Cure culture and normative attitudes towards Autistic people
Nothing sickens me more than people who believe that being Autistic requires intervention. The idea that we have to “improve” an Autistic person’s “skills” is in inherently ableist. Where does this ableism come from?
The truth of the matter is that as we edge closer and closer to a post-normal society, those who have succumbed to normativity fight hard to preserve the world that they believe is “right”. We have been taught that deviation from cultural norms is a disorder, but this is an abject lie.
Society has been built upon a foundation of bigotry and oppression of minorities. When we subscribe to the idea that Autistic people are suffering or in need of intervention, we further that belief. We have centred our own normative ideas into disabled people and made our internalised bigotry their problem.
When we can recognise that the problem is not the Autistic person, we are then able to externalise the issue into the environment. If you want to know why Autistic people are suffering, look no further than their experiences of the wider world and their immediate environment.
The responsibility is not on Autistic people to assimilate into society. The responsibility lies with society to make space for the inclusion of Autistic people.
Every time you empower the curists, you set a blockade on our path to progress. If you are reading this thinking “but you’re not like my child” I would respond with this-
No, I am not, I am an adult. I would ask you to consider why you believe your child is abnormal, where you learned your standards of normalcy from, and why you believe normality to be so important. We have a right to grow and change into whoever we wish to be. No one should be trying to control our expression of the Self, or the way we think and relate to the world.
I ask only one thing of my readers. Please step away from the concept of normal. Recognise that all normality measures is how comfortably we can serve a society that doesn’t give a damn about us.
If we can’t operate at the right level of productivity, without causing a nuisance to other people, we are written off. This is the world that curists want us to fit into, a world that would sooner destroy us than make space for us to exist as whole people.
We have a write to our Self.
Reblogged this on On the Road Again.