Who they are
Jim Sinclair is an autistic self-advocate who co-founded Autism Network International (ANI) in 1992 — one of the first organisations run by and for autistic people. Sinclair is best known for the 1993 presentation “Don’t Mourn for Us,” delivered at the International Conference on Autism in Toronto, which is widely regarded as the founding text of the autistic self-advocacy movement.
Sinclair used the pronoun “they” and identified as intersex and autistic. They were non-speaking until late childhood and described learning to communicate across the neurotype divide, anticipating Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem by two decades.
Key contributions
”Don’t Mourn for Us” (1993)
Sinclair’s essay addressed parents directly. The argument: when you grieve for your child’s autism, you grieve the neurotypical child who doesn’t exist. But the child who does exist is right there, and your grief rejects them as they are.
The essay was radical. In 1993, autism was framed as tragedy and loss. Sinclair argued that autism is constitutive of who the person is, not a separable appendage. To wish away autism is to wish away the person.
This argument is now foundational to the neurodiversity paradigm. The phrase “nothing about us without us,” adopted from the disability rights movement, became the rallying principle of autistic self-advocacy, and Sinclair was one of the first to articulate why it mattered specifically for autism.
Autism Network International
ANI, co-founded with Donna Williams and Kathy Lissner Grant, created the first community space where autistic people could connect, share experiences, and develop a collective identity separate from the clinical establishment. ANI also organised Autreat, an annual retreat designed by and for autistic people with sensory-aware environmental design — one of the earliest practical implementations of the idea that environments should accommodate autistic sensory needs.
Critical assessment
Sinclair’s work is foundational to this wiki’s framework, but shares a limitation of early self-advocacy: it centres people who articulate their experience verbally. Autistic people with significant intellectual disability—this wiki’s focus—aren’t directly represented, though Sinclair’s own late speech development complicates who can and cannot self-advocate.
“Don’t Mourn for Us” is a rhetorical and philosophical text, not a research document. Its power is in reframing, not in empirical evidence. The claims it makes about the relationship between autism and identity are philosophical positions, not scientific findings — though the subsequent masking research has provided empirical support for the argument that forcing autistic people to perform neurotypicality causes harm.
Selected works
- Sinclair, J. (1993). “Don’t Mourn for Us.” Presented at the International Conference on Autism, Toronto. — The founding text of autistic self-advocacy.
- Sinclair, J. (1993). “Bridging the gaps: An inside-out view of autism.” In E. Schopler & G.B. Mesibov (eds.), High-Functioning Individuals with Autism. New York: Plenum Press.
Last reviewed
2026-04-15