Before vaccines, we blamed fairies
The common thread between romantasy and autism you didn't see coming
RFK Jr. is in the news again, this time claiming that genetics is a “dead end” explanation for autism.
“These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old,” he said.
He’s wrong, but not just because the research doesn’t support him.
What he describes as a baffling modern phenomenon – children losing abilities around age 2 – has been part of the human experience for centuries. Before we had a medical name for autism, we had another story: the changeling.
The impulse to find a culprit for autism is far older than the modern anti-vaccine movement.
In the 2023 novel Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, the protagonist Emily Wilde is an academic conducting field research on fairies in an obscure part of Norway. After interviewing locals, she realizes an eerie being she had spotted on a walk was a changeling, an object of professional curiosity for Wilde:
The creature I had seen in the window had not been a wight at all. It had been a changeling. Changelings are monstrous offspring produced by the courtly fae, weak and sickly creatures who bring misfortune upon a household for as long as they remain there….
The changeling was terrorizing its host family, who were also dealing with the loss of their real child.
Wilde was determined to help. To force the changeling into submission, Wilde began to hurt him: “I gave Shadow a signal, and he snapped at the child’s foot, distracting him. I thrust the nail into the child’s chest.” In the novel, the changeling is a purely magical creature, and the violence does no harm.
The changeling story has had a resurgence alongside romantasy, the breakaway bestselling novel genre. Emily Wilde features a changeling plot point; other romantasy novels have echoes of changelings as well: stolen children, kidnapped heirs.
In the milieu of these novels, the changeling is presented at face value: what you see (a magical, malevolent child-being) is what you get.
But in actuality, changeling folklore was about real human children. It was an attempt to explain what has long haunted parents: a child who didn’t behave like other children; a child who was dramatically different.
Let’s back up. What is this changeling myth all about?
A changeling is a creature that looks like a human child, but is a kind of dummy who has been cruelly swapped by fairies. A family’s real child is taken back to fairy land, and they are left with a poor copy.
Some characteristic features of a changeling:
a flat affect and lack of affection
by turns silent and wailing
obstinacy; a terrible temper
may even become violent, striking or biting its parents
often intellectually stunted; it might not talk at all
or, it might display preternatural cunning and unusual talents
These behaviors were taken as proof that a swap had occurred.
The target child is often a boy around toddler age. After a period of normalcy, the child suddenly changes – regresses, you might say.
The changeling folklore is rooted in Gaelic and Celtic cultures, but there are similar traditions across the globe: from the Scandinavian countries of Denmark and Sweden, to Spain, east to China, and as far back in time as ancient Rome.
A link to autistic regression?
Autistic regression typically occurs between 15-30 months of age and may involve a loss of words, social engagement, or other acquired skills.
But this is a relatively uncommon trajectory of autism. Research suggests that regression occurs in 20% to 30% of cases.
Moreover, in some cases regression may be more of a function of what parents are noticing than what’s really going on. There are likely to have been subtler signs of difference prior to the observed regression. In any event, regression is understood to be part of a broader neurodevelopmental trajectory, not a sudden derailment.
Despite being an uncommon occurrence, regression has received a lot of attention ever since that debunked study linking autism to childhood vaccinations.
Even though the link between vaccines and autism has been debunked, repeatedly, people still buy into the theory. The notion of a sudden transformation – a normally developing child turns into a stunted child after being vaccinated – echoes the changeling transformation.
In the belief systems at the time, the changeling wasn’t a real child, just a perverse doppelganger.
So, authorities advised parents to deal with changelings harshly. In Ireland, treatments included throwing the changeling – the child – in boiling water or sitting them on a red hot shovel. Tormenting the changeling-child near to death was believed to induce the fairies to reverse the swap. Changeling-children were also tied up in forests and left there for the fairies to reclaim.
Even if society at the time believed these myths, which it seems they did, the end result was abuse, trauma, and infanticide.
Because these changeling stories weren’t just dark entertainment. D.L. Ashliman, a leading scholar, writes that they were based on actual events: these were methods for dealing with children with disabilities. For this reason, they fall in the category of legends – stories taken as true – rather than fairy tales.
A notable person who believed the stories was Martin Luther. As Ashliman explains:
[Luther] sincerely believed that Satan was responsible for the malformed children known as changelings, and that such satanic child exchanges occurred frequently. In Luther's theological view, a changeling was a child of the devil without a human soul, “only a piece of flesh.” This view made it easy to justify almost any abuse of an unfortunate child thought to be a changeling, including the ultimate mistreatment: infanticide. Luther himself had no reservations about putting such children to death.
The belief in changelings far outlived Martin Luther, who died in 1546. And although the changeling myth focused most often on children, adults weren’t immune. In 1895, Irish woman Briget Cleary was murdered by her husband and neighbors by burning, after other banishment methods failed to work.
The belief even survived into the 20th century. In 1911, an academic who took the stories as true published an extensive study of changeling folklore, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. As recently as 1924, people in rural Germany still took ritual precautions against the “demonic exchange of infants.”
As Ashliman notes, “Views held firmly for a thousand years do not die easily, especially when they appear to answer some of life’s most troublesome questions.”
It seems we’ve now replaced one myth with another. And, it’s not just the common people circulating the myth; it’s the United States’s head bureaucrat in charge of health policy.
The latest myth is that there is a discrete environmental cause for this “epidemic.” That it can’t be merely a function of genetics.
People still want an easy answer to this “troublesome question.”
The fact is, autism is a function of genetics. There are two genetic pathways to autism: spontaneous high-impact gene mutations that principally lead to autism with intellectual disability, and lower-impact inherited genes that, if concentrated enough in a person, lead to a presentation of autism.
It’s true that our genes interact with environmental factors in complex ways, and there likely is some interplay between autism genes and the environment.
But if that’s the case, it’s only part of the story. The main story is one of genes, spontaneous and hereditary, that combine to result in the assemblage of traits we call autism.
Naomi Klein covers this modern iteration of the changeling myth beautifully in Doppelganger. She assembles testimonial evidence of parents grappling with sudden transformations in their children around age 2.
Klein quotes Jenny McCarthy, who described what she perceived as the effect of a vaccine on her autistic son: “Boom – the soul’s gone from his eyes.” The departure of a child’s soul from his body sounds quite a lot like the departure of the real child in the changeling folklore.
Klein also draws on Steve Silberman’s observations from his bestselling book Neurotribes:
…stories began to circulate on the Internet about babies that seemed to be developing normally until they received a routine immunization … Parents referred to their sons and daughters as having been kidnapped, as if a thief – dressed in a pediatrician’s white coast – had stolen them away in the night.
Klein’s book is where I first came across the connection between changeling mythology and autism. I found it immediately persuasive. Of course societies before ours would have sought an explanation for autism, just as we do today.
Except in our era, it’s not the fairies who are to blame. It’s vaccines. Or, if not vaccines, some other environmental cause that RFK Jr. insists is out there.
“Views held firmly for a thousand years do not die easily, especially when they appear to answer some of life’s most troublesome questions.”
The changeling tradition proves that parents have been witnessing regression for millennia. They’ve seen their children develop in ways they neither expected nor wanted.
I can’t personally speak to what that’s like. For many parents, it’s devastating.
But history shows us the cost of reaching for the wrong explanation. Scapegoating – fairies, vaccines, something else – is not the answer.
Thanks for reading Strange Clarity, where I write about neurodivergence, cognition, and the hidden architectures of thought.
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More to explore:
🔍 Related post: Some rules for thinking about autism
🧠 Big-picture essay: Artificial intelligence isn’t replacing me – it’s extending me
For further reading on this topic, check out:
Changelings, an essay by D.L. Ashliman (1997)
Autism and Changelings, an article by Michael Fitzgerald, Trinity College Dublin (2005)
Changelings and the Folk History of Autism, an essay by Kayley Whalen (2023)
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With curiosity,
Laura