Autism can actually affect somebody's understanding of consent.
Or rather, the social circumstances and lack of education people with profound autism are subjected to often results in a severely lacking understanding of consent.
I've been a disability educator on and off for most of my adult life. I've worked primarily with adults between 18 - 25, mostly men, in contexts that I believe your standard "well I'm autistic and I don't ever [problematic behaviour]" poster isn't even aware exist, because those are not contexts such people have ever had to be in.
A considerable part of my job was just having talks about consent with my students.
Many, many autistic people, that is the flavour of autistic people who were identified as autistic from childhood and raised in SPED or adjacent contexts, have spent their whole lives being infantilized and segregated from the outside world. Many of them have always been assumed to be "children in adult bodies." As a result, many of them have never had any meaninful sex education, especially not as relates to consent, beyond "if a stranger touches you in the vagina that's nnnnnno good."
There is a stigma around teaching them about sex and consent for fear of being labelled as a sexual predator, inflicting some kind of harm on the individual, or inspiring them to imitate what you've taught them about. If they are "children in adult bodies," well, children don't have sexual desires and sex in a context with children is always bad, so why would I teach this 19 year old man with descended testicles and adult hormones and shit about all that - he has babybrain, after all.
I had one student, a 22 year old man, who was hugging his psychologist in sessions with her so that he could feel her breasts against his chest. When he told me this, we had a consent talk. As he understood it, it only would've hurt her if she knew about it, but see, she thought it was just hugging and they'd always hugged even when he was a child, so unless she could read minds she'd have no way of knowing he was getting off on it. It took a few weeks and genuine social dev. exercises for him to understand beyond some kind of basic social rule of "don't do that" - and it's important for him to have that broader understanding so that he doesn't replicate the same problems elsewhere, ie. staring at women because "they can't see me staring and if they don't know it doesn't hurt them."
He's someone who 1. is disabled in a way that makes empathy and abstract reason difficult, and 2. has never been treated as having the potential to either have sexual thoughts or conduct himself in a sexually healthy way.
This kind of thing is exceedingly common. I've worked with men and women who masturbate in public because they do not have impulse control and do not understand that doing so can harm the people around them. After all, "I'm not touching anybody." I've worked with men and women who would discuss sex and pornography constantly regardless of social context because that is what they were presently obsessed with, and they lacked the ability to self-regulate. Superwholock was my Vietnam.
Basically, I've been in all kinds of complicated situations surroundinf disabled peoples' sexuality that indicate the severe lack of education that they receive, due to the norm of infantilisation.
I have also, and this is important, worked with dozens and dozens of disabled victims of sexual abuse.
If I were silly enough to think my subjective experience was representative of a universal truth, I'd say that 80% of intellectually disabled people have been sexually abused at some point or another. I have had so many disclosure experiences it is honestly maddening.
Many times students would just tell me things that happened to them during consent talks. It'd usually follow a stucture of,
"Touching someone's penis without asking first is wrong, because even if it makes us feel good, it can hurt them. Hurting people is wrong."
"But [person] touched my penis without asking and it didn't hurt."
That's seriously all it would take to discover half the time.
I'd disclose this to their caregiver, who would often be shocked and go through the motions of my gosh but I never thought I never suspected I never knew but golly it makes so much sense and that's why X, Y and Z happened and and and
All because there is such a social stigma around engaging with the reality that yes, actually, sex is part of the reality that disabled people inhabit, and just because you're reading them as an asexual child does not mean they are one.
I say all of this because every time a Problematic Man does some nonsense and plays neurodivergence as a defense, a legion of the most annoying level one autistic people look to protect the perception that they are ostensibly able-bodied by saying
"Well as an autistic man, I know what consent is."
Good for you, Mark! But a lot of people like us don't! And it leads to the most fucked up problems you've never had to deal with! But I do have to deal with them and if that remains the case for much longer, I'm going to become the fucking Joker!
The better response is: Neil Gaiman is not the kind of autistic person that doesn't know what consent is, or might misread signals like that. That he spent years covering up and lying about it indicates that he understands it was wrong, and that he would face consequences if discovered. His behaviour after being discovered also suggests the same. Additionally, we can see a clear understanding of consent in both his fiction and statements he has made previously. He is attempting to use autism as a cover, and in so doing, making the world more dangerous for the portion of autistic people who might really struggle to understand consent.
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