It's often said but always bears repeating: the problem with emphasizing cures in disabled life is not that a cure will destroy your soul or whatever.
We are not in an X-Men: Days Of Future Past scenario regarding cures for most people. It's not a choice to leave the neurodivergent homo superior and join the inferior human race. It's not a vibes thing. For most disabled people, a cure would in fact be massively beneficial to their quality of life.
The problem with emphasizing cures is that it involves sacrificing available resources that could be used to improve the quality of life of people currently living with disabilities, based on a slim chance that some miracle treatment might emerge. It shifts the focus for abled people from living alongside and adjusting their environment to accommodate disabled people, to waiting it out until the disabled people aren't around any more, whether by cure or other means.
If they cured schizophrenia tomorrow: rad! Currently many abled people think that antipsychotics do functionally "cure" schizophrenia, and that if you just take your meds you will not be schizophrenic in a meaningful sense any more. Therefore, schizophrenics live constantly under the stigma of "going off their meds," to the point where many are living worse lives than they could be with intense side effects, or the looming threat of more severe institutionalization, to manage something that could be accommodated environmentally, because this is nearer to the social construct of "a cure." Where I live, if you have a diagnosis and are involved in any kind of reckless or violent crime, like a car accident or a punch-up on a friday night, you are far, far more likely to be prosecuted with higher sentencing, institutionalization, yada yada, based on the societal stigma that we are normal when medicated, monsters when not.
Or, the intense pressure that deaf people face to have cochlear implants installed. Did you know that cochlear implants have a regret rate of over 40% in some surveys? It turns out this is because a lot of people have unmet expectations of what the implants will actually do. How? They're having conversations with surgeons before getting them, right? Well, the marketing is mostly handled by hearing people and promises deaf people that they basically won't be deaf any more. In a lot of ways, cochlear implants are treated by hearing people as a cure for deafness, and thus like "going off your meds," being actually deaf becomes a disability of choice in the hearing mind. The reality is that they're still going to be hard of hearing, and imagine that. You've just bought into the hype that your disability is basically going to be gone, you're no longer going to be isolated or treated like a punchline by the hearing world, you pay all this fuckin money -- and the best you get is that everybody sounds like the parents in Snoopy.
Finally, you see how people act when they think they've found a "cure" for their child's autism, right? So many autistic kids are subjected to torturous therapies meant to make them neurotypical through concepts like "errorless learning." You have parents slathering their kids in essential oils or forcing them onto batshit diets that fuck up their nutrition while they're growing. Meanwhile, as we see under the current American "MAHA" administration, the budget seems to have bottomless resources for "cure" projects (scams and assorted bullshit) but absolutely nothing for healthcare reform or welfare for autistic families, because again, when you prioritize cures you don't really give a fuck about the quality of life of the people currently living.
When you couch this all in "but I am my wheelchair!" rhetoric, you end up with the most annoying fucking liberals in the universe, cunts like Bill Maher, making fun of the whole concept of disabled rights on a national stage. It's just not really going to persuade any abled people, ever. In fact, they love the idea of cures because it's a compassionate way to not care about disability issues any more.
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