Autistic moms of kids on the spectrum are livid after Trump and RFK Jr blame Tylenol — and them
Jennifer Cook is perhaps best known as a dating expert for the hit Netflix series Love on the Spectrum, which chronicles the travails of autistic adults as they navigate the dating world. But Cook is herself autistic — and a mother to three autistic kids.
That’s why she was shocked when President Donald Trump pegged the use of acetaminophen, commonly known as Tylenol, by pregnant women and children as a major cause of autism.
“I’ve had to have conversations with my kids and, thank God, I’ve had enough loving conversations with them over the years that it seems that it was unnecessary,” she told The Independent.
“But, you know, just say to them, ‘Hey, look, just — by the way — you know you didn’t, you didn’t do anything wrong just by being.’”
At the same time, for Cook and so many other autistic women, Trump’s words — along with those of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary — felt at once marginalizing and as if they were being blamed.
“He didn’t really talk about adults, just babies and children, right,” Cook said. “ I mean, it’s as if we don’t exist.”
Autistic women have long been invisible. Girls are diagnosed at a much lower rate and many women only receive a diagnosis after their children are diagnosed, as was the case with Cook.
“In the ‘80s and the ‘90s, because, you know, especially diagnoses for girls, especially black girls, was not necessarily popularized or fully understood or accessible because, we were very much misdiagnosed with maybe, anxiety, or ADHD or it was kind of like, a comorbid type of like space,” Jennifer White-Johnson, a Black autistic mom of an autistic son who lives in Baltimore, told The Independent.
“Our family’s story has been very much rooted in, ‘OK, well, I’m going to create the world and the space of existence, that maybe I felt that I didn’t always have from my community growing up,’” she said. “ So you’re not going to tell me that I basically have to shut that off, that I have to force my child to unlearn every avenue of freedom and liberation in their lives.”
For many autistic women, getting a diagnosis offered clarity for how they see themselves.
“It gave me a whole new perspective on my behaviors and quirks that I have,” Charlotte Cravins, 37, who lives in Louisiana and has a one-and-a-half year-old son with Down Syndrome whom she plans to get screened for autism.
“It’s, in a lot of ways, it’s benefited me and makes me a better advocate,” she told The Independent. “It just puts more pressure on us and more blame on us and what and the things we do when it’s not even our fault.”
It is unclear how many autistic adults live in the United States, let alone how many autistic women give birth on an annual basis. But the data that do exist show that autistic women with nausea and pain more than their non-autistic counterparts.
Many autistic women experience elevated levels of joint ypermobility, which means that autistic women likely need to take medicine like Tylenol. Samantha Crane, an autistic disability rights lawyer who lives in the Washington, D.C. area, had hypermobility and needed to take Tylenol to relieve her pain.
