all. “Fifty percent of the autistic population are mute and remain that way all of their lives,” one author declared in a 1994 anthology for professionals called Autism in Children and Adults. “Even high-IQ autistic adolescents sustain only rudimentary social relationships and seem to retain the characteristic lack of empathy and the shallow affect,” another author claimed. The clinical definition of autism was mutating, ramifying, spreading out into a rainbow of a million colors. But the outlook on the lives and potential of autistic people remained relentlessly monochrome.
