People ask us why we use the word pride. Why not awareness. Why not acceptance. Why the language of the gay rights movement in a disability context. The question is fair and the answer is specific.
Awareness is insufficient. The world is aware of us. Awareness has not improved our employment rates, our health outcomes, our housing security, or our safety. Awareness has sold puzzle piece merchandise. Awareness has commissioned campaigns that talked over us. Awareness is the floor we have been standing on for two decades while the ceiling has not moved.
Acceptance is closer but still passive. Acceptance positions us as something to be permitted. Tolerated. Allowed. The verb belongs to the people doing the accepting. We are the object. The grammar tells the story.
Pride is active. Pride is a claim. Pride says we are not waiting to be validated, and we are not asking to be included, and we are not negotiating the terms of our own existence with people who do not share our neurology. Pride says this is who we are and that is the starting point of the conversation.
Awareness, acceptance, pride
The word comes from a movement that faced exactly this problem sixty years ago. A community told it was sick, told it was broken, told it should be quieter about itself, chose pride as the refusal of all three. Not because pride was the feeling they had every day. Because pride was the political position that ended the argument about whether they were entitled to exist on their own terms.
We are borrowing the word because the situation is analogous. Not identical. Analogous. The mechanism of a pride movement is what we need, because the shame narrative about autism is the one we have to break for anything else to move.
Pride is not celebration. Pride is refusal plus affirmation. Refusal of shame. Affirmation of identity. That is the word. That is why we use it.
