“There are many important parts of autistic culture that trace back to Mel’s writing and influence,” Ari Ne’eman, a disability rights activist and author, said by email, “but one of the most important is hir insistence that the neurodiversity and autistic self-advocacy movements include all autistic people, not just those who could talk.”

“In the early days (and sometimes still now),” he added, “there were lots of people who argued for advocacy only for certain kinds of autistic people, leaving people who couldn’t talk or who had the wrong diagnosis behind. Mel was one of the most powerful voices contradicting that.”

Mx. Baggs, who lived independently in Burlington until about a year ago, died at the home of Laura Tisoncik, an autism activist whom Anna Baggs described as Mel’s “second mother” and who had taken Mx. Baggs in as cascading health issues and problems with home health services made living independently impossible. Ms. Tisoncik (who emphatically rejected the idea that Mx. Baggs was faking anything), summed up Mx. Baggs’s core idea in a phone interview. “There are no unimportant people,” she said.

Amanda Melissa Baggs was born on Aug. 15, 1980, in Mountain View, Calif., to Anna Marie (Lynch) Baggs, a respiratory practitioner, and Ronald Baggs, an electronics engineer. Childhood was spent in La Honda, Calif., about 45 miles south of San Francisco, where the redwood forests made an impression that was reflected in the poetry Mel wrote as an adult, Anna Baggs said.

Mx. Baggs, who later adopted the name Amelia Evelyn Voicy Baggs and became known as Mel, for a time attended De Anza College in California and Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass.

“I grew up sometimes able to speak and sometimes not,” Mx. Baggs wrote on another blog, ballastexistenz, “and with a complicated relationship to speech and receptive language.”

As an adult Mx. Baggs increasingly came to use a communication device, employing both a keyboard and picture symbols, and posted frequently. The topics addressed ranged far and wide.