Autistic pride vs. disability

Autism is, or at least can be, a disability. That’s a legal fact, and it’s a hugely important one in pushing for our needs to be recognised and respected, but it’s something that many on the spectrum are not entirely comfortable with. To understand why, let’s dig down a bit into what ‘disability’ means, and how that relates to autism.

The Meaning of Disability

The World Health Organisation defines ‘disability’ as ‘any restriction or lack (resulting from any impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being’. There are two bits of that definition which I think are particularly interesting: one, ‘resulting from any impairment’; two, ‘normal for a human being’. The first implies that disability is a direct consequence of an impairment, while the second takes for granted that ‘normalcy’ is both meaningful and desirable. Many involved in Disability Studies activism reject the first, while the second is incompatible with recognition of neurodiversity. We’ll come back to this a bit later.

As one Disability Studies scholar puts it: ‘disability is not a characteristic that exists in the person or a problem of the person that must be “fixed” or “cured.” Instead, disability is a construct that finds its meaning within a social and cultural context’.

In other words, the medical model of disability is already problematic when talking about physical impairments like blindness, deafness or reduced mobility; all of these can be more disabling, or less so, depending on the ways they are accommodated by society and the expectations we have of people. In this sense, disabled people are disabled at least partly by society, not simply by their own impairments. A society that prioritises accessibility and inclusion allows people with differences usually understood as impairments to take part in many activities that would otherwise be made impossible for them. This is the essence of the social model of disability.

With something like autism, where so many of the impairments that are supposed to characterise the condition are specifically social, it’s doubly clear that the medical model is not an adequate lens for understanding how disability arises. Still, in legal and medical contexts, autism is defined by a series of impairments. It seems clear the so-called ‘triad of impairments’ in all of its many formulations misses important features of autism, and arguably it misunderstands others. Still, it’s not a bad starting place for understanding why autism is seen as a disability (as well as why this isn’t the full story).

Social Communication

It’s certainly true that communication difficulties often occur between autistic and non-autistic people. Body language often passes us by, along with context that other people would take for granted, including things that make it easier to understand when people aren’t exactly saying what they mean. This is often disabling. Most of us spend most of our time in social contexts full of non-autistic people, and misunderstandings are common in both directions. In autistic spaces, many of these difficulties evaporate, although we are all so used to neurotypical-dominated spaces that the transition is not automatic.

Social Imagination

Closely related to communication difficulties, autistic people often have trouble imagining how other people will react to or experience a given situation. This is sometimes thought of as a deficit of empathy or imagination, which seems to me to entirely misunderstand what is happening.

Empathising with people who seem very different from ourselves, whose experience of the world if not like our own, is always harder. This is part of the reason why privilege is a problem, and why people feel able to oppress and dehumanise other people. Autistic people don’t lack empathy, any more than other people lack empathy for autistics, but it is hard to know where to direct your empathy if you can’t really understand someone else’s experiences in the first place. As you’ll know if you’ve ever met someone with very different neurology from your own, that can be tough. The communication barriers are relevant here, too — we’re liable to miss the body language that other people use to let each other know how they’re feeling. On the other hand, if do pick it up, we sometimes experience empathy so intensely that we really need to tune it out.

Similarly, it’s no wonder that autistic people can struggle to imagine how other people will react if their heads just don’t work the same way. That doesn’t imply a lack of imagination — even social imagination — it just means that a much greater imaginative leap is required. Difficulty imagining what the people around you will think and do can certainly be disabling, whatever the cause. People thrown suddenly into cultures very different from their own have similar problems. Many autistic people have vivid imaginations for various sorts of things, and some even have rich social imaginations, allowing them to be actors, prolific writers of fiction and so on. On the other hand, some of us just find humans less interesting than a lot of other things. Which brings us on to…

Restricted Interests

This is a fun one. It’s not obvious why restricted interests would be an impairment, for a start. We know that some extremely successful people are obsessively interested in a small number of things. If impairments are supposed to be things that stop us from performing activities, I suppose it’s technically accurate to say that having no interest in that activity is an impairment, but it seems a little odd. It actually makes more sense than it sounds, once you start to think about autistic inertia — I’ll get back to that later. The main problem, though, seems to be more with having little interest in things that other people think are important, and passionate, abiding enthusiasm for things that other people don’t get. Many of us become passionate about different things at different times, too, so to me the idea that autistic interests are specifically restricted as such seems to be a confusion. ‘Focused interests’ is a much more accurate and less stigmatising term. For my part, I’m very interested in almost everything. Apart from sport, which would of course be far more socially acceptable. Perhaps it is unusual for autistic people to have quite such eclectic interests, but it’s certainly not unique.

Usually the most disabling things about this supposed impairment are being seen as odd (can confirm, I am odd) and the pain of being pulled away from things we are passionately interested in. Sometimes, though, people will get so stuck in their interests that it gets in the way of doing other things. We’ll return to the problem of stuckness later; it doesn’t always have to do with intense interests, but it can be disabling whatever the cause.