Something I find annoying is the weird internet bickering about how disabled someone is, whether invisible disabilities are real disabilities, whether cognitive disabilities are real disabilities, yadda yadda.
Often because the people making these arguments are imagining some like, evil wheelchair guy who's going nuh uh. your anorexia isn't a disability, twiggy. nuh uh not like mine (my whole legs don't work). what you have is a skill issue. eat a burger about it.
And like, while individual assholes who are also disabled exist, that's just not a Real Guy in the context of disabled culture or politics man.
You see this all the time in the level wars, which are, to be as generous as I can be here, made up of low needs autistic people insisting that they're being ignored by a community in which 90% of the people speaking are low needs autistic people lol.
Politely, I often don't know what people insisting that "level one autism IS STILL A DISABILITY!" actually want from us. Do you want that nonverbal dude who's gone from special school to day services to residential care, without ever being able to access the outside world like you are, to say you're valid or something? What social power do you think this handful of some of the most marginalized people in society, people identified as moderately to severely disabled, actually has to offer you?
But y'know, that comes from a place of being ignored and invalidated by the able-bodied world. So, when they're diagnosed or they decide on autism as an explanation for their symptoms, they punch sideways and down because they're expecting something. They see those of us who are, let's be clear here, straight up more disabled than they are getting support and so on, don't realize said support often 1. sucks, 2. involves direct abuse, and perhaps most importantly, is 3. absolutely inappropriate for their specific needs. That dude with a support worker with him is experiencing the world through glass. That support worker is both an accommodation of disability, and a marker of segregation. The world is going to treat him differently, and not in the kind, compassionate, "no one would ever be cruel to the disabled!" way a lot of level one autistic people involving themselves in shit like this expect.
They just see that there is activity surrounding our disabilities and they want their pre-conceived, idealized version of that for themselves. Mostly, they want that acknowledgement, they want the world to react to make it real after a childhood spent immersed in the concept that this thing that has always been there is no real unless they prove it.
It's a trauma response, imo.
I'm empathetic to that. But remember, they live on the other side of the glass. They have never been subjected to disabled segregation. Instead they've been forced to live in an environment that doesn't acknowledge their disability at all, which is a very different trauma. So, they think things are better over here.
And that's why they keep quoting the DSM-V. "No, a diagnosis of level one autism spectrum disorder REQUIRES SEVERE IMPAIRMENT," yadda yadda. There's such a textual literalism around it. You wanna be like, OK, if the DSM-V is an always-correct guidebook for how disablement works, um why are Black people over-diagnosed with stigmatized disorders, especially schizophrenia? Is it that Black people are just more likely to be Bad Crazy, or is it that this is an inexact science designed around codifying people into various demographic chunks based on patterns of behaviour, the observation of which is influenced by factors like systemic racism, sexism, class, the particular beliefs of the diagnosing psychologist, and all sorts of other bullshit.
My point is, in some cases the difference between a level one and a level two diagnosis comes down to whether the traffic was slow that morning. The only people who benefit from a doctrinal relationship with the DSM-V are the pharma companies that co-wrote the fucking thing. Not kidding btw! The DSM-V is often Like That to sell you a fuckin pill you don't need my dude. Remember, these are the same institutions that gave us the oxy epidemic.
Lisa Cosgrove and Sheldon Krimsky examine the new competing interest disclosure policy of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and rep
What actually matters is the way in which someone is and was treated. Are they codified as disabled by the public surrounding them, or do they have an "invisible disability" experience? Are they subject to segregation and put on the neo-institutitonalized pipelin, the mono-lifestyle imposed on the cognitively disabled identified in childhood defined by poverty and the impossibility of escape into the outside world, or were they sent to mainstream school and allowed to do shit like apply for jobs with an actual chance of being hired?
When we say "how disabled is he?" we don't mean what his level of impairment is, we mean, ineloquently: how has society treated him in regards to his disability?
Is this dude Special School disabled, or is he weird kid who liked Animorphs perhaps a little too much in mainstream school disabled?
Judgments we draw from these distinctions are often very stupid and materially worthless in political practice regardless, imo, except to demonstrate the level to which disabled segregation is not understood by the public.
