Autism science faces several conceptual and ethical challenges. These include fundamental issues such as how to characterize autism and the fact that research findings and how they are interpreted sometimes contribute to negative perceptions of autistic people. We argue that some of these challenges can be addressed by centering the perspectives of autistic people and focus on one way to accomplish this: having non-autistic researchers critically engage with personal accounts of autistic experience. We discuss some of the advantages and challenges of engaging with these accounts and argue that they can play a role in the reform of autism science.