it is not your job to educate Britain
No, and for a lot of families of children with additional needs it is just too exhausting to attempt - so NEVER feel you have to.
I'm "lucky" in that my now-teen aspie mostly copes with most stuff, and is able to access the majority of things that he wants to access. There are times that his not-coping-well will look to outsiders like misbehaviour, stroppiness or brattishness. And when you're dealing with a meltdown or whatever your focus tends to be on that, not on the people around! He hasn't had any massive public outbursts for quite a long time but people will often 'read' his anxiety and distress when he's buttoning it down as him being rude; that's kind of the other side of him kind of 'passing', of course - people don't necessarily realise that they may need to make an adjustment. Sometimes, after the not-coping has been dealt with, I will take the opportunity to explain to people - not to justify him, but mainly in the hope that down the line some other neuro-divergent person might benefit from someone having just a little bit more insight - but sometimes you just haven't got the spoons.
Classic example - ice skating last week, for the fourth or fifth time, he put on the hire boots and went once round the rink alternating between a face like thunder and looking a bit like a sulky toddler on the edge of tears. It took a couple of iterations of the conversation before I could establish that the problem wasn't boot discomfort but the blades on said boots. I asked if he wanted to swap them, he 'didn't know' which is basically code for not being able to work out, or face implementing, a solution so I offered to go with him to swap - at this point it was abundantly clear to me that he did want to swap them but couldn't face the complex social interaction of dealing with the boot hire staff, because he didn't have a 'script' for that. So I did that bit, and actually he managed to look at them and say thank you for the replacements which was more than I'd expected, and once he'd put on his boots and was back on the ice I took the opportunity to thank the member of staff for their help - and explain that he has ASC, that part of his autism is being differently sensitive to sensation, that he is motivated enough by his enjoyment of skating to get past the boots being pretty uncomfortable but just couldn't deal with the 'wrong' feeling of a particularly blunt set of blades on the ice.
I refuse to ever "apologise" for his autism though!
