Autistic panellists disagreed on whether to call themselves proudly disabled

The panel on autism and disability at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne opened with a question the panellists answered in different ways. Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, asked the first panellist what came to mind when talking about autism and disability. “I consider myself proudly disabled”, the panellist said. Being autistic was intertwined with that, they said, and they framed it through the social model of disability. On that model, the barriers that disable a person sit in society and in the environment, not in the individual, and not in anything internal to the person of the kind people hear about from the media. When they thought about disability, the panellist said, they thought of pride and joy.

The same reasoning appears in Fundamental Principles of Disability, published in November 1976 by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and The Disability Alliance as the record of a meeting held a year earlier. “In our view,” the Union wrote, “it is society which disables physically impaired people.” It defined disability as a disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation that takes little or no account of people with physical impairments and so excludes them from mainstream social life. The statement was written about physical impairment. The panellist applied the same reasoning to being autistic.