So…Rosie O’Donnell made a comment about Barron Trump possibly being autistic. We’ve all heard about it. And if you haven’t (if you’ve just crawled out from beneath a rock somewhere), you can just google “Rosie O’Donnell Barron Trump comment” and you’ll be up to speed in about 10 seconds. It happened back in November, so it’s hardly breaking news.

But…with the latest round of “don’t attack the president’s kid” comments reverberating through the internet, it’s been on my mind again.

Here’s why.

I’ve been feeling pretty uneasy about the whole thing ever since November. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I finally figured it out. It’s because calling someone “autistic” creates an uproar. Apparently, being “autistic” is an insult, and that is NOT okay.

I work all day with people on the autism spectrum. Some of them are awesome. Some of them (sorry, kids and parents) are assholes. Neither is the direct result of their autism. If you ask people with autism how they feel about being people with autism, you’ll get a variety of responses. Lots of people like themselves the way they are. Lots of people want to change some things about the way they are. You know…kind of like everybody else. I, for instance, am fat. I don’t particularly like it, but this is not the only quality I use to define myself. If someone were to call me fat, I might feel offended, not because it isn’t true (it absolutely is), but because the intent of the speaker was likely to marginalize me in some way.

See, it’s not that people are not autistic (by the way, you should really say “that people have autism”–person-first language helps change the conversation). It’s that, by having autism, that a person is now considered in some way defective, less-than, and undesirable. It’s less about the comment, and more about our immediate bristling at it.

I’ve been Googling away, looking for other people responding to the situation who share my concerns. I didn’t find much. I’m not sure if that’s because nobody else said it or because I’m crappy at doing Google searches. Nevertheless, I figure it could use saying again.

When it comes to how we relate to people with disabilities, we’ve made progress. Calling someone “retarded” as an insult is no longer considered acceptable. Yet, somehow, calling someone “autistic” in a effort to convey insult is still acceptable. You see, the Trumps and their supporters were not offended that Ms. O’Donnell called this child “autistic” because she was making assumptions about an (alleged) neurological difference, diagnosing a person without the benefit of data or a medical degree. They were offended because, in their view, Ms. O’Donnell had labeled this child as “inferior” or “less than” by speculating that he had autism.

This tells me that, as a culture, we still have a long ways to go in working through the dialogue about disability in this country. A person with autism is still, first and foremost, a person.