A lot of campaigns about autism avoid the word disability. Neurodiversity, difference, divergence, variant, are used instead. The reasoning is usually kind. Autism as a disability is the old deficit frame, and we are trying to get out of that frame.
We are not trying to get out of it far enough to lose access to it.
The legal frame matters
Autism is a disability. It is a disability under the Disability Discrimination Act. It is a disability under the NDIS. It is a disability under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is a disability in the long historical sense of that word, which is the sense in which disabled people have built a political movement to claim rights that were not given.
The disability frame is how we get workplace adjustments. The disability frame is how we get equal access to education. The disability frame is how we challenge discrimination in court. The disability frame is how the NDIS exists at all. Walking away from it, even in a good-hearted push toward neurodiversity, walks away from all of that.
We can hold both. Autism is a neurological difference, part of the natural variation of human minds. Autism is also a disability, because the built environment was designed for a narrow version of human experience and the rest of us are disabled by that design. Both statements are true at the same time. Neither cancels the other.
Both can be true
There is a reason disabled Autistic writers have pushed back on neurodiversity language when it is used to mean not disabled. It reads as a quiet distancing from the parts of the community that need the legal framework most. Non-speaking Autistic people. Autistic people with intellectual disability. Autistic people who need ongoing support with daily living. The word disability protects them. A campaign that edits it out leaves them less safe.
We are proud. We are Autistic. We are also disabled, and we claim that word without apology, because the movement it belongs to built the infrastructure we rely on.
Pride and disability are not in conflict
Pride and disability are not in conflict. They are the same sentence.
