1,132 Autistic people, parents, carers and professionals told us what language they actually want used to describe autism; and it isn’t what most services default to.
In this episode, David walks through the full findings of NeuroHub’s Autistic Language Preference Survey 2025/26, the largest piece of community-driven research NeuroHub has run on this question to date. Fifty-six percent of respondents prefer an identity-based term such as “Autistic person”; among Autistic respondents themselves, that rises to seventy-one percent. But the real story isn’t the headline number, it’s what predicts it, and it isn’t diagnosis, age or gender. It’s whether someone is Autistic themselves, and whether they’re connected to Autistic community spaces.
The episode also covers the survey’s most uncomfortable finding: nearly forty-five percent of respondents describe Hans Asperger, the clinician whose name still labels a diagnosis and an identity for many people, in terms of Nazi collaboration, eugenics or complicity in the killing of disabled children. David explains what the data shows about who holds that understanding, and why it’s the single strongest predictor of rejecting his name.
Along the way: why a diagnosis doesn’t predict the words people keep using in later life; why professionals and Autistic people so often talk past each other on terminology; and what NeuroHub thinks services, charities and training providers should actually do differently as a result.
Content note: this episode includes factual discussion of the Aktion T4 programme and the Nazi-era killing of disabled children (around minute 32), handled briefly and without graphic detail.
The full written report, with every figure, statistical test and methodological caveat referenced in this episode, plus the anonymised dataset, will soon be available from NeuroHub Community.
