12:26pm May 10, 2014

➸ Yes, neurodiversity activists think we are disabled

I’ve seen so many newspaper articles saying that neurodiversity activists don’t see being autistic as a disability. In pretty much every article I’ve seen where they discuss neurodiversity, there is some kind of a “but there’s a group of people, called neurodiversity…

It’s definitely an inaccurate picture of people who call themselves neurodiversity activists overall, but it’s far from an unknown position among such people, and they can be very vocal. ASAN is one contingent of neurodiversity but it’s hardly the only element of neurodiversity or even the main one. (Hell, autistic people are only one branch of the neurodiversity movement overall.)

(Note that I don’t even always like using the word neurodiversity, I’m just explaining how everyone else uses it. And some extremely vocal people do actually believe autistic people aren’t disabled… at least not the autistic people that matter to them. I once got banned from a message board for telling some autistic people that getting autistic people listed as an oppressed group under the UN was redundant and kind of silly given that disabled people were already listed. They told me that if I’d ever been treated like they had, I’d know why considering autism a disability was a horrific thing to do to an autistic person. Then when I persisted in arguing with them – including correcting absolute factual errors they were making – I got banned because I was “holding them up from doing very important work” or something. That was a very weird experience for me, because I rarely get banned from anyplace, but they really seemed to believe that making autistic people into a special category of oppressed group separate and distinct from disabled people was incredibly important work, and that disagreement was… not working.)

I think that autistic people who are not otherwise disabled in any other way, are more likely to claim that autism isn’t a disability, and to attempt to distance themselves from disability. And usually the arguments they use as to why autistic people shouldn’t be considered disabled, rely on conceptions of disability that are outdated, ableist, and horrible in their own right. And such people will claim to represent the autistic community, or the neurodiversity community.

But I also think that characterizing all of us that way is just an easy out, a way to make it easy to dismiss our point of view without even bothering to find out what it is.

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