With her blond hair often gathered into space buns, Kaelynn Partlow is quick-smiling and earnest on social media as she talks about how her autism shapes her world. She maps out first dates and awkward exits. She offers scripts for difficult moments. And she calls out the adults who get children wrong.
Partlow, 29, speaks about social interaction in her videos the way a physicist might describe gravity: as a system governed by hidden rules most people grasp instinctively but rarely notice.
It’s a tone that has helped make her a standout among a new generation of young, media-savvy autistic creators reshaping how the condition is understood — and, increasingly, debated.
Her posts regularly draw more than a million views. But the Greenville, South Carolina, resident said, “The sad part is that I’m very lonely.”
For much of the late 20th century, many Americans’ understanding of autism began and ended with Temple Grandin, the Colorado State University professor who transformed the livestock industry by designing slaughter operations intended to reduce fear and stress in animals — and who became the public face of autism in the process.
Today, popular shows such as “The Good Doctor,” “Atypical” and “Love on the Spectrum” — in which Partlow was a breakout star — have helped make autism far more visible, while Instagram, TikTok and YouTube have produced influencers who are young and irreverent. Their feeds mix daily life — beauty routines, meals, small pleasures — with efforts to explain the challenges they navigate at a time when being “on the spectrum” has entered the cultural vernacular and self-diagnosis is on the rise.
Autism diagnoses in the United States have risen sharply — from about 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 31 today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But much of that growth has come from people without profound intellectual or communication disabilities: children and adults who can speak independently about their experiences and, increasingly, build audiences around them online.
The influencers include Jeremiah Josey, a 27-year-old from Bowie, Maryland, who has worked as a pastry chef as well as a runway model; Morgan Harper Nichols, 36, a PhD candidate in Lithonia, Georgia, whose art focuses on neurodivergence; and Charlotte Bergslien, a 44-year-old from Oslo who mixes personal reflections with disability advocacy.
But autism lies on a spectrum, and many people — especially those who are nonspeaking or require more support — are far less able to represent themselves in this way.
That imbalance has helped fuel increasingly bitter debates over who gets to define autism publicly. Many parents and caregivers of people with profound autism argue that the narratives of people who need less support can obscure the realities of those living with a severe disability.
The creators who have broken through online quickly learn that attention doesn’t just bring fans — it also brings haters.
Jeremiah Josey
Josey has built a large online following through videos that blend cooking, humor and candid reflections on life as a Black autistic man. Across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, he shares baking tutorials, collaborations with celebrity chefs and conversations about autism, confidence and independence. But he said the visibility has also brought pressure to serve as an “inspirational” figure rather than a person with ordinary flaws and frustrations.
Diagnosed with autism at 2, Josey said teachers often misunderstood him as a child, treating behaviors like quoting movies or interrupting as discipline problems. After transferring to a special-needs school, he said, those same behaviors were recognized as part of how he communicated.
As he got older, Josey pursued modeling, appearing in campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger, Kohl’s and Zappos, while also writing about the risks Black autistic people can face during encounters with police. In his second book, “Here’s What I Want You to Know 2,” he wrote about fearing he “might not understand police commands.”
While Josey was growing up, cooking helped define his identity. Inspired by his grandmother, he learned to bake as a child and later earned an associate’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America. But working in professional kitchens proved difficult. During an internship at Salamander Resort & Spa in Middleburg, Virginia, he struggled with the pace and communication demands of restaurant work and said co-workers often misread him because they did not know he was autistic.
Rather than abandon cooking, Josey pursued it on his own terms. He launched “Jeremiah’s Cooking Adventures,” a YouTube series featuring celebrity chefs including Kwame Onwuachi, Christina Tosi, Marcus Samuelsson and Duff Goldman. His videos mix recipes, jokes and motivational advice while also challenging misconceptions about autism.
“Baking brought me a lot of confidence and courage,” he said.
Morgan Harper Nichols
Harper Nichols learned early how exhausting spending time in everyday environments could be. Church services, crowded stores and school hallways often left her overwhelmed by noise, light and constant social interaction. As a teenager, she carried her guitar almost everywhere — even to her job at California-inspired fashion brand PacSun — because holding it helped calm her nervous system, despite getting the side-eye from confused co-workers.
But it was not until 2020, when she was an adult scrolling TikTok during the pandemic, that she encountered videos from women describing late autism diagnoses and recognized herself in their stories of sensory overload and emotional exhaustion. She later sought out a specialist and was diagnosed with autism at 31.
“It’s very scary to not know what’s going on with yourself,” she said. “So much of what you’re experiencing with autism, people can’t see.”
Harper Nichols uses social media to discuss how autism presents differently in women, particularly Black women, who are often diagnosed late after years of working to mask their symptoms. She said some people online have questioned her diagnosis because she is articulate and socially polished, reactions she sees as rooted in stereotypes about autism.
She compares autism to “driving a stick-shift car, but with 12 gears,” adding that even ordinary tasks involve layers of sensory and social processing invisible to others.
Her artwork often explores suppressing autistic behaviors to appear socially acceptable — and Black natural hair care, which she describes as a minefield to navigate, involving tight braids, chemical smells, bright lights and hours of forced stillness. For Harper Nichols, hair became intertwined with femininity and the pressure many Black women face to straighten or carefully manage their natural hair.
“I could literally tell my story just talking about hair,” she said.
Charlotte Bergslien
Charlotte Bergslien has spent much of her life being bullied or fearing that she would be, even now.
Growing up in a small community in the Norwegian Arctic, she often felt baffled by the social rules that seemed to come naturally to everyone else. When she was 12, after watching “The Lion King,” she tried to comfort a crying classmate the way the cubs did in the movie — by licking away her tears. The girl pulled away. Other children called her a “weirdo.”
The feeling of being out of sync followed her into adulthood. In her 20s and 30s, Bergslien worked in design — mostly branding for food products — but office interactions often went sideways. She overshared personal details, sometimes without realizing how they would land. Once, she told co-workers that her boyfriend had hit her. Instead of offering support, she said, they avoided her, unsettled by what they saw as negativity.
“People would tell me, ‘You’re a terrible person,’ all the time,” she said. “And it was really hard not understanding what you were doing wrong.”
Eventually, the strain became overwhelming. Bergslien quit her job and spent two years largely bedridden, consumed by depression and suicidal thoughts. After seeking medical help, she was diagnosed with autism in 2020.
The diagnosis helped explain years of confusion, but it was online where she first found a sense of belonging. Through social media, she connected with other autistic people in long direct-message conversations and late-night video calls. For the first time, she said, she felt able to communicate without constantly second-guessing herself.
She has found it easier to connect with people in English, saying they tend to be more patient and listen more carefully when she is using that language. Bergslien has shared her feelings on the debate over Mattel’s introduction of an autistic Barbie (“a step in the right direction”) and research showing how autistic people are liked less by others even without knowing they are autistic (the reaction happens after “just a few seconds”).
But lately, she said, those online spaces have changed.
As autism content has exploded on social media, she believes some influencers — including those she calls “fakers” — have turned the diagnosis into a brand, exaggerating or performing their symptoms for attention and profit. At the same time, she said, some within autism communities are quicker to attack.
“It is strange and confusing,” she said. “I feel squeezed out of my own community.”
To Bergslien, 44, the shift resembles watching something once ridiculed suddenly become fashionable. “The geeky look, the glasses, the awkwardness — people used to mock that,” she said. “Then suddenly other people came along and made it cool.”
Now, she’s sometimes scared to post at all.
“This misconception people have about me is that by looking at me they think everything perfect and I am so strong, so damn resilient and can take anything. But they are so wrong about that,” she said. “I’m very, very easy to break.”
Kaelynn Partlow
Partlow was diagnosed with autism at 10, after years of struggling in nearly every environment she inhabited. Neighborhood children called her weird. At school, she fell behind academically and socially; by elementary school, she was already talking about suicide. “I failed third grade pretty spectacularly,” she recalled. “In all environments — at home, the neighborhood, in school — I was constantly getting this negative feedback.”
Doctors eventually diagnosed her with not only autism, but also ADHD, dyslexia and dysgraphia. Soon after, the small private school she attended told her parents it could no longer support her. She left traditional education entirely and began “unschooling,” a form of home schooling built around a child’s interests rather than a fixed curriculum. The change, she now says, altered the course of her life.
What emerged was the intensely analytical personality that viewers now recognize from “Love on the Spectrum.” Online, she speaks about autism with unusual precision, dissecting behaviors and thought patterns that many people instinctively hide. Much of her attention turns to rigidity, which she describes as one of the defining forces in her life. She dislikes retracing her steps once she has left somewhere; returning to the same part of town twice in one day can feel intolerable. “It will ruin my day,” she said.
Even her childhood obsessions came with rules. She spent years fixated on birds, but only certain kinds: She concluded it was a waste of time to learn about any species but East Coast ones, and she ignored waterfowl altogether.
Visibility has brought intense scrutiny and thrust Partlow in the middle of online debates. When she referred to her “Love on the Spectrum” co-star Tanner Smith as someone society might otherwise dismiss as “another weirdo” if he hadn’t been on TV, some people saw the comment as disrespectful. After revealing she did not realize Anne Frank died in the Holocaust until visiting the house where Frank hid a year ago and describing Frank as having “passed away” rather than having been murdered, critics attacked her for using that phrase and her lack of historical knowledge.
She also faced criticism after posting videos in which she and an actor deliberately mispronounced the name of Zohran Mamdani, then mayor-elect of New York, to make a point about autism and communication, with detractors accusing her of trivializing the importance of pronouncing people’s names correctly. Others have taken issue with her support of Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, a common but divisive autism therapy that some families view as beneficial and some autistic adults see as an attempt to suppress their natural behaviors.
I am determined to improve myself, despite starting from a place of deep ignorance. #autism #autistic #actuallyautistic #neurodivergent #autisticadult
For Partlow, the backlash at times felt overwhelming. She responded with a series of apologies that many people saw as genuine attempts to learn from her mistakes.
Over time, she said, she has come to see public misunderstanding as inseparable from life online and has explained that some of the controversies stem from communication differences related to her autism. Her bluntness, word choice and difficulty anticipating how comments will be received can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, she said.
“I’ve definitely had to accept that it’s okay for people to assume incorrect things about me,” she said, “even though that’s hard to tolerate.”
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