Sorry to hear your mother went through that.

I agree that parenting and other social experiences are very important. What you learn about how the world works and your place in it. But autism affects all aspects of our life, literally it’s how our brain works, how we relate to people and understand relationships, friendships, workplaces and the world around us.

As an example, people who value honesty and find ambiguity and indirectness tricky can easily think it’s okay to inform someone you find them attractive, no matter the environment. Logically, honesty is good so understanding that it is context dependent is something some autistic can people struggle with. People who are detail focussed can get hung up on minimising the harm they do (she laughed, it was a joke!) rather than stepping back and seeing the bigger picture that it was still inappropriate. If you don’t practice putting yourself in others shoes, autistic people can struggle with seeing events from different points of view (especially people whose experiences we hear less about). People with “dark” special interests can become fixated on hurting people (there are several recent court cases featuring people who are autistic that mention that the person was obsessed with violent crime and wanted to take part in an attack to become part of that world).

We cannot pretend that autism is some narrow thing that only affects a sliver of our existence. Our brains control our behaviour, our decision making and our ability to self reflect. That is all tied up with autism, which gives us laser like focusing ability on things we care about (and total disregard for things we don’t care about), strong belief systems and the ability to reject social norms. In some cases those strengths can be dangerous. Add in the toxic mix of cishet white male privilege plus celebrity culture and we have a very difficult situation of shutting Wallace’s type of behaviour down once he’s become accustomed to getting away with. We see similar stuff going on with Elon Musk.