Recent debates within the autism advocacy community have raised difficult questions about who can credibly act as a representative of a particular population and what responsibilities that role entails. We attempt to answer these questions by defending a set of evaluative criteria that can be used to assess the legitimacy of advocacy organizations and other nonelectoral representatives. With these criteria in hand, we identify a form of misrepresentation common but not unique to autism advocacy, which we refer to as partial representation. Partial representation occurs when an actor claims to represent a particular group of people but appropriately engages with only a subset of that group. After highlighting symbolic and substantive harms associated with partial representation, we propose several strategies for overcoming it.

自闭症倡导界最近的辩论提出了一些棘手的问题，即谁可以可靠地充当特定人群的代表，以及该角色需要承担什么责任。我们试图通过捍卫一套可用于评估倡导组织和其他非选举代表的合法性的评估标准来回答这些问题。掌握了这些标准后，我们​​确定了自闭症倡导者常见但并非唯一的一种失实陈述形式，我们将其称为部分陈述。当演员声称代表特定人群但仅适当地与该人群的一部分互动时，就会发生部分代表。在强调了与部分表示相关的象征性和实质性危害之后，我们提出了几种克服它的策略。