"Sesame Street Just Unveiled Its First Autistic Character/Julia was introduced... in an effort to fight the stigma associated with autism..."

Headline at Buzzfeed. I listened to part of the embedded video, stopping shortly after the lyric "We all are important/We all are OK..." made me think too much. I read some of the comments, which I sorted according to "best." After wading through some discussion of whether the headline should have said "character with autism" instead of "autistic character," I got to some criticism of "Sesame Street" for working with an organization called Autism Speaks:

As an autistic person I hate that they worked with Autism Speaks. We autistic people can speak for ourselves, we don't need an organization without even one autistic person on the board speaking for us. While Sesame Street's heart is in the right place they're going about this all wrong and I wish I could help them fix it. Have a bunch of actual autistic people provide input on the character, not just the parents of autistic people. Only we can fully express what's in our heads.

There's also criticism of "Sesame Street" for making the character a girl when boys are much more likely to be autistic. One answer is: "It is exactly so they can break the stereotype." But, somebody says, that's "marginalizing boys with autism." Somebody else says having a girl exemplify autism is like have a male breast cancer spokesperson.