Is the artist autistic, or does this autistic person like art?

Let's think of Anthony Hopkins, to cite the perhaps most famous example. He received the diagnosis at over 70 years of age. But we continue to see him as the outstanding actor who shines in many roles, and the fact that he is autistic is, at best, an attribute.

Was Mozart perhaps autistic? Albert Einstein? Or maybe neurodivergent in some other way, as we like to say today, say, ADHD, for example. If we knew, it would be the same as with Hopkins: an interesting personal detail. 

It’s quite different for a young person who has been diagnosed with autism and/or ADHD since childhood. If parents and others around them don’t to pay attention to this, this young person will go out into the world as an autistic person and measure his or her entire life against this circumstance, perhaps even defining life by it. 

But do we define an individual life today by the fact that the person is left-handed? Or maybe has glasses? Both were still considered flaws in my childhood, especially glasses for a girl. A life defined by glasses… well, you’ll always need visual aids. Left-handedness is no longer an issue, at least in Western countries.

And whether an artist paints her pictures with her left hand and needs glasses to do so, or not, is nothing more than a (perhaps) interesting attribute, and that’s exactly how we should see it if she is autistic. How autism affects her life is only of interest to the public to the extent that she herself chooses to discuss it—if at all. That is, for me, the meaning of “inclusion”; anything else is nonsense at best, and at worst, just yet another form of discrimination.