In Shades Of Grey

and it's like, mate they know.

Somehow you didn't notice this but "well he must've been disabled" is literally THE mainstream explanation for violence. A mass shooting? He must've been mentally ill. Political radicalisation into far-right extremes? He must've been mentally ill or possibly autistic. Bloke hits his wife? Mental illness, he needs to Go To Therapy. They just say "mental illness" because saying "disabled" makes it too obvious what's going on. Even when "mental illness" starts to sound too sympathetic, they either say it was an addict or someone who "Went Off Their Meds," so a kind of evil disability we can blame the individual for having.

Kindly, you just have the "permanently infantilised widdle baby angel" disability. You don't have the "this thing is a terrifying monster that, if left unchecked, will start raping and pillaging" kind of disability.

Sorry but I got sick of scrolling through the notes on this on desktop and seeing all the red usernames marked by shinigami eyes reblogging this.

and for all of yall that are still figuring it out or aren't getting the support you deserve:

My dad has 4 half siblings and two step siblings. They're all a decent bit younger than him. When I was a teenager, we went to a family reunion, and I realized something—my dad did not respect his siblings. He looked down on all of them. He saw them as fuck-ups and overgrown children. My dad had the American dream: well paying management job, suburban house, wife, and three kids. My aunt and uncles did not. Excluding my aunt, none of them were married or in serious relationships. They hadn't really settled into long term careers. Several of them were working the kind of jobs that get called "Unskilled labor." So he looked down on them because the youngest one was in his thirties (and several were much older), and yet none of them had "settled down" into what he saw as lifelong, permanent careers and relationships and lives. He was polite to their faces, sure, but I heard how he talked about them behind their backs, to my mother.

And then a few years ago, we visited his brothers again for Thanksgiving. And I realized something again--he respected them now. He saw them as equals. Why? Well. All of a sudden, every single one of them had serious, committed romantic partners. They didn't even need to still be with those partners—one of my uncle's fiance passed away from cancer before they could marry—just having had one showed that they matured into a real adult participating in society. In fact, at one point, my aunt was telling my mom about how one of my uncles was no longer living in an apartment she owned, but instead, after having a steady girlfriend for about a year, he moved in with her. And my mom literally said to my aunt, "wow. Look at that. He finally grew up."

One of the lines that frequently gets repeated about anti-aspec sentiment is "why would anyone hate asexuals/aromantics/etc? They aren't even doing anything." And that's exactly it. In the eyes of amatonormative culture, we aren't doing anything. Adults are supposed to do things. That's how you become a member of society.