals and radio interviews, in public, among people who will still have no support waiting for them tomorrow morning regardless of how any of it gets resolved.

And what is so wrong with simply believing people when they reach out for help? Rather than making the person fit the diagnosis, or lack thereof, surely we should be listening to the millions of people every year who reach out for support and framing research and understanding around that?

Listen, hear it and believe us. It’s all evidence and it all counts. That would be the best place to start.

We are not a debate, we are people.

Rebecca Briggs is a specialist teacher and parent coach with 35 years’ experience working with neurodivergent children and their families. She is the founder of Square Peg Kids, author of a first book published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers (out 2027), and is currently writing her second. She spoke at the South West Paediatric Mental Health Network Conference in June 2026, and Willow Schools, her pilot programme for neurodivergent-informed education, launches in September 2026.