CUSU’s Disabled Student’s Campaign (DSC) has snubbed eminent autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen by denouncing his talk at Clare College and holding their own counter-event.

The event, held on Tuesday, was entitled “Autistic people, not gendered minds”, and criticised Baron-Cohen’s approach to autism, which centres on the notion of autism as “extreme-male-brain”.

Baron-Cohen, who is head of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, is highly influential in his field, having worked on the mechanisms of autism for over 30 years.

The Whiston Society billed his talk as covering Baron-Cohen’s “proposed mechanism by which pre-natal testosterone levels affect the incidence of autism”.

Baron-Cohen has hinted before at the possibility of pre-natal screening for autism, commenting in a 2014 Guardian article that such a test “could possibly happen within five years”.

The DSC accused him of research bias, claiming that his studies have been the victim of biological essentialism and that he ignores the concerns of autistic individuals themselves.

They claimed to have considered challenging Baron-Cohen at his own event, but decided that they would not get an equal platform.

The alternative discussion was led by DSC member Sarra Facey, who began by defining Autism as a neurodevelopmental “disorder”, “meaning that one’s brain develops in such a way as to make some things more difficult than ‘normal’ and other things easier”.

This struggle was explained in detail by Sarra, who spoke of how, for neurotypical people, an increased “attunement to social data” means that you can “kind of outsource your brain to the social cloud”.

The DSC argued that the disability was not, as they claimed Baron-Cohen has argued, something to be simply cured. Rather, they argued, it was something that had to be understood culturally, with a shift towards an idea of neurodiversity; something which they see the successful referendum to create as Disabled Students’ Officer.

The view of the DSC has gained traction within parts of the academic community. Speaking to Varsity, Kate Plaisted-Grant, heads of the Cambridge Laboratory for Research into Autism, has questioned the usefulness of focusing on the search for biological mechanisms.

Dr Plaisted-Grant was quick to emphasise the good work that Simon Baron Cohen has done in autism research, stressing that, while associated with extreme-male-brain theory, “he does research across the board”.

Plaisted-Grant’s research shows that while we don't know of any biological mechanisms which can explain autism, we do know that there are probabilities, particularly in relation to genetic inheritance.

The economic costs of autism are not insignificant, with £25bn going towards supporting adults with autism per year. The meeting questioned whether this makes it a problem to get rid of, as Baron-Cohen appears to believe, or a cultural challenge to be tackled by acceptance of neuro-diversity.

She emphasised that it is important for diversity in autism research, noting that “autism is not only a biological phenomena”, as found in studies of monozygotic twins.

She further acknowledged the significance of the growing neurodiversity movement, which argues that disabilities are not simply illnesses to be cured but “just a different way to be human”.

Students at the event suggested that autistic individuals themselves had been left out of the scientific debate, and that the research agenda, led by neurotypical people, was focused on fixing that which is seen as defective.

Facey argued: “neurotypicality has got hold of the discourses, which includes doing ignorant scientific research without treating subjects as actual living, breathing, thinking subjects”.

Some of those present suggested that the parents of autistic children and autistic individuals themselves should have a say in research priorities, rather than only scientists.

To Plaisted-Grant, the question of research allocation was of the utmost importance, sitting “right on that knife edge between science and ethics”.

The DSC also took on deeper, intersectional questions regarding gender and sexuality, with concern first of all being raised at the problematic tendency to under-diagnose girls with autism.

The group argued that the “male-brainedness” theory, pioneered by Baron-Cohen, was compelling purely because it fits into how we see the world, but that this is socially constructed, primarily by neurotypical people.

This attempt to find empirical evidence for gender bias in autism is a big driver in Baron-Cohen’s work. However, Sarra pointed out that while there is certainly a disparity in diagnosis, the existing theory reinforces this disparity by creating questionnaires which are biased towards the diagnosis of men.

Sarra referenced a recent Royal Society paper which suggested that “human brains are better described as belonging to a single heterogeneous population than two distinct populations”, criticising Baron-Cohen’s attempts to construct an autism quotient based on arbitrarily gendered science.

The Autistic Quotient is a fifty question test which is partially based on Baron-Cohen’s own research. The CUSU group argued that the language of the test had a bias which led to the underdiagnosis of women as autistic

Indeed, Sarah believed that what Baron-Cohen had done was not to measure empathy “but whether you have been able to internalise neurotypical culture”.

Personal experiences were shared, particularly with regards to the struggles of transgender individuals, who due to their non-cis gender type, were often only begrudgingly diagnosed as autistic.

Others had similar struggles, but the other way around. At one point, a few contributors alluded to stories they had heard of waiting lists for autistics who wished to change gender, who were suspected of simply having an autistic fixation on the idea of gender.