When we write news articles for this website, we sometimes struggle with the most respectful and appropriate language to use in talking about autism.

We would never call people who have a disease “patients”, for example, because it is dehumanizing, but the lines get blurrier.

Is it better to refer to “children with autism”, or to “autistic children”?

Most disability activists would cite the former, but within the autism community are activists who argue that autism is not an illness, but an alternative way of being.

By that argument, it’s inaccurate, not to mention strange, to refer to a child with autism, as it would be to describe a man as “a person with maleness”.

I had heard about this remarkable group of activists before, but a fascinating article in this week’s New York magazine airs their views on what they call “neurodiversity”: the idea that autism is not a disease, but simply a genetic variation that should be accepted and even celebrated.

The article is long but well worth reading to the finish. What I found particularly interesting is that the neurodiversity activists are at direct odds with parents who believe that vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism.

Somewhere in the middle are people like Temple Grandin, who say that some people with Asperger’s or high-functioning autism have been the smartest scientists and artists the world has ever known, but that it would be nice to be able to prevent the most severe forms of the disorder.

In other words, like the autism spectrum itself, there are far too many views in the autism community to represent any one as accurate.