Writing Autistic Characters: The Quiet Ableism of Person-First Language

When writing about autistic characters, should you use identity-first language or person-first language? Identity-first language means placing an identity before personhood. For example, people are often identified by their gender. You may only call attention to someone by saying the young man—or my granddaughter—putting huge emphasis on their gender identity for personhood. Rarely would you have someone say that a person who is female—unless the person in question is trans/non-binary, and then it is used to distance the person in question from an identity that others view as distasteful. To be clear, I am non-binary, and I am calling out this language, not condoning it.

You may think that I am digressing. After all, we are here to talk about autism, not transphobia. Except this is exactly the point I want to make. Using person-first language for autistic individuals is often used by non-autistic individuals to distance us from our identity. Instead of saying “I’m autistic,” children are taught to say, “I have autism.” Parents will say, “my child with autism,” instead of “my autistic child.” That distance keeps autism at a safe distance as if we can be separated from our autism—and helps promote a cure mentality.

This distancing language calls out autism as a disease (Brown, 2011). It puts autism less than an identity and more as something that needs to be cured or fixed. It devalues autistic identities and minimizes who we are and our value to society.

Ableism is rampant in our country, and autistic people seem to be another example of easy targets. We are the punchline of late-night comedy jokes (The Daily Show, 2004), the target of political hate (Hamilton, Noguchi, & Greenfieldboyce, 2025), and constantly infantilized and othered. How we talk about autistic people is important. Writers reflect society in books. Then those thoughts and beliefs are taken and used to shape society. It is a cyclical process, and it is our responsibility as writers to look at our role within it. Even autistic authors need to be aware, but non-autistic authors need to be even more so.

In addition, despite 3.2 percent of children being diagnosed as autistic (Shaw et al., 2025), we are still talked about in terms of being children and not people who grow up. Even representation in literature is being increased in children and young adult spaces (Kelley et al., 2025), which are populations that traditionally cannot write their own representation. When adults are talked about, we are a burden (Tian et al., 2026), and it is primarily being written by non-autistic authors or autistic authors who indie because traditional publishing does not welcome our own voices.

The vast majority of autistic adults prefer identity-first language (Taboas, Doepke, & Zimmerman, 2022). My autistic identity permeates every aspect of my being, from how I view and interact with the world to how the world interacts with me. Using language to distance autistic people from our identity is a subtle way of letting us know you wish we weren’t autistic. When you use person-first language for autistic characters, you are reinforcing this and creating an autistic representation that is potentially harmful to autistic people.

Not every autistic person uses identity-first language (Taboas, Doepke, & Zimmerman, 2022), and there are a variety of reasons for this. While each autistic person’s reason will differ, some is internalized ableism. For others, it is a way of acknowledging that interacting with the world as an autistic person is hard. No matter the reasoning, if an autistic person asks you to use person-first language for them, abide by their wishes. It is their right to ask how they want to be represented.

However, as a writer, specifically a non-autistic writer, you are representing an identity other than your own and should stick with identity-first language. This is true even if you are the parent of an autistic child and use person-first language with them. Which, I am sure you can imagine, I would call into question in and of itself. 

References

Brown, L. The significance of semantics: Person-first language: Why it matters, autistichoya, August 4, 2011: https://www.autistichoya.com/2011/08/significance-of-semantics-person-first.html

Hamilton, J., Noguchi, Y., & Greenfieldboyce, N. (2025). Trump blames Tylenol for autism. Science doesn’t back him up. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/22/nx-s1-5550153/trump-rfk-autism-tylenol-leucovorin-pregnancy

Kelley, J. E., Hsiao, Y., Barrio, B. L., Cardon, T. A., & Joyce, M. G. (2025). Representation of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Realistic Fiction for Children and Young Adults Over the Past 20 Years. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, 64 (1). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol64/iss1/5

Taboas, A., Doepke, K., & Zimmerman, C. (2022). Preferences for identity-first versus person-first language in a US sample of autism stakeholders, National Autistic Society, Vol 27(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221130845

Shaw KA, Williams S, Patrick ME, et al. Prevalence and Early Identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 4 and 8 Years — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 16 Sites, United States, 2022. MMWR Surveill Summ 2025;74(No. SS-2):1–22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss7402a1.

The Daily Show. FBI Warns of a Rise in Hate & Chris Broussard Says “R-Word” On-Air|The Daily Show [Video] YouTube. https://youtu.be/fmM1jSdTn1s?si=B2RR97Xk-aE5lW0O

Tian, W., Yan, G., Zhang, X. et al. Global burden of autism spectrum disorders among population aged 70 years and older from 1990–2021, with projections to 2040: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. Mol Psychiatry 31, 775–785 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-025-03172-0