Autistic roles belong to autistic actors, a Think Autism panel argued

One panellist did not hedge when Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, asked what autistic representation meant. It meant authenticity, and authenticity meant lived experience. The panellist told the room at Think Autism Sydney in May 2025 that it was “a terrible terrible idea to have neurotypical actors playing neurodiverse characters because they don’t have the lived experience”. Without that experience, the panellist said, a performance could not be authentic and could come across as a stereotype of autism, which the panellist did not approve of at all.

The panellists, Michael Theo and Heather Ridge, both appeared on Love on the Spectrum. Their session, Telling Our Stories: Autism in the Media, was part of the conference held at UTS in Ultimo as the preamble to Autistic Pride Day 2025. Gold opened it by observing that a few years earlier there had been no autistic people on television and no autism in the movies, only a fixed idea of what the quirks of autism looked like, and that now “we see thousands of versions of ourselves on television”. Some of them were good and some were bad. Through the session the panel kept coming back to who decides which version reaches the screen.