Autistic led does not mean autistic only, an AV panellist told Sydney

One of the sharpest moments in the closing session of the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney came from someone who had been officially part of the neurodivergent community for three weeks. A participant who had started an organisation four years earlier, and who had received an ADHD diagnosis only weeks before the event, spoke near the end of the day and named the remark that had stung. “I got a bit triggered,” they said, referring to something a panellist had said in the first session of the day.

The remark was about autistic leadership. Earlier that day, in a session on autistic led programs, Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked the panel about red flags, the things that go wrong when non autistic people run programs, and a panellist named it as a red flag when a program is not autistic led. Of the programs they advise, the panellist said that “quite often they’re autistic co-designed, but they’re not autistic led”, and linked the problem to money, arguing that large organisations were receiving the funding without delivering the best return on it. In the closing Q&A, a panellist who works at Aspergers Victoria, known in the room as AV, said they had made that red flag remark. For a newly diagnosed ADHD founder working in the same field, the rule raised the question of where they stood.