Opinion

I’m tired of disability activists pretending my son doesn’t exist

Amy S.F. Lutz is a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, a founding board member of the National Council on Severe Autism and the author, most recently, of “Chasing the Intact Mind: How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates that Affect Them Most.”

You can’t miss my son Jonah, 24. He’s the one spinning while blasting “Sesame Street” songs from his iPad in the back corner of Costco. The one popping up from a table at Five Guys, splashed with so much ketchup he looks like a murder victim. The one pounding on his head in agitation, sometimes for obvious reasons (he was directed to the pink waterslide instead of the blue one) and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all.