I tend to be of the opinion that while it’s helpful to have Neurotypical (hereafter abbreviated "NT") researchers studying autism & writing about it, the real autism experts are autistic people themselves. The best experts among experts are the up and coming adult-diagnosed people who are both trained mental health professionals and also have a lifetime’s experience of being autistic. It’s incredibly insulting and hurtful for a supposed NT “autism expert” to tell an ASD person that they’re “NOT” autistic, in their professional/medical opinion (as a psychologist/psychiatrist, respectively). I see this tragedy play out in far too many narratives in the adult with Asperger’s Facebook groups to which I belong, people struggling to obtain and official diagnosis and accepted as autistic by their ASD peers, but hindered and thwarted by uninformed or biased (but neurologically "normal") mental health professionals because the individual before them does not precisely line up with
their idea of what autism "is", and therefore they reject them from that classification in the manner of a quality control expert on an assembly line, say.
