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Epistemic injustice occurs when people are seen as unreliable witnesses of their own experience.

Autistic self-knowledge is often disputed and discarded in favor of "expert" knowledge.

Epistemic injustice takes a major toll on autistic lives, including the lifespan.

Believing autistic people can save lives.

With heartbreaking regularity, the autistic community is rocked by pronouncements from prominent researchers or others with power and reach that boil down to this: “You don’t truly know yourself, and what you think about yourself does not really count.” Last week, it came in the form of an interview given by a veteran autism researcher, Uta Frith, who suggested that current autism diagnosis has been stretched too far by the inclusion of “hypersensitive” people without intellectual disability, and doubted the existence of autistic masking.1 A slew of social media posts from the autistic community pointing to all the masking research and the potentially life-saving role of adult diagnosis followed.

What fuels this reaction is more than what Uta Frith said. Just as important is a long, painful history of researchers, policy‑makers, media voices, and everyday powers-that-be dismissing autistic people’s own accounts of who they are and what their lives are like. In a 2007 book, Miranda Fricker2 called this recurring pattern epistemic injustice, in which those with less power are routinely treated as unreliable knowers of their own experience.

Autistic people and epistemic injustice

Epistemic injustice sounds abstract, but for many in the autistic community, this is the story of being told, over and over, “We know you better than you know yourself.”

Take one autistic life, roughly sketched.

Childhood: You say, “It’s too........

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