I keep seeing posts about Kaelynn Partlow, former Love on the Spectrum participant and an autistic advocate who works as an ABA therapist and produces video content about autism, but unfortunately the stuff on Tumblr is so far removed from what has actually been happening with her that people see "people are criticizing Kaelynn for [x]" and their knee-jerk reaction is often "well I don't see why people are upset with an autistic person for being autistic." I want to clear something up about this.
That is NOT what is happening. Partlow is not being picked on or bullied for being autistic or for demonstrating autistic traits.
Kaelynn made a video in which she created a false dichotomy between autistic people who have Low Support Needs and autistic people who have Moderate or High Support Needs. With this dichotomy, she claimed that MSN & HSN autistics always get their support needs met, and that LSN autistics do not.
She did this by role-playing as an HSN autistic person in her video skit and acting out behaviors such as yelling or screaming when the noise level in a room was too loud and having a caregiver immediately offer her a pair of noise-cancelling headphones to block out the noise. She contrasted this scenario with an LSN autistic person asking through verbalization if people in the room could be a little quieter, only to be met with criticism from her peers to the effect of "you're so sensitive! always too hot, too cold."
Within that "Room Too Loud" skit, Kaelynn's filming partner intentionally mispronounced the name "Zohran Mamdani" in a racist micro-aggression. In a follow-up video Kaelynn posted the next day, she explained that the mispronunciation was added as engagement bait and defended her practice of acting out skits involving HSN autistic people. Multiple BIPOC/racialized advocates in the autistic community such as blackspectrumscholar/Kaligirwa, Sienna.Stims, and Diversity_in_Neurodiversity approached Kaelynn to help explain why what she did was inappropriate and damaging. Kaelynn responded to private messages telling them "I hear you/I understand/I get it" but proceeded to publicly bash these people to her parasocial white knights as "haters," making a false claim that "they have a private discord server where all they do is talk about me" and "they only talk about me online because it gets them views."
After this went on for another day or two, Kaelynn made an apology video, however in her apology message, she never acknowledged specifically what actions of hers were harmful or why they were wrong. She didn't make any effort to take down or correct the misinformation in her viral video.
A few days later, she posted a new video with her mom. In this video, her mom tells the cameraperson that when she was teaching her daughter about the history of Anne Frank, she "left out the part where Anne Frank passed away." Kaelynn responded "I thought Anne Frank survived." and mentions that she only learned the truth that day after visiting the Anne Frank Museum and that she is 28 years old learning this information for the first time. Her mom justifies "protecting her because that's what good mothers do" because "this child of mine has big feelings."
And in my personal opinion, the whole thing is just gross. It infantilizes Kaelynn and other autistic people, it shifts accountability for her previous actions away from her, and it reinforces the basic structure of white supremacy.
By doing this, Kaelynn and her mom are implying that white autistic women are too sensitive and fragile to handle learning real world history and because of that they are also too sensitive to handle learning about racism and other social injustices. It's not cute, it's not funny, and it's fucking infuriating that Kaelynn will — like every other white autistic woman with a strong internet presence — most likely not face any lasting consequences for her actions because so many people are willing to go along with this "I'm baby, I'm just a smol autistic girl too pure for the world" bullshit that's being spun to them.
