Fuck You Eugenics, I Win!

Part of the reason I had a bio kid is as a "fuck you" to eugenics. There, I said it, and I'm not ashamed of it. I'm autistic. In earlier generations, some of my people were forcibly sterilized or even killed to stop them passing on their genes. Even now, it continues, albeit through less violent means. If I tried to become an egg donor, I might be prevented solely because I'm autistic. And probably not because no one would want my eggs - I specifically looked for an autistic sperm donor, I suspect there's people without fertile eggs who feel the same way as I do.

But there's an important difference between me and the sperm donor I found. We're both probably autistic, but unlike me, he has never been diagnosed. He's said that if he was growing up now, he probably would have been diagnosed. But he's around my age, and so, the eugenicists failed to stop him. He's got at least five donor kids, and one has already been diagnosed as autistic.

Whenever I see someone saying that they want kids but don't want to pass on their "defective" genes, I know it's ultimately up to them, but it saddens me. Because it's another one of us that the eugenicists have managed to stop. Sometimes the enemy is in your own head, convincing you that you'd be doing something bad by having a kid like you. They tried to do that to me, but I'm a belligerent sort so it backfired.

And now there's another generation with my "defective" genes. I don't know if she's going to be autistic. But even if she's not, she carries an autistic legacy. She could be part of the reason that future generations still have people who think differently from the neurotypical norm. Her existence means that they've once again failed to wipe us out.

And if she is autistic, or even if she's just a carrier of autistic genes, I hope she carries that forward. I hope she wants kids, and if she wants kids, I really hope she doesn't let the eugenicists talk her out of passing on her autistic legacy to at least some of them.